Much to everyone’s relief, Koch had not sustained any more severe injuries, but he was incapacitated, and their reconnaissance was over. Throughout most of the rest of November they settled into winter quarters and began to work on solving the problem of the lost theodolite. In the end, they constructed three instruments.52
All of these instruments show the mark of Wegener’s training in the history of astronomy, without which they would likely have had to abandon all hope of serious measurement. The first and easiest to construct was a nontelescopic “meridian instrument.” Only a few days before the loss of the theodolite they had taken a sighting of the passage of a bright star from a point about 10 meters away from the hut, with the meridian telescope focused on a point just above the tip of the flagpole that was mounted on one end of the building. They had been able to synchronize their three chronometers and found only a three-second difference between them. To replace the theodolite, they mounted a meter-long staff with a metal disk with a hole punched through it, and they placed it in the spot where the theodolite observations had been made. Peering through the hole at the top of the staff, and sighting at the top of the flagpole, they were able to record the passage of a known star across the meridian. Using this technique, they would be able to photograph the northern lights while taking astronomical time measurements with the meridian instrument.
They then constructed (or, rather, Vigfus constructed according to Wegener’s instructions) both a sextant and a quadrant instrument, the latter of which they christened a “Jacob’s Staff,” though it did not have the movable crossbar of the instrument of that name used throughout the history of pretelescopic astronomy. The former instrument, a Senkelquadranten, consisted of a square of wood with carefully scribed lines at right angles to one another, allowing the construction of a meridional arc marked off in degrees at the bottom of the instrument. The principle is more or less that of an astrolabe. A small pendulum was suspended from the vertex opposite that of the meridian arc.
The design of the sextant was good, but it was hard to hold it steady in even a relatively light wind or to keep the pendulum still long enough to take an accurate reading. They elected instead to depend on the “Jacob’s Staff.” This was a rectilinear wooden frame, not quite a meter long in its horizontal dimension. The two vertical struts had holes bored in them near the top, with metal disks, also with holes bored through them, set into the frame. The top horizontal piece was there to confer rigidity, but along the bottom horizontal piece and up the sides of the verticals about halfway, they carefully glued a flexible celluloid ruler. Also mounted in the face of the bottom horizontal piece was a spirit level that Vigfus had fabricated out of the spirit-filled gauge of the broken galvanometer—a round one that allowed the bubble to be centered in the bull’s-eye and thus assured the leveling of the instrument both in its long axis and perpendicular to it.
Koch was delighted with this instrument. He wrote, “Our primitive Jacob’s staff proves to be a splendid little instrument. It gave the Sun’s altitude to an accuracy of 1 to 2 minutes [of arc]—and of course we needed no greater accuracy than that—and had other valuable characteristics. It did not need to be packed and unpacked, and wind, blowing snow, and hoarfrost had no effect on it; it took almost no time to set it up, it weighed practically nothing, and could be used without taking one’s hands out of one’s gloves.”53
It was remarkably easy to use. One simply set it in the snow, leveled it, and aimed it at the Sun. The Sun’s rays, passing through the small aperture at the top of the upright portion, made a tiny oval of light on the celluloid ruler. If one measured both ends of that tiny oval and took their mean, that gave a measure of the Sun’s altitude. After taking the Sun’s altitude, one reversed the instrument 180° and took the altitude again. The average of these readings canceled out any error of squareness in the instrument and gave a reading of the latitude sufficient for their purposes, as would any noon sighting with the more sophisticated sextant. While it was insufficient for any of their more sophisticated scientific applications, it would get them across the ice cap in the spring.
This navigational problem solved, they settled comfortably into their winter quarters. They worked out a rotating schedule in which they took turns cooking, caring for the stove, and feeding the horses and cleaning their stalls. This work took usually only half the day even under the most severe circumstances, leaving a good deal of time for reading and scientific conversation, most of the latter, of course, between Koch and Wegener. Wegener now had time to complete the setup of his meteorological instruments and their calibration and to finish developing all the photographs on the expedition, as well as time for microphotography of snow crystals and at least some qualitative observations of the northern lights. They began the first of a number of boreholes into the glacial ice, one of which would eventually reach a depth of more than 25 meters (82 feet).54
Wegener later recalled this intense scientific collaboration in the winter of 1912 and 1913 as one of the most wonderful periods of his life.55 During his convalescence, Koch read through Wegener’s thermodynamics and made a number of suggestions that Wegener found important. They discussed both meteorological and glaciological topics on a daily basis: as any history of the subject will show, glaciology, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was still in its infancy, and Wegener noted that Hans Heß’s Die Gletcher, which he had brought along in order to prep himself in the subject, contained many more questions than it did answers.56 In the evenings, Koch and Wegener played chess, and by Wegener’s account he never won a single game from Koch the entire winter.57
The regularity of their work, the ease of their circumstances, the stimulation of their conversation, and their ability to pursue their scientific program, however limited by the damage to the instruments, warded off the depression of the winter darkness. As Wegener later said, “There had probably never been an overwintering of this sort in the Polar Regions. The obviously progressing scientific work amidst a daily stimulating exchange of ideas, provided great satisfaction; its rays banished the shadows of the winter night and even warmed our comrades Vigfus and Larsen right through: such that even though they often did not understand what we were doing, they could sense that it was succeeding and that the aim and object of the expedition was daily drawing closer to fulfillment.”58
As on all expeditions, the Christmas festivities were duly noted in their diaries—extra food, sweets, champagne, and port. The festive Christmas in Borg also marked the halfway point of their trip in time: they should be on the west coast sometime in June. The solstice, Christmas, and New Year’s Day marked the darkest days they would see, and for Wegener the opening of gifts, carefully stored away against the event, contained a special treat: as her Christmas gift Else had carefully packaged two color photographs of herself, and Wegener was overjoyed to have these to replace the ones he had lost.59
January and February were nothing but a waiting game. Wegener’s diary is extremely sparse, and in the published accounts of the expedition the months of January and February take up a bare two pages of text. On 10 January the temperature hit −50°C (−59°F), very close to the coldest temperature ever recorded on an Arctic expedition. In spite of the return of the Sun on the seventeenth of February, which prompted panegyrics of joy in Wegener’s journal, February remained bitterly cold, the temperature never getting above −40°C (−40°F).
The return of the light broke the routine and allowed Wegener to pursue science outside of books, and beyond the time-consuming and engrossing but rather limited task of boring holes in the glacier to examine the layering of the ice and take temperatures with depth. He could begin once again his microphotography of snow crystals and continue the series of photographic studies of Gundahl’s Knoll, the flat-topped hill 5 kilometers to the west, to document the complex layering of the atmosphere near the ground, in the form of complex mirages.
The Crossing of Greenland
The first half of March was devoted to ten
tative attempts at venturing outside. On the ninth they made a reconnaissance to Gundahl’s Knoll, a 10-kilometer round-trip that took them ten hours, and which left Wegener’s nose and cheeks badly frostbitten, but allowed them a view of their “beloved Dronning Luise Land,” their gateway to the west. A week later they tried again, spending a night in a tent—the first night outside their hut since October—and they practiced digging into the firn, as the horses would need to be out of the wind each night on the traverse, or they would freeze to death. It was a matter of exercising the horses and themselves: all of them had soft muscles from their winter’s inactivity.60
The second half of March and the first half of April were devoted to creating a series of depots to move their supplies into Dronning Louise Land. The weather was terrible. They were anxious to get going, but the snow was deep and loose and the crust of the snow so fragile that the horses could not pull the large sleds, and they had to be satisfied with hitching the horses to the lighter “Nansen” sleds. By 10 April they had succeeded in moving the material basis for their expedition only 20 kilometers inland, to a narrow neck of ice between two mountains that appeared to be their only access to the Inland Ice.
As it warmed from −40°C to −30°C (−22°F), the clear and bitter cold gave way to spring snow, which made the exhausting and stupefying work of hauling their supplies through the deep snow even more exasperating and demoralizing. What was worse, they were soon to discover that what they imagined to be their last depot before entering the Inland Ice was still well within Dronning Louise Land. They now paid a bitter price for their inability to complete the reconnaissance the previous fall. As the accompanying map shows, they were headed in the wrong direction: had they gone slightly north, they would have mounted the Inland Ice and cleared the zone of crevasses 60 or 70 kilometers (37–43 miles) sooner than they actually did. Their commitment to a southwesterly route from the beginning gave them an additional month on fissured and uneven ice.
On 20 April, they committed to leaving Borg and headed west. The weather was terrible, and they were immediately pinned down. They wished and hoped for things to get better, but things got worse. In early May, when they had hoped to be on the Inland Ice, they were still trapped in their tent by weather and had not begun their crossing. Wegener confided to his journal on 3 May, a date when the wind was so strong and the cold so bitter that they could still not think of traveling, “Are we ever going to see the good weather that is supposed to be characteristic of the inland ice? Are we just unlucky? This is a dog’s life we are living!”61 He was furious and frustrated, confessing to outbursts of anger at Koch’s leadership, or lack of it, in getting them under way. They were stuck in their tents with nothing to do, in wet sleeping bags, utterly miserable.
Perhaps because of Wegener’s urging, but also perhaps because of the invariably bad weather, Koch decided that they had to move. They departed on 5 May, traveling 45 kilometers (28 miles) the first day!62 But it was still back and forth, back and forth to the depots: in spite of all their attempts to cut back, they were still hauling 1,800 kilograms (3,968 pounds) of gear on five sleds. There was nothing but clothing, fuel, food, and their journals and photographic negatives, but still there was too much.63 Conditions were much worse than anything that Nansen had faced.
Map of the route onto the Inland Ice, April–May 2013, through Dronning Louise Land, showing the consequences of having chosen the southwesterly route. A more northerly course around the area would have saved them weeks of travel. From Koch, Gennem den Hvide Ørken.
The horses, after a month in the cold, were already exhausted from the Sisyphean task of pulling their own fodder across the snow; by the middle of May two of them had gone snow-blind and were so weak that even a half-loaded sled was too much for them. They had to divide each day’s travel into two parts, with a long midday pause to rest the horses. Wegener, who had chafed at the delays in travel scant weeks before, liked this no better: “May 13. Our altitude, from my calculation is now 2287 m. Latitude, longitude, and altitude, these are the three most interesting things that there are here. Beyond them there’s only the blue of the sky and the white of the snow.” Larsen took the mirror out of his private kit and passed it around so they could see themselves. The skin on Wegener’s frostbitten nose hung in black tatters, and his chin was also blackened with frost burn. “It’s a good thing that it will be a long while before anyone in the civilized world sees me again. Anyone would think I was a leper.”64
Things got very bad, very quickly in the middle of May. On the fifteenth Wegener wrote, “A terrible day. We had to shoot ‘Polaris.’” The horse, exhausted and snow-blind, could not pull the load. They repacked on the four remaining sleds and were about to leave when a huge snowstorm blew up, trapping them in their tent for an additional four days. Wegener tried to think of scientific problems but found his mind drifting constantly into fantasy. All he could think about was what it would be like to be living with Else in their own home, and what they would make for dinner. He reckoned that he had spent so much time thinking about these things in this four-day period that, had he the energy, he could have written a treatise on each theme, “compared to which the Origin of Continents would have been a sixth form essay.”65
Crossing the Inland Ice. Wegener and Koch are finding their latitude during the noon break by “shooting the Sun” with the homemade “Jacob’s Staff” built by Vigfus to replace their lost sextant. Note the bright Sun and wind, both constant adversaries. From Koch, Gennem den Hvide Ørken.
The chronicle of their suffering is such that it suffices to summarize it. Its character was just as uniform as it was awful. The men were continually wet, exhausted, cold, and frostbitten. The horses, snow-blind, starved, and overworked, failed one after another. They shot them as they failed, then reconsolidated the loads on the remaining sleds, and went on. They maintained their course using the Jacob’s Staff, shooting the Sun at every opportunity and on every pause in the march. On 2 June it was still 30° below zero, and Wegener noted that the one bit of good news was that the boiling point barometer showed that they were not gaining much altitude, so that they were near the halfway point: the summit of the Inland Ice. They found their way by altitude and latitude alone: the hodometer, which measured the mileage, had shattered irreparably early in May, and their one compass, in which the needle floated in alcohol, was always frozen, leaving only celestial navigation, with an instrument fashioned from pieces of a packing crate, to find their way across a trackless flat expanse of ice and snow.
On 5 June they took a day of so-called rest. The horses were exhausted. The four men took turns and carved and dug a 6-meter (20-foot) hole in the snow to photograph the layering and to measure the temperature with depth. Wegener’s diary for this day shows a brief eruption of good humor with the possibility of doing any science at all, though to balance this good humor he noted that he had smoked his last pipe and was now out of tobacco, except for a few cigars held in reserve. That week it turned colder, and as they reached 2,853 meters (9,360 feet), they were still deep in the grip of winter. On the eleventh of June they shot “Roten,” the third of their five horses, leaving only “Grauni,” their favorite, and “Fuchs.” The need to increase the horses’ rations, to get them to pull at all, left them with barely enough food for a single horse.66
Koch’s drawing of the “7-meter hole” they dug on 12 June 1913 to investigate the structure of the “firn” layers—the multiyear recrystallized snow on its way to becoming ice. Wegener recorded this as one of the best days of science on the whole expedition. From Koch, Gennem den Hvide Ørken.
On their next rest day, the twelfth of June, they dug a 7-meter (23-foot) hole, and Wegener was extraordinarily pleased with the beautiful temperature curve they obtained, revealing to them that the cold they had experienced—roughly −30°C—was indeed the annual mean temperature, measured in layer after layer of snow down more than 6 meters.67 That night, one of their two remaining horses, Fuchs, ran away. Ko
ch wrote in his journal on the fourteenth, “Yesterday we saw the tracks of ‘Fuchs’ and it started our fantasy in motion: is there truly, west from us, some snow-free area in the middle of the ice?”68 This is a reference to the hope of every expedition venturing onto the Inland Ice since the end of the eighteenth century: ever since the missionary pastor Hans Egede had imagined that he would find the lost Norse colony hidden away in an ice-free, verdant valley in the middle of the ice cap, expeditions had dreamed of such a land, with or without Vikings. No such land existed, as their steady, wearying trip to the west soon revealed. They never saw the runaway horse again.
Wegener took an altitude on 12 June with great care and found that they had reached 2,937 meters (9,636 feet). They had been, for several days, very close to that altitude, and he was sure they would cross Greenland and had reached the highest elevation, though more than three-quarters of their food was gone. Each day on the march they went through their belongings and put together a sack to leave behind. With the wind now blowing from the south and mostly behind them rather than in their faces, they could raise the sail every day to help move the sled. Grauni could no longer pull alone; he wanted to pull but lacked the strength. So the men took turns harnessing themselves to the sled along with the horse.
At this point, the expedition took a remarkable psychological turn. From this (halfway) point forward, all of their will to live seems to have become focused on one task and one task alone: saving this last horse, Grauni. “Tomorrow,” Wegener had written on 12 June, “we will test our new method of travel with the last horse and all of us pulling just one sled. We estimate now we have only two more days of rest [two weeks of travel] on the inland ice and hope that we will be able to save Grauni.”69 They had plenty of trouble to record in their journals: Vigfus ill, probably with pneumonia, everything soaked by walking through the melt puddles now appearing atop the snow in midday, the breaking of their tent poles and their attempt to use the sled to make a lean-to, the depletion of the rations. Yet none of this concerned them so much as Grauni’s condition. They pulled, and the horse followed the sled on a tether.
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