Under the Sea to the North Pole (26 page)

It was no slight task to overcome the obstacles that ceaselessly rose before the bow of the gallant ship. But her heroic crew had triumphed over difficulties much more formidable. Invincible ardour animated them, for they all desired to victoriously regain their country.

Clear at last from Long Creek, the
Polar Star
saw the desolate land of Courbet Island sink on the horizon, and the unbroken open sea rise ahead. And then a hymn of joy and gratitude was lifted to the skies. They had losses to deplore: they had known adversity and treachery. Of the forty-three who had sailed out of Cherbourg, there returned only twenty-eight, and this might not be all their losses, for they had still eight sick on board. But hope had sprung up in all their hearts, and they thought no more of the sorrows that were past.

There could be no thought of returning to Cape Washington, for every advantage ought manifestly to be taken of the early and exceptionally warm spring. The house of planks was thus abandoned. The next expedition may perhaps be fortunate enough to find there a shelter ready for them and a store of provisions carefully preserved. Besides, it was absolutely necessary to give the sick the earliest possible opportunity of improving their position if there were still time to do so. It was a fine morning in June when the
Polar Star,
after two months of difficult navigation, let go her anchor in Cherbourg roads. Alas! The cruel expectations had been only too well justified. Off the Scottish coast the good nurse, Tina Le Floc’h, had expired in Isabelle’s arms, lavishing on her the tenderest words with her dying breath. Isabelle was inconsolable, although the death had been foreseen for so long, and she brought the body to be buried in that native land of Brittany, in which the poor woman had longed to rest. It took many days to disperse the cloud of sorrow from her charming- face. But she could not help feeling a noble pride in the wild acclamation of the crowd. Called to Paris by the wish of an enthusiastic people, and also by desire of the authorities, the survivors of the expedition found their last journey a march of triumph. They had to submit to all the inconveniences of glory, but they had also its delights. The President of the Republic desired to receive them and to compliment them at the Elysée. The ministers and the learned societies overwhelmed them with ovations and rewards. Even the decree was applauded that gave the cross of the Legion of Honour to the heroic young Frenchwoman, whose name figured with lustre among those of De Keralio, Captain Lacrosse, Lieutenant Hubert D’Ermont, Lieutenant Pol, Lieutenant Hardy, Doctor Servan, and Boatswain Guerbraz, the other members of the valiant crew having commemorative gold medals. At the banquet which was given to them, De Keralio, replying to the toast proposed by the Minister of Marine, remarked,— “Yes, gentlemen, we went to the Pole for the honour of our dear France, but we have done better in showing the way to future explorers.”

And Captain Lacrosse said with a sigh,—

“It does not matter, but it is a pity the
Polar Star
could not get through the barrier by herself.”

“Captain,” said Hubert, “do not worry. Our first effort was crowned with success, but we had too many miseries to put up with. When we go on
our
expedition it will be in a ship entirely of steel, driven by the all-powerful agency that science has given into our hands. That day, my dear captain, we will dynamite the reef that girds the pole, and we will plant the colours of France on the very borders of the lake that traverses the axis of the globe.”

These words of generous confidence were greeted with unanimous acclamations.

It only remained for the explorers to enjoy their well-earned repose. All those who had shared in these fatigues and unprecedented struggles were invited to the festivities that soon took place in honour of the marriage of Isabelle de Keralio with her cousin, Hubert D’Ermont. On that day the naval officer added to his bride’s wedding presents the decree raising him to the rank of captain, at the same time as that which gave to Marc D’Ermont, member of the Academy of Sciences, the rosette of an officer of the Legion of Honour.

And, as the wedding took place at the beginning of winter, the marvels of Cape Ritter, of Fort Esperance, and the
Polar Star
were renewed for the occasion. The rooms were lighted electrically and warmed hydrogenically. Excursions were made in Cherbourg roadstead on board the submarine boat, and ten superb white bears, with Guerbraz at their head, came to wish every happiness to the young couple in the Celtic and Franco-Canadian speech of the seventeenth century. Finally, a masterpiece in fireworks recalled the episode of the artificial fire on the
Polar Star.

“It is all very well,” said Guerbraz, summing up the general opinion, “there may be ice enough at the North Pole, but it is not cold enough to freeze the hearts of brave men!”

The Conquest of Space Book Series

Ron Miller

About twenty years ago I came up with a bright idea for a book. It was going to be a visual chronology of every spaceship ever conceived, starting in the third century BC. This eventually wound up being a monster called
The Dream Machines
(Krieger: 1993), with 250,000 words and more than 3000 illustrations. In the course of researching this thing, I found myself more and more having to locate copies of scarce books and novels. Some of these I could find in libraries or private collections, but others were available only through antiquarian booksellers (if I could find them at all). All too often, this would mean an investment of many hundreds of dollars—money I simply couldn’t afford to invest in the project. This was frustrating, since I didn’t really need to
own
the book, I just needed the information it contained...and I couldn’t see spending, say, $500 for the privilege of looking at a single paragraph.

I knew that other researchers have had the same problem. There were ordinary readers, too, who were looking for good reading copies of obscure books but, like me, were unwilling or unable to pay hundreds of dollars solely for the chance to read a book.

A few years ago I decided to address this problem. Of course, by that time, at least one aspect had been solved by online archives like gutenberg.org. The text of thousands of obscure and rare titles were now freely available. Still. . . this wasn’t quite the same thing as owning a book and for someone who might want a little more than the bare text, it wasn’t enough. There were also some of the necessary limitations imposed by etexts, such as their inability to handle italics, foreign characters and other typographical problems. Often missing, too, were any illustrations that may have accompanied the original book.

So I decided to set out to create a library of reprints. They would feature handsome new covers, a carefully edited text, attractive design, illustrations (where appropriate) and footnotes, appendices, etc. whenever possible. Books that bridged the gap between etexts and the original editions, books that would be easy to read, good to look at and an attractive addition to any book collector’s shelf. In addition, I tried to emphasize books that were not easy—or were even impossible—to find online. The books would also focus on a very particular theme (or two, as it turned out). The main collection consists of early books and novels that deal with space travel or rocketry. One of my motives in this activity was to illustrate how far back the concept of space travel went, to say nothing of how prescient many early writers were in anticipating everything from solar sails and rocket-powered spacecraft to spacesuits and nuclear propulsion.

I am of course, limited myself to books that are in the public domain. However, this worked out fine for me since my main interest is in books published prior to the 1930s.

II The Dreamers

Until the invention of the astronomical telescope by Galileo Galilei in 1610, the heavens were thought to be no great distance from the Earth, and the Sun and the Moon were thought to be the only material bodies with which we shared the universe. Some few of the early Greek philosopher-scientists speculated on the relative distances of the sun, Moon and planets, such as Anaximander in -600. Pythagoras and Aristotle both theorized that the Moon might be spherical. But these and others were all based on quantitative measurements—little thought, if any, was given to what the Moon
was.
When the question was considered however, speculation knew few limits. Anaximander thought that the Moon might be a kind of fiery chariot wheel and Anaxagoras suggested that it was an incandescent solid (albeit with “plains, mountains and ravines”). But by the time Plutarch was writing, foundation for the thousand-year-long Dark Ages was being laid. During that bleak millennium the Earth was clearly the center of the universe, there were no other worlds than this one and the Moon was a perfect, pristine sphere since Providence would be incapable of creating anything less than ideal. If the Moon showed spots, these were nothing but the reflection of our own imperfect world in the Moon’s mirrorlike surface. Change and decay were limited to the Earth; the heavens were immutable and eternal. To question any of this was dangerous heresy.

Galileo’s revelation changed all of that forever. With his first observations he immediately realized that the Moon was not a pristine disk or sphere, but rather a world as imperfect as our own, with mountains, valleys, plains and hundreds of odd, circular ring mountains and craters.

The Church forced Galileo to recant his discoveries and his interpretations of them, but the damage had already been done. When human beings looked skyward they no longer saw abstract points of light. They saw the infinite possibilities of new worlds.

At the time of Galileo’s discovery of new worlds in the sky, there were new worlds being discovered right here on Earth. Scarcely more than a century earlier, the continents of North and South America had been discovered lying unsuspected and unknown on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean. Since then, John and Sebastian Cabot had explored the coasts of North America for Great Britain, while the Portugese and Spanish were laying the groundwork for a vast empire in the southern continent. Between 1519 and 1522, Magellan and Del Cano made their epic voyage around the now undoubtedly spherical Earth. By the time of Galileo, hundreds of ships and thousands of explorers, colonists, soldiers, priests and adventurers had made the journey to these amazingly fertile, rich and strange new lands. Now they learned that an Italian scientist had found that not only did our own Earth harbor unsuspected worlds, but that the sky was full of them, too.

How frustrating it must have been! The new worlds of the Americas, which could not even be seen and which existed for the vast majority of Europeans only in the form of traveler’s tales and evocative if imaginative charts, nevertheless could be visited by anyone possessing the funds or courage. But now here were whole new Earths—Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the Moon—which could be seen by anyone and even mapped; whole new planets with unimaginable continents and riches . . . yet there was no way to touch them! They were like a banana dangling just beyond the reach of a monkey.

It is little wonder that Galileo’s discoveries could not be suppressed. Their publication was quickly followed by a spate of space travel stories:
Somnium, The Man in the Moone, Voyage to the Moon, A Voyage to the World of Cartesius, Iter Lunaire*, John Daniel*, Micromegas, A Voyage to the Moon
and countless others. (*included in this collection.) There were poems, songs, stage plays and sermons, all inspired by the possibility of traveling to the new worlds in the sky. If it were not presently possible to reach them in reality, it could at least be done by proxy.

Bishop Wilkins had no personal doubts that these voyages would eventually be made. He wrote in his
Discovery of a New World
(1638),

“You will say there can be no sailing thither [to the Moon] . . . We have not now any Drake, or Columbus, to undertake this voyage, or any Daedalus to invent a conveyance through the air. I answer, though we have not, yet why may not succeeding times raise up some spirits as eminent for new attempts, and strange inventions, as any that were before them? . . . I do seriously, and upon good grounds affirm it possible to make a flying-chariot . . .” Galileo’s discoveries, and the discoveries of other great astronomers soon afterwards (the rings of Saturn, Saturn’s great Moon Titan, the dusky markings on Mars and even a new planet, Uranus), had a another profound effect on the evolution of the spaceship, in addition to inspiring the need for such a machine. Since the Moon and planets were now known to be real worlds, it was no longer possible to employ them as merely metaphorical symbols. It was one thing to speak of visiting a vast mirrored disk suspended in the heavens, a disk that, so far as anyone knew, had no real physical existence. Now that the Moon was known to be a real place, transportation there could not be shrugged off onto some vaguely described magic. If one were to write seriously about traveling to the Moon or planets, then the method of getting to them had to have at least the ring of plausibility.