The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (28 page)

After five hours of walking on the following day, the seventh, they had gone a thousand yards. Low on meat, they shot two gulls. “We do not like to shoot unless we can get at least two gulls per shot,” Andrée wrote. “They are delicate birds but I think they cost a lot of ammunition.” He wished for a seal or a bear.

Neither Fraenkel nor Andrée had the runs anymore, but Fraenkel had pain in his left foot from a blister that Andrée tended. He hoped it would heal soon, since they depended on Fraenkel’s strength. On the ninth, Fraenkel could not pull his sled any longer, only push it. Andrée and Strindberg hauled theirs, then returned for his. “This tries our strength,” Andrée wrote. Since the terrain had been very difficult, they could manage only six hours’ walking. Andrée came to a piece of ice that seemed stable when he tested it with the boat hook but turned out to be sludge, and he fell in. He floated on his back until the others could extend an oar to him. He finished the day’s entry by noting that large seals swam around them, but they could not shoot well enough to kill them instantly, and if they only wounded them the seals sank.

“Since I wrote last in my diary much has changed, in truth,” Andrée wrote ten days later—it was the seventeenth of September. Snow had fallen, making sledging harder. Fraenkel’s foot was no better, and Strindberg and Andrée were still pulling his sledge. One of Strindberg’s feet had also begun to hurt. In addition they were nearly out of meat. The current and the wind carried them persistently “down into the jaws between NorthEast Land and Franz Joseph Land,” Andrée wrote. Pinned down by the wind on the eleventh and twelfth, they concluded that they had no chance of reaching the depot on NorthEast Land. Between August 4 and September 9 the ice had carried them eighty-one miles south-southeast, instead of southwest as they had intended. Spending the winter on the ice had become unavoidable. “Our position is not specially good,” Andrée wrote.

Wintering in the Arctic, and especially on the ice, was nothing anyone other than Nansen had ever wanted to do. Horrifying things happened, and the best that could come of it, everyone knew, was that you might still be alive in the spring, although likely diminished. The approach of a winter in the ice led the venerated sledger McClintock to write, “The dreaded reality of wintering in the pack is gradually forcing itself upon my mind,—but I must not write on this subject, it is bad enough to brood over it unceasingly.”

The first people to overwinter were those who had their ships frozen in place. Among these was a ship commanded by Willem Barents, the Dutch navigator, which got stuck in 1596. Barents was making his third Arctic voyage, on which he discovered Spitsbergen. At the end of August, in a harbor called Ice Haven, the ship was caught and violently bound, and the crew realized, as one of them wrote, that they would have “in great cold, poverty, misery, and grief to stay all that winter.” From driftwood, since no trees grew on the land, they built a house, which took a month. Often they had to quit work to run away from bears. The house was so cold that the fire hardly warmed them. They put their feet in the fire so that their socks burned. They knew to withdraw their feet because they smelled the wool burning, not because they felt the heat.

Andrée decided to cross in the boat to another floe, bigger and “richer in ice-humps” than their own, which was “low and small and full of saltwater pools.” Theirs, they thought, would break up in the spring. On the new floe they hollowed out a big piece of ice, then built walls from blocks of ice and snow over which they threw water to harden them. Andrée shot a seal through its head, so it didn’t sink. Over the following three weeks they ate all but the skin and bones. Bears seemed to have disappeared from the territory, and all they had of animal life were the gulls, which Andrée said were “not to be despised” but cost a lot of ammunition. “May we shoot some score of seals so that we can save ourselves,” he wrote.

Fraenkel’s foot had gotten a little better but was weeks from being healed. Strindberg’s feet were now bad, too. “Our humour is pretty good,” Andrée wrote, “although joking and smiling are not of ordinary occurrence. My young comrades hold out better than I had ventured to hope.” Andrée thought that perhaps they might drift far enough south that they could get food from the ocean. Also, closer to the water might not be as cold as on the land. “He who lives will see,” he wrote. “Now it is time to work.”

On the nineteenth, “for the first time since 11 July,” Andrée wrote, they sighted land. He was sure it was New Iceland—White Island—and he made a drawing of its long, low outline, rising and sloping from one edge to the other like the curve of an eye. He guessed it was about six miles away.

Going ashore appeared to be impossible, since the “entire island seems to be one single block of ice with a glacier border,” Andrée wrote. On the west and east, however, it might be reached. Seeing land meant that the ice had moved so rapidly beneath them that Andrée wrote, “If we drift in this way some weeks more perhaps we may save ourselves on one of the islands east of Spitsbergen.”

The following day, the eighteenth, Jubilee Day in Sweden—the twenty-fifth anniversary of King Oscar II’s reign—Andrée shot a seal. Cutting it up, he discovered that the skull was “as thin as egg-shell,” and should therefore easily be killed by a shot to the head. They hoisted the Swedish flag, drank to the king’s health, and sang the national anthem. Strindberg wrote down the menu:

BANQUET, 18 SEPT
. ’97
ON AN ICE-FLOE IMMEDIATELY EAST OF

Seal-steak and ivory gull fried in butter and seal-blubber, seal-liver,—brain, and kidneys
.

Butter and Schumacher-bread
.

Wine.

Chocolate with Mellin’s-food flour with Albert biscuits and butter
.

Gateau aux raisin
.

Raspberry syrup sauce
.

Port wine 1834 Antonio de Ferrara given by the King
.

Toast by Andrée for the King with royal Hurrah:

The national anthem in unison
.

Biscuits, butter, cheese
.

A glass of wine
.

Festive feeling
.

During the day the union-flag waved above the camp
.

“The general feeling was one of the greatest pleasure and we lay down satisfied and contented,” Andrée wrote.

The following day Andrée shot two seals. “I cannot describe how glad I felt and how pleased my comrades seemed to be and how they looked forward to the future with hopes considerably strengthened,” he wrote. White Island had “the appearance of being transparent,” and they took photographs of it. On the following day they shot a bear, which had come swimming toward them through water that was so thick with ice that when they retreived the carcass they had to use a shovel to part the ice. With the new bear they had food to last until April—through the winter, that is. In fact they had so much meat that it became a problem to protect it from bears in the night. They piled it by the edge of the tent and built a fence around it with whatever they found at hand.

Mixing snow and freshwater to make walls and allowing them to freeze, Strindberg—“the architect,” as Andrée described him—began building a house where they could spend the winter. Meanwhile, discord of some kind had begun to surface among them, although Andrée did not say what it was. He said only that the completion of the house was becoming important. “During the last two days the weather has been very pleasant but on the other hand they have not passed without signs of differences arising between us.” He hoped these would not fester.

(illustration credit 68.1)

During the night of the twenty-second they heard the floe break, as if underneath them. They thought they might have run aground, but the bearings they took showed that they were moving, perhaps in a backwater created by the island.

The three of them began working on the house, “cementing together ice blocks,” Andrée wrote. Above the walls Strindberg was making a vaulted roof. They would get up and work for two and a half hours, then have breakfast, then work until 4:45, altogether eight hours, after which they would have lunch and dinner in one meal.

On the twenty-eighth, although the house wasn’t finished, they moved into it, and christened it “Home.” To protect their meat from the bears they brought it inside with them.

By the twenty-ninth they were still off the south side of the island. The sludge ice had frozen solid, and the seals had left, but there were still plenty of bears. “The night-bears seem to be a kind of thief bears,” Andrée wrote. “The one that visited us yesterday night dragged away our big seal twice and we should have lost it if S. had not succeeded in coming so near the bear as to frighten him.” Meanwhile their floe had grown smaller—its edge came close to their hut. The temperature was about seventeen degrees.

The evening of the first of October “was as divinely beautiful as one could wish,” Andrée wrote. The water struck him as being “alive with small animals”—they watched gulls swimming, and seals. They expected to finish the house the following day, but that isn’t what happened. Instead, at five-thirty in the morning there was a crash, and water began streaming in. They ran out and saw that their floe had split into smaller ones. One of the cracks had opened so close beside them that a wall of the house hung from the roof with nothing below it but water. Their floe was now only about eighty feet around. “This was a great reversal in our position and our prospects,” Andrée wrote. Their possessions, among them two bear carcasses with meat for three or four months, floated on different pieces of ice, and they had to race to collect them. “No one lost courage,” Andrée wrote. “With such comrades, one should be able to manage under, I may say, any circumstances.”

Strindberg wrote tersely in his diary, “Exciting situation.”

Worn out from collecting their belongings, they spent the night in the house, even though it was dangerous to do so. Andrée did not seem eager to move ashore. Maybe he felt that the ice would carry them far enough south that they would meet a sealing boat or a whaler, whereas if they spent the winter on land they could not possibly hope to meet anyone until the winter was over.

In any case they stayed on the floe and started another house. On the fourth, having moved with the pack, they could see a lowland on the island where there was no ice, “a refuge if we don’t drift too far past,” Andrée wrote. What they needed was somewhere to land their belongings. One they had seen earlier they could no longer reach. Andrée thought they would have to move from one small floe to another till they got to one large enough to serve as a platform from which they might see how to approach the land. “This afternoon five birds were seen flying toward the island,” Andrée wrote. “They were probably eider-ducks or geese.”

They went ashore finally on the fifth, landing on the glacier, then making their way to the land they had seen. Carrying their possessions took them until late at night and, since they were tired and had difficulty lighting their stove, they ate cold food in darkness under the northern lights, “which neither lighted up nor warmed our camp,” Andrée wrote. By the time they got into their sleeping bags it was the next day, which was Wilhelmina Andrée’s birthday, therefore Andrée called the camp and its vicinity “Mina Andrée’s Place.”

When they woke it was snowing, and the wind was piling the snow in drifts, so there wasn’t much work they could do. They made a small tour. Some distance inland they found driftwood. In the evening they began a snow house on a different site. Andrée decided that their first camp was too vulnerable to being buried by drifting snow.