The Ice Balloon

by Alec Wilkinson

  As they drifted farther south, they began to encounter more seals. On a day toward the end of March they shot seven, and on another they shot nine. Bears left their tracks in the camp at night, but the hunters weren’t able to shoot any. Meanwhile, the Germans, everlasting tinkerers and mechanical improvers, had dismantled nearly every rifle and most were ruined. “They must work away at every thing, and never stop till it is rendered useless,” Tyson wrote.

  On the twenty-eighth a bear came into camp and fed on their sealskins and blubber. Tyson, creeping up on it, knocked over a standing shotgun—to prevent their guns from seizing up from the vapors of their breath, they had to leave them outside. When the bear growled, Tyson fired, “but the gun did not go; pulled a second and third time—it did not go; but I did, for the bear now came for me.” Tyson made it to his hut and got another shell. He crept out again, saw the bear in the darkness, and as it turned toward him he fired and this time hit the bear in the heart. It ran about thirty feet and fell over dead. The meat, Tyson wrote, tasted “more like pork than anything we have had to eat for a long time.”

  In a gale at the end of March, Tyson felt “a great thump, as if a hammer a mile wide had hit us,” and looked out to see that their floe had gotten in the way of an iceberg. Where they were, he couldn’t tell. “Our little ice-craft is plowing its way through the sea without other guide than the Great Being above.”

  By the first of April their floe had separated itself from the larger one it had been part of and was small enough that Tyson no longer thought it was safe. They decided to use the whaleboat to try to reach the larger floe. They had to leave behind their store of meat, which had grown to a size to feed them for a month, and a good part of their ammunition, because of its weight. What they did bring, in addition to their sleeping gear, was Captain Hall’s writing desk. Some of the men wanted to throw it overboard, but Tyson “positively forbade it, as it was all we had belonging to our late commander.” Nineteen people, including five children, fit into a boat built for six or seven. The children were frightened and crying. The boat was nearly swamped, but they made twenty miles, spending the night on a floe. They regained the pack on the fourth. Three days later, as they were having breakfast, the floe split beneath their tent. They managed to get out, but their breakfast went in the water. “What little sleep I get is disturbed and unrefreshing,” Tyson wrote.

  Their boat was so close to the tent that there was no space to walk between them, but the following day, in a storm, the ice split, carrying off the boat, a kayak, and one of the men. “We stood helpless, looking at each other,” Tyson wrote. The man on the floe—he was the cook, whose name was Meyers—couldn’t manage the boat by himself, nor did he know how to use the kayak. He cast it adrift, hoping it would reach the men on the other floe, who could come get him or at least throw him a line, but it went in another direction. The two hunters went after it, jumping from one piece of ice to another. Night fell. Tyson and the others tried to get some rest. In the morning they could see the boat and the two men, who hadn’t the strength to manage it either, and the kayak about a half mile in the opposite direction. Tyson and another man went after them, hopping like goats among the ice. When they reached the boat, all of them were so weak that they couldn’t move it. Finally every man in the camp but two, who were afraid to cross the ice, came, and they got the boat back to camp. Along the way two men had to be pulled from the water. “We are all more or less wet,” Tyson wrote, “and Meyers badly frozen.”

  They set up a tent and passed an uncertain night. In the morning the sea was running high—“the water, like a hungry beast, creeps nearer.” Tyson wrote. “Things look very bad.” That evening the sea overran the tent. They got their possessions into the boat and prepared to launch it, “but I fear she can never live in such a sea.” The women and children had begun to spend all their time in the boat, since the ice could split at any moment and they might not have time to reach it otherwise. The sea’s overwhelming the floe meant that there was no freshwater ice to melt, and all of them suffered from thirst.

  By midnight the ice closed in around them, quieting the sea, and they tried to sleep. In the coming days they saw a fox and some ravens, leading Tyson to conclude that they weren’t far from land. They also saw some seals but were unable to reach them. “Are very hungry, and are likely to remain so.”

  On April 13 Tyson wrote, “I think this must be Easter-Sunday in civilized lands. Surely we have had more than a forty days’ fast. May we have a glorious resurrection to peace and safety ere long!” The night before, sitting alone and pondering their circumstances, he had taken hope while watching the northern lights. “The auroras seem to me always like a sudden flashing out of divinity,” he wrote. The ice was so close about them that they saw no water and therefore couldn’t move. The edges of their floe were wearing away. “Things look very dark, starvation very near,” Tyson wrote.

  They saw seals but not close enough that they could kill them. Snow fell thickly on the fifteenth, then the sun came out, and although the weather would have been good for traveling they saw nothing but ice around them. “Some of the men have dangerous looks; this hunger is disturbing their brains. I can not but fear that they contemplate crime. After what we have gone through, I hope this company may be preserved from any fatal wrong. We can and we must bear what God sends without crime. This party must not disgrace humanity by cannibalism.”

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  On the following day the men’s faces were swollen, but Tyson could not tell why. “I know scurvy when I see it, and it is not that.” Someone had been stealing from the small store of food they had left, and they had grown so weak that no one could stand watch for more than an hour at a time. A few days later, on the eighteenth, they shot a seal, which gave them enough meat for three meals, although it had to be eaten raw. It happened to be the same day they saw land, which then disappeared in a mist, “as if God had raised the curtain” to keep them from giving up, Tyson wrote.

  Meyers, the cook, seemed not to have recovered from his dunking. He wore deerskin gloves that were too large for his hands, so they had no feeling from the cold. He was tall and very thin, and he would bend over and grasp the bones of the seal to try to find one more scrap of meat, “and as he would raise himself up, almost toppling over with weakness, he found time and again that he had grasped nothing.” Tyson wrote. “If Doré had wanted a model subject to stand for famine, he might have drawn Meyers at this moment and made a success. He was the most wretched-looking object I ever saw.”

  Around nine that night, the sea overran their tent, while Tyson was in it. Every five or ten minutes a wave washed over them, until one carried away the tent and all their sleeping skins, “leaving us destitute,” Tyson wrote. They put the women and children in the whaleboat and dragged it to the edge of the floe where the waves were arriving, and until the morning, they endured “what I should say few, if any, have ever gone through with and lived.” A wave would break over them as they held on to the boat and drag them across the floe, sometimes delivering a portion of the boat into the water. Within the waves were blocks of ice as large as dressers, which knocked them down “like so many pins in a bowling alley.” When a wave had passed, they dragged the boat back to where they had started, hoping to arrive before another wave hit them. Hardly anyone made a sound, except the children, who were crying, and Tyson who was yelling to everyone to hold on.

  When daylight arrived Tyson saw a floe riding peacefully and decided they must reach it. As they launched, the cook went in the water but was pulled aboard. Reaching the floe, they lay down in their wet clothes to rest.

  If the sun had come out, their clothes might have dried, but for several days they had snow, sleet, and rain. The exhaustion of the night they had spent hauling the boat settled on them like an illness. They ate some dried skin that had been tanned and was meant for clothing, and was hard to tear with their teeth. They were south of where bears usually hunted, but one appeared and Tyson ordered every
one to lie down on the ice as if they were seals, and when the bear came toward them, the hunters, concealed behind a hummock, dropped it. “We arose with a shout,” Tyson wrote. “The dread uncertainty was over.”

  By the end of April their floe had eroded so much that Tyson was sure it would not survive a gale that appeared to be at hand. Launching the boat, which was now damaged, seemed to be “like putting to sea in a cracked bowl,” but they did, and after eight hours of rowing hauled up on another floe. Snow began to fall and did not stop until the next afternoon. The gale set the icebergs moving—“a grand and awful sight”—and they worried about being run over. Then at four-thirty on the afternoon of April 28, they saw a steamer. They hoisted their flag and pulled toward it, but the steamer never saw them, and by the evening it was lost to view. Under a new moon, they hauled up on another floe. With blubber from seals they had just shot, they built a fire, hoping another ship might see it.

  In the morning a second steamer appeared, a sealer, and they got in the boat and pulled toward it for an hour, but gave up when the ice closed them in. From another floe, they fired three shots and heard three shots from a steamer several miles away that seemed to be heading toward them through the ice, first in one direction, then another, but getting no nearer. They fired their guns again, but it remained four or five miles away. All day they did whatever they could to draw its attention, without being certain if they were seen. Late in the afternoon it turned away and disappeared.

  Through fog on the following afternoon—it was April 30—they saw another sealer, and this time Tyson sent one of the hunters toward it in his kayak. The hunter eventually pulled up beside it and shouted “American steamer,” hoping to convey that he came from an American steamer that had been lost. In a few moments the sealer drew up alongside Tyson’s floe. A hundred men “covered her top-gallant-mast, forecastle, and forerigging,” he wrote. They lowered seal boats, while Tyson and the others threw everything out of their boat to lighten it and got in to row to meet them.

  Once aboard, Tyson was pressed with questions. “How long have you been on the ice?” he was asked, and when he answered, since October fifteenth, “they were so astonished that they fairly looked blank with wonder.” One of them asked, “And was you on it night and day?”

  The Polaris, it turned out, had run aground, and the fourteen men aboard had spent the winter in a camp they built with the help of Eskimos who befriended them. Once open water arrived in the spring, they built two boats and set out and were rescued by a Scottish whaler.

  Tyson and the others had drifted more than fifteen hundred miles and had arrived off the coast of Newfoundland. When their story was made known, there were Arctic experts who said it was “impossible” and “ridiculous.”

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  The Bratvaag was hired during the summer of 1930 to take Dr. Horn’s geological expedition to Franz Josef Land, with the provision that it would also hunt seals and walruses; the owner wouldn’t lease it otherwise. White Island lay in its path, sufficiently secluded that until 1925 its place on the map was east of where it actually is. Over the years the island, which is now called Kvitøya and belongs to Norway, had different names. The first appears to have been Giles Land, sometimes also written “Gillies Land,” after a Dutch cartographer named Giles, whose maps describe it as an “ice highland,” discovered in 1707. It was called White Island—the name being descriptive of its appearance—in 1876 by a Norwegian sealing captain named Johan Kjeldsen. (In 1887 another captain named it New Iceland, but the name didn’t stick.) It was seventeen miles long, eight miles wide, and entirely occupied by a dome of ice that was 660 feet tall.

  Horn described the island as “a dazzling white shield seeming to float on the waves from which it rose in precipitous walls of ice.” All around it were icebergs, some of them grounded on shoals and reefs. The Bratvaag’s captain went slowly among them, taking soundings, since the charts gave no depths, and finally anchored half a mile offshore. Horn collected his “geologist’s hammers, botanizing boxes, nets, and other scientific equipment,” and rode in a launch to shore, passing a herd of walruses. He spent the day hammering at rocks and startling flocks of birds.

  The next day, August 6, was “a glittering day, with the sun shining in a cloudless heaven,” Horn wrote. “A most intense silence prevailed everywhere, broken only now and then by thunder from the glacier to our north.” The walrus hunt began around noon. After a few hours the captain returned to the ship. “He approached us calmly and quietly and told us that they had made a great find. They had found Andrée.”

  The captain then handed Horn the book. “We were astonished to see how neatly and orderly everything was written,” Horn wrote. “It was just as if the notes had been put down in a warm room, and yet the calculations had been made and written during the course of a death-march across the ice.”

  Ashore, Horn found the sealers gathered around Andrée’s boat. “It was strange to stand there and let our gaze wander over the same landscape and the same sea that Andrée and Strindberg and Fraenkel looked at for the last time thirty-three years before,” Horn wrote. “It was as if we saw them before us.” He pictured them coming toward him, struggling with the boat and their belongings. Seeing the island at last, he thought, must have filled them “with renewed courage, with fresh hopes.” He imagined them climbing the glacier to look for other signs of land. “Maybe, one day of clear weather, they caught sight of Great Island’s white dome in the west. They knew that behind it lay North-East Land, and behind that again Spitzbergen, whence there was the path home to Sweden.”

  The camp was beside a sloping rock against which snow had drifted. The boat was on the snow, and one side was covered with it. By the end toward the water were some books, one of which had tables of figures. “Of other objects lying about in the snow we noticed: a square, heavy box which certainly contained ammunition, trousers, a piece of black-and-red cloth, an oblong instrument-box, a barometer; a piece of canvas was found farther off, probably a part of the covering of the boat which had been torn loose by the wind. At about right angles to the boat lay an empty sledge, the upper rail of which was on a level with the surface of the snow, and by the side of which there was found a handkerchief with the monogram N. S. marked with red thread.”

  Andrée lay about thirty-five feet away. In a pocket inside his jacket was a pencil, a pedometer, and another diary with a few pages of writing. Close by, was the butt of a shotgun whose barrel was in the snow, and a camp stove, which had fuel in it. When they pumped the stove, “the paraffin came out of the burner in a fine spray,” meaning it still worked. (In Stockholm it boiled a liter of water in six minutes.) There was also a “china pot of lanoline,” a bottle of white tablets, and about sixty yards east a pelvis, which they decided was Andrée’s. About forty yards north was “a typical Arctic grave”—stones, that is, piled on a body laid on the ground in the cleft between two rocks. From the stones “feet in their Lapp boots stuck out,” and a shoulder. Bears had disturbed the grave; nearby a skull, bleached by the sun, “lay there dreadfully smiling.”

  Working with mattocks and spades, they began to free the boat from the ice, then discovered that it was lashed to a sledge underneath it. They were too heavy to lift, so the men cut the boat free and began to excavate the sledge.

  For a while they stood beside Andrée, wondering if it was proper to move him. They decided that he should be brought home, along with whoever was buried beneath the stones. Having removed them, they discovered that the body was frozen to the ground and had to be hewed free, which was difficult because the cleft was so narrow that they could work only from the ends.

  Others among the crew piled stones on a ridge above where Andrée had lain. Inside the cairn they placed a bottle containing a note that described their having found “the relics of the Swedish Andrée Expedition,” and so that the cairn could be seen from the water they put up a white pole steadied by three guy wires.

  On a tarpaulin they carried the bodies t
o the shore, then went back for the boat, which was filled with ice and so heavy that when they placed it aboard a whaleboat, the whaleboat sank nearly to its gunwales. Towing it to the ship by a motorboat took an hour. “Later on, Ole Myklebust made a chest, rather more than two yards long, with two compartments,” Horn wrote. “The skeletons were placed in the larger compartment—Andrée with the gun by his side—while in the other were put all the smaller objects that had been found beside Andrée.”

  The next day they left, watching White Island disappear in fog.

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  The following day, August 8, the Bratvaag met the Ternigen, a sealer from Tromsø, Norway. When they told the captain what was in the box on the foredeck, the news “made a great impression on him, for everyone knew Andrée,” Horn wrote. “He had become, so to say, a legend.” The Bratvaag had no radio with which they could send messages—they could only receive them—so they asked the Ternigen, which was heading home, to convey word of their find. They planned to be gone some time on Franz Josef Land.

  As it happened, they stayed a little more than two weeks. Coming home, they passed White Island. Through a telescope they saw the pole by the cairn, and a bear walking on the beach. The sea was running too high to allow them to land and see if they could find anything more. On the evening of the thirtieth one of the crew appeared on deck saying he had just heard a message calling them home. They all ran down into the hold and heard it broadcast again.

  The following morning, hoping to trade bear meat for fish, they met a fishing boat, and were told that a lot of vessels were looking for them. They put into Hasvik, on Sor Island, to make telephone calls and send telegrams “and so for the first time came into contact with a world that seemed to be a trifle excited,” Horn wrote. They stopped next at Skjaervo, where the Fram had stopped, and found journalists everywhere. They were ordered to sail to Tromsø, to meet an escort and the commission appointed by the government to receive the remains.