The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (12 page)

On his fifth flight Andrée ascended to fourteen thousand feet, higher than on any of his other flights. Approaching thirteen thousand feet, “the beating of the pulse produced a faint singing noise on the left side of my skull,” he wrote. It also gave him a headache. On his sixth, in July of 1894, he used guide ropes and a sail and found that he could steer the balloon at a deviation of nearly 30 percent to the wind. This result, along with his experience over the Baltic, convinced him that a balloon could travel long distances and that it could be made to go where it was wanted to. On this trip Andrée also threw cards out of the balloon asking anyone who found them to send them back to him so that he could tell exactly where he had been. The seventh trip was mostly devoted to notations about the wind and the clouds and the temperature. The eighth lasted three and three-quarter hours and covered 240 miles. For the first time he landed using the rip valve, which let out nearly all the gas in fewer than two minutes. The valve allowed him to stop the landed balloon, instead of having it be dragged by the wind. Sometimes aeronauts landed safely but were injured or killed when their balloon was dragged, and they either fell out of the basket or struck something hard. Andrée made his last ascent in the
Svea
on March 17, 1895. In all he had spent about forty hours aloft and had traveled more than nine hundred miles. In June he sold the
Svea
to an outdoor museum in Stockholm.

After giving his speech in Stockholm, Andrée went back to work in the patent office. Money for the voyage arrived slowly. On the tenth of May, Alfred Nobel called on Andrée at work. Eight years earlier Nobel had come to Andrée’s office on a matter concerning a patent, and for three hours they had carried on a discussion about “everything between heaven and earth,” Andrée wrote, during which they had shared not a single opinion. When Nobel appeared the second time, he asked Andrée if he recognized him, and Andrée said that he remembered their exchange and was prepared to continue it. Instead Nobel said that if the subscription for the balloon trip wasn’t closed, he wanted to make a contribution. A week later, hearing from Andrée that money hadn’t been coming in quickly, Nobel offered half the amount Andrée needed, so long as the rest could be raised in two months. Andrée took Nobel’s offer to the king, who felt that by virtue of their propinquity the Swedes deserved the honor of discovering the pole and gave him eight thousand dollars. In nineteen days Andrée had all that was necessary.

(illustration credit 23.1)

Andrée’s balloon was built in Paris from layers of varnished silk. The upper portion had three layers of silk and the lower, two, which happened to be the formula that John Wise had proposed for his transatlantic balloon. It was ninety-seven feet tall and sixty-seven and a half feet around, and it weighed a ton and a half.

On the top was a coverlet to keep snow from settling, and to inhibit the sun from heating the gas. A net made of hundreds of ropes enclosed the balloon. From their ends hung the bearing ring, which was made from American elm, and from the ring hung the basket, a rectangular box made from willow and Spanish cane on a frame of chestnut, because iron or steel would have affected the magnetic instruments they carried for science. Where metal was necessary, Andrée used, if possible, bronze, copper, or aluminum, which are not magnetic. The basket frame was wrapped in sailcloth covered with tar. Customarily the bottoms of baskets were rounded and given to tipping over when they were dragged, but Andrée made the bottom of his basket flat, with one edge rounded and the opposite one straight. Food and anything else vital was typically carried in the basket, but Andrée had everything essential stowed in pockets strung between the bearing ropes (because of the instruments, the food was stored in copper tins). Knowledgeable people said that if the basket struck the ground and turned over, the aeronauts would fall out and the balloon would sail away with their food and tools. Andrée was more concerned about coming down in the water and drowning. By placing his provisions in the ropes, he and the others could climb into the bearing ring if the basket landed in the water, then cut the basket loose and ride off. If they hit the water and were flooded but able to rise without having to shed the basket, they could open two valves in the floor to drain it.

Above the basket was a platform where two men could work and keep watch, while one slept in the basket on a horsehair mattress encased in reindeer hide. Hydrogen is explosive. To heat water and cook, Andrée had a stove, invented by a friend, that could be lowered from the basket until it hung about twenty-five feet beneath it. It was lit from the basket through a tube. A mirror placed by the stove allowed someone in the basket to see if the flame had lit. Blowing down a second tube put it out.

From the bearing ring, eleven ropes hung, like tails on a kite. Eight of these, called ballast ropes, were stationary. Each was seventy-seven yards long and weighed 110 pounds. If the balloon sank low enough, the ropes would touch the ground, thereby losing some of their weight and helping to prevent the balloon from sinking farther. If the balloon rose, more rope rose with it, slowing the ascent.

The other three ropes, called the guide ropes, were meant to drag on the ground. Each had an upper section of hemp and a lower one of coconut fiber, which were joined by metal ends that threaded together. Fifty-five yards from the end, each also had a weak point, so that one that caught fast would snap. If a rope that had snapped snagged a second time, its parts could be unscrewed by a mechanism in the gondola. If both methods failed, Andrée, in 1897, had a device made of brass that slid down the rope and stopped where he wanted. Inside were two knives that cut the rope when a gunpowder charge was set off.

To prevent the guide ropes from tangling, each was a different length—one was 1,205 feet, one was 1,042, and one was 1,017. Altogether they weighed sixteen hundred pounds. The first of the guide ropes’ two functions was to help control the balloon’s elevation. In clouds or fog the hydrogen would contract, and the balloon would sink. Sunshine caused the hydrogen to expand and the balloon to rise. Andrée planned to travel above the fog and below the clouds, which would preserve the hydrogen. As with the ballast ropes, the more of the guide ropes that touched the ground, the less they weighed on the balloon.

The guide ropes’ second purpose was to help steer the balloon. A balloon traveled where the wind blew. The only means of controlling its course was to throw out an anchor and wait until the wind shifted, or to climb and hope to find a wind going the way the pilot wanted to go. Since a balloon couldn’t go faster than the wind, and therefore against it, the only way to steer was for the balloon to travel slower than the wind and to use a sail. Andrée’s plan, tested on the
Svea
, was to slow the balloon with the guide ropes. A sail could then propel the balloon aslant to the wind, “just as it does with a sailing boat,” Andrée wrote. A course deviating as much as twenty-seven degrees from the wind was possible—he said that he once got forty degrees in the
Svea
. To run before the wind, the sail would face it. To run obliquely, the balloon would be turned by moving the guide ropes with a pulley, which rotated the balloon on its vertical axis. Andrée’s balloon had three sails—two small ones on either side of a large one that hung from a bamboo mast just below the balloon, between the net and the bearing ring. In all the sails covered about eight hundred square feet, a quarter of the circle of the balloon. The sails on the
Svea
had been roughly one-eighth the size.

Whether Andrée made it or not depended largely on the ropes’ working well, so they were tested thoroughly at two factories in Stockholm, one that made fuses and one that made horseshoes. They were dragged over the ground and over ice, and mounted on a flywheel and turned by a steam engine for twenty-six hours, at the end of which no signs of friction were found. To waterproof them they were pulled through barrels of petroleum jelly mixed with animal fat, palm oil, wax, and paraffin. Andrée decided the best mixture was three-quarters petroleum jelly and one-quarter fat.

To send messages Andrée planned to take carrier pigeons, given to him by the Swedish newspaper
Aftonbladet
. Fastened to the pigeon’s middle tail feathers were parchment cylinders into which
Aftonbladet
meant Andrée to insert dispatches. Aboard the balloon was room for thirty-six birds in small baskets.

Andrée estimated that the balloon included seventy innovations, thirty of which he thought of himself. His three sledges, made of ash, had a second pair of runners on the top of the sledge, so that if a runner broke, the sledge could be turned over. “I get as good as two sledges out of one,” he said. In addition, he had a tent made from balloon silk. The floor was three layers thick, and the cover was a single layer varnished with the mixture that was used on the balloon’s envelope. The last large piece of equipment was a boat that was assembled from a wood frame covered with layers of silk. To test it Andrée went out on Lake Mälaren with nine people aboard. Finally, although neither Andrée or his crew was much of a skier, he brought skis, in case they made pulling the sledges easier.

According to the head of the company that supplied their food, they were to bring “every kind of steaks, sausages, hams, fish, chickens, game, vegetables and fruit.” It was the first polar expedition to bring lozenges of concentrated lemon juice to prevent scurvy. In addition they had about fifty-five pounds of “thin chocolate cakes, mixed with pulverized pemmican.” This was wrapped in parchment and packed inside airtight boxes. Should they have to land and travel over the ice, they had food for two years, assuming that they would also kill bears. Every piece of equipment was marked “Andrée’s Polar Expedition 1896.” On wood it was printed, on metal it was engraved, and on the balloon, the tarpaulin covering the basket, and the ballast bags it was painted. Where there wasn’t room it was abbreviated. In addition the underside of one wing of each pigeon was stamped “Andrée.”

The balloon was made by Henri Lachambre in May of 1896. It was inflated and displayed for a week in a gallery at the Palais du Champ de Mars. Beside it was a balloon sufficient to carry two people, which according to one observer resembled “a small piece of sugar by the side of an egg.” Thirty thousand people came to see it, among them the president of France, who later sent “to the three courageous men of this daring enterprise the warmest wishes for a successful outcome, which will be followed with the greatest and most intense attention in France as well as everywhere else in the civilized world.”

The notion that natives of the Arctic had a hundred words for snow is apocryphal. Mariners, however, had many names for types of ice. Greely’s book had a glossary of terms, and Sir Clements Markham, the English explorer who had risen from the audience to admonish Andrée, also defined terms in a lexicon called “Ice Nomenclature,” which appears in “The Antarctic Manual for the Use of the Expedition of 1901.”

New ice was called young ice. Old ice was from at least the previous year. Paleocrystic ice took years to form, which was apparent from its greater thickness. Bay ice, or harbor ice, formed each fall. Pieces of it were drift ice. A small collection of drift ice was a patch, and a large one was a pack. A close pack was dense; an open pack had lanes of water running through it. Sailing ice was ice in an open pack that allowed room for a ship to pass. Round pieces of pack ice were pancake ice: collisions had softened their edges.

Long narrow trains of broken ice were streams. Stray bits of ice, usually small and sharp or with other irregular features, “the wreck of other kinds of ice,” according to Markham, was brash ice, rubble or mush. Brash ice mixed with saltwater was sludge ice. Pen-knife ice had been covered with water that had left columns, sometimes pointed, six to eighteen inches tall that were painful to cross. Rotten ice was honeycombed from melting unevenly. The water from its surface was ablation.

A floe was a plain of harbor ice. An indentation or a bay in a floe was a bight. Above the floes, like hills, rose hummocks, formed by pressure and also called pressure ice. A hummock might be as much as fifty feet tall, and some were reported as reaching a hundred. The boundaries of a floe could be seen from a crow’s nest. A floe that extended beyond the horizon was a field. Field ice, made of paleocrystic ice, could be as thick as twenty feet. A sufficiently agitated sea could make a field appear to undulate, to move in “swell-like ridges, as if our ice was a carpet shaken by Titans,” an American explorer named Elisha Kane wrote. For Kane the sight was startling, since for weeks the ice had appeared “as unyielding as the shore.” Now it had taken “upon itself the functions of fluidity, another condition of matter.”

Ice attached to the shore was land ice, or fast ice. Ice that lay against the shore and didn’t move with the tides was an ice foot. The border between an ice foot and the migrant ice was a tidal crack. An iceberg forced ashore was a floeberg. Floeberg was also the name for a paleocrystic iceberg in the shape of a cube. A piece of ice that rose abruptly to the surface from beneath a floe was a calf. A tongue was a calf still attached to a floe. In smooth water a tongue could usually be seen to some depth. Chinese walls were the cliffs at the end of a glacier whose foot was in the sea. Island ice covered an island, as in the case of White Island, where Andrée was found.