The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (26 page)

Strindberg did not tell Charlier that he had fallen into water deep enough that he “was in imminent danger of drowning,” Andrée wrote. After being rescued, he was “dried and wrung out and dressed in knickerbockers.”

That evening Andrée made a list of all the items he carried on his sledge, which weighed 459 pounds. It included a shovel, three bamboo poles, a hose, a tarpaulin, a boat hook, and one “basket with contents,” which on its own weighed 143 pounds. Strindberg calculated that in pulling one sledge and returning for another, they had made perhaps a mile and no more than two in the last five days. They decided to shed what they could so that each man’s sledge weighed little enough that he could pull it himself. What they would do is take sufficient provisions and equipment to last forty-five days. Andrée got his sledge down to 285 pounds, and Fraenkel got his to three hundred. “Strange feelings and great indulgence in food on making reduction,” Andrée wrote.

That day Strindberg shot a bear, his first. They soaked it for an hour in salt water which made it, according to Andrée, “immensely good.” The wind, having blown from the north, swung around to the south, which Andrée hoped would make the ice drift with them as they walked.

On the twenty-seventh, to lighten the sledges again, they got rid of some meat powder and bread, which they thought they wouldn’t need, since Fraenkel had also shot a bear. They had tried to frighten it off by blowing a whistle and a hunting horn, then Fraenkel had “put in a beautiful shot at 38 m.,” Andrée wrote. With the skin they patched their sleeping sack.

Most of the day they spent crossing leads, one while rowing, two others pushing the boat across. The leads had ice in them that was difficult to move, and cut the boat. The day was “extremely fatiguing,” Andrée wrote, so that even Fraenkel said he was tired.

In the tent the next day, they drank a bottle of champagne, possibly the one they had brought to celebrate crossing the pole, and ate some biscuits with honey. The day was easier than many. They saw bear tracks but no bears. “Now we have turned in 12 o’cl. noon the 29th after having thus been at work 16 hours,” Andrée wrote. “We learn the poor man’s art: to make use of
everything
. We also learn the art of living from one day to the next.” Then he made a note to “Describe in detail. Difficulties with the ice, the ice-humps, melted snow-water, the sludge pools and the leads and the floes of broken ice.”

On the thirtieth Fraenkel had incipient snow blindness but didn’t take any treatment. Their camp tasks had fallen into a pattern. Strindberg boiled and fried, serving bear meat twice a day, and Fraenkel took meteorological notes, oiled the guns, made sandwiches, and set the table and cleared it. “I reconnoiter,” Andrée wrote. At meals they sat on a medicine chest, a piece of photographic equipment, and a case of matches. To protect his hands from drying and cracking Andrée smeared them with bear grease.

“Now it is a long time since I chatted with you,” Strindberg wrote Charlier on the thirty-first. The brief letter, roughly five sentences long—because parts have faded it is not possible to be certain—describes their changing the loads on their sledges a few days earlier. It was a letter Strindberg didn’t finish, and it was the last he wrote to her. After that he wrote only in his diary. It is an indication, perhaps, that he felt less hopeful.

They took astronomical measurements and discovered that the ice had drifted west faster than they had walked east. “This is not encouraging,” Andrée wrote. “Out on the ice one cannot at all notice that it is in movement.”

On the morning of the thirty-first, they got under way at four. A fog kept them from seeing the best route. The snow was deep, and repeatedly they sank to their knees; Strindberg fell often, “flopping,” Andrée called it. When they came to an immense field of pressure ice—ice heaved up by collisions, that is—they had to cut their way through it. “The Polar dist. is certainly the source of the idea of the stumbling block,” Andrée wrote. He climbed a large pyramid-shaped piece of ice, but could see no land or water, even though, while resting earlier, they had heard “a murmuring noise as from a sea.”

Toward evening they crossed bear tracks. “He had gone down in the soup a couple of times so hard that not even he is above making mistakes in this regard,” Andrée wrote.

They saw the back of an animal they hadn’t seen before, “which looked like a long snake 10–12 metre long,” Andrée wrote—about thirty-three to thirty-nine feet—“of a dirty yellow color and, in my opinion, with black stripes running from the back for some distance down the sides.” He heard it breathing heavily and supposed it was a whale.

The day was not difficult but when Andrée woke up more tired than usual the next morning, he wrote, “It seems as if good country were more fatiguing than half-good.”

They began to run out of food. “The last bear meat was cut into small pieces so that it might at least look like being a lot.” An hour after breaking camp, however, Andrée shot a bear in the chest at 125 feet, “an old worn-out male animal with rotten teeth.” Strindberg and Fraenkel had shot at it too (“both fired outers”). Andrée hoped that the remains would draw other bears “so that we shall always have fresh meat at our heels.” From heavy wire Andrée made a fork for Fraenkel because the bear meat was so tough that it bent the forks they had. Strindberg stood the fork against a box in the boat and took a photograph of it.

In ten hours they made a little more than a mile. Cutting a path, they destroyed their ax. When they came to a challenging place to cross, one of them would say, “Is it easy to get across?” and another would answer, “Yes, it is easy with difficulty.”

On August 4 they gave up walking east. “We can surmount neither the current, nor the ice,” Andrée wrote. They decided to start southwest, toward a smaller depot on the Seven Islands, which they hoped they might reach in six or seven weeks. The temperature dropped to about twenty-eight degrees. “Each degree makes us creep deeper down into the sleeping sack.” The cold froze leads inconsistently, which left the three of them sometimes having to cross uncertain ice on hands and knees. When they ran low on bear meat, they ate mainly bread, biscuits, and water. In “extremely clear air” Andrée searched with a spyglass for land or water and saw none. “Only ice and very difficult ice visible in all directions,” he wrote.

Between August 4 and 6 they were at nearly the same place they had been in the balloon between one-thirty in the morning and three on July 12.

In the
Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society
for August of 1875, Adm. Sir Francis Leopold McClintock published a piece with the title “On Arctic Sledge Travelling,” in which he wrote that the first sledge party to look for Franklin had managed five hundred miles in forty days. They had two sleds, each drawn by six men. “The labour of doing so is most excessive,” he wrote, and of the twelve men at the end “five were completely knocked up, and every man required a considerable time under medical care to recruit his strength.”

People unacquainted with sledging tended, he wrote, to think “that we either skate over glassy ice, or walk on snowshoes over snow of any considerable depth,” he went on. “Saltwater ice is not so smooth as to be slippery; to skate upon it is very possible, though very fatiguing. But hardly is the sea frozen over, when the snow falls, and remains upon it all winter. When it first falls, snow is often soft, and perhaps a foot or fifteen inches deep; but it is blown about by every wind, until having become like the finest sand, and hardened under a severe temperature, it consolidates into a covering of a few inches’ depth, and becomes so compact, that the sledge-runner does not sink more than an inch or so: its specific gravity is then about half that of water.

“This expanse of snow is rarely smooth: it is broken into ridges or furrows by every strong wind.” These “inequalities are seldom more than a foot high, they add greatly to the labour of travelling, especially when obliged to cross them at right angles.

“As the spring season advances, the old winter snow becomes softened, fresh snow falls, and sledging is made more laborious still.

“At length the thaw arrives; the snow becomes a sludgy mixture, with wet snow on top and water beneath, through which men and sledges sink down to the ice below. It is now almost impossible to get along at all.”

Moreover, “We seldom find either unbroken ice, or ice so crushed up into ridges that we cannot get over it at all, but, as a rule, crushed up or hummocky ice, three or four feet in height, is of very frequent occurrence, and of course adds much to the labour of sledging.”

Sir George Nares, who led an expedition to discover the pole in 1875, tried to prepare his crew for sledging by telling them “that if they could ever imagine the hardest work they had ever been called upon to perform in their lives intensified to the utmost degree, it would only be as child’s play in comparison with the work they would have to perform whilst sledging.”

Typically while sledging, men ate six or eight pounds of meat a day and sometimes as many as sixteen.

Turning toward the Seven Islands on the fourth, they crossed uneven ice. “Often the most practicable crossings lie at the ugliest hummock,” Andrée wrote, because the leads were narrower there. They walked for six hours, had a meal of biscuits, butter, and cheese, then walked six hours more. When they left their tent to start again, it was raining.

By the sixth they had arrived at a level plain extending about a hundred yards, but which was covered with “powdered-sugar ice and ice gravel,” against which they slipped and fought for their footing, Andrée wrote. Crossing a lead, the sledges rolled several times, which led Fraenkel to say that the journey could not be called altogether hopeless—a pun from the Swedish word that emphasized hop. The wind was against them and seemed to drive them back as far as they advanced. “New difficulty: the leads altering while we are crossing them,” Andrée wrote.

Bear meat was “very good when it has become old,” he continued, and a little reindeer-hair in the food, from the sleeping sack, was recommended, “for while taking it out one is prevented from eating too quickly and greedily.” The wind was “right in our noses, but it is cooling.” In the brightest light he needed dark glasses. The rest of the time he squinted.

When they came to “a dreadful country” with pools of fresh water, Fraenkel, who was in the habit of complaining of the monotony of the landscape, “did not like what was offered him,” Andrée wrote. Freshwater pools, more than saltwater ones, were usually too shallow to cross in the boat and their edges tended to be smooth and slippery.

9 Aug. at 2:20 a.m. we began to get up in the tent

3:00 the primus started

3:18 the steak ready and the coffee-making begun

3:29 the steak eaten

3:48 the coffee made

4:00 the coffee drunk

5:30 broke camp

The terrain they faced consisted “of ice-humps blocks and hills with snowdrifts between and this is difficult for the pullers,” Andrée wrote. Fraenkel began to suffer from the runs, and Andrée gave him opium for it. In addition, he grew despondent. A bear approached but turned tail before they could shoot it, though Strindberg and Fraenkel chased it. “This was a great grief for us and a pity too for soon we shall have no more bear’s meat left.” The next problem was Strindberg’s gun, which was poorly made, and had to be fixed. By the time they got into their sleeping sack, they had been up and working for eighteen hours.

Andrée’s sledge still weighed nearly 300 pounds, and he made another inventory of it: one gun, one box of ammunition, a tent, a medicine chest, two tent poles, five pounds of meat, and various instruments and private items. Fraenkel carried the boat, which weighed nearly 139 pounds, the oars, some books, a gun, ammunition, hay for their shoes, eight boxes of matches—altogether 338 pounds.

The ground they crossed next Andrée described as “absolutely untrafficable”—broad channels with clumps of ice and snow through which neither the boat nor the sledges could pass except laboriously. By Strindberg’s calculations they had passed south of eighty-two degrees longitude, and to celebrate they had sardines for dinner, at four in the afternoon, with bread, biscuits, butter, and cheese. Fraenkel’s stomach was better. Afterward it began to rain, and in the evening to snow. They walked until ten that night.

Late in the morning—it was August 11—Andrée and his sledge went into the water, soaking everything aboard. Strindberg’s sledge ran into Fraenkel’s, and a grapnel it was carrying poked a hole in the boat. Each of their sledges rolled several times. Twice Andrée’s landed upside down. “All imaginable difficulties happened and when the evening came we were not at all happy,” he wrote.

“Something else happened,” he added. “F. shot an ivory gull.” He described the gull’s markings and feet. “The beak had a yellow point but was otherwise yellowish-white with black longitudinal shadings. The bird landed quite near us.”