The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (5 page)

In 1876, when Andrée was twenty-three, he went to America to see the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which had been organized to celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Officially it was the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, and on display were all the world’s most prominent new inventions. Absorbed by modernity, he was there when word arrived of Custer’s defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

Sailing to America, Andrée had had two acquaintances, his cabinmate, “a young German who was ducking military duty,” he wrote in a journal, “and a Swede who claimed to be a pork importer bound for Chicago, but who later proved to be a fugitive.” However, “the pseudo pork dealer, who was a good mixer, soon made other friends who were richer than we and with whom he became engaged in gambling. My German cabin mate and I preferred remaining quietly in our berths.”

The deserter had brought love letters that he liked to pore through. Andrée had only one book,
Laws of the Winds
, by C. F. E. Björling, which he would read lying on his bunk. One day, reading about the trade winds and struck by their regularity, an idea “ripened in my mind which decisively influenced my whole life,” he wrote. This was the thought “that balloons, even though not dirigible, could be used for long journeys. And not only from the Old to the New World, but also in the opposite direction and between the other continents.” The German happened to laugh and interrupt Andrée’s reverie, but he returned to it and “firmly resolved, when I landed in America, to get in touch with an aeronaut and find out what I could about such balloons as were then manufactured.”

In Philadelphia, Andrée went to the Swedish consul to ask for a pass to the fair. The consul said he couldn’t give him one, but he could hire him as the janitor at the Swedish Pavilion. He could live upstairs in the pavilion and go anywhere at the fair that he wanted.

Andrée would go to bed at nine and get up at five. One day he made a trip to a river where he picked roses and daisies to press and send home to one of his sisters. He had only one companion, he wrote her, Plato, “but the best is good enough.” It pleased him that work was honored in America and that the harder someone worked the better he was treated. At the fair he was impressed by the machines that printed hundreds of thousands of newspapers in hours, and the “screws to make pocket watches so small and delicate that only with a microscope can you see that they are screws.” There was a steam engine “high as a three-story house,” and a cannon weighing “millions of pounds” that shattered a foot-thick steel plate “as easily as if it were glass.” In New York he had heard they were building “a suspension bridge over the city, which already cost eighty million crowns, but it is not ready yet for a long time” (the Brooklyn Bridge was finished in 1883).

Once in New York and once in Philadelphia, Andrée visited phrenologists. He presented himself as a tailor, and was told that he would make an excellent engineer. Also that his determination led people to regard him sometimes as stubborn. His contrary temperament made him “quick to avenge insults and repel attacks.” A love for independence and change led to behaviors that frequently contradicted his feelings. His thinking was unconstrained by conventions. He could be trusted with “positions that demand masculinity, honor and faith” and was a natural leader: “You win people over to your cause and get them to sympathize personally with whatever you undertake.” Nevertheless, from deep caution, he was “watchful and worried” and deliberate, and only reluctantly did he trust people. Judgment and prudence helped him control his fantasies, “however large.” As for his future, twenty years would “pass before you achieve the highest degree of your spiritual development.”

Historically the Arctic was congenial to opposites. For some of the ancients, it was both holy and infernal. The devil lived there in a house of fire, a supposition based on a reading of Isaiah 14, which says that Lucifer will “sit on the mount of assembly in the far north.” A northerly wind was believed to transmit evil. “The Victorine monk Garnerius says that the ‘malign spirit’ was called Aquilo, the north wind,” Jung wrote in
Aion
. “Its coldness meant the ‘frigidity of sinners.’ ” Jung also wrote that Adam Scotus, a theologian of the twelfth century, believed that “there was a frightful dragon’s head in the north from which all evil comes.” The smoke that came from the dragon’s nose and mouth “was the smoke which the prophet Ezekiel, in his vision of God, saw coming from the north,” Scotus wrote.

The anthology of myths and deities and peculiar people assembled about the Arctic by the ancients includes the Arabs in the ninth century who knew about the Arctic from an Arabian traveler named Ahmad ibn Fadhlan. The king of the Bulgarians told Fadhlan that a tribe named the Wisu lived three months north of his country. Their summer nights were not even one hour long. The thirteenth-century Persian geographer Zakariya al-Qazwini says that the Wisu were not allowed to visit the Bulgarians’ territory, because wherever they went the air turned cold, even in summer, which killed the Bulgarians’ crops. To trade with the Wisu, from whom they mainly got furs, the Bulgarians would go to the border in a cart that was drawn by a dog. It had to be a dog, and not a horse or an ox, because dogs could get a purchase on the ground with their claws—in Wisu there were no trees or dirt or rocks, only ice. The traders would leave their goods on the frontier. When they came back, they would find an item beside their own, and if they liked the trade they would take it. Otherwise they withdrew their item, so they never saw the Wisu or knew what they looked like.

The cold in the north made a fantastic impression on al-Qazwini. Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, in his book
In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times
, quotes his opinion that the northern winter was “an affliction, a punishment and a plague; during it the air becomes condensed and the ground petrified, it makes faces to fade, eyes to weep, noses to run and change color, it causes the skin to crack and kills many beasts. Its earth is like flashing bottles, its air like stinging wasps; its night rids the dog of his whimpering, the lion of his roar, the birds of their twittering and the water of its murmur, and the biting cold makes people long for the fires of Hell.” Hell is a complicated notion for people in cold climates. When the Presbyterians went to Alaska in the nineteenth century they told the Indians about the fires of hell that burned perpetually, and the Indians thought it sounded pretty good, so the missionaries had to change hell to a place where it was always cold.

An Arab writer named Shams ad-din Abû Abdallâh Muhammad ad-Dimashqi (1256–1327) described the Far North as a desert with no people in it. It had no animals, either, only great amounts of snow and darkness, and “around it the vault of heaven turns like a stone in a mill.”

The Greeks believed that a people named the Hyperboreans lived at the top of the world, beyond the Boreas, the harsh northern wind that issued from a cave. Their territory was a paradise that could not be reached. The Hyperboreans were peaceful and just, they lived in the woods instead of living in houses, they never had wars, and they grew to be a thousand without becoming ill. When a Hyperborean had become tired of life, he or she would put on garlands of flowers, walk to the edge of a particular cliff, and fall into the sea. They cherished Apollo, who could transport to Hyperborea mortals who had lived especially pious lives. To worship him they had a sphere-shaped temple, which hovered on wings. Three brothers who were twelve feet tall were the priests. Every nine years Apollo visited, possibly in a chariot drawn through the air by swans. He played a kind of lyre, called the kithara, and danced for months without resting. When the priests offered their sacrifice and played music, immense herds of swans flew down from the mountains and landed on the temple.

Other ancients thought that a miscellany of oddities and monsters lived in the North. A lost poem from the seventh century BC, called the
Arimaspeia
, was said to have been written by a figure, perhaps mythical, named Aristeas of Proconnesus. Aristeas said that he had traveled to the region of the northernmost people, called the Issedonians. The Issedonians told him that north of them lived the Arimaspians, who had long hair and one eye. North of them were Griffins, which looked like lions and had wings and beaks like eagles. The Griffins guarded the earth’s gold and often fought with the Arismaspians, who tried to steal it.

Elsewhere in the North were the Meropians, whose territory shared a border with a country called Anostos, which means “No Return.” Anostos had no dark or light, only a reddish fog. There were two streams—the Hedone, which was the stream of gladness, and the Lype, which was the stream of sorrow. Each stream had trees on its banks. If you ate the fruit from the trees by the stream of sorrow, you shed tears until you died. If you ate the fruit by the stream of gladness, your desires were slaked and you got younger, but you lived life backwards and died as an infant.

As for the Romans, Pliny in his
Natural History
described a territory in the north where the snow fell almost constantly and was like feathers. This region had no light, it produced nothing but frost, it was where the north wind lived, and it was cursed. The existence of the Hyperboreans should be accepted, “since so many authors tell us about them,” he wrote. Tacitus wrote that the sea in the North was still and sluggish and that the sun in rising from it made a sound that could be heard.

By the fourteenth century, sailors believed that seas in the North had whirlpools so big that traveling into them was like falling into an abyss. In them lived plenty of fantastic creatures. The unknown writer of a thirteenth-century book called
The King’s Mirror
, a scientific treatise in the form of a dialogue between a man and his son, said that “the waters of Greenland are infested with monsters.” The merman was “tall and of great size and rises straight out of the water.” It had a head and shoulders and eyes and a mouth, “but above the eyes and the eyebrows it looks more like a man with a peaked helmet on his head.” Its form “looked much like an icicle,” in that it narrowed toward its lower half, “but no one has ever seen how the lower end is shaped, whether it terminates in a fin like a fish or is pointed like a pole.” The mermaid rarely appeared except before violent storms and was ugly to look at, with a “large and terrifying face.”

Instead of whirlpools the author mentions “sea hedges,” which are three-sided, “higher than lofty mountains,” and box in the sea. “We have to speak cautiously about this matter, for of late we have met but very few who have escaped this peril and are able to give us tidings about it.”

Among the region’s other attributes were the ice fields on the ocean, which he said were sometimes “as flat as if they were frozen on the sea itself,” and icebergs, “which never mingle with other ice, but stand by themselves.”

To read these accounts is to feel that the world the explorers were to step into hadn’t yet been completely created.

Soon after Andrée got to Philadelphia, he “looked up the balloonist John Wise, an elderly man who had begun his career as a piano polisher,” he wrote. Actually Wise had started as a cabinetmaker and had then built pianos. At fourteen, from an article in a German-language newspaper, he got interested in balloons. In his twenties he built one from muslin and varnished it with linseed oil and birdlime, a sticky substance made from tree bark, that was used to trap birds. The mixture, Wise noted, was prone to combust spontaneously.

Wise was also an innovator. He was among the first aeronauts to use draglines as a means for a balloon to maintain a stable height. He also invented the rip panel, which allowed a balloon to deflate quickly and safely for landing. Beforehand a balloonist had to climb through the rigging to the top of the balloon, and with his knees grasp the valve that released the gas. From his weight, the balloon would often turn upside down, which, depending on how hard it hit the ground, might not be so good for the balloonist.

Wise had made roughly four hundred flights “and had had all manner of thrilling adventures,” Andrée wrote. “He had flown with them in sunshine, rain, snow, thunder showers and hurricanes. He had been stuck on chimneys, smoke stacks, lightning rods and church spires, and he had been dragged through rivers, lakes, and over garden plots and forests primeval. His balloons had whirled like tops, caught fire, exploded and fallen to the ground like stones. The old man himself, however, had always escaped unhurt and counted his experiences as proof of how safe the art of flying really was.

“In order to convince a few fellow citizens who had been inconsiderate enough to doubt his thesis, Mr. Wise once made an ascent in Philadelphia, and while in mid-air he deliberately exploded his balloon. Then using the remains of the bag as a parachute he landed right in the midst of the doubters. What effect this had on them I do not know, but the old man himself felt better.”

Wise believed that the wind blew predominantly from west to east, and with sufficient force and steadiness to transport a balloon carrying people and freight not only across America but also to Europe. Building a balloon to cross the Atlantic was, he wrote, “the dream of my lifetime.” The balloon he imagined had a basket shaped like a boat, in case he came down in the water. On the gunwales it had oars and hand-turned propellers. In 1859 Wise started the Trans Atlantic Balloon Corporation with two partners. The balloon they built they flew from Missouri to New York in twenty hours and forty minutes, a record. Two months later, the partners, flying from New York to Canada, crashed in the Canadian woods, and the balloon was destroyed.

In 1873, Wise raised money for a second transatlantic balloon from the
Daily Graphic
, a New York newspaper. This balloon was accompanied by two smaller ones that carried extra gas and could also support someone making repairs to the balloon itself. Wise thought that a crossing to Ireland would take sixty hours and be almost absurdly perilous. “The discovery of the North Pole, which had recently caused Captain Hall’s death,” he wrote, meaning Charles Hall, who died in 1871 trying to reach the pole, “not to mention the journey of the vessel Polaris”—Hall’s ship—“which has just disappeared and probably been lost, is nothing but a pleasure trip compared to this journey through airspace, win or lose.” Wise eventually decided that the balloon wasn’t substantial enough, and he withdrew. While being filled, the balloon tore and collapsed. A smaller version left for Europe and after three hours crashed in a storm near New Haven, Connecticut.