Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  His desire for books was then not just the desire of anyone on long foreign travel to hear or read his own language, but a more specific need. In Germany, every one of his acquaintances was a cosmopolitan intellectual trained in the same way as he, men who had read the same books and thought the same thoughts: it had never occurred to him that he would end up on a scientific expedition without any other intellectuals, because the distinction between scientists and scientific intellectuals had no counterpart in his experience. His Danish companions were competent, strong, brave, hardworking, well trained, humorous, skilled, energetic, and intelligent, but with the exception of Koch, there was no one interested in large scientific themes or ideas, and there was, to be honest, some doubt about Koch’s interest in larger themes, too. Wegener wanted his work to be good work, but it had to fit some larger scheme than a map or a chart. Mapping and charting were, however, just what he was now scheduled to do.

  The Sled Trip, Spring 1907

  Mylius had set departure for 28 March. This trek north was the point of the entire expedition, and excitement and anxiety increased apace with the proximity of the event. There were to be four teams: two exploration teams and two support teams, ten men in all. The exploration teams were to be led by Koch and Mylius-Erichsen. Koch was to drive rapidly to one of the farthest points reached by Robert E. Peary, Cape Clarence Wyckoff (N 82°57.7′, E 23°09′).15 Koch was to find Peary’s cairn, retrieve his notes, and deposit evidence of his own arrival there. Mylius would strike a little farther south and east to the other farthest point east reached by Peary: “Navy Cliff” (N 81°37′, W 34°05′, at the head of “Independence Sound”).16 Wegener was to be a part of one of the support teams, laying down depots, hunting game for dog food, and filling in blanks and details left by the high-speed reconnaissance of Koch along the coast. This push north aimed to cement Danish control of all lands to the east of those reached by Peary and, in so doing, to map the last uncharted stretch of Greenland coast. One question Mylius hoped to answer was whether Peary Land was an island or actually the northern tip of Greenland itself. Peary’s 1900 map showed a channel continuing through Independence Sound right across the northern tip of Greenland, so that Peary Land was itself a substantial island in the Arctic Ocean cut off from Greenland.

  Accounts of polar travel are, in general, stories of danger and disaster or near disaster, of high expectations dashed, of unanticipated obstacles, and of amazing achievements in spite of everything. In this sort of work every day is, without any exaggeration, a matter of life and death. So it was in the Great Sledge Trip to the North. Where to begin this tale of wonder and woe? Half the drivers were inexperienced, and the men were out of shape after winter quarters and easily injured. The sledges were overloaded, and the dogs were undertrained and so underfed that they ate the sledge harnesses and their own traces during the nights; only the handful of experienced drivers could repair them.

  The snow was much deeper than they had anticipated, the pressure ridges in the sea ice the worst they had ever encountered, and the ice foot along the shore sloping and dangerous: it broke the sleds daily. They tied their skis to the sled runners to help the dogs in the deep snow, and the skis broke. They tried the Greenlanders’ method of turning over the sleds and urinating on the runners to give them an ice coating, and they froze their fingers while smoothing the freezing liquid. They had expected to cover 60 kilometers (37 miles) a day, and they were fortunate when they made half that distance. They had expected to hunt along the way, but the musk oxen and bears (for dog food) failed to materialize in the numbers they had estimated and counted on. Using Peary’s wildly erroneous description of the trend of the coast, Mylius had underestimated the length of the outward march by almost 300 kilometers (186 miles)—an error of ten days’ travel at their rate of progress.17

  Sketch map drawn by Johannes Georgi of Wegener’s sled trips in Northeast Greenland. The legend reads, “I. From Danmarkshavn to Sabine Island Nov.–Dec. 1906; II. From Danmarkshavn N to 81° March–May 1907; III. From Danmarkshavn to Dronning Louise Land March–April 1908.” There is also reference to a planned trip by Wegener and Koch at a later date. Wegener Nachlaß. Courtesy of Deutsches Museum, Munich.

  When they reached latitude 78° north, they encountered for the first time the Inland Ice flowing as glaciers directly into the ocean—and these huge tongues of ice rose and fell with the tide, constantly splitting and making huge crevasses, while simultaneously shattering the ice foot, making the shorewise traverse harrowing and exhausting. They were trapped in time between two crucial climate events. They had to get north before the Sun began to melt the snow cover, making it impossible to travel with fully loaded dogsleds, and they had to return south before the ice went out along the shore—and there were already places in mid-April where they could see open water only a few hundred meters from the land. The going was made more uncertain by the prevalence of mirages. Wegener noted that the pressure ridges in the sea ice gave the impression that great glacial fronts coming off the Inland Ice were everywhere—but this was mostly atmospheric distortion.18 Koch constantly had to go ahead and reconnoiter and then come back and guide the rest of the party.

  The journey began as badly for Wegener as for the rest. He had a good sled but poor dogs, pulling more weight than they had ever attempted. Anxious and careless the first day while fixing his sled in bad weather, he froze his fingers and blistered them severely: “I was too embarrassed” [to say anything].”19 By the time his fingers had begun to heal, his foot, which had developed a fissure on the heel the first day out, had rapidly worsened and within a week was infected, swollen, and painful. There was nothing to do but go on, and on 10 April, after fifteen days of wet, cold, exhausting, and dangerous slogging, he limped along with the rest, covering twenty-five miles on foot behind his dogs and arriving at Cape Bergendahl (Lambert’s Land, N 78°33′) at midnight.

  The next day they paused. They were all badly beaten up by two continuous weeks of forced marching. Mylius had a swollen knee, and Hagen and Ring—among the most stoic and uncomplaining of men—said that their feet were too sore to go on, which Wegener reported in his diary with grim satisfaction, as he had not himself complained in spite of the terrible pain in his foot. The sleds were a mess and, because the starving dogs had gnawed the lashings, were many times retied with hemp, which loosened as it got wet instead of tightening; in consequence, the sledges were falling apart. On top of this, the dogs were exhausted. The party spent the “rest day” building a cairn on the point, both to lighten the sledge loads for the dogs and to ensure a landmark where the returning parties could find food.

  If there were any doubt how laconic a writer Wegener was in matters other than his admiration for the dogs, the majesty of the landscape, and the varieties of weather, the events of the next two days would have settled the point. Wegener’s journal for 12 April reads as follows: “We found fresh bear tracks. The Greenlanders Brønlund and Tobias took off at once with empty sleds and shot a bear and two cubs. Stopped. Big dog feeding. I saved a good piece of bear meat for my team.”

  Here is what actually happened: Crossing the sea ice in front of the huge glacier extending out from the fjord at 79° north, Mylius saw bear tracks. He told Brønlund and Tobias to follow them and hunt them down even if it took all day. The other eight sleds went on and camped 18 kilometers (11 miles) further north. Later in the day, the Greenlanders returned with the bears on their sleds. The dogs (seventy or eighty in all) were, as in every camp, free of their traces, and as the men began to cut up the carcasses, the dogs commenced to lunge at them. To keep the men who were doing the butchering from being bitten, six men stood in a ring, fending off the dogs with their whips, while the remaining four men cut up the bears. The dogs became so frantic to get at the meat that several eventually attacked the men like wolves, ignoring the whips and blows and trying to bite them. Suddenly all eighty dogs rushed the carcasses at once, and the men had to flee. The dogs stripped the bears to the bones in
fifteen minutes. That is covered in Wegener’s diary by the phrase “Big dog-feeding.” Later that night, when Wegener heard his dogs barking outside the tent, he grabbed his gun and crawled out of the tent, only to find a polar bear coming straight toward him. He managed to get his gun up just in time and killed it with a single shot. The dogs were so full from their afternoon gorge that the men, roused by the gunshot, could cut up this bear in peace. This entire episode, which might for many outdoorsmen be the anecdote of a lifetime, was covered in Wegener’s diary by the sentence “I saved a good piece of bear meat for my team.”20

  On the other hand, the exploits of the others, especially the Greenlanders, often thrilled him. After a good day’s travel on hard snow, the fourteenth of April (“travel with these sleds when you can ski beside them is wonderful”), they ran into a difficult pressure ridge, and in climbing it, one of Koch’s sled runners not only broke but split on its long axis. Koch had no idea what to do, but Tobias Gabrielsen and Jørgen Brønlund came up with their sleds and, quickly unloading Koch’s sled, turned it upside down. Holding their rifles to the split runner, they shot two holes through it, quickly threaded leather dog harness through the holes, and bound the pieces tight. Then they drove small wooden wedges into the remaining gap, flipped the sled over, whipped up their dogs, and sped off.21

  With the going somewhat slower during the next week, if no less difficult, Wegener had some time to write. In addition to loving the new land they were seeing, the giant basalt mountains, their first views of sedimentary rocks with fantastic forms and colors, he made a few notes about expedition life and even about himself, mostly reflecting on the poor rations and bad weather, but also proud of his increasing strength and endurance.22

  On 20 April, as the weather cleared, Koch took Wegener out to do some geology—to show him what needed to be done in the way of collecting—while the others built depots and tried to keep their sled lashings and harnesses away from the still-ravenous dogs, and while Mylius and Brønlund were trying to find a way north across very bad ice. Wegener knew quite enough geology to do what was required—distinguishing a volcanic rock from a sediment, or a sandstone from a shale. The essential thing was a good field description—some hammering of samples and collection of fossils, bagging and tagging. Most of the world was mapped stratigraphically in this straightforward way, and Greenland would be no exception: the finds need not be evaluated immediately. They collected a number of “astonishing” fossils, which was exciting because fossils, and not the fabric or mineral content of the rock, would determine (on expert inspection in Denmark and Germany) to which geological period the rocks belonged.

  Pushing north on the twenty-fourth, they passed into land dominated by high sedimentary cliffs backed by even higher alpine peaks. The shore was indented now with alternating headlands and fjords, the cliffs footed by slopes of loose pebbles swept clean of snow by the powerful and constant wind. There were numerous fossils and even sandstone pyramids that reminded Wegener of similar structures in Saxony. With so much geology to do, and a major new fjord to put on the map, Mylius decided that Wegener and Gustav Thostrup (1877–1955), the Danmark’s second mate, should turn back in two more days. The expedition was low on dog food (as usual), and decreasing the pack by sixteen dogs could make a big difference in the provisioning. On the twenty-fifth they discovered an even bigger fjord, named by Mylius “Ingolfs Fjord,” and pushed on to the next headland, reaching a latitude of 80°42′ north. This was as far as Wegener and Thostrup would go, and on the twenty-seventh Wegener, in a gesture of support for those going on to the north, gave his good sledge to Aage Bertelsen, the painter—one of his bunkmates in the “Villa”—in return for Bertelsen’s badly beaten-up sled, and he also offered a good dog to Lt. Høeg Hagen in exchange for his weakest dog, named Ajorkpok, who was quite old and feeble.23

  Whatever disappointment Wegener may have felt at the order to turn back, it was soon swept away by the exhilaration of his freedom. He liked poking around, not dashing forward in a race, which always seemed to be Koch’s and Mylius’s goal. On their first day of freedom, he and Thostrup struck out over the clear open sea ice to a series of islands, only about 25 meters (82 feet) high. Wegener scoured the pebbly shore for fossils and was rewarded by some good examples of fossil corals. They were sure that they had reached the farthest east extension of Greenland (they were wrong), and this added to the excitement.

  They spent the next week mapping the interior of Ingolf’s Fjord. Thostrup was taciturn, completely absorbed in the cartography. It was simple and laborious plane surveying with a theodolite. They zigzagged back and forth across the fjord ice: sighting on a distant point, then sledding to it and sighting back the other way. Wegener helped Thostrup each day with the noon sighting and calculation of latitude and azimuth, but he spent most of his time wandering. Their ability to stay out and explore depended crucially on their ability to find food for the dogs. Thostrup was not a keen hunter, so Wegener offered to hunt by himself, to which Thostrup assented. Wegener was thrilled to be on his own. He had already collected marine fossils along the north shore of the fjord, which turned out (on later examination) to be from the Permo-Carboniferous boundary. Sledding deep into the fjord and onto the land, Wegener discovered a small herd of musk oxen—seen first through his telescope. He was able to shoot two of them but found he had no more ammunition, so he returned to camp and rousted Thostrup; together they killed the remaining musk oxen—animals that, having never seen humans before, showed no fear, not even shying at the sound of the guns.24 This was good luck, since it meant at least seven more days of exploring—measured in quantities of available dog food.

  On 3 May they crossed the ice of Ingolf’s Fjord to the south side, where they found some small islands to use as a measuring station. Thostrup, perhaps pleased by Wegener’s industriousness, uncomplaining character, and silence (the latter a result of Wegener’s lack of Danish but congenial to the taciturn Thostrup), named these “Wegener’s Øer.” Wegener was in an expansive mood. He was drawing good geological profiles, doing original cartography, and making a good collection of rocks and fossils. He had proven himself as a hunter and was accepted as a team player. He was getting used to living with deprivation and danger and learning the land, and he could note in passing in his journal, “Clouds visible in the west, we think the weather will turn bad, petroleum for only about two more days.” He could begin to read the signs of game as well: “When we got here, saw fresh bear-tracks, a mother with two cubs. If we were Greenlanders we would start following their trail, as a mother with cubs can’t travel very fast or very far, and the tracks are at most a day old.” However, he added wryly, “As civilized Europeans, we would rather lie around and sleep.”25

  Wegener was also photographing constantly, keen to get color photos of the sediments, especially the sandstones; he was soon down to his last plates. He possessed a strongly visual imagination and intuition, and one reason for the sparseness of his diary entries was his preference for keeping a visual diary in the form of photographs. Of the 9,000 photos in the Danmark Expedition Archive, Wegener took a significant portion. He was also excited to be doing geology. He had collected so many samples that he could barely move the box on and off his sledge—“and I keep on finding more and more!”26

  On 5 May they got past what they thought (mistakenly) would be the most difficult part of their southward journey, a shattered ice foot at the southern cape of Holm Land, under a looming 500-meter (1,600-foot) cliff they had named Mallemukfjeld. As it turned out, colder temperatures, while Wegener and Thostrup had been in the north, had sealed the leads of water, but the ice was still bad, and Wegener’s sled came completely apart; Thostrup needed all of his fabled ingenuity to get it back together. They were almost out of food now, and facing an even greater catastrophe—they had run out of coffee, then as now the national beverage of Greenland, and something they dreamed of whenever they weren’t actually drinking it. “Yesterday we had coffee and soup mix. Today,
an infusion of musk ox meat, chocolate, and used coffee grounds. Our menu is quite uniform: ‘soup mix with pemmican, and pemmican with soup mix, in alternation.’”27

  They spent three weeks getting back to Danmarkshavn. For the most part they got on well, though over time Thostrup’s silence and stubbornness began to wear on Wegener. It was a hard trip, harder than they had anticipated. Wegener was indefatigable in his geological work, and Thostrup shared his enthusiasm for specimens. Of their struggles during these weeks, several exploits stood out in the annals of the expedition and are worthy of mention. For example, on a single day, 9 May, they hunted down and killed four bears, stashing the meat in a depot for the returning northern parties.

  Exploring deeply into Djimphna Sound and Hekla Sound, which they discovered and mapped in the course of a week, they proceeded south with a dangerous traverse over the crevasse fields of the Inland Ice for four days, trying to shorten their return. This desperate adventure was forced on them by the melting of the snow above the sea ice. Trying to get off the fjord ice in Hekla Sound, they fell continually through treacherous snow crust into running meltwater. Their feet were wetted inside their kamiks, and they could feel them beginning to freeze, with more than ten days of travel still to go. Soon everything was wet—dogs, sleds, harnesses, sleeping bags. Sleep was almost impossible, food scarce, energy receding. They were exhausted. Thostrup, who had smashed one of his fingers under a falling boulder building a cairn for the bear meat, was driving with one arm. Wegener, whose Greenland-style sun goggles had slipped, was snow-blind in one eye, with the shocking pain that a sunburnt eye yields its owner. He was so burned on the surface and even the inside of his nose that it hurt to face into the wind, making it even harder to see where he was going.