Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  When the horse stopped, they stopped.70 They decided to cut their own rations in order to supplement the horse’s, by soaking their allotted bread in water and feeding it to the horse, supplementing this in turn with their rapidly diminishing supply of ground peameal and even pemmican with chocolate.71 Each day the horse got weaker; each day they paused longer. By 26 June their measurement of the Sun’s altitude at noon showed that they were only 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the depot on the west coast: “a stones throw for a healthy strong horse—but will we be able to get Grauni there with us?”72

  On 28 June the horse could go no further, and the men looked at each other and came to a decision: they picked up the horse and put it on the sled, binding it gently so it would not fall off, and then put themselves in its harness and began to pull him toward the coast. They were within 60 kilometers of the depot and could have reached it within a single day had they not had the horse, but they would not give him up.73

  It took them five more days to reach the depot, and on the last day, 4 July, they left their tent, the sled, and Grauni and skied downhill the last few kilometers to the depot. “It was a strange feeling,” wrote Wegener, “after all that snow, to feel earth, real earth under your feet, to see flowers swaying in the wind, bumblebees and butterflies darting about, to hear the twittering of birds.”74 They opened a case of provisions and quickly wolfed down a cold breakfast. A “council of war” ensued, and Vigfus and Koch left to hike the 30 kilometers further on (according to their map) to the head of Laxelv Fjord to see if there were any signs of Eskimos. Wegener and Larsen quickly packed up bread, to take back to the last tent place and feed Grauni.

  When Wegener and Larsen arrived at the tent site with food for the horse, they found Grauni on his side, barely breathing, clearly dying. They had to use their last cartridge to put him out of his misery.75 After everything they had done, harnessed together, struggling along, resting when he needed to rest, feeding him their own food, pulling him for a week on the sled mile after mile, he was dead. “And he died a mile from the depot! So this wasteland gathered in its sacrifice in the last hour while we thought we had already brought him to safety.”76

  With the horse went their hope for anything out of the expedition but their own survival, and this was by no means certain. They had a few days of food in the depot, otherwise nothing, and it was many miles over rough terrain to the settlement at Prøven; they would not arrive there without help, as it lay on an island. There was no time to grieve, only to haul the remains of their camp down to the depot. Wegener and Larsen struggled all that day (4 July) and all the next, in rain and fog over terrible uneven ice: “in an hour’s hard work, we would make 300 m, a distance I could’ve covered twice in 5 min. just walking.”77

  Koch and Vigfus did not return until 6 July. They had traveled 90 kilometers (56 miles) in fifty-eight hours over difficult terrain in terrible weather, with almost no food. They had found an abandoned but quite recent Eskimo encampment on the shores of the fjord and left a note there, with some expectation that the Eskimos would return in a few days.78 They were completely exhausted (it was four more days before Koch could even write in his diary). The news was not promising: not only were there no Eskimos, but they would have to cross the fjord; they would have to fashion a boat out of their sled and tent, a sort of homemade coracle known to polar explorers as a “Leffingwell,” after the American Ernest DeKoven Leffingwell (1875–1971), who had first described the technique of lashing a sled inside a tent to make a canvas boat.

  While Koch and Vigfus tried to recover their strength, Wegener and Larsen moved the rest of their equipment from the edge of the Inland Ice to the depot and pared it down to the essentials. They would be traveling across bare land and could not pull a sled: everything would go on their backs. Wegener packed all the journals, diaries, scientific results, photographs, and photographic negatives, including those from the traverse of the ice which he had not yet developed, into their medicine chest. They would also haul the sled, the mast and sail (to raise as a signal flag), as much food as they could reasonably carry, and their tools, scientific instruments, and camera. They would leave their sleeping bags behind, heavy and soaked as they were, with most of the hair gone off the reindeer hides; their tent would travel only as far as the other side of the fjord. Still, the gear to be packed totaled more than 90 kilograms (200 pounds): Vigfus would carry the sled, the others rucksacks with 23-kilogram (50-pound) loads on their backs and the remaining poles in their hands.79

  They left for the coast on 8 July, four men and their dog, heavily overloaded. Disaster struck almost immediately. While using the sled as a bridge over a fast-rushing stream, whoever was carrying the medicine chest, with all the expedition scientific work in it, lost control of it, and the box fell into the stream. If Vigfus had not immediately plunged into the water and grabbed it, it would have been swept away and lost in the lake into which the stream emptied a few meters away. Everything in the chest was soaked, and they feared that the photographic negatives of their traverse might be irreparably damaged. (In the end they lost about two dozen photos.) They had to spend the day spreading their journals, the photos, and the rest of their scientific gear on rocks in the meadow and wait for the Sun to dry them.80 Wegener could think of nothing but going home.

  Koch wrote in his journal that all that he and Vigfus had learned on their reconnaissance to the fjord was that they would not be able to retrace their steps via that route carrying a heavy load: they would have to find another path up and over the mountainous arm of the headland behind which their depot had been situated.81 Every step was an agony. Their feet, unaccustomed to rough terrain and knocked about by rocks, began to swell. Larsen had injured his foot and was limping, and in the afternoon of the second day Wegener developed leg cramps and couldn’t go on. In all, it took them two days to go 10 kilometers, wet, cold, and bitten ferociously by huge swarms of mosquitoes that they could not escape. Arriving on the shore of the fjord at three o’clock in the morning on the eleventh, they set immediately to building their boat and fashioning kayak paddles. It took them eleven hours to ferry their gear across in the leaky boat: two men to paddle and 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of gear per trip. At the end of each trip the canvas of the tent would be soaked and the boat would need to be disassembled and the tent dried in the wind.82

  Once across the fjord, they made a cache of their equipment, scientific records, and instruments, in a place on the rocky shore easily visible from the fjord, and covered it with the remains of the tent. Each man now had a load of only 9 kilograms (20 pounds) or so—food, matches, but little else. “We made no distinction from then on between day and night. We traveled for 50 min. and rested for 10 and when we had been going on in this way for four hours we cooked some food, a long and difficult process without our stove” (they boiled food in open tins on a campfire of gas-soaked heather twigs).83

  Moving forward in this way over the next twenty-four hours, they covered nearly 22 kilometers (13 miles), and the next day another 18 kilometers (11 miles). Toward the end of this day they had to climb up and over the arm of the mountainous promontory named Kangek and down to the coast again, which should have brought them in sight of the settlement at Prøven; their map, however, was faulty, and they had completely misjudged their location: the settlement was still 11–13 kilometers (7–8 miles) distant and invisible behind a boggy peninsula that they could not traverse.84 They were exhausted and starved and nearly at the end of their food, and whatever courage they might have summoned at this point was drowned in a cold rain that soon turned to snow. They had to find shelter, quickly, and found a rocky overhang that they could block up with stones and moss. Koch, Vigfus, and Larsen were so exhausted that they couldn’t move and stumbled in out of the rain. Koch later wrote that Wegener was the only one of them at this point with any remaining energy. While they lay exhausted under the overhang, Wegener searched here and there under the scattered boulders to find dry heather twigs, and he boiled
the last of their milk and soaked the last of their bread in it.85 The snow intensified, and fog rolled in, making it impossible for them to find a way forward; for the next thirty-two hours they lay, as Koch said, “in a semiconscious stupor.”86

  They no longer knew whether it was day or night, but when the weather cleared slightly on the fifteenth, they knew they had to move forward or die. Koch was at this point hallucinating, and they were all, with the exception of Wegener, using smelling salts to keep from blacking out. They started out to the west carrying their few remaining belongings, in wet snow that made it seem “as if each foot had a 10 pound weight tied to it.”87 After five minutes of travel Koch was so out of breath that he stopped, sat down in his tracks, and then fainted. As he later wrote, “I experienced this blackout as a foretaste of death.” They were in the final stages of physical and mental exhaustion and had traveled only 30 meters from their miserable hut. There was no going forward; they had to go back to shelter. Wegener remembered thinking at this point, “Are we going to die like animals, here at the end of this long and danger filled trek, scarcely 2 miles away from the colony [Prøven, 6 miles distant], in the month of July? Where is a trace of logic in that?” He also recalled thinking, “Everything in me rebelled against this, and all my mental energy was focused in a single powerful thought: I will live, I will reach Proven, even if the sky falls.”88

  They had not eaten in thirty-seven hours, and they had one hope to survive and took it. They killed Gloë, their faithful and loyal companion in every extremity, built a fire, and cooked their dog. “It was our sole remaining hope,” Wegener wrote flatly, “that a big meal would allow us to continue to walk.” They were cutting up the half-raw dog meat into portions to eat it when Wegener jumped up and pointed toward the fog-shrouded fjord. Wegener saw something that he had initially mistaken for an iceberg, but it was moving too fast. A quick look through the telescope confirmed that it was a sailboat. Their exhaustion forgotten, they jumped and yelled wildly, and Larsen waved the sail back and forth, but it was their yells that brought the boat to them. Along with the crew of Eskimos was the Danish pastor, Chemnitz, from the mission at the Upernavik, who had come to Prøven for a confirmation class and, knowing of the expected arrival of their expedition, had set out to see if he could find them.89

  Wegener and Koch at the home of the Danish trader in Prøven, on 17 July 1913, a day after their rescue by Pastor Chemnitz and a group of Inuit traveling with him. They are wearing borrowed clean clothing and enjoying tobacco for the first time in many days. From Koch, Gennem den Hvide Ørken.

  Within a few hours they were sitting in the European-style house of the Danish trader at Prøven: fed, dry, warm, and smoking their pipes indoors. Two days later, they were wearing new, clean clothes purchased at the trading post and waiting for a festive dinner with speeches praising their heroism. “It would be difficult to imagine a starker contrast than this,” wrote Wegener on the seventeenth of July, “from the furthest limits of desperate need, to the full comforts of civilization.”90

  Wegener and Koch spent most of the day on the seventeenth re-creating their travels from the time of their departure from the depot on 9 July, eight days and a universe away, before the memories faded into unreality—so great was the contrast between their safe haven in Prøven and their near demise a few days before. On the nineteenth Vigfus, Larsen, and twelve Eskimos took a boat back up the fjord to recover the scientific records and equipment cached on the eleventh. The trip took a single day to cover a distance that had taken them five days and nights. The pastor, Chemnitz, had returned to Upernavik and brought back the motorboat that the expedition had shipped there the previous year. A supply ship reached Prøven on the nineteenth, and Wegener was able to send news home of his safe arrival. Else, who had finished her year in Bergen with the Bjerknes family and was waiting at Alfred’s parents’ house for news of the expedition, received a telegram from Copenhagen on the thirteenth and a letter directly from Alfred on the fourteenth. Her joy at the news was moderated by Alfred’s announcement that though all he wanted to do was come home, he was committed to stay in Greenland until the autumn.91

  However astonishing and anticlimactic it may seem, their work was not over, and Wegener was indeed committed to carrying out measurements with Koch of the Jacobshavn Isbrae, some 386 kilometers (240 miles) to the south of Prøven on the west coast of Greenland, opposite Disko Island. This storied glacier, with an iceberg-calving front some tens of miles across, moved at speeds that defied imagination: 15–30 meters (49–98 feet) per day, roughly a meter per hour: fast enough to actually see.92 It moved so fast that most of the early measurements had been discounted, but these speeds, as Wegener confirmed, were actually the case.

  As was his practice, Wegener abandoned his daily journal as soon as the traverse of the ice was complete: in spite of the necessity of remaining in Greenland, the expedition was “over.” It was a “crossing” expedition, and they had crossed. His sketchy notes on the outflow of the glacier at Jacobshavn filled a few pages at the end of his last journal, but they began from the back of the notebook and formed a separate entity. These scant notes contain no speculations on his theory of continental displacements, but it is interesting to think of the impact on his imagination of the outflow velocity of this immense glacier, considering how clearly he had made the analogy between flowing rock and flowing glaciers and between floating continents and floating glaciers. He had hypothesized that Greenland was moving west at 10 meters per year: here was a glacier moving almost 1,000 times faster. That such a velocity could be achieved by something in the solid state, something this massive, would not have escaped his attention.

  As interesting as this may have been, his mind was reaching beyond the expedition, already collating material for his preliminary reports of their scientific findings, on the model of the articles he had written in 1908, and for the same semipopular journals, Umschau and Himmel und Erde. For all their effort, and nearly at the cost of their lives, they had produced rather little in the form of science, although their traverse was notable for its length and the great altitude reached at the center of the ice cap—nearly 3,000 meters (9,843 feet)—as well as the temperature data concerning the astonishing perpetual cold at the center of Greenland.

  For all Wegener’s dissatisfaction with aspects of the Danmark Expedition, it had made his reputation and allowed him to produce volume after volume of scientific work. In sharp contrast, he had since then set out on two expeditions of his own, each a failure in its own way. His trip to Argentina in 1910 had failed in making upper atmospheric wind measurements. He had now failed in Greenland in 1912–1913 to amass a significant scientific output, especially for the problem he cared most about: auroral measurements to compare with those made by Kurt simultaneously in Spitsbergen, and their implications for understanding the composition of the upper atmosphere. He had some photos of ice crystals, some photos of mirages, and some borehole measurements of ice temperatures. He had some photographic data on the lamination of the ice cap, its deformation, and the blue bands in glaciers, though his explanations were conjectural. That was it. Neither he nor Koch mentioned it, but their deepest intention, to show everyone in the polar science community the “right way to do polar science,” had been less than a complete success.

  Though anxious to return home, he was happy and excited. Both Else and Wladimir Köppen had sent letters to him in Greenland on the first ship leaving Copenhagen in the spring.93 Köppen’s letter had some encouraging news. In Wegener’s absence, his patron at Marburg, Richarz, and his new dean, Ernst Elstner, had bombarded the Ministry of Education in Berlin with appeals to establish an extraordinary professorship for Wegener at Marburg, with the hope of keeping him there. The Ministry of Education had ruled, in September of 1912, that such a decision must wait for Wegener’s return from Greenland and his return to Marburg.94 This, from Wegener’s standpoint, was excellent news. He had wanted to return to Marburg and felt that the setting was ideal for
him there: he had lived with the conviction, for more than a year, that with persistence, such a position in physics, or even (his deeper wish) in cosmic physics, must open for him there. The ministry had not said yes, but they had also not said no. Writing from Jacobshavn to his future mother-in-law in August, he said, “The best news, after hearing that all of you are well, is the news of the planned position for me in Marburg. I think we [he and Else] can marry as soon as I get an official communication concerning the position. In any case as soon as possible. I have written the same to Else and my parents.”95

  He had every reason to be happy. His reputation as a polar traveler and polar scientist was now completely secure. His persistence and hard work in building a position for himself at Marburg appeared to be paying off, and he would now be able to both marry Else and avoid moving to Hamburg, for the Carnegie Institution and its money had moved along without him. He would have a few responsibilities in working up the expedition’s findings, but since the meteorological portion of the work, including studies of the aurora, had largely failed, most of the data reduction and all of the cartography would be the responsibility of Koch. Wegener would not find himself, as he had in 1908, buried in the aftermath and afterlife of an expedition. He might have wished for a bigger harvest of data certainly, but although he thought of himself as a practical field scientist, it was increasingly clear to him, and to those who read his work, that his greatest successes were coming from his ability to collate, integrate, and reinterpret the work of others, and that his work in the field was a source of inspiration as much as or more than a source of data. He would return to Germany without debt, without obligations, and ready to pursue a course of life he had mapped out himself. All he had to do now was find a ship home.