The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (13 page)

Field ice was saltwater ice. Ice from fresh water, such as snow that had melted, was sweet-water ice. According to Julius von Payer, sweet-water ice was “hard as iron, and so transparent that it is scarcely to be distinguished from water.” By the end of summer, when the air was damp, snow covering the ice became grainy, with the grains sometimes larger than beans, Payer said, and in a wind they made a rustling sound like sand. In winter the snow in some places was hard as rock and elsewhere as fine as dust or sugar. “Where it lies with its massive wreaths frozen in the form of billows, our steps resound, as we walk over them, with the sound as of a drum,” Payer wrote. “The ice is so hard it emits a ringing sound.” In bitter cold, butter got hard as stone, meat needed to be split like cordwood, and mercury could be fired from a gun. In parts of Siberia milk was sold in pieces. One explorer’s account describes Eskimos using the cold for revenge on wolves that had attacked them. Into the ice the Eskimos set several sharp knives with their blades upright; then they covered the blades with blood. The wolves licked the blades and cut their tongues, but felt nothing because of the cold. Their own blood on the blades kept them licking “until their tongues were so scarified that death was inevitable.”

A ship attempting to make headway in the ice was said to be boring. If its crew had tied ropes to a stationary object such as an iceberg and were pulling, they were warping. A ship caught in the ice had been nipped and was beset.

Distant light reflected from ice looked different from light reflected from water. A dark storm-colored horizon denoted open water and was a water sky. A yellow brightness over a horizon meant the distance was dominated by ice, and the effect was called an ice blink. A mariner seeing an ice blink knew that there was no point trying to force his way to open water: nothing lay before him but more ice.

One of the reasons that there are so many terms for conditions of ice is that the mariners observing it were often trapped in it, and had nothing to do except look at it. With the close attention of naturalists, they described how it formed. From the edge of old ice “threads like a spider’s web” ran toward the middle of young ice, according to J. Y. Buchanan, in the
Antarctic Manual
, causing the young ice to thicken into a substance that was “thin and pasty,” and that followed “every surface movement of the water.” Even in the worst cold, however, it would not support a man before thirty to thirty-six hours. Then it sank under his weight, without breaking. “It gives the impression that one is walking on well-stretched leather,” Buchanan wrote. For as long as two weeks it will bend more than break under pressure. The flexibility is a matter of the salt water, which freezes differently from fresh water. The concentrations of brine never freeze, and give the ice its pasty texture. “On walking over such a surface, so long as no fresh snow has fallen on it, one is astonished to find that every step one takes remains impressed on the white surface.”

The ice also made a lot of noise. A crewmember of Nordenskiöld’s ship, the
Vega
, wrote, “The song of the sea ice is a very peculiar one, and can scarcely be described so as to convey any clear idea of its nature. It is not loud, yet it can be heard to a great distance. It is neither a surge, nor a swash, but a kind of slow, crashing, groaning, shrieking sound, in which sharp silvery tinkling mingle with the low, thunderous undertone of a rushing tempest. It impresses one with the idea of nearness and distance at the same time and also that of immense forces in conflict. When this confused fantasia is heard from afar through the stillness of an Arctic night the effect is strangely weird and almost solemn, as if it were the distant hum of an active, living world breaking across the boundaries of silence, solitude and death.”

There is more than one North Pole. Andrée’s destination, the geographical North Pole, from which all directions are south, is at ninety degrees N. The north magnetic pole, which wanders, and is the pole toward which the compass needle points, is situated in northern Canada. It was first reached in May of 1831 by an English naval officer named John Ross. The north geomagnetic pole is on the northwest coast of Greenland. The geomagnetic pole marks the intersection between the earth’s surface and the axis of a magnet that might be placed in the center of the earth. The pole that represents the longest distance from any land in the Arctic is the pole of relative inaccessibility. Until 1926, when an airship flew over it, it was the pole of inaccessibility. Sometimes also called the pole of ice, it is halfway between Franz Josef Land and Ellesmere Island. The first person to arrive there on foot, an English explorer named Wally Herbert, visited in 1968, on his way to the geographical pole. The north pole of cold, where temperatures sometimes fall near ninety below Fahrenheit, is along the Indigirka River, in Siberia, between the villages of Tomtor and Oymyakon, which are the coldest inhabited places on earth.

When Greely, in his speech before Andrée’s in London, spoke of the Arctic’s “startling by astounding phenomena that appeal noiselessly to the eye,” he was describing capacities of the Arctic air, which because it contains so much moisture and there are so many ice crystals floating in it, and because it is often so still, produces many arresting effects. One of these is parhelia, the appearance of additional suns, sometimes in the shape of a cross. The apparitions are also called sun dogs. Payer reported seeing eight of them once, in April 1872, from the deck of his ship, the
Tegetthoff
. He wrote that they came before episodes of driving snow and were so frequent that they no longer amused him.

Another peculiar condition of Arctic light is the Novaya Zemlya effect, in which the sun appears on the horizon as a rectangle and sometimes in the shape of several hourglasses stacked on top of one another. The actual sun is below the horizon, but its image is projected through layers of thermoclines—zones of differing temperatures, that is.

Perhaps the most eccentric quality of the air is its capacity to produce refractions—changes in the appearance and proportions and placement of objects. Sometimes a refraction duplicates an object, like a reflection in water, and sometimes it bizarrely obscures the object’s identity. Elisha Kane wrote one evening in 1854 on his ship: “Refraction again! There is a black globe floating in the air about 3 degrees north of the sun. What it is you can not tell. Is it a bird or a balloon? Presently comes a sort of shimmering about its circumference, and on a sudden it changes shape. Now you see plainly what it is. It is a grand piano, and nothing else. Too quick this time! You had hardly named it, before it was an anvil—an anvil large enough for Mulciber and his Cyclops to beat out the loadstone of the poles. You have not got it quite adjusted to your satisfaction, before your anvil itself is changing; it contracts itself centerwise, and rounds itself endwise and,
presto
, it has made itself duplicate—a pair of colossal dumb-bells. A moment! And it is the black globe again.

“About an hour after this necromantic juggle, the whole horizon became distorted: great bergs lifted themselves above it, and a pearly sky and pearly water blended with each other in such a way, that you could not determine where the one began or the other ended. Your ship was in the concave of a vast sphere; ice shapes of indescribable variety around you, floating, like yourself on nothingness; the flight of a bird is as apparent in the deeps of the sea as in the continuous element above. Nothing could be more curiously beautiful than our consort the Rescue, as she lay in mid-space, duplicated by her secondary image.”

To mariners the icebergs were immense and ghostly forms, both substantial and ethereal. “There was something about them so slumberous and so pure,” Kane wrote, “so massive yet so evanescent, so majestic in their cheerless beauty, without, after all, any of the salient points which give character to description, that they seemed to me the material for a dream, rather than things to be definitely painted in words.” Once a boat had entered their region it was surrounded. In 1818, the explorer Sir William Edward Parry, off Greenland, began counting the ones in his vicinity and gave up at a thousand.

Light went through icebergs as if through a prism, turning them different colors according to its angle of entry. “On our road we were favored with a gorgeous spectacle, which hardly any excitement of peril could have made us overlook,” Kane wrote. “The midnight sun came out over the northern crest of the great berg, our late ‘fast friend,’ kindling variously colored fires on every part of its surface, and making the ice around us one great resplendency of gemwork, blazing carbuncles, and rubies and molten gold.”

Not only sunlight made the ice seem ghostly. Of a night landscape Kane wrote, “A grander scene than our bay by moonlight can hardly be conceived. It is more dream-like and supernatural than a combination of earthly features.

“The moon is nearly full, and the dawning sunlight, mingling with hers, invests everything with an atmosphere of ashy grey. It clothes the gnarled hills that make the horizon of our bay, shadows out the terraces in dull definition, grows darker and colder as it sinks into the fiords, and broods sad and dreary upon the ridges and measureless plains of ice that make up the rest of our field of view. Rising above all this, and shading down into it in strange combination, is the intense moonlight, glittering on every crag and spire, tracing the outline of the background with contrasted brightness, and printing its fantastic profiles on the snow-field. It is a landscape such as Milton or Dante might imagine—inorganic, desolate, mysterious. I have come down from the deck with the feelings of a man who has looked upon a world unfinished by the hand of its Creator.”

The unfinished aspect, the whiteness and immensity of the Arctic, unnerved Herman Melville, who had been among ice as a whaler.
Moby-Dick
has a chapter called “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in which Ishmael tries to locate the horror inspired by the whale’s abnormal color. Within it, he wrote, “there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than the redness which affrights in blood.” Rather than purity or innocence, he sees the cold whiteness of the dead and the color of the shroud they are wrapped in. “Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious things he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.”

Andrée was to be accompanied to the pole by Nils Eckholm, the meteorologist who had led the Swedish delegation to Spitsbergen in 1882, and Nils Strindberg, a physics professor. Eckholm was forty-eight and had been born in the central Swedish region of Kopparberg, to a father who like Andrée’s was a pharmacist. He had been a physicist before he got interested in meteorology, and he was regarded as an authority on Arctic weather. He and Andrée had not gotten along especially well in Spitsbergen, but he wrote that “bonds of friendship were formed that did not break.” Whether they had kept in touch afterward is no longer known, but in 1893 Andrée had written to Eckholm about balloon flights and asked for advice about meteorology. He signed on in 1895. He was tall, with a high forehead; deep-set, owlish eyes; and he wore wire-rimmed glasses. The lower half of his face was obscured by a beard and mustache so thick that they looked like a mask.

Nils Strindberg was born in Stockholm and was twenty-four. His father, Oscar, was a wholesaler who published verse under the pseudonym Occa. Oscar’s cousin, and Nils’s godfather, was the writer August Strindberg. Strindberg’s mother, whose name was Rosalie, was also from a venerable Stockholm family. She and Oscar had three other sons, Tore, who became a sculptor; Sven, an art dealer; and Erik, an architect, who later lived in America. Nils was the second child, and his father’s favorite.

Strindberg had, according to a report from the period, “a fine open countenance” and “the frank ingenuous manners of a boy.” The writer went on to describe him as taking “immense delight in the prospect of the voyage to the Pole.” When he was asked how he and the others would know that they had arrived at the pole, he said, “The instant the south wind becomes a north wind.” He went to an elite boys’ grade school in Stockholm that was also attended by members of the royal family. As an adolescent he learned to take photographs and to play the violin. His favorite opera, which he saw with his parents when he was twenty, was Léo Delibes’
Lakmé
, a melodrama set in India during the mid to late nineteenth century. It is the period of British rule, and they have forbidden Hindus to practice their religion. A British soldier falls in love with Lakmé, the daughter of a Hindu priest who regards the courtship as an affront. The priest stabs the soldier, whom Lakmé takes to the forest and nurses to recovery. She is off getting holy water to sanctify their relationship when a British soldier arrives and persuades his friend that his duty to his regiment is greater than his obligation to Lakmé. The love affair is over, and Lakmé takes poison rather than live under the shadow of scandal. Strindberg learned pieces from it on the violin.

He went to high school at Stockholm College, where his best subjects were physics and chemistry. At home in his room, he had a laboratory where he carried out experiments. He became close to a professor named Svante Arrhenius, who was later on the committee that helped establish the Nobel Prizes and then won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1903. Arrhenius was the first scientist to suggest that changes in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would alter the earth’s temperature: the greenhouse effect.

In 1893 Strindberg received a degree from Uppsala University, and over the next two years he published papers about electricity and electrical circuits. In 1895 he got a position as an amanuensis, an assistant, in physics at Stockholm University, and in the fall he joined Andrée’s expedition.

How he did isn’t entirely clear. He may have won a competition.

It is also possible that he heard Andrée deliver a talk about his plan and spoke to him about it, or that Arrhenius knew Andrée and introduced them. Strindberg was interested in flying machines and had written a paper about Samuel Pierpont Langley, a rival of the Wright brothers. Langley had launched two aircraft from a catapult in the Potomac River in the weeks before the Wright brothers’ flight, and both had crashed. Strindberg’s paper went unpublished.