The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (14 page)

Strindberg’s mother had recently died, apparently of stomach cancer, and his father was not convinced that his son should join Andrée. He wasn’t opposed so much as skeptical and needed more than once to be assured that Andrée’s plan was practical. His first impression of Andrée, he wrote, was of a man with a mustache, a bent nose, a handsome mouth, and large slender white hands. His dress was proper and his bearing strong, and he seemed happy and to joke a lot. He was the sort of person one could listen to for hours, Oscar thought. He noticed that all the women in his family were immediately sympathetic to Andrée, even the ones who weren’t usually well disposed toward others, and he felt sure that his wife would have liked him. “And after talking to him,” Oscar wrote, “would have felt considerably less fear than she would otherwise have for this venture.”

Andrée arranged for Strindberg to travel to Paris to learn to fly a balloon, and he went in March of 1896. He was befriended by famous aeronauts who took him to cafés, and by a rich industrialist who had him to his estate, where they hunted rabbits (the party shot sixty, six of which were Strindberg’s). For breakfast he served Strindberg wild boar tails, which were roasted, and which Strindberg enjoyed but thought tasted strange. In the evenings he liked to walk on the boulevard St.-Germain and say
Bonsoir
to the people he passed. He visited the Eiffel Tower and wrote home that he was more disconcerted by being high up in the tower than when aloft at the same height in a balloon. He went to the opera to see
Faust
and was impressed, but thought that Stockholm had at least as good an opera company. He saw the Lumières’ famous moving image of the train arriving at La Ciotat. He stayed at a pension where one of the other guests was a young American woman making a tour of Europe with a chaperone. Her name was Jones. She had long blond hair piled high on her head like Marie Antoinette, beautiful hands, and slightly round cheeks. You start an interesting conversation with her and immediately fall deeply into it, he wrote to one of his brothers. After what he called the polar trip, he thought he might visit her, or that she might come to Sweden with her chaperone. On the last evening before she left, he took a photograph of her and sent it to his brother. Before his second ascent, as he was preparing to launch, she handed him an album and asked him to write verses in it when the balloon had reached its maximum altitude, which disconcerted him, but he did it. “What does this mean in America?” he asked his brother. “Does it mean anything at all?”

He went to tea at the studio of a woman sculptor named Matton, who had a friend named Miss Rudbeck, who was a physical therapist. The three of them then went to the Grand Café, where someone mentioned a club, Café de la Mort, which had an atmosphere like a spookhouse. They went looking for it and found it in a basement on the boulevard de Clichy, with a green electric light at the entrance. The room they walked into was lit by a chandelier of candles that Strindberg sketched in a letter to his brother. The chandelier consisted of human skulls arranged in a ring and attached to a spine that connected to the ceiling. The tables were coffins, and the waiters were dressed as hearse drivers and monks. The drinks were served in glasses that had
Bacilles
written on them—bacilli being a genus of bacteria—and were called drinks of death.

On the walls were portraits that changed abruptly, so that the figures became skeletons, and everyone was given a candle and led into a vaulted cellar room, where a skeleton occupied a niche, as in a catacomb. In front of the skeleton was the image of a saint. Everyone placed his candle next to the saint, then took a seat on a bench. In another niche was an empty coffin. A young man, likely a plant, volunteered to be wrapped in a shroud and placed in the coffin. In his place a skeleton suddenly appeared and the coffin withdrew into the wall while organ music played. Strindberg wrote that a magic lantern—a projector, that is—had been used to accomplish the trick.

From the cellar everyone went to a room that was decorated with symbols of death and another skull-and-spine chandelier. The room had a small stage. A young woman volunteered to sit on a chair, and a ghost walked toward her and kissed her, an effect that Strindberg thought had been produced with a mirror. Finally a young woman began a striptease. As she lifted her chemise, the lights went out. The women thought it was a little vulgar, Strindberg wrote, but they couldn’t help laughing.

One evening Nils also met his godfather, who was living in Paris while one of his plays was being produced. August’s family later developed the impression that he, and not Nils, was the aeronaut. This had partly to do with Oscar’s having sent his son Sven, in Helsinki, a telegram asking him to come home to a party for Nils, who was leaving for the pole. The telegram was delivered instead to one of August’s sons. In
The Inferno
, a kind of diary, August wrote, “May 13
^th
.—A letter from my wife. She has learned from the papers that a Mr. S. is about to journey to the North Pole in an air-balloon. She feels in despair about it, confesses to me her unalterable love, and adjures me to give up this idea, which is tantamount to suicide. I enlighten her regarding her mistake. It is a cousin of mine who is risking his life in order to make a great scientific discovery.”

After the balloon departed, the painter Paul Gauguin wrote to a friend that “by some circumstance, because I don’t read the newspapers, I found out that Strindberg had set off for the North Pole in a balloon, but since then no one had heard anything. But I do hope that he comes back without delay and without having broken his arms and legs.”

The
Jeannette
, the ship that Greely had been supposed to search for traces of while at Fort Conger, had belonged to James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the New York newspaper publisher who in 1871 had sent Henry Morton Stanley into Africa to find David Livingstone. In 1879 Bennett had sent George de Long in the
Jeannette
to find the pole. The
Jeannette
became stuck in the ice, drifted for nearly two years, was eventually crushed in a hurricane off the Siberian islands, and abandoned while it slowly sank. Twenty of its crew of thirty-three, including de Long, died in the retreat. Some of them drowned when their lifeboat capsized, and the others starved or froze trying to reach native towns in Siberia. In 1884 relics from the
Jeannette
washed up on the southwest coast of Greenland—on the other side of the world, that is. The
Danish Geographical Journal
published a partial inventory:

1. A list of provisions, signed by De Long, the commander of the Jeannette.

2. A MS. list of the Jeannette’s boats.

3. A pair of oilskin breeches marked “Louis Noros,” the name of one of the Jeannette’s crew, who was saved.

4. The peak of a cap on which, according to Lytzen’s statement, was written
F. C. Lindemann
[a misprint, since the crewman, who was saved, was F. C. Nindemann].

In 1884 a professor named Henrik Mohn gave a talk at the Scientific Society of Christiania, in Norway, in which he said that he believed that the relics had drifted on a current that crossed the pole. From Mohn’s observations the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who had been the first to cross Greenland, conceived the idea that he could strand in the ice a specially made ship—one that would be “small and strong as possible—just big enough to contain supplies of coals and provision for twelve men for five years,” he wrote—and be carried in it to the pole.

The ships that had gone to the Arctic had all been conventional ones. They had been reinforced with timbers and iron, but many were still crushed once the ice pinched them. They were too long and narrow, and their sides were too steep for the assault. Nansen’s ship would have smooth, gently sloping sides, so that when gripped, the ice could not take hold; instead of being crushed the ship would rise. “The whole craft should be able to slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice,” Nansen wrote.

August or early September would be the time to sail as far as one could into the pack by the New Siberian Islands and moor between floes. The ship would be a sort of floating boardinghouse, a barracks, from which the crew could go out on the ice to make scientific studies and notes. If the ice did manage to damage the ship fatally, its demise would happen slowly, leaving time to move all its supplies onto a floe he would have chosen earlier. Those people who thought Nansen’s plan had a flaw tended to think that there were islands around the pole that had bays into which his boat would drift and never get out. Nansen believed that the pole was surrounded by water.

Nansen called his ship the
Fram
, which translates as forward. It looked like a bathtub toy—Nansen said it resembled half a coconut. It was 138 feet long and 36 feet wide, with three masts, the tallest of which was a little more than 100 feet. The hold was so intricately reinforced that it looked “like a cobweb of balks, stanchions, and braces.” To keep the ship from heeling too much, the bottom was flat. Nansen knew the
Fram
was too wide to sail well—and it didn’t. The first heavy sea poured over the decks while the
Fram
rolled on its beam and all the cargo on the deck washed around, and some of it went overboard.

One of Nansen’s emphatic critics was Adolphus Greely, whom Nansen referred to as “the leader of the illfated expedition generally known by his name.” In a piece in
The Forum
magazine, Greely wrote that it struck him as “almost incredible” that Nansen’s plan “should receive encouragement or support. It seems to me to be based on fallacious ideas as to physical conditions within the polar regions, and to foreshadow, if attempted, barren results, apart from the suffering and death among its members.” Nansen, he went on, “has had no Arctic service; his crossing of Greenland, however difficult, is no more polar work than the scaling of Mt. St. Elias”—a mountain on a boundary between Canada and the United States. Greely doubted that any hydrographer would take seriously Nansen’s theory of the polar currents, or any Arctic specialist endorse his plan. He said that Nansen would not be able to build a ship that could sustain the pressure of the ice, mocking him—as he mocked Andrée—by saying essentially that sharp minds had spent a great deal of money trying and would have succeeded if the task were possible. Arctic exploration was “sufficiently credited with rashness and danger in its legitimate and sanctioned methods, without bearing the burden of Dr. Nansen’s illogical scheme of self-destruction,” Greely wrote.

The
Fram
left Norway with thirteen men in June of 1893. Wherever it stopped, people stared at it and then at the crew. In
Farthest North
, Nansen’s account of the trip, he wrote: “We were looked on somewhat as wild animals in a menagerie. For they peeped unceremoniously at us in our berths as if we had been bears and lions in a den, and we could hear them loudly disputing among themselves as to who was who, and whether those nearest and dearest to us whose portraits hung on the walls could be called pretty or not.” As Norway fell behind, the last figure Nansen saw was a man fishing in the light of the early morning, an image he regarded as emblematic.

The
Fram
entered the ice at the end of September and was not always carried north. Sometimes it went south and even east, the way it had come. At one point Nansen calculated that the pace it was traveling would have them home in eight years. Sometimes the grinding and shifting of the ice was so loud that they had to shout to be heard above it.

In case they had to abandon the ship and make their way home on the ice, they brought sled dogs, which were nearly wild and killed one another if not watched. “ ‘Job’ is dead, torn in pieces by the other dogs,” Nansen wrote in October. “He was found a good way from the ship, ‘Old Suggen’ lying watching the corpse, so that no other dog could get to it. They are wretches, these dogs; no day passes without a fight. In the day-time one of us is generally at hand to stop it, but at night they seldom fail to tear and bite one of their comrades. Poor ‘Barabbas’ is almost frightened out of his wits. He stays on board now, and dares not venture on the ice, because he knows the other monsters would set on him. There is not a trace of chivalry about these curs. When there is a fight, the whole pack rush like wild beasts on the loser.”

After the sun disappeared for the winter—“a flattened body with a dull red glow, but no heat”—they had the company of the moon, “which goes round the sky night and day.” Every now and then the ice parted briefly, and they floated in open water. They lowered pails to the bottom and pulled up mud and emptied out the creatures it held, “chiefly starfish, waving starfish, medusæ (
Astrophyton
), sea-slugs, coral insects (
Alcyonaria
), worms, sponges, shell-fish, and crustaceans,” which they preserved in spirits.

Ships in the Arctic became a species of dungeon once the winter arrived. Having been built for waters where the climate was moderate, they weren’t well insulated. Vapors from cooking and the men’s breathing turned to ice on the walls once the warmth from the cooking had dissipated. When the interior warmed again, the ice melted. Water seaped into the crews’ beds and their clothes, then froze once it got cold again. Since the ships had no portholes and a candle might start a fire, the crews lived mostly in darkness. The cold caused them to withdraw into the holds and their beds for weeks, which made everything worse.

Nansen planned for all these circumstances. Heavily insulated, the
Fram
was always warm, and well lit. More than a typical Arctic ship it was a men’s club. No one had ever sailed to the Arctic in comfort before.