The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (16 page)

On August 3, a Saturday, Nansen wrote, “Inconceivable toil. We never could go on with it were it not for the fact that we
must
.” Two days later Johansen was picking up a rope by his kayak when he saw something crouched by one end of the boat and thought it was a dog. Instantly “he received a cuff on the ear which made him see fireworks.” It was a bear, and the blow knocked him on his back. Johansen grabbed the bear by the throat. Meanwhile, Nansen, who had his back to them and hadn’t seen the attack, was trying to pull his sledge and kayak out of the water. Johansen called out, “Take the gun,” which was in the kayak. Nansen turned and saw Johansen on the ground, and lost his grip on his kayak, which slipped into the water. He was struggling to recover it, when he heard Johansen say quietly, “You must look sharp if you want to be in time.” The dogs distracted the bear briefly, and Nansen’s shot hit it behind one ear. From its tracks they could see how it had stalked them.

On August 7 they finally stood at the edge of the ice. “The large head of a seal came up, and then disappeared silently; but soon more appeared. It is very reassuring to know that we can procure food at any minute we liked.” Two dogs were left, one on each sledge, but there was no room to carry them on the kayaks—beforehand they had traveled through leads, but now they would be crossing open water. “We were sorry to part with them; we had become very fond of these two survivors. Faithful and enduring, they had followed us the whole journey through; and, now that better times had come, they must say farewell to life. Destroy them in the same way as the others, we could not we sacrificed a cartridge on each of them. I shot Johansen’s, and he shot mine.”

That evening, having reached the island, Nansen wrote, “The delight of the feeling of being able to jump from block to block of granite is indescribable.”

In the following days they shot several walruses, which were disgusting to dress. As the dead animals floated in the shallow channels, Nansen and Johansen had to lie on them and reach with their knives as far as they could beneath the water. Getting wet and cold was disagreeable, but the worse part was being soaked by the blubber and the blood while wearing clothes that they would have to wear all winter.

In September they collected stones for a hut. With a spade they constructed from a walrus shoulder blade tied to a broken snowshoe shaft, and a mattock made from a walrus tusk fastened to a sledge crosstree, they dug a foundation three feet deep. The gaps between stones they stuffed with moss and dirt. Across the roof they stretched walrus skins, which were frozen; one of the skins had to be thawed in water before it could be bent. From the ends of the skins they hung stones to stretch them. Now and then they were interrupted by a bear’s appearing or some walruses to shoot. The finished hut was ten feet long and six feet wide and just barely tall enough for them to stand. For months they hardly left it.

On Christmas Day the weather was so fine, with nearly no wind, that Nansen described it as provoking a feeling like “the peace of a thousand years.” The northern lights that evening were “a bright, pale-yellow bow.” They “smouldered for some time, and then all at once light darted out westward along the bow; streamers shot up all along it towards the zenith, and in an instant the whole of the southern sky from the arc to the zenith was aflame.”

For diversion they thought about food or taking a bath. “When we wanted to enjoy a really delightful hour,” Nansen wrote, “we would set to work imagining a great, bright, clean shop, where the walls were hung with nothing but new, clean, soft woolen clothes, from which we could pick out everything we wanted. Only to think of shirts, vests, drawers, soft and warm woolen trousers, deliciously comfortable jerseys, and then clean woolen stockings and warm felt slippers. We would sit up side by side in our sleeping bag for hours at a time, and talk of these things.”

On New Year’s Day of 1896, it was forty-one degrees below zero, and Nansen’s fingers got frostbite. He and Johansen spent the winter making new clothes, including socks from polar bear skins, and a new sleeping bag, also from bearskin, since parts of their new clothes had come from the old bag’s blankets. “There was not much variety in our life,” Nansen wrote. They tried to clean themselves with warm water, using moss as an abrasive. When that didn’t work they tried scraping the dirt from their skin with a knife.

In May they emerged and took photographs of their hut and wrote an account of their voyage thus far:

Tuesday, May 19, 1896. We were frozen in north of Kotelnoi at about 78 degrees 43′ north latitude, September 22, 1893. Drifted northwestward during the following year, as we had expected to do. Johannessen and I left the
Fram
, March 14, 1895, at about 84 degrees 4′ north latitude and 103 degrees east longitude, to push on northward. The command of the remainder of the expedition was transferred to Sverdrup. Found no land northward. On April 6, 1895, we had to turn back at 86 degrees 14′ latitude and about 95 degrees east longitude, the ice having become impassable. Shaped our course for Cape Fligely; but our watches having stopped, we did not know our longitude with certainty, and arrived on August 6, 1895, at four glacier-covered islands to the north of this line of islands, at about 81 degrees 30′ north latitude, and about 7 degrees E. of this place. Reached this place August 26, 1895, and thought it safest to winter here. Lived on bear’s flesh. Are starting to-day southwestward along the land, intending to cross over to Spitzbergen at the nearest point. We conjecture that we are on Gillies Land [another name for White Island].

Nansen signed the note and put it in a brass tube that had been part of their stove, shut up the tube with a wood plug, and hung it by a wire from the rooftree. Then they started walking. Having had so little exercise over the winter, they found the sledges heavy. Aboard their kayaks one day they pulled up to a floe to rest and got out, and when they weren’t looking the wind took the kayaks, which were lashed together. Nansen swam after them. The closer he got to them, the stiffer with cold he became. When he was finally able to grab hold of them, he had hardly the strength to pull himself aboard. To paddle back to the floe he had to make two strokes off the side of one kayak, then step across to the other kayak and make two strokes there, while the wind went through his clothes. Two auks landed on the bow, and wanting them for a meal, he shot them both with one bullet. On the shore Johansen, hearing the gunshot and seeing Nansen paddle toward the birds, thought that Nansen had gone insane. When Nansen made it back to the floe, he put on dry clothes, and they spread the sleeping bag on the ice and Johansen covered him with the sail and whatever else could be found. He fell asleep while Johansen prepared the auks, and when he woke he was warmer, and they ate the birds and some soup.

Often their kayaks were followed by walruses. One rose up beside Nansen and struck the boat with its tusks. Nansen hit it in the head as hard as he could with his paddle, but before he could reach his gun, the walrus submerged. Nansen heard water coming into the kayak and managed to get to a floe, where the kayak started to sink. He and Johansen got it out of the water and saw a six-inch tear. Nansen felt sure that the animal had meant to harm him.

On the seventeenth of June, camped on land, Nansen rose to make breakfast. He walked to the edge of the ice for some fresh salt water, and while watching birds, heard what he thought was a dog barking. He decided it had been the birds. “Then the barking came again, first single barks, then full cry.” Johansen also thought it was birds. After breakfast Nansen found tracks that might have belonged to a fox. It didn’t seem possible that a dog could have been so close to them in the night and made no noise. He heard the dog again, then saw fox tracks among the other tracks, and noted how small the fox prints were beside them. Then there was a long period when he heard only birds. This was broken by a shout. Nansen ran to the top of a hummock and yelled, but moving among the ridges and icebergs, he saw only white until he made out a dark form: the dog—and, in a moment, behind it, a man. Nansen waved his hat, and the man waved back. Shortly he could hear him speaking to the dog in English. As they drew toward each other, “I thought I recognized Mr. Jackson, whom I remembered once to have seen—” Frederick Jackson, who was exploring Franz Josef Land.

Jackson was wearing a wool check suit and high rubber boots. His face was clean and shaved. Nansen hadn’t bathed in a year. His skin in places was black from smoke and soot and seal fat. His hair hadn’t been cut, or his beard either. Jackson took him for a walrus hunter who had come to some misfortune.

Nansen raised his hat. They shook hands and engaged in a dialogue by Beckett. “How do you do?” each asked the other.

Jackson said, “I’m glad to see you.”

“Thank you, I also.”

“Have you a ship here?”

“No, my ship is not here.”

“How many are there of you?”

“I have one companion at the ice edge.”

They walked a little, inland. Jackson stopped and looked him in the face and said, “Aren’t you Nansen?”

“Yes, I am.”

“By Jove,” Jackson said, “I am glad to see you.”

Nansen asked how things were at home, and Jackson said that Nansen’s wife and child had been fine when he had last seen them two years earlier. Then each of them fired two shots as a signal to Johansen to join them.

Jackson’s camp was nearby at Cape Flora. He had gone out on the ice because after he and his companions had finished dinner—their schedule was apparently different from Nansen’s—they were sitting in their headquarters, smoking pipes, when the company astronomer put his head in the door and said, “How many of you are here? I see a man on the ice floe.” Counting, they realized everyone was present; then Jackson said, “Whoever it is, I am off,” and he ran out. One of the company, standing on a hill watching two specks through binoculars, said that the stranger approaching was “jumping about from one ice hummock to another in a marvelous manner.” Nansen’s nearest relative would not have recognized him, the witness said. “His light hair and mustaches were jet black.” He went on to say, “His clothes—the one suit he had worn for fifteen months—were stiff with blood and oil with which his face and hands were also covered.”

Jackson’s party made them dinner—roast loon, green peas, jam tart, cheese, and preserved fruits, served with port, sherry, and whiskey—and Nansen felt the cares of the past three years fall away from him. He was handed a soldered tin box that held letters from Norway, which he opened, he wrote, “with a trembling hand and a beating heart.” After reading the letters, “a delightful feeling of peace settled upon the soul.” Having spent three weeks trying to reach the pole, it had taken him fourteen months to return.

Within a week, while still at Cape Flora, he heard that Andrée was nearby, on Dane’s Island, “waiting for wind to go to the Pole in a balloon,” he wrote. “If we had pursued our course to Spitzbergen, we should thus have dropped into the very middle of all this.”

When Andrée, Strindberg, and Eckholm left Göteborg for Dane’s Island aboard the
Virgo
in June of 1896, forty thousand people saw them off. Of those who had helped him, Andrée said that if he died in the attempt, “the last thought that at least I will have is what a pity I was not able to thank them.” Before going aboard he wrote to his mother. “Don’t be uneasy, dear, your heart is close beside me,” and on the
Virgo
he read her last letter. She always worried that something would happen to him, but he had assured her that he was safe in the air. “I am so dissatisfied with myself for having been such a poor, weak creature on that difficult day of leave-taking,” she wrote. “But there is
one
thing I wish you to bear in mind, and that is this: if when you return I am no longer here, you must not be depressed by thinking that your grand enterprise has had the
least
influence on my having gone the way of all flesh.… And now, my thanks for all you have been to me!”

Andrée reached Spitsbergen on June 21 with fifty-one people, including scientists and carpenters. The following day he spent looking for somewhere to build the balloon house. He chose a place close to the shore where the ground had no ice, and there were mountains on three sides—the balloon would depart to the north over the water. Nearby was a small house built in 1888 by an Englishman named Arnold Pike, who had sailed among the islands and had given Andrée permission to use the house.

The
Virgo
anchored about 150 yards offshore, at the edge of the ice; then, using pine from northern Norway, the crew built a railway to connect to the land. The first items to be unloaded were the equipment and ingredients for the hydrogen. Some of it was hauled over the railway using tackles and pulleys, and some came ashore on rowboats and a small steamer finding its way through leads in the ice, a few of which had been opened with dynamite. Next came the parts of the balloon house. There was rain on Midsummer Eve, the solstice, which is a traditional Swedish holiday, but they celebrated with a party where speeches were delivered, Strindberg played the violin, and a dog did tricks.