The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (4 page)

To build the balloon and equip the expedition would cost about thirty-eight thousand dollars. The balloon would travel approximately 250 meters above the ground—below the clouds, that is, and above the fogs. It should start as close to the pole as possible, and as early in July as a brisk and steady south wind arrived. A moderate wind would be better than a powerful one, since the ground would pass in a more regular way, and more of it could be added to the map. “The stay in the unknown regions should be of such long duration as circumstances will permit,” he said, “and if chances to visit the surface should occur, they must be improved,” meaning acted on.

Being almost finished, Andrée said that he couldn’t “help adding a few remarks which will tend to show that not only is it
possible
to cross the Arctics by balloon, but that these regions are particularly well suited for balloon voyages.” Obstacles for other expeditions would be advantages for a balloon trip, he said. Since the sun never set during the Arctic summer, he and his companions would be able to take photographs at all hours of territory that had never been viewed, and, since they could always see where they were going, they would not have to tie up at night, “and incur the risk of a heavy gale destroying the harnessed balloon.” In addition, the constant sun kept the temperature steady, which helped preserve hydrogen. “In the tropics, on the other hand—for instance, in Central Africa—a balloon would be strongly heated during the day, and considerably cooled at night, whereby great losses of gas and ballast would result.”

Furthermore, with the balloon traveling continuously, the trip would take half as long as otherwise. The “glossy” ground without trees to tangle the guide ropes meant that the basket would proceed at a constant altitude, making photographs and scientific measurements easier to manage than if the balloon were passing over a forest. Thunder and lightning, which were common at the equator, and which the balloon, with its ropes wet from rain, would be especially vulnerable to, were almost unknown in the Arctic. Finally, snow, which might collect and sink the balloon, hardly ever fell during the Arctic summer. Any that appeared when the temperature was warmer than freezing would melt, Andrée said, and if the temperature was lower the snow would blow away. What portion settled on the balloon would evaporate, “the evaporation in these regions being very considerable during the season in question.”

“The methods heretofore employed to cross the polar ice have not led to the desired result,” Andrée said in closing, “and there is no reason to suppose that future attempts of the same nature will be more successful.” Undoubtedly, more was to be learned from people who set out in ships and sledges, he conceded, but the knowledge would arrive in increments and only gradually, and a century might pass before the pole was reached. Moreover, the farther the sledges advanced, the more difficult the terrain was likely to be, and the slower their progress.

“With these facts before us, it is only natural to look for other means of accomplishing the difficult task, and every reasonable proposition with a view to solving the problem should be carefully considered,” he said. “The solution here proposed, to explore the Arctics by balloon, is not based on obscure theory, but on clear and indisputable facts, which appear to me quite convincing. They teach us—(1) That a balloon can be sent far into the Polar Regions; (2) that it can be kept afloat there a sufficiently long time for the purpose in question; (3) that such a balloon can carry the exploring party there and back; and (4) that many of the peculiarities of the Arctic Regions that have heretofore been a great hindrance in making Arctic exploration, prove to be factors in favour of an expedition by balloon.

“Besides, is it not more probable that the north pole will be reached by balloon than by sledges drawn by dogs, or by a vessel that travels like a boulder frozen into the ice? And can anybody on good grounds deny that it will be possible, by a single successful balloon journey, to acquire in a few days greater knowledge of the geographical aspect of the Arctic Regions than would otherwise be obtainable in centuries?”

Among the first in the audience to rise and respond was the president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Clements Markham, who had been to the Arctic to look for Franklin. Markham said that clouds might keep Andrée from seeing the ground, or even from knowing whether he was above “land, ice, or snow.” Furthermore, unless Andrée descended, he wouldn’t be able “to collect natural history specimens,” or to take celestial readings to find out where he was. Finally, if the balloon ran into a cliff or an iceberg and was wrecked, how would he get back?

A British explorer of Africa named A. Silva White said that experiments he had conducted with balloons in Scotland had led him to conclude that they couldn’t be steered and that Andrée’s attempt was “foolhardy, and not one to be seriously discussed at a meeting of this character.”

General Adolphus Greely, the American who had spoken before Andrée, added that Andrée’s balloon would lose too much gas to complete the trip. If Andrée had solved the problem of permeability, “which has engaged the attention of some of the acutest minds in France and Germany,” and to which “money in great sums has been applied,” Greely hoped he would share it before he left. Moreover, the southerly winds that might carry Andrée to the pole would converge there and strand him. “As geographers, looking at these things from a practical point of view, and having some knowledge of air and currents,” Greely said, “this Congress should not give the weight of their influence or their endorsement to this expedition.”

While Andrée listened, he made notes with a pencil. When he returned to the lectern, he said that the discussion seemed to have “wandered somewhat out of the region of the methods by which I propose to make my polar journey.” He was aware of how hard flying a free balloon was, he said, but his balloon would control its course by means of guide ropes and a sail. The suggestion that fog might appear in his path had no support. The polar region was about the size of Europe, and as in Europe, there would be fog in some places and not others. He described a trip in the Baltic in which he had controlled his course.

Then he pointed a finger at several explorers. “When something happened to your ships, how did
you
get back?” he asked. Greely, on his expedition a decade earlier, had lost eighteen of his twenty-five men. “I risk three lives in what you call a ‘foolhardy’ attempt, and you risked how many?” Andrée continued, “A shipload.”

He crumpled the paper he had written his notes on and left the stage, arriving at his seat “wiping his brow and taking deep breaths like an athlete,” a witness wrote. Meanwhile the audience “cheered until the great hall of the Colonial Institute rang.”

The first mariners to go toward the North had no idea what they were approaching. Homer described people in
The Odyssey
called the Men of Winter, who lived at the edge of the ocean and never saw the sun. What the Greeks knew of the Arctic they derived from observing that the stars went round a stationary point and that some stars could be seen every night whereas others were only occasional. The two classes were separated by a circular boundary that ran through Arktos, the Great Bear. From astronomical speculations they had deduced that north of the Arctic Circle there was sun at midnight during midsummer, and no sun at midwinter.

The first sailor to advance some ways north was a Greek named Pytheas, who probably lived in the third century BC, about the time of Aristotle and Alexander the Great. He sailed around Britain and six days north to a land he called Thule. What he wrote, which was apparently a geography more than a travel account, survives only in references by other writers, mainly Polybius, and those only brief. It is not possible to tell where Thule was for sure—some people think it was the Shetland Islands, some people think perhaps Iceland—but Pytheas, possibly having encountered ice and fog, wrote that in its vicinity the air, the earth, and the sea all blended, and it was no longer possible to navigate northward.

The next known journeys were made in the seventh and eighth centuries by Irish monks who were seeking a haven. At least some of the monks had followed the flocks of geese that flew over their monasteries. Proof of the monks’ visits appears in the form of place-names. Their legacy may be the impression of the Arctic as a sanctified territory, a refuge where a soul might withdraw to cleanse itself.

The Vikings displaced the monks. Among their legends was the visiting of Iceland, which was called Snowland, around 864, by Rabna Floki, which translates as Floki of the Ravens. The mariner’s compass hadn’t been invented, and fog often shrouded the sun for days, so Floki took three ravens trained to fly toward land (some accounts say two ravens, some say four). When Floki released the first raven, it flew in the direction he had come, leading him to conclude that land was closer behind than ahead. Released farther on, the second raven circled the ship, then also flew toward home. The third one flew forward. Floki spent the winter on Snowland and didn’t like it, and is the one supposed to have named it Iceland. After Floki came Ingolf, who with others, in 874, was escaping the rule of the Norwegian king, Hårfager. Approaching the shore of Iceland, Ingolf threw a door over the side of his ship, a Norwegian custom. The gods were supposed to guide the door to a favorable landing, but it drifted out of Ingolf’s sight, and he landed on the southern shore of the island. The settlement he established was the island’s first permanent one.

The British spent three hundred years looking for the Northwest Passage, dying by degrees, sometimes in big numbers, and usually of scurvy, starvation, and cold. The Arctic scholar Jeannette Mirsky wrote that Arctic exploration from the beginning had been a “series of victorious defeats.” Sometimes sandhogs—the men who build tunnels for trains and aqueducts—describe a task as a man-a-mile job, because a man dies every mile. By victorious defeats, Mirsky meant that while one expedition after another turned back, and many lives were given up, mile after mile of the blankness on the northern map was effaced.

After Andrée’s speech in London, a lot of explorers and geographers and journalists, offended by the brevity of the voyage he proposed, classified it as a stunt. Arctic exploration was supposed to be a grueling and harrowing journey through the harshest terrain imaginable, conducted sometimes over an interval of years, and occasionally for so long that the explorer and his party were thought to have been lost and often were. The stories the explorers told when they returned were ennobling. The science they did—practically all of it observing and collecting, the categorizing came later—expanded their version of the world. They were naming things for the first time, the way the Greeks named the sky. Their findings provided material for subordinate careers, the ordering and identifying of the natural world based on the artifacts brought back by the people who had been to the far edge of the frontier. Andrée’s dash to the pole didn’t seem properly respectful. He wouldn’t have sufficient time to do science, it was said. His purposes weren’t serious, and what value would his accomplishment have? He’d merely own a record.

In interviews Andrée defended himself by saying that he would take plenty of measurements and that the photographs he would add to the map would be invaluable. And what disadvantage could be claimed for seeing a part of the earth that had never been seen before? What he didn’t often say is that he would have preferred to cross the Atlantic Ocean, which he regarded as more daunting, but the trip to the pole appealed more to the public imagination and was easier to raise money for. Unlike explorers of the earlier ages and even of his own, Andrée wasn’t looking to test himself in a remorseless environment. He didn’t see himself as a solitary figure measuring himself against the wilderness and the elements, or as someone trying to wrest from nature its secrets. Or even, as some did, a man in a headlong approach toward the seat of the holy. He was an engineer who wanted to prove the validity of an idea, and he had found a forum in which to enact it.

Andrée was born on October 18, 1854, in Gränna, a small town about three hundred miles southwest of Stockholm, on Lake Vättern. His mother, Wilhelmina, was called Mina, and his father, Claes, was the town’s apothecary. They had four other sons and two daughters, with whom they lived above Claes’s shop on the main street in the center of town (the building is still there). Mina’s father was a mathematics professor, and behind him were three generations of clergymen, some of whom were known for keeping records of the weather. As a child, Andrée was said to have a wide-ranging intelligence, a capacity for asking difficult questions, and to be stubborn. He was fond of games whose outcome depended on solving a problem. His mother noted that if he was treated unjustly by someone, “he spared no effort to pay him back,” but “by character and from principle he was magnanimous.”

As a boy Andrée built a raft from boards he found, and he and a friend sailed out onto Lake Vättern and had to be rescued when the wind rose. Another time, from a cliff above Gränna, he launched a balloon he had filled with gas, and the balloon landed on the roof of a barn and caught fire. Over the Christmas vacation of 1867, when he was thirteen, he told his father that he no longer cared to study dead languages and that he wanted to be an engineer. He is said to have pounded the table as he spoke.

Andrée’s attachment to his mother was profound and only deepened when he was sixteen and his father died. He left money for Andrée to attend the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where his favorite subject was physics and his closest friendship among the faculty was with his physics instructor, Robert Dahlander. During successive summers Andrée worked as a tinsmith, in a foundry, and in a machine shop, and for two years after he graduated he was a draftsman and a designer in a mechanical works in Stockholm. Through friends he got interested in phrenology, the practice of drawing conclusions about someone’s nature and tendencies from the topography of his skull, and while he worked at an engineering firm in Trollhaven, called Nydquist and Holms, he made a phrenological helmet out of brass. It was a half-sphere with screws ascending in rows an inch apart to the crown. It opened into two parts, connected by a hinge, and the screws screwed down to trace the skull’s bumps and depressions. Andrée didn’t so much believe in phrenology as he was interested in the conclusions phrenologists reached, which he thought sometimes were precisely apt.