The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (11 page)

In the next-to-last entry, for October 6, Greely had written, “My party is now permanently encamped on the ‘west side of a small neck of land,’ ” which he went on to say was “about equally distant from Cape Sabine and Cocked Hat Island. All well.”

With the wind “driving in bitter gusts,” Schley wrote, the mission’s navigator, Lieutenant Colwell, piloted their steam cutter into the cove off Cape Sabine. It was eight o’clock on a Sunday night, broad daylight but overcast—“the daylight of a dull winter afternoon,” Schley wrote. Rounding a point, the men saw a figure at the top of a low hill. They waved a flag at him, and Long bent over and picked up a flag and waved it. Then he walked slowly and carefully toward the boat, falling down twice before reaching the shore. “He was a ghastly sight,” Schley wrote. “His cheeks were hollow, his eyes wild, his hair and beard long and matted. His army blouse, covering several thicknesses of shirts and jackets, was ragged and dirty. He wore a little fur cap and rough moccasins of untanned leather tied around the leg. As he spoke, his utterances were thick and mumbling, and in his agitation his jaws worked in convulsive twitches.”

Lieutenant Colwell led a party up the hill, arriving at the tent just as Brainard was stepping from it. Brainard was about to salute, but Colwell reached for his hand. “Meanwhile one of the relief party, who in his agitation and excitement was crying like a child, was down on his hands and knees trying to roll away the stones that held down the flapping tent cloth,” Schley wrote. With a knife Colwell slit the tent cover. What he saw “was a sight of horror. On one side, close to the opening, with his head towards the outside, lay what was apparently a dead man. His jaw had dropped, his eyes were open, but fixed and glassy, his limbs were motionless.” This was Connell, who was, however, still alive. “On the opposite side was a poor fellow, alive to be sure, but without hands or feet, and with a spoon tied to the stump of his right arm.” Two men were trying to pour something from a bottle into a can—“the pitiful ration of tanned oil, sealskin, and lichens that they called their meal,” the navy report says, but Schley says it was brandy, the last few teaspoons left, which they were giving to Connell, “of whom all hope had been given up.” A third, also on “hands and knees, was a dark man with a long, matted beard, in a dirty and tattered dressing gown. The man wore “a little red skull cap” above “brilliant, staring eyes.” He raised himself slightly and put on wire-framed glasses. Colwell asked, “Who are you?” The man only stared at him. When Colwell asked again, one of the others said, “That’s the Major—Major Greely.” Colwell crawled into the tent and took his hand. He said, “Greely, is this you?”

Greely said, “Yes. Seven of us left. Here we are, dying like men. Did what we came to do. Beat the best record.” Then he collapsed.

Colwell gave them some biscuits and shavings of pemmican, a substance made from dried meat, fat, and berries. Since they couldn’t stand, they knelt, and held out their hands. After each had had two servings, Colwell told them that they had eaten all they could safely ingest, “but their hunger had come back full force and they begged piteously.” Their hunger returned, Schley wrote, “like a drunkard’s craving for rum.” When Greely was refused more, he produced a can of “boiled sealksin, which had been carefully husbanded, and which he said he had a right to eat, as it was his own.” Colwell threw away the pemmican can, but while he was trying to raise the tent, one of the men found it and scraped from it what was left.

Colwell built a small fire and every ten minutes for two hours fed them milk punch and beef extract while he waited for the doctor to arrive and tell him it was safe to move them. Except for Greely, none of them seemed especially affected by their rescue. “The weaker ones were like children,” Schley wrote, “petulant, rambling and fitful in their talk, absent and sometimes a little incoherent.” To cheer them Colwell told them that more people were coming and that relief was at hand, but they “could not realize it and refused to believe it.” Schley went on to speculate that “their year of privation and hopelessness had blunted or deadened their recollection of the world, as they had known it, and the feelings to which the recollections gave rise.”

Schley had two ships and the men were carried to them on stretchers. Frederick said that he was strong enough to walk, but a man had to stand on either side of him. “Leaning on their shoulders, he followed the slow procession as it wound its way around the rocks and through the snow-fill hollows to the sea,” Schley wrote.

The gale had become a hurricane. Crossing the hundred yards to the ships, Greely and the others got “a severe wetting.” Having been taken below, Greely fainted but was revived with spirits of ammonia.

When Brainard was undressed, calluses more than half an inch thick were found on his knees. “After so many months in the desolate Arctic regions, after so much suffering, and passing through such scenes of horror, it was seldom that the men stood upright,” the report says. “They crawled about on their hands and knees over the rock and ice.”

Once the men were aboard, the party retrieved the dead men from graves out of which some of their hands and feet protruded. The five men who had been left on the ice foot had disappeared, apparently taken by the tide. The officers who dug up the corpses called for blankets and rolled up the bodies without letting anyone see them. In the hurricane they were loaded aboard the ships, which had difficulty staying head to the wind. Two of the bodies went into the water, but were “recovered by one of the seamen before they could sink,” Schley wrote. Still wrapped in blankets, they were put into coffins and then the lids were riveted into place.

Some of the sailors who had handled the remains thought that they seemed very light, and that some of the blankets seemed to contain only half a body. “Giving the allowance for the imagination of the sailors,” the naval report said, “the hard facts of the few who saw the remains and related what they saw to others before silence was enjoined show that terrible scenes must have been enacted by the famishing men in the Greely camp during the many long months that famine was with them.”

On the way home they stopped at Disko to bury the Greenlander, Fred Christiansen, Eskimo Fred. In the pastor’s remarks one can hear the cadence of the nineteenth century. “No man knows the thought of God concerning us,” he said. “He whose soulless body we are today to bury, and the other, his companion, who perished in a kayak in the northern regions, did not think their days were numbered when they took leave of the wives they loved and of the children who were to be their support in old age.”

Two days passed before Greely could sit up in bed for a few hours, and for his hunger to begin to leave him. Elison, who had lost his fingers and feet, died aboard his ship when his wounds turned septic. Apparently in the cold the bacteria they contained had been dormant. “He passed away quietly without apparent suffering,” Schley wrote.

The navy ordered Schley’s crew not to speak to anyone about the rescue, but someone must have. In August the
New York Times
printed a story with the headline, “Horrors of Cape Sabine,” saying that some of the bodies had been clumsily mutilated and the others skillfully. The skillful ones had been done apparently by Dr. Pavy. When he died, the other cuts were made. Pavy and the men who died after him were the ones who had washed away, and the circumstance was seen as being meant to conceal the cannibalism. Lieutenant Kislingbury’s three brothers were persuaded by a newspaper in Rochester, New York, to have his remains examined, and they discovered that flesh had been cut from him. Then Private William Whisler’s parents, who lived in Indiana, had his body examined. What was left of him was hardly more than a skeleton.

Greely said he had been unaware of what the others had been doing. “I can give no stronger denial,” he wrote, but he said that he could not answer for anyone else.
Three Years of Arctic Service
was published in 1886. He retired from the army in 1907 as a major general and was the first president of the Explorers Club in New York City. Brainard was eventually promoted to general. Every June, on the anniversary of their rescue, he and Greely would together eat one of the meals they had planned in the Arctic.

Andrée didn’t ride in a balloon until he was thirty-eight, in 1892. He went up with Captain Francesco Cetti, a Norwegian. In addition to being a balloon pilot specializing in demonstrations, Cetti was a mind reader and a starvation artist. In 1885 he had performed for the Swedish royal family a display of “mind-reading and thought transmission.” Two years later, at the Aquarium Theatre in London, he conducted a starvation performance that lasted thirty days, during which he was allowed only water, but as much as he wanted. He ate his last meal, some raw meat with champagne, in front of a thousand people. He began flying balloons in 1890.

Cetti described Andrée aloft as “disagreeably calm.” Andrée wrote in his journal, “I observed myself as closely as possible in order to learn whether I was afraid or not. I discovered that I was not conscious of any feeling of fear, but that I probably was influenced by it unconsciously. However I could not note any other signs of it than that I surprised myself holding fast to the stay ropes, although these were the part of the entire outfit in which from the beginning I felt the least confidence. Later I remembered that I had thought them weak and then caught hold of something else. It took a few seconds before this reasoning seeped through. As I let go of the ropes I thought: ‘I must have been afraid.’ But I felt no sense of dizziness, not even when I leaned over the railing at the highest point of our flight and looked right down into the deep.”

After two flights with Cetti, Andrée decided that he needed his own balloon. With money from a fund created to further science and the public welfare, he bought one he called
Svea
, after the thistle that is the Swedish national emblem. He made nine flights in
Svea
, all of them alone, sometimes carrying a mirror in order to see whether his face turned different colors at different altitudes.

On his first flight, on July 15, 1893, the balloon rose quickly, then fell and hit the ground, then rose again. The flight lasted about two and a half hours and covered twenty-six miles. At 13,500 feet he could hear dogs barking. Descending, he noticed that as gas escaped, the bottom of the balloon flattened and became like a parachute. After landing he wrote that three seemed the ideal number of people to take part in a balloon trip devoted to science—one person to manage the balloon, one to observe, and one to record the observations.

Andrée’s second flight, in August, lasted seven hours and covered sixty miles, during which he rose as high as 11,800 feet. He recorded the temperature and took photographs that were used to correct a map. He also noticed that the balloon fell faster when under the shadow of a cloud.

Andrée’s third trip, in October, was the first on which he used guide ropes over water, and it also made him famous in Stockholm. He left early in the morning, with the wind blowing faintly toward the east. By the time he had finished making notes on the weather and the things that he saw, he was over the Baltic Sea, with Sweden receding. He tried to slow the balloon by lowering its anchor. Then he emptied some ballast sacks, tied them to the end of his landing line, and let them drift in the water like a sea anchor. A steamer appeared in his path, and Andrée hoped that he could get the steamer to catch the landing line. From the way the captain of the steamer maneuvered his ship, however, he appeared to believe that he could place himself in Andrée’s way and catch the balloon in his rigging. Not only would this be dangerous for Andrée, but if the balloon came too close to the steamship’s funnel it would explode and catch fire. Andrée rose clear of the ship, intending to reach Finland.

To make the balloon go faster Andrée tried to haul up the landing line, but couldn’t and had to cut it instead. He couldn’t lift the anchor either, but let it drag in the water rather than lose it. He headed toward Finland at about eighteen miles an hour. The ships he passed he merely waved to, and they waved back. Around three in the afternoon, realizing he would have to go faster to make Finland by nightfall, he cut the anchor loose. Shedding gas, the balloon rose and fell like a kite in a varying wind. The evening arrived while he was still aloft, and then it grew dark. Above a small island that was hardly more than a rock, Andrée stood on the basket rail, preparing to jump, when the wind shifted suddenly, turning the basket over and throwing him to the ground at 7:18, which he was able to note because the impact smashed his watch. It also dislocated one of his shoulders and broke one of his arms. The balloon sailed away; it was found on an island fifty miles distant. Andrée swam to a larger island where he spent “an extremely unpleasant night.” What food he had begun with—three sandwiches, two bottles of beer, two bottles of Vichy water, and some brandy—he had consumed on the trip. Rain fell. At 11:00 the following morning, a fisherman arrived in a rowboat. Andrée asked why he hadn’t come sooner, and the man said that when his wife had seen the balloon she had concluded that the Day of Judgment had arrived, and she wouldn’t let him leave the house until daylight. Andrée had to pay him to row him to shore. He wrote a telegram to friends to say that he was all right, but the messenger didn’t send it until that evening, so it arrived in the middle of the night, and because of the suspense over his disappearance, and the time that had passed, it was printed in a special edition of the papers. The steamer that carried him back to Stockholm was met by three thousand people. He had traveled 170 miles, over ten hours, and used the guide ropes for 120 of them.

Leaving the ground on its fourth flight, in February of 1894, the
Svea
was struck by a gust of wind that took it toward an enormous woodpile. Andrée had to throw out so much ballast to avoid the pile that the balloon ascended quickly to a little above a mile before he collected himself and began making notes on the temperature. He eventually rose above two miles, and when he landed he got stuck in a tree. Running back to some of the buildings he had passed over, he met a woman and a boy who had locked themselves in their house and would not come out until he had persuaded them that he was not an apparition or an evil spirit.