The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (3 page)

In 1881 a member of a British Arctic expedition, describing the allure of the frigid places, wrote, “It seems to us certain that the Arctic world has a romance and an attraction about it, which are far more powerful over the minds of men than the rich glowing lands of the Tropics.”

The pole was the chaste and pitiless heart of a god-dwelling region. People thought of the tropics and saw golden cities. People thought of the cold territories and shuddered.

Why did they go, then, this parade of fanatics heading for the deep places? You have to wonder. What they did was so extravagant that their impulses can’t be assumed to have been those of an ordinary citizen, even allowing for the differences between our period and the ones they lived in. It is no observation of my own that the nineteenth century was the last to have been receptive to the enactment of myths, to see the footprints of larger, ineffable beings laid out like dance steps on the map and to feel them wandering through their art and writing. The last to pursue their models and outlines and to feel the rightness of embodying them. Selfless heroism, and the public pursuit and praise of it, reverberates throughout their centuries. The walls of the known, the boundaries, were closer at hand. It was as if the restraints that men felt in sociable life made them feel compelled to rush into the wild.

Who were they? Not a single type but a multiplicity. A procession of thrill seekers, god chasers, romantics, pragmatists, visionary dreamers, nomads, criminals hiding where they thought no one would look, withdrawers from more complicated lives, penitents, mourners, long-shot followers, defeated characters hopeful of redemption, careerists, misfits, and malcontents ill at ease anywhere but the solitary places. Add to them brooders. And self-testers, anxious and feeling vital only when facing a challenge; men whose neurology was sufficiently deadened that only the most profound experiences could stir them. Upright men who adhered courageously to the highest codes of conduct, while marked for death. Devious men who took money from patrons to find Franklin when their intent was to get to the Arctic to find the pole. Ambitious men avid for attention and profoundly receptive to impulse. They set themselves a forbidding task, and came back or didn’t, the way heroes do in legends, and in children’s books, too.

Very few of them were adequate self-explainers. Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, to sudden insights and epiphanies, often can’t explain himself well. Such people act because the gesture feels right, or because they feel provoked, convinced by the obscurity, the persistence, and the vitality of their desires, the self-persuading and incontrovertible correctness of something they see in a vision. “The history of polar exploration is a single mighty manifestation of the power of the unknown over the mind of man, perhaps greater and more evident here than in any other phase of human life,” one of them, Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian, wrote.

No explorer says, I’ll go a little farther than the one who went farthest. He declares for the pole or its equivalent, and he breaks down and turns back or dies sometimes just short of, or just past, where the last mark stood—sometimes merely from luck, bad weather, poor planning. And sometimes determination and a rigorous constitution assert themselves in the vacuum created by hopelessness.

“At least I shall have made my mark on the world,” Adolphus Greely, an American explorer, wrote, before leaving on a journey that had a hideous outcome. Nansen’s explanation was drawn from that part of the landscape where romance and mysticism merge. During the Arctic night, aboard a ship stuck in the ice, he wrote, “What demon is it that weaves the threads of our lives, that makes us deceive ourselves, and ever sends us forth on paths we have not ourselves laid out, paths on which we have no desire to walk? Was it a mere feeling of duty that impelled me? Oh, no! I was simply a child yearning for a great adventure out in the unknown, who had dreamed of it so long that at last I believed it really awaited me; and it has, indeed, fallen to my lot, the great adventure of the ice, deep and pure as infinity, the silent, starlit polar night, nature itself in its profundity, the mystery of life, the ceaseless circling of the universe, the feast of death, without suffering, without regret, eternal in itself. Here in the great night thou standest in all thy naked pettiness, face to face with nature; and thou sittest devoutly at the feet of eternity, intently listening; and thou knowest God the all ruling, the centre of the universe. All the riddles of life seem to grow clear to thee, and thou laughest at thyself that thou couldst be consumed by brooding, it is all so little, so unutterably little.… ‘Whoso sees Jehovah dies.’ ”

Spoken straight from the unconscious, which is wild and ungovernable and used to be called the soul.

Flying over the pole in a balloon appears to have occurred to Andrée on the evening of March 16, 1894, after a meeting of the Swedish Anthropological and Geographical Society in Stockholm, when the explorer A. E. Nordenskiöld asked Andrée to walk home with him. In 1878 Nordenskiöld, on the
Vega
, had finally discovered the Northeast Passage. He was interested to know what Andrée thought of using captive balloons—ones tethered to the ground, that is—to rise above the wall of ice surrounding Antarctica and see what lay beyond it. Andrée said, Why not rise above the ice and keep going?

A year later, on February 13, 1895, Andrée described his intentions in an address to the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. The following August, in London, at the Sixth International Geographical Congress, during a morning session devoted to polar exploration, he gave essentially the same speech, called “A Plan to Reach the North Pole by Balloon.” He followed General Greely, the American, whose subject was a history of Arctic expeditions, in which he delivered a sort of roll call of nations and names, prefaced by remarks depicting the Arctic as a place where “solitude and monotony, terrible in the weeks of constant polar sunlight,” nearly overthrew the mind “in the months of continuous Arctic darkness.” It was a territory “of silence awful at all times, but made yet more startling by astounding phenomena that appeal noiselessly to the eye; of darkness so continuous and intense” that a person was led to wonder “whether the world has been cast out of its orbit in the planetary universe into new conditions.”

Because I would have chafed at such dramatized talk, however fervent or earned, I imagine Andrée as waiting impatiently to speak. He was thirty-nine, blond, tall, and well built, with wide shoulders and a strong jaw. A woman in the audience described him as “heroic-looking.” An acquaintance portrayed him in a letter as “a worthy descendant of the old Vikings.” When he felt something passionately, he wasn’t above rhetoric, and he liked the long run-up. In his Swedish accent, words such as “have” came out “haff.”

(illustration credit 4.1)

“The history of geographical discovery is at the same time a history of great peril and suffering,” he began. “While forcing their way through unknown regions across the vast deserts of Australia, Asia, Africa, the prairies of North America, or through the forests of South America and Central Africa, the explorers have encountered dangers, endured hardships, and been obliged to conquer difficulties, of which no clear idea can be formed by those who have never passed through similar experiences.”

In warm climates, however, “nearly every hindrance can be said to contain a means of success.” Natives often “bar the way of the explorer, but just as often, perhaps, they become his friends and helpers.” Lakes and rivers carried him places; plus he could drink from them and find in them things to eat. In the desert, despite the harsh sun, there could also be “a luxuriant vegetation that serves as a shelter,” not to mention people who have been where you are going and can tell you the best way to get there.

In the Arctic, “the cold only kills,” Andrée continued. There were “no oases in the icy desert, no vegetation, no fuel,” just “a field of ice that invites to a journey,” but this field, “covered with gigantic blocks,” had proved too daunting to cross. The current might lead a vessel forward, but only into waters filled with ice that crushed ships, and in the high reaches of the Arctic desert, no natives were around to help you. The sun lit one’s way in the summer, but it also rotted the ice so that your sledge balked and bogged down and with each step you might sink to your knees. Only by considerable toil could you advance, and then only farther into a landscape that had no comforts or shelter.

“If we further remember that the Arctic explorer can engage in active traveling during a brief season only,” Andrée said, “and that during the remainder of the year he is compelled to inactivity under the weakening influence of cold, together with darkness, while he has to resort to the nourishment that is usually unsuitable and often insufficient, and that is always haunted by the consciousness, that the results he can attain will almost inevitably be meagre in comparison with those which can be secured by explorers in other parts of the globe; then it must be admitted that Arctic research offers drawbacks which are materially greater than those encountered by geographical explorers in other places.”

Laying out his case, Andrée went on—perhaps incautiously—to malign the sledge, the only means for Arctic travel that had “hitherto been used or even been available for use.” Whether drawn by dogs or men, it had failed to carry anyone far enough, “although new efforts to make them a success have repeatedly been made. The fact remains that, in the attempts made for centuries to cross the polar ice, numerous lives and vessels have been lost and large sums of money wasted.”

No nation took greater pride in its sledging or its sledgers than Britain, and no nation had lost more of them. Perhaps Andrée was giving the same speech he had given in Sweden, where sledging was not so revered. Possibly he didn’t care what the British thought. Or maybe, as his friends sometimes said, he had a tin ear and didn’t understand the effect his remarks might have. It requires little of the imagination, however, to hear throats being cleared and feet shuffling.

Nevertheless, Andrée was now at the hinge of his speech. “It would seem,” he went on, “as if it were about time to look into the matter carefully, with a view to ascertaining whether there is no other means of transportation than the sledge available for a journey in the regions referred to. We need not pursue the investigation very far to discover such a means, one that appears to be created for the purpose in question. I refer to the balloon.”

The perfect and navigable balloon, “which is worshipped because nobody has ever produced one,” was not what was needed, he said. The version at hand would suffice—people weren’t aware of how suitable it was because, more than seeing its advantages, they were accustomed to noting its defects. “Such a balloon is capable of carrying an exploring-party to the pole and back again,” Andrée said. “It is possible, with such a balloon, to cross the Arctic plains.”

His purpose declared, he now needed to persuade, and he softened his tone. “To make a journey across the Arctic deserts, is not a purely scientific, but a technical problem.” The results of such a voyage were important for science, but the means must be devised by the engineer. A balloon to reach the pole needed to carry three people, he continued, all the instruments they required for scientific experiments, and their food. It should be able to remain aloft for thirty days (the record was fifteen), and, unlike all balloons thus far known, it had to be able to be steered. Last, it had to be inflated in the Arctic.

A larger balloon, with sufficient lift, had been built and displayed in 1878 in Paris at an exhibition, where it made fifteen hundred ascents, each time carrying thirty or forty people, Andrée said. Since then a number of balloons had had the carrying power that the Arctic balloon required. “It is evident that the problem involving the manufacture of a balloon that will satisfy requirement No. 1 has long since been solved by the arts,” he said.

Balloons had also been made that retained gas long enough to suggest that a thirty-day flight was achievable. The hydrogen could be manufactured at the launching place or brought in canisters aboard ships. To prevent the wind from interfering with the balloon while it was being filled, a shed could be built as a hangar. Finally, the difficulty in sailing a balloon to a specific destination was that conventional balloons could travel only where the wind blew. A balloonist might take to the air hoping to be carried by currents to where he wanted to land, but the currents could change on him. Andrée announced that he had designed a system using guide ropes and a sail that had allowed his balloon to travel at cross-purposes to the wind.

Next Andrée described the attributes of the balloon he needed. The basket should be “spacious and comfortable,” have floats attached, and be hung from the balloon in such a way that it could be disengaged quickly, possibly by pulling a single rope. “The occupants will thus be able to save themselves at sea, when a vessel heaves in sight, by descending to the surface, and, if a heavy wind is blowing, ridding themselves of the balloon.” (Such an escape was possible only if a ship was seen. When asked what he would do if his balloon came down in the water with no one around, he said, “Drown.”) The balloon should also carry “a sledge, a canvas boat, a tent, arms and ammunition, and provisions for four months, all with a view to making a rescue possible in case of a mishap.”