The Ice Balloon

by Alec Wilkinson

  By the sixth they had arrived at a level plain extending about a hundred yards, but which was covered with “powdered-sugar ice and ice gravel,” against which they slipped and fought for their footing, Andrée wrote. Crossing a lead, the sledges rolled several times, which led Fraenkel to say that the journey could not be called altogether hopeless—a pun from the Swedish word that emphasized hop. The wind was against them and seemed to drive them back as far as they advanced. “New difficulty: the leads altering while we are crossing them,” Andrée wrote.

  Bear meat was “very good when it has become old,” he continued, and a little reindeer-hair in the food, from the sleeping sack, was recommended, “for while taking it out one is prevented from eating too quickly and greedily.” The wind was “right in our noses, but it is cooling.” In the brightest light he needed dark glasses. The rest of the time he squinted.

  When they came to “a dreadful country” with pools of fresh water, Fraenkel, who was in the habit of complaining of the monotony of the landscape, “did not like what was offered him,” Andrée wrote. Freshwater pools, more than saltwater ones, were usually too shallow to cross in the boat and their edges tended to be smooth and slippery.

  9 Aug. at 2:20 a.m. we began to get up in the tent

  3:00 the primus started

  3:18 the steak ready and the coffee-making begun

  3:29 the steak eaten

  3:48 the coffee made

  4:00 the coffee drunk

  5:30 broke camp

  The terrain they faced consisted “of ice-humps blocks and hills with snow-drifts between and this is difficult for the pullers,” Andrée wrote. Fraenkel began to suffer from the runs, and Andrée gave him opium for it. In addition, he grew despondent. A bear approached but turned tail before they could shoot it, though Strindberg and Fraenkel chased it. “This was a great grief for us and a pity too for soon we shall have no more bear’s meat left.” The next problem was Strindberg’s gun, which was poorly made, and had to be fixed. By the time they got into their sleeping sack, they had been up and working for eighteen hours.

  Andrée’s sledge still weighed nearly 300 pounds, and he made another inventory of it: one gun, one box of ammunition, a tent, a medicine chest, two tent poles, five pounds of meat, and various instruments and private items. Fraenkel carried the boat, which weighed nearly 139 pounds, the oars, some books, a gun, ammunition, hay for their shoes, eight boxes of matches—altogether 338 pounds.

  The ground they crossed next Andrée described as “absolutely untrafficable”—broad channels with clumps of ice and snow through which neither the boat nor the sledges could pass except laboriously. By Strindberg’s calculations they had passed south of eighty-two degrees longitude, and to celebrate they had sardines for dinner, at four in the afternoon, with bread, biscuits, butter, and cheese. Fraenkel’s stomach was better. Afterward it began to rain, and in the evening to snow. They walked until ten that night.

  Late in the morning—it was August 11—Andrée and his sledge went into the water, soaking everything aboard. Strindberg’s sledge ran into Fraenkel’s, and a grapnel it was carrying poked a hole in the boat. Each of their sledges rolled several times. Twice Andrée’s landed upside down. “All imaginable difficulties happened and when the evening came we were not at all happy,” he wrote.

  “Something else happened,” he added. “F. shot an ivory gull.” He described the gull’s markings and feet. “The beak had a yellow point but was otherwise yellowish-white with black longitudinal shadings. The bird landed quite near us.”

  (illustration credit 64.1)

  For the first time they changed course to reach what they thought was land but discovered was only a peculiarly shaped piece of ice. A parallel line of narrative in Andrée’s diary is the observations he made now and then on natural history—on the consistency of the snow or the elements such as clay that he sometimes found among the ice, and what they suggested about where the ice had originated. In their specificity his notes have a suggestion of mania. “Sample no. 7 was found near the edge of a melt-hole and on the under-side of a thin, newly formed ice covering about 2cm thick lying over the water in the same melt hole.”

  From readings they thought they were close to Gillies Land—that is, White Island—“but neither that nor any other land is visible,” Andrée wrote. Having only one meal of bear left, they fried a gull and liked how it tasted. Before going to bed, at three-thirty on the morning of the thirteenth, they heard a whale and looked for it but didn’t find it.

  Later that day they tried to catch a seal and failed. In a fissure, with a shovel, Andrée killed a small fish, probably a polar cod, by his description, which “seemed astonished to see us.” Almost at the same moment Strindberg yelled, “Three bears!” They hid behind a hummock, but no bears appeared. Softly whistling, Andrée crept forward as bait, then lay down in the snow. The she-bear left her cubs and came toward him but scented him and retreated. Andrée lay still in the snow, hoping she might return, and when he could stand it no longer he yelled that they should rush the bear. The bear came toward him, they fired but missed, and Andrée leaped up, wounding the bear as she fled. With his next shot he dropped her, and with the fourth he dropped one of the cubs. Fraenkel wounded the other, and Strindberg dropped it. From them they got 138 pounds of meat, sufficient for twenty-three days. The heart, brain, and kidneys they had come to like especially, as well as the tongue. With butchering the bear, they didn’t walk much that day. The following day they ate themselves “prop full,” Andrée wrote. He noted that the mother bear had bitten her tongue clean through, then he wrote, “The ivory gull has three cries 1. piyrrrr with four soft and trilling r’s 2. pyot-pyot 3. resembling the croaking of the crow.”

  The next day it rained. They stayed in their tent and mended their glasses and sharpened their knives. Andrée said they ate “masses of meat.” He and Strindberg both had the runs, and Strindberg cut his hand. They left in a snowfall at four in the morning and made good progress through terrain that Andrée wrote was “very bad.”

  On the seventeenth Andrée wrote, “Our journey today has been terrible. We have not advanced 1000 meters but with the greatest difficulty have dodged on from floe to floe.” On the eighteenth, from open water between floes, seals watched them get in and out of their boat time and again, trying to ferry their way through troublesome ice. “We must be near the sea, the ice being so divided,” Andrée wrote. It was a clear day, and they could see the horizon distinctly, but no land appeared where they hoped it would be. All their effort had again taken them not much more than a thousand yards.

  Mending his pants later in the tent, Andrée heard a noise and, looking through a crack, “saw a bear close to my nose.” Still sewing he said, “Look, there’s another bear for us.” Fraenkel crept out of the tent and as the bear rose to attack him he shot it. It turned out to be a young male, the best of all the bears they had shot, and from the brain, the kidneys, the tongue, and some steaks along the back, they got twenty-two pounds of meat. With some of it, Strindberg baited fishhooks, which he dropped through the ice, but he didn’t catch anything.

  (illustration credit 64.2)

  Snow concealed irregularities in the ice, which slowed the sledges, and detouring around pools too shallow for their boat meant that they couldn’t travel in a straight line. To find a path Andrée would walk ahead. “I have to go a long way among hummocks and over pools and along the leads,” he wrote. “The worst are the fresh-water pools which turn in innumerable windings, real labyrinths, and which are united by means of wide fissures that do not become visible until one is close to them.” Meanwhile Strindberg and Fraenkel sat shivering with the sledges.

  The hidden contours of the ice led frequently to what Andrée called “wild crossings,” in which the sledges turned over or hung above “an abyss while the puller tumbles down.” Over certain kinds of ice the sledges had to be hauled as fast as the three of them could manage and over others inch by inch, or rotated at speed on
a pivot point. When their way was blocked they would cut a track with an ax or a spade. Other terrain required that they unload the sledges completely. To cross deeper leads they had to balance the sledges between the gunwales of the boat, which left them always in danger of tipping over. Even a small lead, if it was only half frozen or filled with ice, might take hours to cross cautiously.

  One evening toward the end of August, Andrée proposed that they try bear meat raw, which, if you salted it, tasted like oysters, he wrote. It was the twenty-first, and while they were pitching their tent three bears came at them. Strindberg shot one, and Fraenkel shot the other two. At Andrée’s suggestion Fraenkel mixed some of the bears’ blood with oatmeal and fried it in butter, which they called a blood pancake and thought was excellent. Strindberg then put algae and yeast powder together for a soup which Andrée wrote “should be considered as a fairly important discovery for travelers in these tracts.”

  Early in the morning Andrée shot a young ivory gull. “It seems to be one of the young ones that give the cry ‘pyot-pyot,’ ” he wrote. The piyrrr call he had decided was the mother’s call of concern. He preserved its eyes so that they could be examined for how they were defended against snow blindness. The country the three of them faced consisted of “a boundless field of large and small hummocks. One cannot speak of any regularity among them,” he wrote. Just as they crossed a lead it closed. “The floes came at a great speed and there was a creaking sound about us. It made a strange and magnificent impression.” The day, he said, had been “perhaps the most beautiful we have had.” With the horizon’s being so clear they tried again to sight land, with no luck.

  They had grown fatigued but were undaunted. Andrée could still find beauty in where he found himself. Of the formations of ice on a peaceful clear night he wrote, “Magnificent Venetian landscape with canals between lofty hummock edges on both sides, water-square with ice fountain and stairs down to the canals. Divine.”

  The same day, August 22, Fraenkel’s knee was dislocated but went back into its joint without difficulty. His foot was sore, and Andrée massaged it. Strindberg had pain in one of his toes.

  The next day a lead opened just where they were about to cross, and they had to stop and ferry the boat over instead. Fraenkel made a soup with algae and bear meat, which Andrée liked but Strindberg and Fraenkel thought should be only an “emergency soup.” The temperature had fallen so that the ice in the pools had begun to support their weight, meaning that they wouldn’t have to travel such curving courses. With all the bears they had shot, they were now each eating six pounds of meat a day, and thriving.

  About eight inches beneath the surface of a lead, a small, dark gray fish, perhaps four inches long, glided among the pieces of ice. They saw it only briefly. “Fulmars and ivory gulls sail around us pretty often,” Andrée wrote. A small black bird “with white on the wings like a black guillemot, but white under the belly like a little auk,” they were unable to identify. “It has a kind of twitter and we have not seen it fly but only dive.” To preserve a sample of leaves and clay (“Find no. 17”), Andrée washed it in a tea-strainer, then wrapped it and dried it against his chest.

  Fraenkel had developed a severe case of the runs, which Andrée thought came from his having caught cold. Also he suffered “sometimes from cramp perhaps on account of overexertion.” Strindberg’s toe had been cured by rubbing boot grease on his sock, which probably reduced the abrasion.

  Andrée saw a bird, which he thought was a skua, a gull-like bird, that flew “as silently as a spirit.” He also saw the sea-serpent-like animal again, which was “gray everywhere and when he dived a two-cloven fin was seen.”

  Later in the day—it was August 25—Fraenkel fell in the water. He still had the runs, and Andrée got them too. One of Strindberg’s feet also had begun to hurt. That evening Andrée made six fishhooks from pins, strung them nineteen inches apart, baited them with bear meat and fat, and set them sixteen feet beneath the ice. He left them for two days, but nothing touched them.

  On the twenty-seventh, they had one of their best days, making roughly four miles in very good weather. Fraenkel was still suffering from the runs, and Andrée gave him opium for it. Andrée’s case seemed to have gotten better without his taking anything.

  Andrée put out his fishing line again, but still nothing touched it. They broke camp at nine and walked across ice that “was very much in movement,” he wrote. By midday they had reached “terrible ice: large hummocks with deep perpendicular pools between.” In the evening Fraenkel had pain in his stomach, and Andrée gave him morphine. “We shall see if he can be made a sound man again.”

  The gulls and the fulmars came so close that Andrée was tempted to kill them with a stick. They discovered that the movement of the ice had thwarted them again, and that in six days they had come only twelve miles. “To keep a tolerably steady course among the leads is on my word no easy task.”

  The next day, August 29, Andrée wrote that he had started to feel the cold. The floor of the tent had begun to be covered in ice. A bear they wished they could shoot ran “off at a gallop when he saw that he was noticed.” The ice had turned hard as glass and was difficult to pull a sledge across.

  “Tonight was the first time I thought of all the lovely things at home,” Andrée wrote.

  65

  On the thirtieth they started walking at five in the evening, with the temperature at twenty degrees. When they arrived on a floe they couldn’t leave except in their boat, they decided to pitch their tent and see if the floe moved during the night. A bear crept up until it was about ten feet from Strindberg, who finally saw it and shouted. Andrée was inside the tent, but Fraenkel was outside and wounded it. To save cartridges they let it run for a while, although it took three more shots to kill it, and it ended up in a lead where they had to use the grapnel and a rope to collect it. Strindberg took a photograph of it lying on the ice, with Andrée and Fraenkel standing beside it. From it they got meat to last fourteen days.

  The following day they again began walking in the evening. “The sun touched the horizon at midnight,” Andrée wrote. “The landscape on fire. The snow a sea of fire.” The polar summer was finished. Not a soul in the world knew where they were.

  They came to a sheet of new ice, which Andrée crept across on hands and knees. Then they passed among ice that was moving. “It is fine to work the sledges onward through the middle of the crashing ice-pressures round about us,” Andrée wrote. “Sometimes a lead closes just when we need it, sometimes it opens suddenly the moment before or after a crossing.”

  That night Andrée had the runs—from having gotten a chill, he thought—and took both morphine and opium. The next morning, September 1, he wrote that “we needed to be out of harness for a day.” They mended the sleeping sack and “chatted and ate and drank. We were in the best of humours.” They resolved to try and keep day-and-night schedules.

  On the third they rowed for three hours “slowly over the mirror-like surface,” as if already in the afterlife. “We knew that we were moving onwards more quickly than usual and at every turn of the leads we asked ourselves in silence if we might not possibly journey on in this glorious way to the end,” Andrée wrote. They came to a bay full of ice that closed as they arrived, so they had to get out of the boat and return to hauling their sledges.

  The fourth was Strindberg’s birthday. Andrée woke him and gave him letters Charlier and his family had written for the occasion, which pleased him immensely. In his honor they allowed themselves extra food for dinner—bear’s meat, goose-liver paste, and cake with syrup—and they made speeches. Not long after they started traveling, Strindberg fell in the water, soaking him so thoroughly that they had to pitch their tent to dry him out. His sledge, which carried their bread, had gone in with him. They dried the bread and fried what they could, but there was nothing to do with the sugar except pour the water it had dissolved in into their coffee. “It was a pretty great misfortune for us,” Andrée wrote
. “On such a journey as this there is developed a sense of both the great and of the little. The great nature and the little food and other details.”

  From tracks they could tell that a bear had come close to them in the night. Twelve ivory gulls settled on a piece of ice beside the tent, and Fraenkel killed three with one shot. After four hours’ marching, they got in the boat to cross a lead and ended up rowing through the following night, then pitched their tent on a floe. When they woke, the openings around them had frozen, and only with great effort did they reach the next floe. From the top of it they saw a better route, and along it they saw a walrus, which Andrée realized had been the sea serpent. Walruses sometimes swim in single file, cutting the water like dolphins, and Andrée had apparently seen a line of them and thought from a distance they were one long creature. They took to the boat again but were forced from it by sludge that was formed by pieces of new ice piled on top of one another “like tiles or cards in a pack,” until the pieces formed a mass they couldn’t penetrate.

  After five hours of walking on the following day, the seventh, they had gone a thousand yards. Low on meat, they shot two gulls. “We do not like to shoot unless we can get at least two gulls per shot,” Andrée wrote. “They are delicate birds but I think they cost a lot of ammunition.” He wished for a seal or a bear.

  Neither Fraenkel nor Andrée had the runs anymore, but Fraenkel had pain in his left foot from a blister that Andrée tended. He hoped it would heal soon, since they depended on Fraenkel’s strength. On the ninth, Fraenkel could not pull his sled any longer, only push it. Andrée and Strindberg hauled theirs, then returned for his. “This tries our strength,” Andrée wrote. Since the terrain had been very difficult, they could manage only six hours’ walking. Andrée came to a piece of ice that seemed stable when he tested it with the boat hook but turned out to be sludge, and he fell in. He floated on his back until the others could extend an oar to him. He finished the day’s entry by noting that large seals swam around them, but they could not shoot well enough to kill them instantly, and if they only wounded them the seals sank.