The Ice Balloon

by Alec Wilkinson

  The next morning Andrée wrote that the balloon had been heavily encumbered by ice from the fine rain and the fog. (By now it was only a flat piece of dark fabric; trash beside the basket.)

  All around them were ice and ruins of ice, pieces heaved up and toppled and ground into angles and corners like sawteeth. Here and there were leads and pools of water resembling ponds and channels. From the air the leads had looked like deep open water, but now they saw that some were only shallow streams formed by melted ice.

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  They had left as explorers, and now they were adventurers. Explorers study accounts of trips similar to their own as closely as scholars study an absorbing text. No concern is too slight to entertain. In A Thousand Days in the Arctic, Frederick Jackson, the man who met up with Nansen, described an explorer about to leave on a sledging trip who was observed in his cabin weighing a handkerchief and trying to decide if he could bring it. Adventure arrives on a voyage of discovery in the form of a mistake, and is almost always unwelcome. It is as if an explorer had conceived a plan for a trial voyage and then carried it out the way a scientist conducts an experiment. Roald Amundsen, who was first to the South Pole, in 1911, said that people often thought of adventure when they encountered the word discovery. A voyage of discovery was “a race against time, in order to escape death by starvation,” he wrote. An adventure was “an error in his calculations, the fact of which the ‘experiment’ has exposed.”

  It took them a week to build their boat and choose what to pack in their sledges. Meanwhile there were periods of snow and rain. On the morning of the twentieth the pigeons flew away, and that evening Andrée shot a bear that came close to the camp. Strindberg cooked it, and they ate it with “excellent pumpernickel.” The next day they tried the boat in a lead with “extremely good result.”

  They might have stayed where they were and let the ice carry them, as Tyson had, but no science could be done on an ice floe, or any new territory seen. In addition, to drift to rescue was passive and symbolically meager, whereas polar exploration was confrontational. Ernest Shackleton, the British explorer, called polar work “the white warfare,” after trying to traverse Antarctica in 1914. “Twice I examined the horizon carefully in every direction without discovering land,” Andrée wrote. He was about 192 miles from North-East Land, part of the Spitsbergen archipelago, and about 210 miles from Franz Josef Land, where Nansen had spent the winter. No one had ever crossed the wilderness between him and either place; he hoped to find land and shelter that was closer and unknown.

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  On the evening of July 22, they began walking southeast toward the depot that Jackson had left for them on Franz Josef Land. Their sledges weighed between 300 and 450 pounds. Strindberg noted that they were very hard to pull. Two hundred and fifty pounds had been the weight that had led Nansen’s crewman to conclude that “if a man had to draw a load like that he might just as well lie down at once—it would come to the same thing in the end.”

  At midnight they camped, and Strindberg wrote Charlier, “Well, now your Nils knows what it is to walk on the Polar ice. We had a little mishap at the start. When we were crossing from our ice-floe with the first sledge it went crooked and fell in. It was with difficulty we succeeded in getting it up. I climbed down up to the knees and held fast the sledge so that it should not sink. Andrée and Fraenkel crossed over to the other ice-floe and then suddenly we managed to get the sledge up but I expect that my sack which was on the sledge is wet inside. And it is there that I have all your letters and your portrait. Yes, they will be my dearest treasure during the winter. Well, my dear, what will you be thinking all winter? That is my only anxiety.—Well, after we had got the sledge up again we piloted ourselves across some floes with channels of water between. The way we did it was by making the ice-floes move quickly so that they came near each other. This was slow work with the large floes of course. At last we came on to a large field of ice across which we travelled with our sledges two or three kilometers. Each is loaded with about 160 kg. so that they are very heavy and during the last hour what we did was for all three of us to help with one sledge at a time. Now we have encamped on a picturesque bit of ice and have pitched our tent. In the tent we have our sleeping-sack in which all three of us are now lying side by side. It is a squeeze but the fellowship is good. Well, there is much I should write about but now I must sleep. Good night.”

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  When they woke at eleven-thirty in the morning, the sun was among clouds. To make breakfast and pack the sledges took an hour and they started walking around one. The leads were hard to cross and Strindberg and Andrée had different ideas about how to, although neither wrote them down. Andrée wrote, “The traveling bad and we were extremely fatigued. Dangerous ferryings and violent twistings, etc. of the sledges among the hummocks.” They discussed whether to lighten the sledges but reached no conclusion. It was Charlier’s birthday, and they gave her four cheers.

  “We have just stopped for the day,” Strindberg wrote her, “after drudging and pulling the sledges for ten hours. I am really rather tired but must first chat a little. First and foremost I must congratulate you, for this is your birthday. Oh, how I wish I could tell you now that I am in excellent health and that you need not fear for us at all. We are sure to come home by and by.”

  What Strindberg wrote next has faded away. When the text began again, he said, “Yes, how very much all this occupies my thoughts during the day, for I have plenty of time to think and it is so good to have such pleasant memories and such happy prospects for the future as I have, to think about!

  “(Later.) Now we have camped for the night and had coffee and eaten our sandwiches with cheese and h … biscuits and syrup and … Just now we are putting up the tent and Fraenkel is taking the meteorological observations. Now we are enjoying a caramel, it is a real luxury. You can fancy we are not over-delicate here. Yesterday evening I gave them (for it is I who attend to the housekeeping) a soup which was really not good, for that Rousseau meat-powder has a bad taste one soon becomes tired of it. But we managed to eat it in any case.…

  “Well, we have stopped for the night on an open place, round about there is ice, ice in every direction. You saw from Nansen’s pictures how such ice looks. Hummocks, walls, and fissures in the sea alternating with melted ice, everlastingly the same. For the moment it is snowing a little but it is calm at least and not especially cold (–0.8°). At home I think you have nicer summer weather.”

  Strindberg’s tone then turned downcast. “Yes, it is strange to think that not even for your next birthday will it be possible for us to be at home. And perhaps we shall have to winter here for another year more. We do not know yet. We are now moving onwards so slowly that perhaps we shall not reach Cape Flora this winter, but, like Nansen, will have to pass the winter in an earth-cellar. Poor little Anna, in what despair you will be if we should not come home next autumn. And you can imagine how I am tortured by the thought of it, too, not for my own sake, for now I do not mind if I have hardships as long as I can come home at last.

  “Now the tent is in order and we are going to our berths. We are all rather tired but in good humour. We discuss our mental characteristics and our faults, a very educative … I chat with …”

  They awoke on the twenty-fifth to rain and stayed in their tent, sleeping, until three. “Then we rose and I cooked a little food—cocoa and condensed milk and biscuits and sandwiches,” Strindberg wrote Charlier. “At 4.30 o’cl. we started and now we have drudged and pulled our heavy sledges for four and a half hours. The weather is pretty bad: wet snow and fog, but we are in good humour. We have kept up a really pleasant conversation the whole day. Andrée has talked about his life, how he entered the Patent Office, etc. Fraenkel and Andrée have gone ahead on a reconnoitering tour. I stayed with the sledges and now I am sitting writing to you. Yes, now you are having evening at home and you, like I, have had
a very jolly and pleasant day. Here one day passes like another. Pulling and drudging at the sledges, eating and sleeping. The most delightful hour of the day is when one has gone to bed and allows one’s thoughts to fly back to better and happier times. But the immediate object now is our winter-place. We hope to find things better in the future. Now the others are coming back and we shall continue the drudgery with the sledges, Au revoir.…”

  Strindberg did not tell Charlier that he had fallen into water deep enough that he “was in imminent danger of drowning,” Andrée wrote. After being rescued, he was “dried and wrung out and dressed in knickerbockers.”

  That evening Andrée made a list of all the items he carried on his sledge, which weighed 459 pounds. It included a shovel, three bamboo poles, a hose, a tarpaulin, a boat hook, and one “basket with contents,” which on its own weighed 143 pounds. Strindberg calculated that in pulling one sledge and returning for another, they had made perhaps a mile and no more than two in the last five days. They decided to shed what they could so that each man’s sledge weighed little enough that he could pull it himself. What they would do is take sufficient provisions and equipment to last forty-five days. Andrée got his sledge down to 285 pounds, and Fraenkel got his to three hundred. “Strange feelings and great indulgence in food on making reduction,” Andrée wrote.

  That day Strindberg shot a bear, his first. They soaked it for an hour in salt water which made it, according to Andrée, “immensely good.” The wind, having blown from the north, swung around to the south, which Andrée hoped would make the ice drift with them as they walked.

  On the twenty-seventh, to lighten the sledges again, they got rid of some meat powder and bread, which they thought they wouldn’t need, since Fraenkel had also shot a bear. They had tried to frighten it off by blowing a whistle and a hunting horn, then Fraenkel had “put in a beautiful shot at 38 m.,” Andrée wrote. With the skin they patched their sleeping sack.

  Most of the day they spent crossing leads, one while rowing, two others pushing the boat across. The leads had ice in them that was difficult to move, and cut the boat. The day was “extremely fatiguing,” Andrée wrote, so that even Fraenkel said he was tired.

  In the tent the next day, they drank a bottle of champagne, possibly the one they had brought to celebrate crossing the pole, and ate some biscuits with honey. The day was easier than many. They saw bear tracks but no bears. “Now we have turned in 12 o’cl. noon the 29th after having thus been at work 16 hours,” Andrée wrote. “We learn the poor man’s art: to make use of everything. We also learn the art of living from one day to the next.” Then he made a note to “Describe in detail. Difficulties with the ice, the ice-humps, melted snow-water, the sludge pools and the leads and the floes of broken ice.”

  On the thirtieth Fraenkel had incipient snow blindness but didn’t take any treatment. Their camp tasks had fallen into a pattern. Strindberg boiled and fried, serving bear meat twice a day, and Fraenkel took meteorological notes, oiled the guns, made sandwiches, and set the table and cleared it. “I reconnoiter,” Andrée wrote. At meals they sat on a medicine chest, a piece of photographic equipment, and a case of matches. To protect his hands from drying and cracking Andrée smeared them with bear grease.

  “Now it is a long time since I chatted with you,” Strindberg wrote Charlier on the thirty-first. The brief letter, roughly five sentences long—because parts have faded it is not possible to be certain—describes their changing the loads on their sledges a few days earlier. It was a letter Strindberg didn’t finish, and it was the last he wrote to her. After that he wrote only in his diary. It is an indication, perhaps, that he felt less hopeful.

  They took astronomical measurements and discovered that the ice had drifted west faster than they had walked east. “This is not encouraging,” Andrée wrote. “Out on the ice one cannot at all notice that it is in movement.”

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  On the morning of the thirty-first, they got under way at four. A fog kept them from seeing the best route. The snow was deep, and repeatedly they sank to their knees; Strindberg fell often, “flopping,” Andrée called it. When they came to an immense field of pressure ice—ice heaved up by collisions, that is—they had to cut their way through it. “The Polar dist. is certainly the source of the idea of the stumbling block,” Andrée wrote. He climbed a large pyramid-shaped piece of ice, but could see no land or water, even though, while resting earlier, they had heard “a murmuring noise as from a sea.”

  Toward evening they crossed bear tracks. “He had gone down in the soup a couple of times so hard that not even he is above making mistakes in this regard,” Andrée wrote.

  They saw the back of an animal they hadn’t seen before, “which looked like a long snake 10–12 metre long,” Andrée wrote—about thirty-three to thirty-nine feet—“of a dirty yellow color and, in my opinion, with black stripes running from the back for some distance down the sides.” He heard it breathing heavily and supposed it was a whale.

  The day was not difficult but when Andrée woke up more tired than usual the next morning, he wrote, “It seems as if good country were more fatiguing than half-good.”

  They began to run out of food. “The last bear meat was cut into small pieces so that it might at least look like being a lot.” An hour after breaking camp, however, Andrée shot a bear in the chest at 125 feet, “an old worn-out male animal with rotten teeth.” Strindberg and Fraenkel had shot at it too (“both fired outers”). Andrée hoped that the remains would draw other bears “so that we shall always have fresh meat at our heels.” From heavy wire Andrée made a fork for Fraenkel because the bear meat was so tough that it bent the forks they had. Strindberg stood the fork against a box in the boat and took a photograph of it.

  In ten hours they made a little more than a mile. Cutting a path, they destroyed their ax. When they came to a challenging place to cross, one of them would say, “Is it easy to get across?” and another would answer, “Yes, it is easy with difficulty.”

  On August 4 they gave up walking east. “We can surmount neither the current, nor the ice,” Andrée wrote. They decided to start southwest, toward a smaller depot on the Seven Islands, which they hoped they might reach in six or seven weeks. The temperature dropped to about twenty-eight degrees. “Each degree makes us creep deeper down into the sleeping sack.” The cold froze leads inconsistently, which left the three of them sometimes having to cross uncertain ice on hands and knees. When they ran low on bear meat, they ate mainly bread, biscuits, and water. In “extremely clear air” Andrée searched with a spyglass for land or water and saw none. “Only ice and very difficult ice visible in all directions,” he wrote.

  Between August 4 and 6 they were at nearly the same place they had been in the balloon between one-thirty in the morning and three on July 12.

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  In the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society for August of 1875, Adm. Sir Francis Leopold McClintock published a piece with the title “On Arctic Sledge Travelling,” in which he wrote that the first sledge party to look for Franklin had managed five hundred miles in forty days. They had two sleds, each drawn by six men. “The labour of doing so is most excessive,” he wrote, and of the twelve men at the end “five were completely knocked up, and every man required a considerable time under medical care to recruit his strength.”

  People unacquainted with sledging tended, he wrote, to think “that we either skate over glassy ice, or walk on snow-shoes over snow of any considerable depth,” he went on. “Salt-water ice is not so smooth as to be slippery; to skate upon it is very possible, though very fatiguing. But hardly is the sea frozen over, when the snow falls, and remains upon it all winter. When it first falls, snow is often soft, and perhaps a foot or fifteen inches deep; but it is blown about by every wind, until having become like the finest sand, and hardened under a severe temperature, it consolidates into a covering of a few inches’ depth, and becomes so compact, that the sledge-runner does not sink more than an inch or so: its
specific gravity is then about half that of water.

  “This expanse of snow is rarely smooth: it is broken into ridges or furrows by every strong wind.” These “inequalities are seldom more than a foot high, they add greatly to the labour of travelling, especially when obliged to cross them at right angles.

  “As the spring season advances, the old winter snow becomes softened, fresh snow falls, and sledging is made more laborious still.

  “At length the thaw arrives; the snow becomes a sludgy mixture, with wet snow on top and water beneath, through which men and sledges sink down to the ice below. It is now almost impossible to get along at all.”

  Moreover, “We seldom find either unbroken ice, or ice so crushed up into ridges that we cannot get over it at all, but, as a rule, crushed up or hummocky ice, three or four feet in height, is of very frequent occurrence, and of course adds much to the labour of sledging.”

  Sir George Nares, who led an expedition to discover the pole in 1875, tried to prepare his crew for sledging by telling them “that if they could ever imagine the hardest work they had ever been called upon to perform in their lives intensified to the utmost degree, it would only be as child’s play in comparison with the work they would have to perform whilst sledging.”

  Typically while sledging, men ate six or eight pounds of meat a day and sometimes as many as sixteen.

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  Turning toward the Seven Islands on the fourth, they crossed uneven ice. “Often the most practicable crossings lie at the ugliest hummock,” Andrée wrote, because the leads were narrower there. They walked for six hours, had a meal of biscuits, butter, and cheese, then walked six hours more. When they left their tent to start again, it was raining.