The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (25 page)

Andrée meant James Glaisher, an Englishman, from Wolverhampton, who had made the highest ascent in a balloon in 1862, when he rode to thirty-six thousand feet. At twenty thousand feet “I laid my arm upon the table possessed of all its vigour, and on being desirous of using it I found it powerless,” he wrote. “I tried to move the other arm and found it powerless also.” As he looked at the barometer “my head fell on my left shoulder.” He managed to raise it, but then it fell on his right shoulder. Glaisher had gone aloft with a partner named Coxwell, who was up in the ring, making an adjustment, and Glaisher tried to speak to him but “an intense black darkness came, the optic nerve finally losing power suddenly.” He came to hearing Coxwell say, “Do try—now do.” He rose as if from sleep and said, “I have been insensible,” and Coxwell said, “You have, and I, too, very nearly.” Coxwell’s hands had turned black, and Glaisher poured brandy over them, possibly to warm them.

Glaisher had taken six pigeons aloft. One was set free at three miles and flew off; one was released at four and flew away but “taking a dip each time; a third was tossed out between four and five miles and fell downward like a stone.” A fourth, thrown out on the descent at four miles, flew in a circle and landed on top of the balloon. The other two were brought to the ground. One was dead and the other, a carrier, “would not leave the hand when I attempted to throw it off.” Finally it left and flew to Wolverhampton and was “the only pigeon that has been heard of.”

Andrée “adjusted the steering apparatus at its maximum southwards”—it was around two-thirty in the morning—and set a course to the north. About forty-five minutes later he cut the side sails loose. At six-twenty “the balloon rose to a great height,” but he opened the valves and immediately brought it back close to the ice.

“Anchored on an ice-floe 7:30 a.m., July 14,” Strindberg wrote. The flight was all but done. About forty minutes later they jumped out of the basket, “worn out and famished,” according to Andrée.

They had made the longest flight ever, having been aloft for sixty-five hours and thirty-three minutes, had traveled 517 miles, and were about 300 miles north of where they started, approximately 300 miles from the pole.

Andrée landed the balloon so expertly that none of the birds was injured and not even the most sensitive of their instruments was damaged. It lay on its side—the huge orb, flattened like a tire against the ice. The rigging and the ropes enclosing it made it appear as if it were a live thing that had been pursued and brought down. Andrée and Fraenkel stood looking at it, as if the first to arrive at the scene of a disaster or a remarkable anomaly, while Strindberg walked off on the ice and took photographs of it.

The next morning Andrée wrote that the balloon had been heavily encumbered by ice from the fine rain and the fog. (By now it was only a flat piece of dark fabric; trash beside the basket.)

All around them were ice and ruins of ice, pieces heaved up and toppled and ground into angles and corners like sawteeth. Here and there were leads and pools of water resembling ponds and channels. From the air the leads had looked like deep open water, but now they saw that some were only shallow streams formed by melted ice.

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They had left as explorers, and now they were adventurers. Explorers study accounts of trips similar to their own as closely as scholars study an absorbing text. No concern is too slight to entertain. In
A Thousand Days in the Arctic
, Frederick Jackson, the man who met up with Nansen, described an explorer about to leave on a sledging trip who was observed in his cabin weighing a handkerchief and trying to decide if he could bring it. Adventure arrives on a voyage of discovery in the form of a mistake, and is almost always unwelcome. It is as if an explorer had conceived a plan for a trial voyage and then carried it out the way a scientist conducts an experiment. Roald Amundsen, who was first to the South Pole, in 1911, said that people often thought of adventure when they encountered the word discovery. A voyage of discovery was “a race against time, in order to escape death by starvation,” he wrote. An adventure was “an error in his calculations, the fact of which the ‘experiment’ has exposed.”

It took them a week to build their boat and choose what to pack in their sledges. Meanwhile there were periods of snow and rain. On the morning of the twentieth the pigeons flew away, and that evening Andrée shot a bear that came close to the camp. Strindberg cooked it, and they ate it with “excellent pumpernickel.” The next day they tried the boat in a lead with “extremely good result.”

They might have stayed where they were and let the ice carry them, as Tyson had, but no science could be done on an ice floe, or any new territory seen. In addition, to drift to rescue was passive and symbolically meager, whereas polar exploration was confrontational. Ernest Shackleton, the British explorer, called polar work “the white warfare,” after trying to traverse Antarctica in 1914. “Twice I examined the horizon carefully in every direction without discovering land,” Andrée wrote. He was about 192 miles from NorthEast Land, part of the Spitsbergen archipelago, and about 210 miles from Franz Josef Land, where Nansen had spent the winter. No one had ever crossed the wilderness between him and either place; he hoped to find land and shelter that was closer and unknown.

On the evening of July 22, they began walking southeast toward the depot that Jackson had left for them on Franz Josef Land. Their sledges weighed between 300 and 450 pounds. Strindberg noted that they were very hard to pull. Two hundred and fifty pounds had been the weight that had led Nansen’s crewman to conclude that “if a man had to draw a load like that he might just as well lie down at once—it would come to the same thing in the end.”

At midnight they camped, and Strindberg wrote Charlier, “Well, now your Nils knows what it is to walk on the Polar ice. We had a little mishap at the start. When we were crossing from our ice-floe with the first sledge it went crooked and fell in. It was with difficulty we succeeded in getting it up. I climbed down up to the knees and held fast the sledge so that it should not sink. Andrée and Fraenkel crossed over to the other ice-floe and then suddenly we managed to get the sledge up but I expect that my sack which was on the sledge is wet inside. And it is there that I have all your letters and your portrait. Yes, they will be my dearest treasure during the winter. Well, my dear, what will you be thinking all winter? That is my only anxiety.—Well, after we had got the sledge up again we piloted ourselves across some floes with channels of water between. The way we did it was by making the ice-floes move quickly so that they came near each other. This was slow work with the large floes of course. At last we came on to a large field of ice across which we travelled with our sledges two or three kilometers. Each is loaded with about 160 kg. so that they are very heavy and during the last hour what we did was for all three of us to help with one sledge at a time. Now we have encamped on a picturesque bit of ice and have pitched our tent. In the tent we have our sleeping-sack in which all three of us are now lying side by side. It is a squeeze but the fellowship is good. Well, there is much I should write about but now I must sleep. Good night.”

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When they woke at eleven-thirty in the morning, the sun was among clouds. To make breakfast and pack the sledges took an hour and they started walking around one. The leads were hard to cross and Strindberg and Andrée had different ideas about how to, although neither wrote them down. Andrée wrote, “The traveling bad and we were extremely fatigued. Dangerous ferryings and violent twistings, etc. of the sledges among the hummocks.” They discussed whether to lighten the sledges but reached no conclusion. It was Charlier’s birthday, and they gave her four cheers.

“We have just stopped for the day,” Strindberg wrote her, “after drudging and pulling the sledges for ten hours. I am really rather tired but must first chat a little. First and foremost I must congratulate you, for this is your birthday. Oh, how I wish I could tell you now that I am in excellent health and that you need not fear for us at all. We are sure to come home by and by.”

What Strindberg wrote next has faded away. When the text began again, he said, “Yes, how very much all this occupies my thoughts during the day, for I have plenty of time to think and it is so good to have such pleasant memories and such happy prospects for the future as I have, to think about!

“
(Later.)
Now we have camped for the night and had coffee and eaten our sandwiches with cheese and h … biscuits and syrup and … Just now we are putting up the tent and Fraenkel is taking the meteorological observations. Now we are enjoying a caramel, it is a real luxury. You can fancy we are not over-delicate here. Yesterday evening I gave them (for it is I who attend to the housekeeping) a soup which was really not good, for that Rousseau meat-powder has a bad taste one soon becomes tired of it. But we managed to eat it in any case.…

“Well, we have stopped for the night on an open place, round about there is ice, ice in every direction. You saw from Nansen’s pictures how such ice looks. Hummocks, walls, and fissures in the sea alternating with melted ice, everlastingly the same. For the moment it is snowing a little but it is calm at least and not especially cold (–0.8°). At home I think you have nicer summer weather.”

Strindberg’s tone then turned downcast. “Yes, it is strange to think that not even for your next birthday will it be possible for us to be at home. And perhaps we shall have to winter here for another year more. We do not know yet. We are now moving onwards so slowly that perhaps we shall not reach Cape Flora this winter, but, like Nansen, will have to pass the winter in an earth-cellar. Poor little Anna, in what despair you will be if we should not come home next autumn. And you can imagine how I am tortured by the thought of it, too, not for my own sake, for now I do not mind if I have hardships as long as I can come home at last.

“Now the tent is in order and we are going to our berths. We are all rather tired but in good humour. We discuss our mental characteristics and our faults, a very educative … I chat with …”

They awoke on the twenty-fifth to rain and stayed in their tent, sleeping, until three. “Then we rose and I cooked a little food—cocoa and condensed milk and biscuits and sandwiches,” Strindberg wrote Charlier. “At 4.30 o’cl. we started and now we have drudged and pulled our heavy sledges for four and a half hours. The weather is pretty bad: wet snow and fog, but we are in good humour. We have kept up a really pleasant conversation the whole day. Andrée has talked about his life, how he entered the Patent Office, etc. Fraenkel and Andrée have gone ahead on a reconnoitering tour. I stayed with the sledges and now I am sitting writing to you. Yes, now you are having evening at home and you, like I, have had a very jolly and pleasant day. Here one day passes like another. Pulling and drudging at the sledges, eating and sleeping. The most delightful hour of the day is when one has gone to bed and allows one’s thoughts to fly back to better and happier times. But the immediate object now is our winter-place. We hope to find things better in the future. Now the others are coming back and we shall continue the drudgery with the sledges, Au revoir.…”