This passage is interesting because it makes clear that Wegener already had ambitions to go to Antarctica, but while dreaming about the glorious future in his journal, he also had some time to reflect on the present. In the middle of a (rather typical) diary entry on 14 September, talking about the problems with his mercury barometer, his need for some solvent to clean his air-electrical instrument, and progress on the (woefully insufficient) prefab structure for the magnetic measurements, he suddenly stopped and began to write about himself—the first of a rare series of introspective passages.
It is remarkable what trivial things one records here in a journal. But it is symptomatic. If I report everything I did during the day it is a sort of justification, it is a victory, that I succeeded in occupying myself productively. For me this expedition is unquestionably very valuable. In the past I have had of course to some extent a certain energy, which I would like to call here, for the sake of contrast, moral energy, but here I am learning practical energy, the energy of occupational work. All of those things which appear insignificant to one, for example washing every day, disposing of any outstanding task, no matter what it is—all these little things, which make up daily life, are the means by which one can learn practical energy.66
He was, in other words, overworked, anxious, and slightly depressed, having to push himself even to wash and accomplish small tasks—none of these being uncommon phenomena for expedition novices. He was also a little homesick. On the previous day he had written, “Isn’t today Papa’s birthday? I really cannot remember for sure. They’re probably at home, receiving visitors, maybe Kurt is there too, and they will surely be talking about me.”67 There was no relief from the work, however, and it was as well that he did not have much time for such musings. It snowed often now, and the bay was freezing over. The nights were very cold and the daytime temperatures below freezing as well.
Setting Up and Falling Apart
With the carpenter, Gundahl Knudsen (1876–1948), back from his travels with Mylius-Erichsen, work had finally begun on the large hut that would be the main shore station. This building (5 meters square) and the magnetic and astronomical observatories had been completely prefabricated so that they could be set up and bolted together in a matter of hours. For the smaller buildings this worked as planned, but during the outward voyage all the sections of the larger hut had been tightly lashed over the main hatch of the Danmark, and constant cycles of wetting and drying had warped and damaged these panels so badly that Knudsen had to completely disassemble and then painstakingly reassemble them.68
By the time the large building was finished in the middle of September, the ground had begun to freeze, and it was exhausting work raising an insulating earth-and-stone wall around it. Scientific research and journal writing ceased for a week in the race with the oncoming winter. “Dead tired,” scrawled Wegener on 21 September. “The whole day, strenuous earth-work on the house.” This house had no sooner been raised than it had been christened Villaen (the Villa) by the crew, and its four residents—the botanist Andreas Lundager (1869–1940), the painter Aage Bertelsen, Wegener, and Koch—were known henceforth as the “aristocrats.”69 Someone found an old rack of reindeer antlers and mounted them on the north gable, completing the illusion of an aristocratic hunting lodge. Wegener and Koch, of course, had to be on shore to be close to their instruments, since winter weather would make multiple trips back and forth from the ship dangerous or even impossible, and summertime trips would have to be a series of rowboat voyages; the stern of the triple-anchored Danmark was 60 meters (197 feet) from shore. Bertelsen and Lundager were there simply because there was room for four, though they enjoyed themselves and the relative privacy the Villa afforded.
The “Villa” where Wegener would live for most of the next two years was a Spartan accommodation but quieter, cleaner, and less odiferous than the ship—and it had no rats. It had a single large room 5 meters square (about 270 square feet), with two ample bunk beds flanking the door. At the south end, facing the only window, was a large worktable for four. A small cooking stove stood in the middle of the room, with its chimney passing up through the storage loft above, where sledge materials, tents, and boots were kept. The stove, they soon found, was too small to heat the space and, consequently, had to be constantly fed. There was room to work, though, if one could keep warm.
Wegener installed (in the southeast corner of the room) a barometer and a barograph, a normal clock (i.e., not a chronometer), and his air-electrical recording instrument, with its insulated wire leading via a brass rod to a tellurium-pointed sensor on the roof. There was shelving along the walls for the other instruments in their cases, as well as shelf room for notebooks and the astronomical reference works, including the stellar ephemerides, the mathematical tables, and the nautical almanacs. There was even a working telephone that allowed calls to and from the ship.70
The environs began to look “scientific” as well. Along the phone line leading to the ship Wegener set up his thermometer hut, with the instruments in a louvered box about 2.5 meters (8 feet) above the ground. These consisted of a thermograph, maximum and minimum thermometers that would register the highest and lowest temperature in each twenty-four-hour span, one of Aßmann’s aspiration psychrometers (to measure the humidity), and a hair hygrometer to measure humidity when the wet-bulb thermometer in the Aßmann instrument froze. Closer to the ship were the anemometer, to measure wind velocity, and, on a separate mast, the wind vane. The rain gauge was a few meters from the entrance to the Villa, where someone could reach and empty it daily.
First snowfall at Danmarkshavn, September 1906. The “Villa” where Wegener and Lt. Koch lived from 1906 to 1908 is in the foreground. To the left is the kite winch. Wegener may be seen beyond the Villa at the “thermometer hut,” changing the paper on the recording drum. One of the crew is standing guard with a rifle to watch for polar bears. From Achton Friis, Im Grönlandeis mit Mylius-Erichsen: Die Danmark-Expedition 1906–1908, trans. Friedrich Stichert, unaltered 2nd (1913) German ed. of 1909 Danish original ed. (Leipzig: Otto Spamer Verlag, 1910).
The hydrogen canisters for the balloons were stacked along the shore near the petroleum depot (fire was a constant and terrible danger, and flammables were stored far from the ship and the huts). Wegener’s air-electrical and magnetic observatories stood a few tens of meters inland from the Villa, as did a “kite-house” made of provision crates, snugged under the lee of the only rising ground in the area in a mostly vain attempt to protect it from the prevailing northwest wind. This makeshift structure for storing the assembled kites (and sometimes an inflated balloon) was necessitated by the great labor of lashing together kites for each flight and the near impossibility of disassembling them after winching them down, when their lashings were frozen. Surmounting the small rise that protected the kite-house was the astronomical observatory, which featured (miracle of modernity) electric lights powered by dry-cell batteries in the Villa—a creation of Bendix Thostrup (1876–1945), the ship’s third mate who, in the view of everyone on board, could make anything.71 With the meteorological instruments set up—both in the area immediately around the Villa and at the second station slightly inland on an exposed hilltop at an altitude of 132 meters (433 feet)—Wegener felt he could really begin his aerological program.
On the equinox (21/22 September) he was finally able to get a balloon launched: “After all the work, finally, we have come to the desired result. We have made the first balloon ascent!” It was no little thing to get it airborne, though, and his description gives a hint of what it requires to attempt science under these conditions. The balloon was stuck together and frozen, and he had to pull it apart three or four times before it would lie flat. “We worked at this for hours, and the ‘end of the song’ was that we tore a hole in it. It had to be repaired. The rubber patch would not stick on the mirror-smooth frozen varnish, and so I had to sew it—this was a real delight, outdoors, at −7°C (19°F).”72
The repair of the b
alloon took until noon, when, in Danish Greenland as in Denmark itself, everything stopped for lunch. After lunch, Wegener wanted to hurry back to the balloon work, but a polar bear had wandered across the new ice toward the ship. Everyone on the expedition was wild to shoot a bear, and they all plunged below for their guns and then dashed out on the ice and began blasting away at it. Wegener had none of this sporting fervor and ambition, nor any desire to be killed by the astonishing display of poor marksmanship. “The bear was unbelievably stupid, and walked along a line of hunters stretching almost a hundred meters. I had to wait till someone shot it, and then I could finally go clean the instruments—it is awful, the number of things one has to consider when one is making all the attachments [of the apparatus] the first time.”73 He could not get the inflating tube into the balloon until finally his housemate Lundager happened by with Niels Høeg-Hagen (1877–1907), the other cartographer besides Koch, who took pity on him and helped him inflate the balloon and get it aloft. He was delighted: “even the recording apparatus worked.”
The following day he was able to make a second balloon flight and observed something that absorbed his interest for the rest of the expedition—the presence of a sharp temperature inversion. A few hundred meters aloft, above a fog layer, the temperature was 14°C (39°F) warmer than at the ground. He had seen inversions earlier in the month, but usually only 1°–3°—this was a striking example and worthy of further study. Moreover, he was beginning to grasp the weather pattern. Whatever the wind at the surface, above 500 meters (1,640 feet) it almost invariably blew from the west-northwest very constantly.74
At the end of the day on the twenty-third he got some long-hoped-for news from Koch: he was to be included in a major sledge trip in November and in the trip to the north the following spring. Mylius-Erichsen had, to this point, left Wegener completely out of the planning for the exploring trip to the north. For this undertaking, already bombastically titled “The Great Sled Trip to Map the Coast of Northeast Greenland,” preparations had begun as soon as the station was established—including the building of dogsleds on the Greenland model, the plaiting of dog harnesses, and the training of the Danish novices, supervised by the Greenlanders, in driving sled dogs. This was not only a cartographic endeavor but a political one—to extend Danish sovereignty along a coast also claimed by a recently independent (1905) Norway. Wegener, mentally and physically tied to his weather instruments, had no part in any of these preparations.75
Koch, as chief cartographer, had successfully talked Mylius-Erichsen into a major—and risky—dogsled trip in November even as the winter night began. He had convinced Mylius-Erichsen that it would be necessary, if the expedition’s mapping of the north in the following spring were to be accurate, to correlate the longitude of Danmarkshavn with the longitude of Germania Haven, some 245 kilometers (147 miles) to the south. This longitude had been repeatedly measured by the Germania Expedition in winter quarters in 1870–1871, and Koch had great confidence in its accuracy. Mylius-Erichsen gave in, partly because he had already committed to a smaller trip himself, depositing messages and locating caches of food to the south as part of their escape plan, should the Danmark be crushed in the ice, but he had grave misgivings.76
Koch claimed he needed Wegener’s skills with the astronomical instrument (a zenith telescope) on the trip, and he had gone to Mylius-Erichsen and insisted that Wegener be included. Wegener and Koch had, it would seem, hatched this plan together,77 and Wegener was pleased—he had come to Greenland to be an explorer, had he not? Yet with this gratification came a sort of unease about his scientific program, and he confided to his diary, “So I am to take part in the great sled journey, and I also am bound for the northern tip of Greenland! I am very satisfied by this thought, though I doubt that anyone will make meteorological observations in the meantime.”78
Spurred by the knowledge that he would soon be unable to make observations for some weeks, Wegener pushed forward his meteorological observations and struggled to get some aerological work done. He managed, in the rest of October, to get off eleven kite and balloon launches, but not without his share of disasters. On 4 October he lost one of his precious recording instruments—one of two he had obtained from Hergesell—when the balloon tore in its descent and hurtled to the ground, utterly smashing the instrument on the rocks.79 He took this disappointment philosophically, noting in his diary that without the sort of assistance he had at Lindenburg, such things had to be expected, and one can see him revising his expectations downward: “If I can just carry forward a [limited] observation program, and gain experience in sled trips and cartography, these two years will be well repaid.”80
Working anxiously and in haste to achieve even limited observations, he was repeatedly frostbitten, mostly through his own carelessness. On 7 October he volunteered to stand the night watch on board the Danmark, which required him to ascend the frozen iron ladder 90 feet to the crow’s nest every other hour to take observations. Bertelsen had loaned him a revolver, in case he met a bear walking in the dark to the ship, but in touching the frozen metal parts of his instruments repeatedly with an ungloved hand, Wegener froze his right index finger so badly that the gun was rendered useless as a weapon on the way back to the “Villa.” On 10 October he froze his left ear, and on the twelfth the fingers of his left hand, from constantly taking off his gloves to adjust the instruments—nighttime temperatures were already nearly −20°C (−4°F).
On the fifteenth he had his worst day of the expedition thus far: “A Tycho Brahe day.” Fumbling with frozen fingers while adjusting his magnetic recording instruments, he dropped and smashed one of Koch’s precious pocket chronometers. He was terribly embarrassed. In all the preparations for Greenland, he had forgotten to bring a timepiece of his own. Now that this chronometer was broken, he had to find another and borrow it whenever he wished to make any observations (i.e., many times each day), which was a source of constantly renewed mortification. On the eighteenth he frost-burned his face quite badly while winching down a (very successful) kite ascent to 2,400 meters (7,874 feet); the hoarfrost on the kite cable showered him as he winched it onto the drum—by hand.81
These repeated accidents frustrated him and left him feeling vexed and inadequate. He was obsessed with having broken Koch’s chronometer, and on top of everything else, Mylius-Erichsen paid him a visit and suggested that Wegener should stand night watch regularly, like everyone else. Wegener was appalled at the realization that, in the eyes of the leader, he was not pulling his weight on the expedition. On the nineteenth he fell into a black depression, and on the twenty-second he wrote,
The last few days have been really bad. Moody! I am brought low by two different things—above all my misfortune with the clock (the balance is broken) and also my clumsiness in not freely volunteering to take a regular part in the night watch, but waiting until Mylius-Erichsen had to ask me if I would. So the last few days I’ve been really down. I could probably work my way through the worst of it, and I want to work, but I can’t keep myself from being intolerable to everyone around me. So I’ve read a lot the last few days, and now I’m over the hump.82
When he did return to work on Friday, 26 October, he found himself able to function but overwhelmed by all he had to do: “This business with the chronometer really took its toll on me, and now all these observations! Today is clear and still. So I should of course make a tethered- balloon ascent, send up a sounding balloon, make some magnetic observations, begin the air-electrical measurements, and take part in the astronomical work. It is all too much! But I believe I can make it through this whole episode, if I can just keep calm.”83
Fortunately, he was saved from his indecision by Mylius-Erichsen. If Wegener was to take part in the sled trip to the south in mid-November, he had to be able to drive a dogsled, and Mylius-Erichsen wanted to find out if he was up to it. Taking advantage of the waxing Moon, which would be full on the twenty-ninth, Mylius-Erichsen had cooked up a little trip—himself and Wegener and two
dogsleds—to Hvalrosødden (Walrus Spit), some 50 kilometers (31 miles) to the east along the coast of Germania Land. The ostensible reason was to check on the cache of walrus meat from the animals Mylius and the others had shot and slaughtered in August and September for dog food—with the hides reserved to make overboots. But it was quite clear to Wegener that this was a test: “Mylius-Erichsen obviously wants to see how I conduct myself on a sled-trip. I haven’t had any training, and recently have been nearly immobile. But I’m glad to go. I have to admit it’s about time! Other than the two or three days I spent with Koch in the motorboat, I haven’t been out of sight of the masts of the ship.”84
From the moment they left on 27 October, Wegener was stunned by the speed with which the dogs moved. Mylius led the way with his team, followed by Wegener driving Koch’s dogs (these were superbly trained, and Koch was stacking the deck in Wegener’s favor). They moved along at a trot, the dogs pulling the lightly loaded sleds enthusiastically and with ease. When they hit deep snow, Wegener followed Mylius-Erichsen’s example and jumped off the sled and trotted along with the dogs. As the miles unrolled, Wegener thought constantly of the Koldeway Expedition in 1870–1871. It was along this stretch of coast that they had abandoned their attempt to reach the North Pole. Where the German expedition had struggled and sweated, without even skis, and pulling their ungainly and balky sledges through deep snow, Wegener was gliding almost effortlessly along, alternately riding and running at an easy jog—the kind of pace one could easily keep up all day.
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