The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (23 page)

On the following day the men’s faces were swollen, but Tyson could not tell why. “I know scurvy when I see it, and it is not that.” Someone had been stealing from the small store of food they had left, and they had grown so weak that no one could stand watch for more than an hour at a time. A few days later, on the eighteenth, they shot a seal, which gave them enough meat for three meals, although it had to be eaten raw. It happened to be the same day they saw land, which then disappeared in a mist, “as if God had raised the curtain” to keep them from giving up, Tyson wrote.

Meyers, the cook, seemed not to have recovered from his dunking. He wore deerskin gloves that were too large for his hands, so they had no feeling from the cold. He was tall and very thin, and he would bend over and grasp the bones of the seal to try to find one more scrap of meat, “and as he would raise himself up, almost toppling over with weakness, he found time and again that he had grasped
nothing
.” Tyson wrote. “If Doré had wanted a model subject to stand for famine, he might have drawn Meyers at this moment and made a success. He was the most wretched-looking object I ever saw.”

Around nine that night, the sea overran their tent, while Tyson was in it. Every five or ten minutes a wave washed over them, until one carried away the tent and all their sleeping skins, “leaving us destitute,” Tyson wrote. They put the women and children in the whaleboat and dragged it to the edge of the floe where the waves were arriving, and until the morning, they endured “what I should say few, if any, have ever gone through with and lived.” A wave would break over them as they held on to the boat and drag them across the floe, sometimes delivering a portion of the boat into the water. Within the waves were blocks of ice as large as dressers, which knocked them down “like so many pins in a bowling alley.” When a wave had passed, they dragged the boat back to where they had started, hoping to arrive before another wave hit them. Hardly anyone made a sound, except the children, who were crying, and Tyson who was yelling to everyone to hold on.

When daylight arrived Tyson saw a floe riding peacefully and decided they must reach it. As they launched, the cook went in the water but was pulled aboard. Reaching the floe, they lay down in their wet clothes to rest.

If the sun had come out, their clothes might have dried, but for several days they had snow, sleet, and rain. The exhaustion of the night they had spent hauling the boat settled on them like an illness. They ate some dried skin that had been tanned and was meant for clothing, and was hard to tear with their teeth. They were south of where bears usually hunted, but one appeared and Tyson ordered everyone to lie down on the ice as if they were seals, and when the bear came toward them, the hunters, concealed behind a hummock, dropped it. “We arose with a shout,” Tyson wrote. “The dread uncertainty was over.”

By the end of April their floe had eroded so much that Tyson was sure it would not survive a gale that appeared to be at hand. Launching the boat, which was now damaged, seemed to be “like putting to sea in a cracked bowl,” but they did, and after eight hours of rowing hauled up on another floe. Snow began to fall and did not stop until the next afternoon. The gale set the icebergs moving—“a grand and awful sight”—and they worried about being run over. Then at four-thirty on the afternoon of April 28, they saw a steamer. They hoisted their flag and pulled toward it, but the steamer never saw them, and by the evening it was lost to view. Under a new moon, they hauled up on another floe. With blubber from seals they had just shot, they built a fire, hoping another ship might see it.

In the morning a second steamer appeared, a sealer, and they got in the boat and pulled toward it for an hour, but gave up when the ice closed them in. From another floe, they fired three shots and heard three shots from a steamer several miles away that seemed to be heading toward them through the ice, first in one direction, then another, but getting no nearer. They fired their guns again, but it remained four or five miles away. All day they did whatever they could to draw its attention, without being certain if they were seen. Late in the afternoon it turned away and disappeared.

Through fog on the following afternoon—it was April 30—they saw another sealer, and this time Tyson sent one of the hunters toward it in his kayak. The hunter eventually pulled up beside it and shouted “American steamer,” hoping to convey that he came from an American steamer that had been lost. In a few moments the sealer drew up alongside Tyson’s floe. A hundred men “covered her top-gallant-mast, forecastle, and forerigging,” he wrote. They lowered seal boats, while Tyson and the others threw everything out of their boat to lighten it and got in to row to meet them.

Once aboard, Tyson was pressed with questions. “How long have you been on the ice?” he was asked, and when he answered, since October fifteenth, “they were so astonished that they fairly looked blank with wonder.” One of them asked, “And was you on it night and day?”

The
Polaris
, it turned out, had run aground, and the fourteen men aboard had spent the winter in a camp they built with the help of Eskimos who befriended them. Once open water arrived in the spring, they built two boats and set out and were rescued by a Scottish whaler.

Tyson and the others had drifted more than fifteen hundred miles and had arrived off the coast of Newfoundland. When their story was made known, there were Arctic experts who said it was “impossible” and “ridiculous.”

The
Bratvaag
was hired during the summer of 1930 to take Dr. Horn’s geological expedition to Franz Josef Land, with the provision that it would also hunt seals and walruses; the owner wouldn’t lease it otherwise. White Island lay in its path, sufficiently secluded that until 1925 its place on the map was east of where it actually is. Over the years the island, which is now called Kvitøya and belongs to Norway, had different names. The first appears to have been Giles Land, sometimes also written “Gillies Land,” after a Dutch cartographer named Giles, whose maps describe it as an “ice highland,” discovered in 1707. It was called White Island—the name being descriptive of its appearance—in 1876 by a Norwegian sealing captain named Johan Kjeldsen. (In 1887 another captain named it New Iceland, but the name didn’t stick.) It was seventeen miles long, eight miles wide, and entirely occupied by a dome of ice that was 660 feet tall.

Horn described the island as “a dazzling white shield seeming to float on the waves from which it rose in precipitous walls of ice.” All around it were icebergs, some of them grounded on shoals and reefs. The
Bratvaag
’s captain went slowly among them, taking soundings, since the charts gave no depths, and finally anchored half a mile offshore. Horn collected his “geologist’s hammers, botanizing boxes, nets, and other scientific equipment,” and rode in a launch to shore, passing a herd of walruses. He spent the day hammering at rocks and startling flocks of birds.

The next day, August 6, was “a glittering day, with the sun shining in a cloudless heaven,” Horn wrote. “A most intense silence prevailed everywhere, broken only now and then by thunder from the glacier to our north.” The walrus hunt began around noon. After a few hours the captain returned to the ship. “He approached us calmly and quietly and told us that they had made a great find.
They had found Andrée
.”

The captain then handed Horn the book. “We were astonished to see how neatly and orderly everything was written,” Horn wrote. “It was just as if the notes had been put down in a warm room, and yet the calculations had been made and written during the course of a death-march across the ice.”

Ashore, Horn found the sealers gathered around Andrée’s boat. “It was strange to stand there and let our gaze wander over the same landscape and the same sea that Andrée and Strindberg and Fraenkel looked at for the last time thirty-three years before,” Horn wrote. “It was as if we saw them before us.” He pictured them coming toward him, struggling with the boat and their belongings. Seeing the island at last, he thought, must have filled them “with renewed courage, with fresh hopes.” He imagined them climbing the glacier to look for other signs of land. “Maybe, one day of clear weather, they caught sight of Great Island’s white dome in the west. They knew that behind it lay NorthEast Land, and behind that again Spitzbergen, whence there was the path home to Sweden.”

The camp was beside a sloping rock against which snow had drifted. The boat was on the snow, and one side was covered with it. By the end toward the water were some books, one of which had tables of figures. “Of other objects lying about in the snow we noticed: a square, heavy box which certainly contained ammunition, trousers, a piece of black-and-red cloth, an oblong instrument-box, a barometer; a piece of canvas was found farther off, probably a part of the covering of the boat which had been torn loose by the wind. At about right angles to the boat lay an empty sledge, the upper rail of which was on a level with the surface of the snow, and by the side of which there was found a handkerchief with the monogram N. S. marked with red thread.”

Andrée lay about thirty-five feet away. In a pocket inside his jacket was a pencil, a pedometer, and another diary with a few pages of writing. Close by, was the butt of a shotgun whose barrel was in the snow, and a camp stove, which had fuel in it. When they pumped the stove, “the paraffin came out of the burner in a fine spray,” meaning it still worked. (In Stockholm it boiled a liter of water in six minutes.) There was also a “china pot of lanoline,” a bottle of white tablets, and about sixty yards east a pelvis, which they decided was Andrée’s. About forty yards north was “a typical Arctic grave”—stones, that is, piled on a body laid on the ground in the cleft between two rocks. From the stones “feet in their Lapp boots stuck out,” and a shoulder. Bears had disturbed the grave; nearby a skull, bleached by the sun, “lay there dreadfully smiling.”

Working with mattocks and spades, they began to free the boat from the ice, then discovered that it was lashed to a sledge underneath it. They were too heavy to lift, so the men cut the boat free and began to excavate the sledge.

For a while they stood beside Andrée, wondering if it was proper to move him. They decided that he should be brought home, along with whoever was buried beneath the stones. Having removed them, they discovered that the body was frozen to the ground and had to be hewed free, which was difficult because the cleft was so narrow that they could work only from the ends.

Others among the crew piled stones on a ridge above where Andrée had lain. Inside the cairn they placed a bottle containing a note that described their having found “the relics of the Swedish Andrée Expedition,” and so that the cairn could be seen from the water they put up a white pole steadied by three guy wires.

On a tarpaulin they carried the bodies to the shore, then went back for the boat, which was filled with ice and so heavy that when they placed it aboard a whaleboat, the whaleboat sank nearly to its gunwales. Towing it to the ship by a motorboat took an hour. “Later on, Ole Myklebust made a chest, rather more than two yards long, with two compartments,” Horn wrote. “The skeletons were placed in the larger compartment—Andrée with the gun by his side—while in the other were put all the smaller objects that had been found beside Andrée.”

The next day they left, watching White Island disappear in fog.

The following day, August 8, the
Bratvaag
met the
Ternigen
, a sealer from Tromsø, Norway. When they told the captain what was in the box on the foredeck, the news “made a great impression on him, for everyone knew Andrée,” Horn wrote. “He had become, so to say, a legend.” The
Bratvaag
had no radio with which they could send messages—they could only receive them—so they asked the
Ternigen
, which was heading home, to convey word of their find. They planned to be gone some time on Franz Josef Land.

As it happened, they stayed a little more than two weeks. Coming home, they passed White Island. Through a telescope they saw the pole by the cairn, and a bear walking on the beach. The sea was running too high to allow them to land and see if they could find anything more. On the evening of the thirtieth one of the crew appeared on deck saying he had just heard a message calling them home. They all ran down into the hold and heard it broadcast again.

The following morning, hoping to trade bear meat for fish, they met a fishing boat, and were told that a lot of vessels were looking for them. They put into Hasvik, on Sor Island, to make telephone calls and send telegrams “and so for the first time came into contact with a world that seemed to be a trifle excited,” Horn wrote. They stopped next at Skjaervo, where the
Fram
had stopped, and found journalists everywhere. They were ordered to sail to Tromsø, to meet an escort and the commission appointed by the government to receive the remains.

In Tromsø a black pall was brought from the cathedral and laid over the box that held Andrée and, it turned out, Strindberg. Sealers from the
Bratvaag
—“a group of young men with weather-beaten faces, bare-headed,” the account in
The Andrée Diaries
says—carried the box to a hearse that was drawn by a horse. Along with relatives of Andrée and Strindberg, the crew walked beside it, leading a procession the mile to the hospital. Once the remains had been laid on tables in the sick ward, it was seen that Andrée and Strindberg were wearing the clothes they had left in. In Andrée’s pockets was a little black leather purse that had in it objects that had belonged to Strindberg. Among these was a gold heart with a photograph of Anna Charlier, and a lock of her hair. There were also two chronometers—one belonging to Strindberg, and one attached by a gold chain to a locket with photographs of Andrée’s mother and father, and to a gold ring with two garnets and a piece of turquoise. Around Andrée’s waist was a blue wool jersey. The doctors who opened it found some sennegrass and within the grass, a book with writing in pencil from cover to cover.