Читать онлайн книгу "The Ice Balloon"

The Ice Balloon
Alec Wilkinson

In August 1930, a Norwegian sloop, sailing in the Arctic Ocean, stopped at a remote island, where its crew members foudn a book, together with a boathook stamped вЂ?AndreeвЂ™s Pol. Exp 1896вЂ™. Not far from the boat was a body leaning against a rock, with its frozen legs extended. They carefully opened the jacket the corpse was wearing. When they saw a large monogram вЂ?AвЂ™, they knew who they were looking at: S. A. AndrГ©e, the Swede who, in 1897, set off to discover the North Pole, one of the last unmapped places on earth.The Ice Balloon is the story of the heroic ago of polar exploration, and the dream of conquering one of the most inhumane landscapes on earth. In this golden age of discovery, AndrГ©eвЂ™s ambition was the most original and remarkable, with many comparing him to Columbus for novelty and daring. For, of the thousand or so people who had gone looking for the Pole, at least seven hundred and fifty of whom had died, only AndrГ©e used a balloon.

The Ice Balloon

One manвЂ™s dramatic attempt to

discover the North Pole by balloon

Alec Wilkinson

Dedication

For Sara Barrett

and

Sam Wilkinson

Contents

Cover (#u0e8c161d-3458-5884-915e-1cdc2122322a)

Title Page

Dedication

1

In August of 1930, a Norwegian sloop, the Bratvaag, sailingвЂ¦

2

Except for the bottom of the sea or the centerвЂ¦

3

Why did they go, then, this parade of fanatics headingвЂ¦

4

Flying over the pole in a balloon appears to haveвЂ¦

5

Among the first in the audience to rise and respondвЂ¦

6

The first mariners to go toward the North had noвЂ¦

7

After AndrГ©eвЂ™s speech in London, a lot of explorers andвЂ¦

8

Sailing to America, AndrГ©e had had two acquaintances, his cabinвЂ¦

9

Historically the Arctic was congenial to opposites. For some ofвЂ¦

10

Soon after AndrГ©e got to Philadelphia, he вЂњlooked up theвЂ¦

11

AndrГ©e exemplified a conceit that outlived himвЂ”the belief, then nascent,вЂ¦

12

By the time AndrГ©e announced his plan to leave forвЂ¦

13

Once AndrГ©e was grown, the only woman for whom heвЂ¦

14

In 1875 an Arctic explorer named Karl Weyprecht, who wasвЂ¦

15

The first balloon plans patented were patented in Lisbon inвЂ¦

16

While AndrГ©e was in Spitsbergen at the Swedish station, makingвЂ¦

17

No one got along any better during the second winter.

18

For thirteen days they drifted among pack ice, вЂњsuffering horriblyвЂ¦

19

On the first of June, Kislingbury sat up in hisвЂ¦

20

Once the men were aboard, the party retrieved the deadвЂ¦

21

AndrГ©e didnвЂ™t ride in a balloon until he was thirty-eight,вЂ¦

22

Leaving the ground on its fourth flight, in February ofвЂ¦

23

After giving his speech in Stockholm, AndrГ©e went back toвЂ¦

24

The notion that natives of the Arctic had a hundredвЂ¦

25

There is more than one North Pole. AndrГ©eвЂ™s destination, theвЂ¦

26

AndrГ©e was to be accompanied to the pole by NilsвЂ¦

27

The Jeannette, the ship that Greely had been supposed toвЂ¦

28

The Fram left Norway with thirteen men in June ofвЂ¦

29

Nansen and AndrГ©e were inspired by visionary theories they wereвЂ¦

30

The days passed half-idly with tasks and diversions. One nightвЂ¦

31

In November of 1894, on a walk in the eveningвЂ¦

32

On July 24, for the first time in two years,вЂ¦

33

Nansen asked how things were at home, and Jackson saidвЂ¦

34

When AndrГ©e, Strindberg, and Eckholm left GГ¶teborg for DaneвЂ™s IslandвЂ¦

35

On August 16, AndrГ©e sent a telegram announcing that theвЂ¦

36

Over the winter Nansen and AndrГ©e exchanged letters. Nansen feltвЂ¦

37

At the end of October 1896 AndrГ©e wrote to AlfredвЂ¦

38

Over the winter Alfred Nobel died, unsettling AndrГ©e. Then, shortlyвЂ¦

39

Arriving at DaneвЂ™s Island in a bay filled with packвЂ¦

40

On July 6, during a storm, the wind blew heavilyвЂ¦

41

Around three in the morning on July 11, the windвЂ¦

42

They left at two-thirty in the afternoon. First the hawsersвЂ¦

43

AndrГ©e had predicted the speed of the Arctic wind fromвЂ¦

44

A few days after the launch Svedenborg, the alternate, visitedвЂ¦

45

Toward the end of July the Chicago Chronicle wrote, вЂњHasвЂ¦

46

Oscar Strindberg wrote in a letter, вЂњAnd so one hasвЂ¦

47

In 1898 word reached Sweden from Russia that AndrГ©e hadвЂ¦

48

AndrГ©e began to travel like a shade through the pagesвЂ¦

49

In October men sent to look for AndrГ©e in AlaskaвЂ¦

50

What else? Two of AndrГ©eвЂ™s sisters, interviewed in GrГ¤nna, saidвЂ¦

51

The experience that AndrГ©e might be having on the iceвЂ¦

52

On the following day the menвЂ™s faces were swollen, butвЂ¦

53

The Bratvaag was hired during the summer of 1930 toвЂ¦

54

The following day, August 8, the Bratvaag met the Ternigen,вЂ¦

55

In TromsГё a black pall was brought from the cathedralвЂ¦

56

A number of journalists had gone looking for the Bratvaag.

57

Early in the afternoon of October 5, 1930, escorted byвЂ¦

58

The Isbjorn had been able to stay at White IslandвЂ¦

59

That evening the concussions against the ice made Strindberg seasick.

60

AndrГ©e landed the balloon so expertly that none of theвЂ¦

61

On the evening of July 22, they began walking southeastвЂ¦

62

On the morning of the thirty-first, they got under wayвЂ¦

63

In the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society for AugustвЂ¦

64

Turning toward the Seven Islands on the fourth, they crossedвЂ¦

65

On the thirtieth they started walking at five in theвЂ¦

66

вЂњSince I wrote last in my diary much has changed,вЂ¦

67

AndrГ©e decided to cross in the boat to another floe,вЂ¦

68

The following day AndrГ©e shot two seals. вЂњI cannot describeвЂ¦

69

Explorers kept diaries mainly to publish them. Even when theyвЂ¦

70

Who finally discovered the pole is disputed. Frederick Cook, anвЂ¦

71

One winter I went with a friend to their grave,вЂ¦

72

After I got back from Sweden, I wondered what theвЂ¦

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

A Note About the Author

Other Books by Alec Wilkinson

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

In August of 1930, a Norwegian sloop, the Bratvaag, sailing in the Arctic Ocean, stopped at a remote island called White Island. The Bratvaag was partly on a scientific mission, led by a geologist named Dr. Gunnar Horn, and partly out sealing. On the second day, the sealers followed some walruses around a point of land. A few hours later, they returned with a book, which was sodden and heavy, and had its pages stuck together. The book was a diary, and on the first page someone had written in pencil, вЂњThe Sledge Journey, 1897.вЂќ

Horn rode to shore with the BratvaagвЂ™s captain, who said that two sealers dressing walruses had grown thirsty and gone looking for water. By a stream, Horn wrote, they found вЂњan aluminum lid, which they picked up with astonishment,вЂќ since White Island was so isolated that almost no one had ever been there. Continuing, they saw something dark protruding from a snow-driftвЂ”an edge of a canvas boat. The boat was filled with ice, but within it could be seen a number of books, two shotguns, some clothes and aluminum boxes, a brass boathook, and a surveyorвЂ™s tool called a theodolite. Several of the objects had been stamped with the phrase вЂњAndrГ©eвЂ™s Pol. Exp. 1896.вЂќ Near the boat was a body. It was leaning against a rock, with its legs extended, and it was frozen. On its feet were boots, partly covered by snow. Very little but bones remained of the torso and arms. The head was missing, and clothes were scattered around, leading Horn to conclude that bears had disturbed the remains.

He and the others carefully opened the jacket the corpse was wearing, and when they saw a large monogram A they knew whom they were looking atвЂ”S. A. AndrГ©e, the Swede who, thirty-three years earlier, on July 11, 1897, had ascended with two companions in a hydrogen balloon to discover the North Pole.

Before the twentieth century, more than a thousand people tried to reach the pole, and according to an accounting made by an English journalist in the 1930s, at least 751 of them died. Only AndrГ©e used a balloon. He had left on a blustery afternoon from DaneвЂ™s Island, in the Spitsbergen archipelago, six hundred miles from the pole. It took an hour for the balloon, which was a hundred feet tall, to disappear from the view of the people who were watching from the shoreвЂ”carpenters, technicians, members of the Swedish navy who had assisted in the weeks leading up to the launch.

Two years of planning had led AndrГ©e to predict that he would arrive at the pole in about forty-three hours. Having crossed it, he would land, maybe six days later, in Asia or Alaska, depending on the winds, and walk to civilization if he had to. Ideally, he said, and perhaps disingenuously, he would descend in San Francisco. To meet the dignitaries who would be waiting for him, he brought a tuxedo.

Every newspaper of substance in Europe and North America carried word of his leaving. The headline on the front page of the New York Times said, вЂњAndrГ©e Off for the Pole.вЂќ A British military officer called the voyage вЂњThe most original and remarkable attempt ever made in Arctic exploration.вЂќ For novelty and daring, the figure to whom he was most often compared was Columbus.

Then, having crossed the horizon, he vanished, the first person to disappear into the air.

It may be the strangest image in the annals of explorationвЂ”a dark gray orb in a white landscape. My wife found it in a slim English book from 1948 called Ballooning, by C. H. Gibbs-Smith, Companion Royal Aeronautical Society. The twenty-eight pages of text refer to prints, woodcuts, engravings, and photographs that range chronologically from вЂњThe First Public Balloon Ascent, Annonay, 1783,вЂќ to вЂњWorld Altitude Record. 1935.вЂќ In between are вЂњDeath of Madame Blanchard, 1819вЂќ (fall from balloon); вЂњAn Alarming Experience in GypsonвЂ™s Balloon, 1847вЂќ (lightning); and вЂњThe вЂ?ZenithвЂ™ Tragedy, 1875вЂќ (crash). Plate 28 is the orb on its side, with two men contemplating it as if detectives sent to determine the circumstances.

All around the balloon is white from snow and ice, and the sky is white from fog, so there is no horizon, and only a fine line, which the balloon delineates, between the background and foreground. The photograph is not entirely in focus, which makes it appear to be more a print than a photograph, and so somehow obscurely unrealistic, or, on the other hand, realistic in an exaggerated way.

When my wife showed me the image, I assumed it was staged, a Victorian entertainment of some peculiar kind, a lark in an alien landscape, because a balloon couldnвЂ™t be where this one appeared to be any more than an airplane could be on the moon. And if it wasnвЂ™t a stunt, I could view it only with a sense of dread for the two men in it. Their craft is wrecked, the landscape is forbidding, and something about the static quality of their forms makes their situation seem utterly hopeless. The caption said, вЂњAndrГ©eвЂ™s balloon on the ice.вЂќ Who was AndrГ©e, I wondered? How had he come to be standing beside this ruined contraption, and where was this forlorn place? What had he intended? And what happened to the men in the photograph? Had they made their way safely home? And if they hadnвЂ™t, how was it that this photograph existed?

2

Except for the bottom of the sea or the center of the earth, the North Pole, at the end of the nineteenth century, was the worldвЂ™s last mysterious destination. For decades before the South Pole was visitedвЂ”in December of 1911 by Roald Amundsen, a NorwegianвЂ”it was known to reside on land, whereas no one knew what lay at the end of where the compass needle pointed. Some thought a temperate sea; some thought more ice; some thought mountains and islands; and, oddly concretizing the inner life, a remnant of early-nineteenth-century believers, called Hollow Earthers, thought a hole there led to an interior world. (The Tropics, on the other hand, while not entirely revealed, had at least been comprehended; no one, for example, thought that they might enclose a frigid desert.)

To go to an unknown place on the earth that might take a year to reach and come back from, using the fastest means possible, is no longer within the capacity of human beings, but between 1496 and 1868 roughly 135 expeditions went to the Arctic, predominantly from Europe. Until 1845 they were mainly looking for a way to get to the East, a trade route, and their attempts were described as voyages of discovery, even though they were made in the service of commerce. The men who took part were passionate to see what no one else had seen. They were filling in the map, not always accurately, but honorably, and one after another, the ice turned all of them back.

A northern passage had become necessary in 1493, when Pope Alexander VI divided the world, East and West, between the Spanish and the Portuguese, leaving the British, less powerful, unable anymore to reach China or India by sailing around Africa. Following the orders of Sebastian Cabot, a Venetian who, under Edward VI, was вЂњGovernour of the Mysterie and Companie of the Merchants Aventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Island, and Places Unknowne,вЂќ they tried sailing above Russia, a northeast passage, because a map of the period suggested that China and India were closer to England than they actually were. In 1553, Cabot sent three ships to China, two of which got caught in the ice off eastern Lapland, which was uninhabited. According to Sir John Barrow, writing in 1818, in Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions, their crews of about seventy men вЂњperished miserably from the effects of cold, or hunger, or both.вЂќ The third ship reached a place where, according to Richard Hakluyt, in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in the early seventeenth century, there was вЂњno night at all, but a continual light upon the huge and mighty ocean.вЂќ From the White Sea, near St. Petersburg, the captain trekked fifteen hundred miles south to Moscow, met Ivan the Terrible, who was pleased to see him, and established a trade route. In 1556, another English expedition to China made it to Novaya Zemlya, roughly three thousand miles north of the border of Iran and Afghanistan, encountered ice and fog, lost nerve, and turned back. Only one more English expedition went east, in 1580. It consisted of two small ships, one of which was lost.

Martin Frobisher, who made three voyages between 1576 and 1578, was the first Englishman to look for a passage west. Because Magellan had found a way between the Atlantic and the Pacific by sailing south of the Americas, Frobisher believed that he would find one by sailing north. On his first voyage Queen Elizabeth I waved to him from a window as he sailed down the Thames. Weeks later he and his crew met Eskimos in kayaks and from the strangersвЂ™ Mongoloid features concluded that they were close to China. Five Englishmen went ashore and didnвЂ™t come back, so Frobisher seized an Eskimo and brought him to England, where he died of a cold. The other artifact Frobisher came home with was a shiny black stone that was somehow taken for evidence of gold. It is not clear how this supposition aroseвЂ”possibly Frobisher began it cynically as a means of raising money for another voyageвЂ”but English speculators embraced it, and Frobisher was sent to get more. Elizabeth named the territory Meta Incognita, which means вЂњworth unknown.вЂќ Frobisher returned with two hundred tons of the substance.

On his third trip Frobisher left England with fifteen ships and a hundred settlers to establish a mining colony. Three ships were to stay with the colony, and the other twelve were to load up with black stones and return to England. On the way over a storm off Greenland sank the ship that was carrying a lot of their food and the materials for the house that would see them through the winter. When the crew reached shore and took stock of their loss, they realized they couldnвЂ™t stay. They spent a few days loading up with stones, sailed home, and arrived to learn that the stones from their last trip had been discovered to be iron pyrite, which was not even worth smelting and was eventually crushed for roads. Frobisher was in disgrace, though he revived himself five years later by a marriage that made him rich and by joining up with Sir Walter Raleigh and seizing a Spanish ship, the Madre de Dios.

The first man to try to reach the pole was Henry Hudson, in 1607, who believed that the most efficient way to travel to the East would be not to thread oneвЂ™s way among icebound channels and bays of ice, but to go over the top of the world. Hudson was persuaded, as many geographers had been for centuries, that the ice formed only a species of blockade, and that past it was an open polar sea that possibly was temperate. On a voyage in 1610, pressing his crew to continue, he was overthrown. They put him and his son and a few sympathizers in a small boat, and they drifted off, through the bay that had been named for him, and were never heard from again.

After about 1847 most journeys to the Arctic were essentially search parties looking for the British explorer Sir John Franklin, who became the most famous man ever to be lost there. He was fifty-nine when he left England in May of 1845, having been sent to determine whether the part of Canadian coastline that was still unvisited, a little more than three hundred miles, completed the Northwest Passage. He had two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, which were last seen by a whaler in Baffin Bay, off Greenland, in late July. Franklin had been twice to the Arctic, and one of his voyages had been nearly legendary for its deprivations and suffering, but his third was inept. He sailed into the ice as if a gentleman on a foray into interesting territory, and disappeared.

Many historians think that Lady Franklin sent her husband to the Arctic in late middle age as a means of restoring prestige that had seeped from him (and her). Nevertheless she insisted that the government find him. Over thirty-one years, with public and private money, forty-two expeditions, the bulk of them from England but some from America, went looking for Franklin or for some explanation of why he hadnвЂ™t come back, then finally for relics of him. More people died in the search than on the expedition. Eventually it was learned from Eskimos and from diaries that were found, and from gravesites and artifacts, that his ships had been enclosed by ice, that he had died early in the confinement, the ships had been crushed, and that every one of his crew, roughly 128 in all, had died in the long retreat, some having practiced cannibalism.

This deeply unwelcome news was brought to England in 1854 by a Scottish explorer named John Rae, who was also a doctor. Eskimos told Rae, through an interpeter, that in the winter of 1850 some of their people had encountered about forty white men who were dragging a boat and some sledges. By means of gestures the white men explained that ice had destroyed their ship, and that they were hoping to reach territory where they could hunt deer. All of them were very thin. They bought seal meat from the Eskimos, camped overnight, and left the following day, heading east toward a river. Months later, by the river, the Eskimos found about thirty bodies and some graves. A dayвЂ™s walk away they found five more bodies. Many of the bodies in both places had been mutilated. As best Rae could, he checked versions of the story against one another and found that they essentially agreed. In his report he wrote, вЂњIt is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative as a means of sustaining life.вЂќ From the Eskimos Rae bought a gold watch, a surgeonвЂ™s knife, some silver spoons and forks, and a piece of silver plate that was engraved with FranklinвЂ™s initials.

Rae had meant his account to be private, but it was published in a newspaper, and it outraged Lady Franklin and pretty much the rest of the British, who refused to believe that their naval officers and sailors could have behaved dishonorably. Some people said that the Eskimos probably killed the Englishmen and made up the story. Charles Dickens, in a piece called вЂњThe Lost Arctic Voyagers,вЂќ published in two editions of his weekly magazine Household Words, wrote that Rae, while an unimpeachable source, had likely been misled by an interpreter who had been either unskilled or inclined, as were вЂњninety-nine interpreters out of a hundred, whether savage, half-savage, or wholly civilized,вЂќ to exaggerate so as to make himself seem more important.

Franklin was a sentimental figure but not a sympathetic one. He and his men had insisted on the rightness of British bearing and cold-weather cunning, and refused to enact any of the widely known practices of the Eskimos whose territories they were crossing. Apparently believing that their ships were invincible and that their tinned food would never run out, they had not included any accomplished hunters among them. The Arctic explorer and scholar Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote of them in 1938, вЂњOne of the most baffling problems of Canadian exploration is how Sir John Franklin and his party of more than a hundred contrived to die to the last man, apparently from hunger and malnutrition, in a district where several hundred Eskimos had been living for generations, bringing up their children, and taking care of their aged.вЂќ People more favorably disposed to Franklin would respond that the meagerness of the EskimoвЂ™s circumstances was proof that game was scarce in the Arctic and that even skillful hunters could not have fed as many men as were left; they had, so to speak, overwhelmed the territory.

Almost no nation managed more, or got beat up worse, in the Arctic than the British, the losses coming partly from a willfully romantic attitude and partly from pridefulness. A famously skilled British sledger of the nineteenth century, Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, who had looked for Franklin, gave a speech on sledging in which he described the British sledger undertaking a journey in the Arctic as characterized by a вЂњstrong sense of duty, and an equally strong determination to accomplish itвЂ”dauntless resolution and indomitable will; that useful compound of stubbornness and endurance which is so eminently British.вЂќ Before Franklin disappeared explorers frequently went to the Arctic and had terrible things happen to them, but often they returned and were heroes. After the Arctic erased Franklin and his ships and crew, the British were less keen about what benefits might be had from going there. (By the time the Northwest Passage was completed, in the late nineteenth century, it was useless from being so difficult to navigate. Furthermore, depending on how much ice there was and where it was concentrated, the passage wasnвЂ™t even in the same place every year.) Almost as a nation the British seemed to feel that the Arctic, having been paid the compliment of courtship, had not played fair.

The difference between the Arctic and the tropics, the other blanks on the periodвЂ™s maps, is one of conception. Each drew a somewhat different type. Discoverers in the tropics were geographers, missionaries, seekers after mineral wealth, or pursuers of stories left in the archives of Spanish exploration about cities of gold. The formidable threats they facedвЂ”natives, disease, parasites, unholy heat, antagonistic creaturesвЂ”were an alliance of resistance. To the European the place was a clotted mass of hazards, a closet in which disaster came at you in waves, whereas the Arctic was the open plain, the desert, the spaces where God and the wild spirits roamed.

In the mind of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Arctic was a region of severeвЂ”even sacredвЂ”purity, and the terms of life there were different from those of any more temperate place. In a year, to begin with, it had only one day and one night. Absence defined it. The palette of dangers was reduced to two: cold and starvation. No secondary antagonists such as poison arrows or insects or parasites or diseases intervened, unless in the case of scurvy, which was caused not by an agent native to the ground but by poor nutrition. (Fresh meat, it turned out, protected the Eskimos, but the Europeans relied mainly on lemon juice and the less effective lime juice.)

The path in the Arctic had two ends: arrival or death, which of course was its own arrival. And it was imagined to be the cleanest death, nearly conceptual, a wasting away slowly, an exhaustion relaxing into sleep, it was said; a perishing, an erasure, which was essentially different from a mauling or a withering amid fits of fever or the weakening effects of a larva or a parasite that had worked its way through the bloodstream and the body. A man was believed to have his wits in the Arctic until nearly the end. It was a godly place, fierce and unknowable, the spooky and capacious territory of the imagination. Onto its blackness any idea could be projected. Men who went to the Arctic enraptured, who saw God in the austerity and the otherworldly ice, were often disabused by the experiences they had there, though. A holy-minded American explorer named Charles Hall, viewing the frozen body of a comrade, wrote in a journal, вЂњO, My God, Thy ways are not our ways!вЂќ

Finally, while exploration in the tropics might be a treasure hunt, the Arctic offered no riches that could be held in oneвЂ™s hand. In the Arctic what prizes might be obtained would fall mostly to othersвЂ”the route one found would be traveled. The science one might work would be for selfless gain, and was more likely to be specific than practical, since the conditions of the landscapeвЂ”a region of ice, not landвЂ”were duplicated nowhere else. Certainly oneвЂ™s name would be revered. One would get a statue. One could leave the names of oneвЂ™s family and sponsors and friends on the landscape, although that wouldnвЂ™t necessarily fill a bank vault.

In 1881 a member of a British Arctic expedition, describing the allure of the frigid places, wrote, вЂњIt seems to us certain that the Arctic world has a romance and an attraction about it, which are far more powerful over the minds of men than the rich glowing lands of the Tropics.вЂќ

The pole was the chaste and pitiless heart of a god-dwelling region. People thought of the tropics and saw golden cities. People thought of the cold territories and shuddered.

3

Why did they go, then, this parade of fanatics heading for the deep places? You have to wonder. What they did was so extravagant that their impulses canвЂ™t be assumed to have been those of an ordinary citizen, even allowing for the differences between our period and the ones they lived in. It is no observation of my own that the nineteenth century was the last to have been receptive to the enactment of myths, to see the footprints of larger, ineffable beings laid out like dance steps on the map and to feel them wandering through their art and writing. The last to pursue their models and outlines and to feel the rightness of embodying them. Selfless heroism, and the public pursuit and praise of it, reverberates throughout their centuries. The walls of the known, the boundaries, were closer at hand. It was as if the restraints that men felt in sociable life made them feel compelled to rush into the wild.

Who were they? Not a single type but a multiplicity. A procession of thrill seekers, god chasers, romantics, pragmatists, visionary dreamers, nomads, criminals hiding where they thought no one would look, withdrawers from more complicated lives, penitents, mourners, long-shot followers, defeated characters hopeful of redemption, careerists, misfits, and malcontents ill at ease anywhere but the solitary places. Add to them brooders. And self-testers, anxious and feeling vital only when facing a challenge; men whose neurology was sufficiently deadened that only the most profound experiences could stir them. Upright men who adhered courageously to the highest codes of conduct, while marked for death. Devious men who took money from patrons to find Franklin when their intent was to get to the Arctic to find the pole. Ambitious men avid for attention and profoundly receptive to impulse. They set themselves a forbidding task, and came back or didnвЂ™t, the way heroes do in legends, and in childrenвЂ™s books, too.

Very few of them were adequate self-explainers. Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, to sudden insights and epiphanies, often canвЂ™t explain himself well. Such people act because the gesture feels right, or because they feel provoked, convinced by the obscurity, the persistence, and the vitality of their desires, the self-persuading and incontrovertible correctness of something they see in a vision. вЂњThe history of polar exploration is a single mighty manifestation of the power of the unknown over the mind of man, perhaps greater and more evident here than in any other phase of human life,вЂќ one of them, Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian, wrote.

No explorer says, IвЂ™ll go a little farther than the one who went farthest. He declares for the pole or its equivalent, and he breaks down and turns back or dies sometimes just short of, or just past, where the last mark stoodвЂ”sometimes merely from luck, bad weather, poor planning. And sometimes determination and a rigorous constitution assert themselves in the vacuum created by hopelessness.

вЂњAt least I shall have made my mark on the world,вЂќ Adolphus Greely, an American explorer, wrote, before leaving on a journey that had a hideous outcome. NansenвЂ™s explanation was drawn from that part of the landscape where romance and mysticism merge. During the Arctic night, aboard a ship stuck in the ice, he wrote, вЂњWhat demon is it that weaves the threads of our lives, that makes us deceive ourselves, and ever sends us forth on paths we have not ourselves laid out, paths on which we have no desire to walk? Was it a mere feeling of duty that impelled me? Oh, no! I was simply a child yearning for a great adventure out in the unknown, who had dreamed of it so long that at last I believed it really awaited me; and it has, indeed, fallen to my lot, the great adventure of the ice, deep and pure as infinity, the silent, starlit polar night, nature itself in its profundity, the mystery of life, the ceaseless circling of the universe, the feast of death, without suffering, without regret, eternal in itself. Here in the great night thou standest in all thy naked pettiness, face to face with nature; and thou sittest devoutly at the feet of eternity, intently listening; and thou knowest God the all ruling, the centre of the universe. All the riddles of life seem to grow clear to thee, and thou laughest at thyself that thou couldst be consumed by brooding, it is all so little, so unutterably littleвЂ¦. вЂ?Whoso sees Jehovah dies.вЂ™вЂќ

Spoken straight from the unconscious, which is wild and ungovernable and used to be called the soul.

4

Flying over the pole in a balloon appears to have occurred to AndrГ©e on the evening of March 16, 1894, after a meeting of the Swedish Anthropological and Geographical Society in Stockholm, when the explorer A. E. NordenskiГ¶ld asked AndrГ©e to walk home with him. In 1878 NordenskiГ¶ld, on the Vega, had finally discovered the Northeast Passage. He was interested to know what AndrГ©e thought of using captive balloonsвЂ”ones tethered to the ground, that isвЂ”to rise above the wall of ice surrounding Antarctica and see what lay beyond it. AndrГ©e said, Why not rise above the ice and keep going?

A year later, on February 13, 1895, AndrГ©e described his intentions in an address to the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. The following August, in London, at the Sixth International Geographical Congress, during a morning session devoted to polar exploration, he gave essentially the same speech, called вЂњA Plan to Reach the North Pole by Balloon.вЂќ He followed General Greely, the American, whose subject was a history of Arctic expeditions, in which he delivered a sort of roll call of nations and names, prefaced by remarks depicting the Arctic as a place where вЂњsolitude and monotony, terrible in the weeks of constant polar sunlight,вЂќ nearly overthrew the mind вЂњin the months of continuous Arctic darkness.вЂќ It was a territory вЂњof silence awful at all times, but made yet more startling by astounding phenomena that appeal noiselessly to the eye; of darkness so continuous and intenseвЂќ that a person was led to wonder вЂњwhether the world has been cast out of its orbit in the planetary universe into new conditions.вЂќ

S. A. AndrГ©e

Courtesy of the Grenna Museum, Sweden (www.grennamuseum.se)/The Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography.

Because I would have chafed at such dramatized talk, however fervent or earned, I imagine AndrГ©e as waiting impatiently to speak. He was thirty-nine, blond, tall, and well built, with wide shoulders and a strong jaw. A woman in the audience described him as вЂњheroic-looking.вЂќ An acquaintance portrayed him in a letter as вЂњa worthy descendant of the old Vikings.вЂќ When he felt something passionately, he wasnвЂ™t above rhetoric, and he liked the long run-up. In his Swedish accent, words such as вЂњhaveвЂќ came out вЂњhaff.вЂќ

вЂњThe history of geographical discovery is at the same time a history of great peril and suffering,вЂќ he began. вЂњWhile forcing their way through unknown regions across the vast deserts of Australia, Asia, Africa, the prairies of North America, or through the forests of South America and Central Africa, the explorers have encountered dangers, endured hardships, and been obliged to conquer difficulties, of which no clear idea can be formed by those who have never passed through similar experiences.вЂќ

In warm climates, however, вЂњnearly every hindrance can be said to contain a means of success.вЂќ Natives often вЂњbar the way of the explorer, but just as often, perhaps, they become his friends and helpers.вЂќ Lakes and rivers carried him places; plus he could drink from them and find in them things to eat. In the desert, despite the harsh sun, there could also be вЂњa luxuriant vegetation that serves as a shelter,вЂќ not to mention people who have been where you are going and can tell you the best way to get there.

In the Arctic, вЂњthe cold only kills,вЂќ AndrГ©e continued. There were вЂњno oases in the icy desert, no vegetation, no fuel,вЂќ just вЂњa field of ice that invites to a journey,вЂќ but this field, вЂњcovered with gigantic blocks,вЂќ had proved too daunting to cross. The current might lead a vessel forward, but only into waters filled with ice that crushed ships, and in the high reaches of the Arctic desert, no natives were around to help you. The sun lit oneвЂ™s way in the summer, but it also rotted the ice so that your sledge balked and bogged down and with each step you might sink to your knees. Only by considerable toil could you advance, and then only farther into a landscape that had no comforts or shelter.

вЂњIf we further remember that the Arctic explorer can engage in active traveling during a brief season only,вЂќ AndrГ©e said, вЂњand that during the remainder of the year he is compelled to inactivity under the weakening influence of cold, together with darkness, while he has to resort to the nourishment that is usually unsuitable and often insufficient, and that is always haunted by the consciousness, that the results he can attain will almost inevitably be meagre in comparison with those which can be secured by explorers in other parts of the globe; then it must be admitted that Arctic research offers drawbacks which are materially greater than those encountered by geographical explorers in other places.вЂќ

Laying out his case, AndrГ©e went onвЂ”perhaps incautiouslyвЂ”to malign the sledge, the only means for Arctic travel that had вЂњhitherto been used or even been available for use.вЂќ Whether drawn by dogs or men, it had failed to carry anyone far enough, вЂњalthough new efforts to make them a success have repeatedly been made. The fact remains that, in the attempts made for centuries to cross the polar ice, numerous lives and vessels have been lost and large sums of money wasted.вЂќ

No nation took greater pride in its sledging or its sledgers than Britain, and no nation had lost more of them. Perhaps AndrГ©e was giving the same speech he had given in Sweden, where sledging was not so revered. Possibly he didnвЂ™t care what the British thought. Or maybe, as his friends sometimes said, he had a tin ear and didnвЂ™t understand the effect his remarks might have. It requires little of the imagination, however, to hear throats being cleared and feet shuffling.

Nevertheless, AndrГ©e was now at the hinge of his speech. вЂњIt would seem,вЂќ he went on, вЂњas if it were about time to look into the matter carefully, with a view to ascertaining whether there is no other means of transportation than the sledge available for a journey in the regions referred to. We need not pursue the investigation very far to discover such a means, one that appears to be created for the purpose in question. I refer to the balloon.вЂќ

The perfect and navigable balloon, вЂњwhich is worshipped because nobody has ever produced one,вЂќ was not what was needed, he said. The version at hand would sufficeвЂ”people werenвЂ™t aware of how suitable it was because, more than seeing its advantages, they were accustomed to noting its defects. вЂњSuch a balloon is capable of carrying an exploring-party to the pole and back again,вЂќ AndrГ©e said. вЂњIt is possible, with such a balloon, to cross the Arctic plains.вЂќ

His purpose declared, he now needed to persuade, and he softened his tone. вЂњTo make a journey across the Arctic deserts, is not a purely scientific, but a technical problem.вЂќ The results of such a voyage were important for science, but the means must be devised by the engineer. A balloon to reach the pole needed to carry three people, he continued, all the instruments they required for scientific experiments, and their food. It should be able to remain aloft for thirty days (the record was fifteen), and, unlike all balloons thus far known, it had to be able to be steered. Last, it had to be inflated in the Arctic.

A larger balloon, with sufficient lift, had been built and displayed in 1878 in Paris at an exhibition, where it made fifteen hundred ascents, each time carrying thirty or forty people, AndrГ©e said. Since then a number of balloons had had the carrying power that the Arctic balloon required. вЂњIt is evident that the problem involving the manufacture of a balloon that will satisfy requirement No. 1 has long since been solved by the arts,вЂќ he said.

Balloons had also been made that retained gas long enough to suggest that a thirty-day flight was achievable. The hydrogen could be manufactured at the launching place or brought in canisters aboard ships. To prevent the wind from interfering with the balloon while it was being filled, a shed could be built as a hangar. Finally, the difficulty in sailing a balloon to a specific destination was that conventional balloons could travel only where the wind blew. A balloonist might take to the air hoping to be carried by currents to where he wanted to land, but the currents could change on him. AndrГ©e announced that he had designed a system using guide ropes and a sail that had allowed his balloon to travel at cross-purposes to the wind.

Next AndrГ©e described the attributes of the balloon he needed. The basket should be вЂњspacious and comfortable,вЂќ have floats attached, and be hung from the balloon in such a way that it could be disengaged quickly, possibly by pulling a single rope. вЂњThe occupants will thus be able to save themselves at sea, when a vessel heaves in sight, by descending to the surface, and, if a heavy wind is blowing, ridding themselves of the balloon.вЂќ (Such an escape was possible only if a ship was seen. When asked what he would do if his balloon came down in the water with no one around, he said, вЂњDrown.вЂќ) The balloon should also carry вЂњa sledge, a canvas boat, a tent, arms and ammunition, and provisions for four months, all with a view to making a rescue possible in case of a mishap.вЂќ

To build the balloon and equip the expedition would cost about thirty-eight thousand dollars. The balloon would travel approximately 250 meters above the groundвЂ”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. вЂњThe stay in the unknown regions should be of such long duration as circumstances will permit,вЂќ he said, вЂњand if chances to visit the surface should occur, they must be improved,вЂќ meaning acted on.

Being almost finished, AndrГ©e said that he couldnвЂ™t вЂњhelp 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.вЂќ 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, вЂњand incur the risk of a heavy gale destroying the harnessed balloon.вЂќ In addition, the constant sun kept the temperature steady, which helped preserve hydrogen. вЂњIn the tropics, on the other handвЂ”for instance, in Central AfricaвЂ”a balloon would be strongly heated during the day, and considerably cooled at night, whereby great losses of gas and ballast would result.вЂќ

Furthermore, with the balloon traveling continuously, the trip would take half as long as otherwise. The вЂњglossyвЂќ 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, AndrГ©e said, and if the temperature was lower the snow would blow away. What portion settled on the balloon would evaporate, вЂњthe evaporation in these regions being very considerable during the season in question.вЂќ

вЂњThe methods heretofore employed to cross the polar ice have not led to the desired result,вЂќ AndrГ©e said in closing, вЂњand there is no reason to suppose that future attempts of the same nature will be more successful.вЂќ 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.

вЂњWith 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,вЂќ he said. вЂњThe 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 usвЂ”(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.

вЂњBesides, 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?вЂќ

5

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 AndrГ©e from seeing the ground, or even from knowing whether he was above вЂњland, ice, or snow.вЂќ Furthermore, unless AndrГ©e descended, he wouldnвЂ™t be able вЂњto collect natural history specimens,вЂќ 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 couldnвЂ™t be steered and that AndrГ©eвЂ™s attempt was вЂњfoolhardy, and not one to be seriously discussed at a meeting of this character.вЂќ

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

While AndrГ©e listened, he made notes with a pencil. When he returned to the lectern, he said that the discussion seemed to have вЂњwandered somewhat out of the region of the methods by which I propose to make my polar journey.вЂќ 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. вЂњWhen something happened to your ships, how did you get back?вЂќ he asked. Greely, on his expedition a decade earlier, had lost eighteen of his twenty-five men. вЂњI risk three lives in what you call a вЂ?foolhardyвЂ™ attempt, and you risked how many?вЂќ AndrГ©e continued, вЂњA shipload.вЂќ

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

6

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 sureвЂ”some people think it was the Shetland Islands, some people think perhaps IcelandвЂ”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 monksвЂ™ 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 marinerвЂ™s compass hadnвЂ™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 didnвЂ™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, HГҐrfager. 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 IngolfвЂ™s sight, and he landed on the southern shore of the island. The settlement he established was the islandвЂ™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 вЂњseries of victorious defeats.вЂќ Sometimes sandhogsвЂ”the men who build tunnels for trains and aqueductsвЂ”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.

7

After AndrГ©eвЂ™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 didвЂ”practically all of it observing and collecting, the categorizing came laterвЂ”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. AndrГ©eвЂ™s dash to the pole didnвЂ™t seem properly respectful. He wouldnвЂ™t have sufficient time to do science, it was said. His purposes werenвЂ™t serious, and what value would his accomplishment have? HeвЂ™d merely own a record.

In interviews AndrГ©e 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 didnвЂ™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, AndrГ©e wasnвЂ™t looking to test himself in a remorseless environment. He didnвЂ™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.

AndrГ©e was born on October 18, 1854, in GrГ¤nna, a small town about three hundred miles southwest of Stockholm, on Lake VГ¤ttern. His mother, Wilhelmina, was called Mina, and his father, Claes, was the townвЂ™s apothecary. They had four other sons and two daughters, with whom they lived above ClaesвЂ™s shop on the main street in the center of town (the building is still there). MinaвЂ™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, AndrГ©e 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, вЂњhe spared no effort to pay him back,вЂќ but вЂњby character and from principle he was magnanimous.вЂќ

As a boy AndrГ©e built a raft from boards he found, and he and a friend sailed out onto Lake VГ¤ttern and had to be rescued when the wind rose. Another time, from a cliff above GrГ¤nna, 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.

AndrГ©eвЂ™s attachment to his mother was profound and only deepened when he was sixteen and his father died. He left money for AndrГ©e 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 AndrГ©e 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 someoneвЂ™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 skullвЂ™s bumps and depressions. AndrГ©e didnвЂ™t so much believe in phrenology as he was interested in the conclusions phrenologists reached, which he thought sometimes were precisely apt.

In 1876, when AndrГ©e was twenty-three, he went to America to see the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which had been organized to celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Officially it was the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, and on display were all the worldвЂ™s most prominent new inventions. Absorbed by modernity, he was there when word arrived of CusterвЂ™s defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

8

Sailing to America, AndrГ©e had had two acquaintances, his cabin mate, вЂњa young German who was ducking military duty,вЂќ he wrote in a journal, вЂњand a Swede who claimed to be a pork importer bound for Chicago, but who later proved to be a fugitive.вЂќ However, вЂњthe pseudo pork dealer, who was a good mixer, soon made other friends who were richer than we and with whom he became engaged in gambling. My German cabin mate and I preferred remaining quietly in our berths.вЂќ

The deserter had brought love letters that he liked to pore through. AndrГ©e had only one book, Laws of the Winds, by C. F. E. BjГ¶rling, which he would read lying on his bunk. One day, reading about the trade winds and struck by their regularity, an idea вЂњripened in my mind which decisively influenced my whole life,вЂќ he wrote. This was the thought вЂњthat balloons, even though not dirigible, could be used for long journeys. And not only from the Old to the New World, but also in the opposite direction and between the other continents.вЂќ The German happened to laugh and interrupt AndrГ©eвЂ™s reverie, but he returned to it and вЂњfirmly resolved, when I landed in America, to get in touch with an aeronaut and find out what I could about such balloons as were then manufactured.вЂќ

In Philadelphia, AndrГ©e went to the Swedish consul to ask for a pass to the fair. The consul said he couldnвЂ™t give him one, but he could hire him as the janitor at the Swedish Pavilion. He could live upstairs in the pavilion and go anywhere at the fair that he wanted.

AndrГ©e would go to bed at nine and get up at five. One day he made a trip to a river where he picked roses and daisies to press and send home to one of his sisters. He had only one companion, he wrote her, Plato, вЂњbut the best is good enough.вЂќ It pleased him that work was honored in America and that the harder someone worked the better he was treated. At the fair he was impressed by the machines that printed hundreds of thousands of newspapers in hours, and the вЂњscrews to make pocket watches so small and delicate that only with a microscope can you see that they are screws.вЂќ There was a steam engine вЂњhigh as a three-story house,вЂќ and a cannon weighing вЂњmillions of poundsвЂќ that shattered a foot-thick steel plate вЂњas easily as if it were glass.вЂќ In New York he had heard they were building вЂњa suspension bridge over the city, which already cost eighty million crowns, but it is not ready yet for a long timeвЂќ (the Brooklyn Bridge was finished in 1883).

Once in New York and once in Philadelphia, AndrГ©e visited phrenologists. He presented himself as a tailor, and was told that he would make an excellent engineer. Also that his determination led people to regard him sometimes as stubborn. His contrary temperament made him вЂњquick to avenge insults and repel attacks.вЂќ A love for independence and change led to behaviors that frequently contradicted his feelings. His thinking was unconstrained by conventions. He could be trusted with вЂњpositions that demand masculinity, honor and faithвЂќ and was a natural leader: вЂњYou win people over to your cause and get them to sympathize personally with whatever you undertake.вЂќ Nevertheless, from deep caution, he was вЂњwatchful and worriedвЂќ and deliberate, and only reluctantly did he trust people. Judgment and prudence helped him control his fantasies, вЂњhowever large.вЂќ As for his future, twenty years would вЂњpass before you achieve the highest degree of your spiritual development.вЂќ

9

Historically the Arctic was congenial to opposites. For some of the ancients, it was both holy and infernal. The devil lived there in a house of fire, a supposition based on a reading of Isaiah 14, which says that Lucifer will вЂњsit on the mount of assembly in the far north.вЂќ A northerly wind was believed to transmit evil. вЂњThe Victorine monk Garnerius says that the вЂ?malign spiritвЂ™ was called Aquilo, the north wind,вЂќ Jung wrote in Aion. вЂњIts coldness meant the вЂ?frigidity of sinners.вЂ™вЂќ Jung also wrote that Adam Scotus, a theologian of the twelfth century, believed that вЂњthere was a frightful dragonвЂ™s head in the north from which all evil comes.вЂќ The smoke that came from the dragonвЂ™s nose and mouth вЂњwas the smoke which the prophet Ezekiel, in his vision of God, saw coming from the north,вЂќ Scotus wrote.

The anthology of myths and deities and peculiar people assembled about the Arctic by the ancients includes the Arabs in the ninth century who knew about the Arctic from an Arabian traveler named Ahmad ibn Fadhlan. The king of the Bulgarians told Fadhlan that a tribe named the Wisu lived three months north of his country. Their summer nights were not even one hour long. The thirteenth-century Persian geographer Zakariya al-Qazwini says that the Wisu were not allowed to visit the BulgariansвЂ™ territory, because wherever they went the air turned cold, even in summer, which killed the BulgariansвЂ™ crops. To trade with the Wisu, from whom they mainly got furs, the Bulgarians would go to the border in a cart that was drawn by a dog. It had to be a dog, and not a horse or an ox, because dogs could get a purchase on the ground with their clawsвЂ”in Wisu there were no trees or dirt or rocks, only ice. The traders would leave their goods on the frontier. When they came back, they would find an item beside their own, and if they liked the trade they would take it. Otherwise they withdrew their item, so they never saw the Wisu or knew what they looked like.

The cold in the north made a fantastic impression on al-Qazwini. Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, in his book In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times, quotes his opinion that the northern winter was вЂњan affliction, a punishment and a plague; during it the air becomes condensed and the ground petrified, it makes faces to fade, eyes to weep, noses to run and change color, it causes the skin to crack and kills many beasts. Its earth is like flashing bottles, its air like stinging wasps; its night rids the dog of his whimpering, the lion of his roar, the birds of their twittering and the water of its murmur, and the biting cold makes people long for the fires of Hell.вЂќ Hell is a complicated notion for people in cold climates. When the Presbyterians went to Alaska in the nineteenth century they told the Indians about the fires of hell that burned perpetually, and the Indians thought it sounded pretty good, so the missionaries had to change hell to a place where it was always cold.

An Arab writer named Shams ad-din AbГ» AbdallГўh Muhammad ad-Dimashqi (1256вЂ“1327) described the Far North as a desert with no people in it. It had no animals, either, only great amounts of snow and darkness, and вЂњaround it the vault of heaven turns like a stone in a mill.вЂќ

The Greeks believed that a people named the Hyperboreans lived at the top of the world, beyond the Boreas, the harsh northern wind that issued from a cave. Their territory was a paradise that could not be reached. The Hyperboreans were peaceful and just, they lived in the woods instead of living in houses, they never had wars, and they grew to be a thousand without becoming ill. When a Hyperborean had become tired of life, he or she would put on garlands of flowers, walk to the edge of a particular cliff, and fall into the sea. They cherished Apollo, who could transport to Hyperborea mortals who had lived especially pious lives. To worship him they had a sphere-shaped temple, which hovered on wings. Three brothers who were twelve feet tall were the priests. Every nine years Apollo visited, possibly in a chariot drawn through the air by swans. He played a kind of lyre, called the kithara, and danced for months without resting. When the priests offered their sacrifice and played music, immense herds of swans flew down from the mountains and landed on the temple.

Other ancients thought that a miscellany of oddities and monsters lived in the North. A lost poem from the seventh century BC, called the Arimaspeia, was said to have been written by a figure, perhaps mythical, named Aristeas of Proconnesus. Aristeas said that he had traveled to the region of the northernmost people, called the Issedonians. The Issedonians told him that north of them lived the Arimaspians, who had long hair and one eye. North of them were Griffins, which looked like lions and had wings and beaks like eagles. The Griffins guarded the earthвЂ™s gold and often fought with the Arismaspians, who tried to steal it.

Elsewhere in the North were the Meropians, whose territory shared a border with a country called Anostos, which means вЂњNo Return.вЂќ Anostos had no dark or light, only a reddish fog. There were two streamsвЂ”the Hedone, which was the stream of gladness, and the Lype, which was the stream of sorrow. Each stream had trees on its banks. If you ate the fruit from the trees by the stream of sorrow, you shed tears until you died. If you ate the fruit by the stream of gladness, your desires were slaked and you got younger, but you lived life backwards and died as an infant.

As for the Romans, Pliny in his Natural History described a territory in the north where the snow fell almost constantly and was like feathers. This region had no light, it produced nothing but frost, it was where the north wind lived, and it was cursed. The existence of the Hyperboreans should be accepted, вЂњsince so many authors tell us about them,вЂќ he wrote. Tacitus wrote that the sea in the North was still and sluggish and that the sun in rising from it made a sound that could be heard.

By the fourteenth century, sailors believed that seas in the North had whirlpools so big that traveling into them was like falling into an abyss. In them lived plenty of fantastic creatures. The unknown writer of a thirteenth-century book called The KingвЂ™s Mirror, a scientific treatise in the form of a dialogue between a man and his son, said that вЂњthe waters of Greenland are infested with monsters.вЂќ The merman was вЂњtall and of great size and rises straight out of the water.вЂќ It had a head and shoulders and eyes and a mouth, вЂњbut above the eyes and the eyebrows it looks more like a man with a peaked helmet on his head.вЂќ Its form вЂњlooked much like an icicle,вЂќ in that it narrowed toward its lower half, вЂњbut no one has ever seen how the lower end is shaped, whether it terminates in a fin like a fish or is pointed like a pole.вЂќ The mermaid rarely appeared except before violent storms and was ugly to look at, with a вЂњlarge and terrifying face.вЂќ

Instead of whirlpools the author mentions вЂњsea hedges,вЂќ which are three-sided, вЂњhigher than lofty mountains,вЂќ and box in the sea. вЂњWe have to speak cautiously about this matter, for of late we have met but very few who have escaped this peril and are able to give us tidings about it.вЂќ

Among the regionвЂ™s other attributes were the ice fields on the ocean, which he said were sometimes вЂњas flat as if they were frozen on the sea itself,вЂќ and icebergs, вЂњwhich never mingle with other ice, but stand by themselves.вЂќ

To read these accounts is to feel that the world the explorers were to step into hadnвЂ™t yet been completely created.

10

Soon after AndrГ©e got to Philadelphia, he вЂњlooked up the balloonist John Wise, an elderly man who had begun his career as a piano polisher,вЂќ he wrote. Actually Wise had started as a cabinet-maker and had then built pianos. At fourteen, from an article in a German-language newspaper, he got interested in balloons. In his twenties he built one from muslin and varnished it with linseed oil and birdlime, a sticky substance made from tree bark, that was used to trap birds. The mixture, Wise noted, was prone to combust spontaneously.

Wise was also an innovator. He was among the first aeronauts to use draglines as a means for a balloon to maintain a stable height. He also invented the rip panel, which allowed a balloon to deflate quickly and safely for landing. Beforehand a balloonist had to climb through the rigging to the top of the balloon, and with his knees grasp the valve that released the gas. From his weight, the balloon would often turn upside down, which, depending on how hard it hit the ground, might not be so good for the balloonist.

Wise had made roughly four hundred flights вЂњand had had all manner of thrilling adventures,вЂќ AndrГ©e wrote. вЂњHe had flown with them in sunshine, rain, snow, thunder showers and hurricanes. He had been stuck on chimneys, smoke stacks, lightning rods and church spires, and he had been dragged through rivers, lakes, and over garden plots and forests primeval. His balloons had whirled like tops, caught fire, exploded and fallen to the ground like stones. The old man himself, however, had always escaped unhurt and counted his experiences as proof of how safe the art of flying really was.

вЂњIn order to convince a few fellow citizens who had been inconsiderate enough to doubt his thesis, Mr. Wise once made an ascent in Philadelphia, and while in mid-air he deliberately exploded his balloon. Then using the remains of the bag as a parachute he landed right in the midst of the doubters. What effect this had on them I do not know, but the old man himself felt better.вЂќ

Wise believed that the wind blew predominantly from west to east, and with sufficient force and steadiness to transport a balloon carrying people and freight not only across America but also to Europe. Building a balloon to cross the Atlantic was, he wrote, вЂњthe dream of my lifetime.вЂќ The balloon he imagined had a basket shaped like a boat, in case he came down in the water. On the gunwales it had oars and hand-turned propellers. In 1859 Wise started the Trans Atlantic Balloon Corporation with two partners. The balloon they built they flew from Missouri to New York in twenty hours and forty minutes, a record. Two months later, the partners, flying from New York to Canada, crashed in the Canadian woods, and the balloon was destroyed.

In 1873, Wise raised money for a second transatlantic balloon from the Daily Graphic, a New York newspaper. This balloon was accompanied by two smaller ones that carried extra gas and could also support someone making repairs to the balloon itself. Wise thought that a crossing to Ireland would take sixty hours and be almost absurdly perilous. вЂњThe discovery of the North Pole, which had recently caused Captain HallвЂ™s death,вЂќ he wrote, meaning Charles Hall, who died in 1871 trying to reach the pole, вЂњnot to mention the journey of the vessel PolarisвЂќвЂ”HallвЂ™s shipвЂ”вЂњwhich has just disappeared and probably been lost, is nothing but a pleasure trip compared to this journey through airspace, win or lose.вЂќ Wise eventually decided that the balloon wasnвЂ™t substantial enough, and he withdrew. While being filled, the balloon tore and collapsed. A smaller version left for Europe and after three hours crashed in a storm near New Haven, Connecticut.

Wise took AndrГ©e to his shop and showed him вЂњhow balloons were cut, sewed together and varnished.вЂќ When AndrГ©e asked if he might go up in a balloon, Wise вЂњacquiesced immediately, and a short time afterwards informed me that I might accompany his niece, who was to make an ascension a few days later. It was to take place at the city of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where the authorities had decided to celebrate the Day of Independence with a balloon ascension.вЂќ

The evening before, AndrГ©e, Wise, and the niece rode west on a train, with the balloon. When they arrived in the morning Wise said that he needed to rest and gave AndrГ©e the task of filling the balloon, вЂњwhich I naturally accepted with alacrity.вЂќ The gas was drawn from a main in the city square, and by five the balloon was full. As AndrГ©e and the niece, dressed as the goddess of liberty, were about to get into the basket, a high wind rose and вЂњthe bag collapsed like a rag.вЂќ The balloon had been torn, and there was not sufficient time to mend it and fill it again. вЂњThus ended my first attempt to get up into the air.вЂќ

A few weeks later AndrГ©e heard of a balloon in Philadelphia that would be taking five passengers, and he reserved a place. The ticket, however, cost seventy-five dollars, and he had only fifty, which the owner wouldnвЂ™t accept. (вЂњTo be sure, I had more money,вЂќ he wrote, вЂњbut at the moment it had been lent to a fellow student, who just then was out in the country, painting picket fences at fifty cents a day and board, and thus was in no position to pay me back.вЂќ)

Not long after that AndrГ©e fell sick with an intestinal complaint that he believed was caused by drinking ice water, but may have been from his living mostly on cake, candy, and ice cream, according to his journals. Having stayed five months in Philadelphia, he went back to Sweden.

Three years later, in May of 1879, Wise wrote a letter to the New York Times to say that someone should make a trip to the pole in a balloon. вЂњIn the polar summer there is an inflowing current of air that will carry a balloon into the polar basin, if it be kept near the earth, with balance ropes for compensation, to avoid the balloonвЂ™s rising up into the outflowing current,вЂќ he wrote.

вЂњIt is utterly futile to attempt an ingress by landcraft or watercraft with a handful of men,вЂќ he continued. вЂњWith a well-organized party of a thousand men, moved and stationed at intervals of five milesвЂ”say ten men at each station, it may be accomplishedвЂ¦. Aircraft is the most feasibleвЂ”the least expensive, the fewest number of men required, and the shortest time necessary to make the ingress and egress. It is possible to solve the problem within a hundred hours from the time the aerostat is made available. If you deem my suggestions of any value, give the scheme a push, as I am more than convinced that it can be pushed to ultimate consummation through the upper highway.вЂќ

If AndrГ©e ever saw the letter, he didnвЂ™t mention it in his writings.

He never saw Wise again either. In September, five months after Wise had written to the Times, AndrГ©e вЂњread in the papers that my old friend had gone off on a balloon trip, had been caught in a storm and had never since been heard of.вЂќ Wise was lost on September 29, in the Pathfinder, over Lake Michigan. вЂњFor his sake I like to believe that he landed unhurt and that he thereafter encountered obstacles which prevented him from coming home,вЂќ AndrГ©e wrote.

11

AndrГ©e exemplified a conceit that outlived himвЂ”the belief, then nascent, that science, in the form of technology, could subdue the last obstacles to possession of the worldвЂ™s territories, if not also its mysteries. More or less as psychologists were beginning to regard the deeper orders of the mind, this view saw nature as a shadowy chamber of secrets, a vault, that could be illuminated by the new instruments of science. Its banal applications were typified by devices for the home and the factoryвЂ”the gramophone, the vacuum cleaner, the arc welding machineвЂ”that made life easier, and its sinister ones were the innovations in weaponsвЂ”the machine gun, the torpedoвЂ”and their influence on the tactics of war. For all its worldliness it was also an innocent notion, a response to Romanticism, which had influenced earlier ideas about the Arctic.

AndrГ©e might also be said to have believed in a sort of new dismissiveness that held that anything modern was more desirable than a lived-in idea or artifact. The balloon was superior to the sledge and the ship. The encumbrances of the ocean and the land were absent from the air. The sledge and the ship had failed, the balloon and the air were all possibility. He was the first explorer to head toward the pole unaccompanied by Romantic references.

A hallmark of the Romantic tradition was the notion of the вЂњsublime,вЂќ described by Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry, which was published in 1757. The sublime was characterized by an astonishment that drove from the mind all other feelings but terror and awe, Burke wrote. This stupefying dread was вЂњthe strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.вЂќ The terror, which was encompassing and prevented reasoning or reflection, was provoked partly by an apprehension of the infinite, and also of the holy. The sublime aroused the deepest feelings the soul could embody, while simultaneously making someone aware that the object which inspired them was a component of a universe that was perhaps largely indifferent, if not unsympathetic, to his well-being both as an individual and a type. Man responded to the sublime because it was gloriousвЂ”to feel the sublime was to scent the sacredвЂ”and because being fitted to feel powerfully, to be profoundly stirred, meant that something of the sublime reverberated within him, otherwise how could he recognize it.

The objects that inspired the sublime were вЂњvast in their dimensionsвЂќ and вЂњsolid, even massive,вЂќ Burke wrote. Mountains are what he had in mind, the type of towering, pointy, snow-covered peaks that northern Europeans never have to travel very far to stand beneath. When more became known of the immense and remorseless ground of the Arctic, however, with its darkness, its ship-crushing ice, and terrible coldвЂ”a place that was both sanctified and antagonisticвЂ”it lent itself even more handsomely to the case.

In one of the enduring Romantic novels, Frankenstein, a young Englishman named Walton is traveling to the Arctic, as a hobby scientist and discovererвЂ”he hopes to find the Northwest Passage and вЂњthe secret of the magnet.вЂќ He is writing letters to his sister, Margaret, in London. In Russia he writes that a cold wind, which he imagines as coming from the Arctic, has stirred him. вЂњInspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid,вЂќ he says. вЂњI try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.вЂќ He pictures it as вЂњa land surpassing in wonders and beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe,вЂќ as being вЂњa part of the world never before visitedвЂќ and вЂњnever before imprinted by the foot of man.вЂќ

The pole during this period was often personified. Vestiges of the romance surrounding it can be found in the introduction to Arctic Experiences, an account of an expedition made by the ship Polaris toward the pole, published in 1874. вЂњThe invisible Sphinx of the uttermost North still protects with jealous vigilance the arena of her ice-bound mystery,вЂќ it begins. вЂњHer fingers still clutch with tenacious grasp the clue which leads to her coveted secret; ages have come and gone; generations of heroic men have striven and failed, wrestling with Hope on the one side and Death on the other; philosophers have hypothesized, sometimes truly, but often with misleading theories: she still clasps in solemn silence, the riddle in her icy palmвЂ”remaining a fascination and a hope, while persistently baffling the reason, the skill, and courage of man.

вЂњSkirmishers have entered at the outer portals, and anon retreated, bearing back with them trophies of varying value. Whole divisions, as of a grand army, have approached her domains with all the paraphernalia of a regular siege, and the area of attack been proportionately widened; important breaches have been effected, the varied fortunes of war befalling the assailants; some falling back with but small gain; others, with appalling loss and death, have vainly sought escape and safety from her fatal toils. Nor has the citadel been won. вЂ?UNDISCOVEREDвЂ™ is still written over the face of the geographical pole.вЂќ

12

By the time AndrГ©e announced his plan to leave for the pole he was вЂњaltogether of Herculean frame,вЂќ one writer wrote. Another described him as вЂњrather stout in appearance,вЂќ and as вЂњone of the handsomer men in Sweden.вЂќ He was six feet tall, with a large nose, вЂњwhich people in Sweden regard as an augury of success, and a piercing blue-grey eye,вЂќ which made him seem вЂњcut out for command.вЂќ A German explorer, Dr. Georg Wegener, met AndrГ©e in London in 1895 and wrote, вЂњThe Swedish researcher is a personality cut out of a wood with which world history forms its great men, at the same time daring and balanced, with this strange assurance about progress, with this belief based on the captivating ability to convince, which with all explorers has played the main role, and where the original type is the great, splendid fanatic Columbus.вЂќ A French geographer especially interested in glaciers, whose name was Charles Rabot, described AndrГ©e as someone who вЂњcreated sympathy at first sight. I was attracted towards him, at once I felt confidence in him; at our first meeting he gave me the impression of a strong personality.вЂќ AndrГ©e and Rabot spent an afternoon looking for fossils while AndrГ©e asked about the balloons that had carried the mail during the siege of Paris in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. вЂњEverything that I could recollect of these ascensions interested him,вЂќ Rabot said. вЂњThat evening we parted as old friends.вЂќ

Much of what was written about how AndrГ©e looked and what he was like was written after he had disappeared. He is recalled mostly in tributes, that is, and so he becomes reduced to abstractions and admirable qualities and blurs a little around the edges. He was said to have had few close friends, but among them he was regarded as sociable and devoted. He liked pranks and playing games with children. He had a talent for maxims and penetrating judgments: вЂњBe careful of health, but not of life,вЂќ he said. Liberals tended to be tranquil because they believed that a moral force lay behind their positions and so were content to see them unfold, whereas conservatives, he wrote, were combative because they regarded themselves as always under attack.

He practiced a precautionary discipline he called self-hypnosis. Someone whose will was strong, he believed, was always liable to coming under its thrall, and вЂњit is therefore essential to direct oneвЂ™s will through daily training towards that which one, through judgment and experience, has found to be sensible and therefore beneficial.

вЂњOne masters oneself in the same way one masters others:вЂќ he wrote, вЂњby cultivating a keen conception of how one should and should not act.вЂќ His вЂњcold blooded calmness and realism,вЂќ wrote a friend, вЂњwere not based on a cold temperament, but on his incessant exercise of self-control.вЂќ

He had no ear for music or writing, or any eye for art. In the portrait of him published in The AndrГ©e Diaries, the 1930 account of the voyage and the discovery of the remains, this indifference is described as amounting nearly to вЂњa defect in his character.вЂќ Friends who persuaded him to go to the opera or an art exhibition вЂњhad every reason to repent of their success, for he always managed to spoil their own pleasure by his remarks and criticisms.вЂќ The writer doesnвЂ™t mention what those criticisms were, but they were apparently uninformed. When the novelist Selma LagerlГ¶f was given a prize, AndrГ©e was invited to a dinner in her honor where he was asked if he had read her book, and he said, вЂњNo, but I have read Baron MГјnchhausenвЂќвЂ”the German fabulist who had said that he had been to the moonвЂ”вЂњand I suppose that it is all the same.вЂќ An oaf in cultured company is what he sounds like sometimes, but perhaps he was only trying to deflate manners he regarded as pretentious. As for nature, вЂњhe displayed a highly developed sense of beauty, and during his many balloon journeys he greatly enjoyed the magnificent scenery.вЂќ

He seemed to have a kind of intelligence that saw patterns in forms that other people found chaotic, and to be able to hold complicated structures and solutions in his head. He cared deeply about how things went together and how they worked and whether their design was efficient. According to The AndrГ©e Diaries, once he decided on an end he did everything he could to attain it. Even so, вЂњno one could weigh every consequence more ruthlessly, more critically than he. He never acted spontaneously, and there was wanting in him the spirit of fresh, impulsive action, but this was compensated for by the sense of security which is conveyed by the actions of an assured, discriminating man. He embodied, in every respect, the ancient phrase: вЂ?To speak once and stand by oneвЂ™s word is better than to speak a hundred times.вЂ™вЂќ

AndrГ©e appears to have been one of those people whose attitudes and habits of mind are literal and firmly formed, so that moving among disciplines is not a matter of broadening oneself by means of new terms so much as applying oneвЂ™s customary judgments to new circumstances. Such a temperament seeks to encounter the familiar and to assess it or deplore its absence, rather than be influenced and possibly enlarged by what it doesnвЂ™t recognize. It is a commanding, not a humble, state of mind, restless rather than engaged, and capacious more than penetrating. An advantage of it is the capacity to interest oneself in a mulitiplicity of subjects and to arrive quickly at personally satisfying determinations. AndrГ©eвЂ™s interests were wide-ranging. According to the portrait, he made notes for papers on the influence of new inventions on вЂњevery branch of human activity,вЂќ from вЂњthe general development of mankindвЂќ to вЂњlanguage, architecture, military science, the home, marriage, education, etc.вЂќ He wrote about scientific topics, in papers such as вЂњConductivity of Heat in Construction MaterialвЂќ and вЂњElectricity of the Air and Terrestrial Magnetism.вЂќ He wrote about social phenomena in others such as вЂњThe Education of Girls,вЂќ and вЂњBad Times and Their Causes,вЂќ and about miscellaneous topics such as вЂњThe Importance of Inventions and Industry for the Development of Language,вЂќ and вЂњDirectives and Advice for Inventors.вЂќ He appeared to feel that nothing that interested him was beyond his ability to have an opinion about it.

13

Once AndrГ©e was grown, the only woman for whom he felt a strong attachment was his mother. вЂњHer rich natural endowments, in which good judgment and sharp intellect dominate such characteristics as are commonly called feminine in this day and time, her remarkable will power and capacity for work, as well as her ability to endure and suffer, remind us of the old Norse women,вЂќ he wrote in a notebook. вЂњDespite her seventy-five years she does not seem old. Her face has few wrinkles. It seems to belong rather to a woman of sixty. The impression of power still unshaken is heightened by her voice which lacks the sentimental, pleading tone one so often finds in older women. Her voice harmonizes with her exterior: firm, strong, almost gruff, but with an undertone of kindliness.вЂќ

A monument, in other words, erected by a child and tended into adult lifeвЂ”which must have been fatiguing. When AndrГ©e felt himself drawn to a woman, what he called the вЂњвЂ?heart leavesвЂ™ sprouting, I resolutely pull them up by the roots,вЂќ he wrote. The consequence was that he was вЂњregarded as a man without romantic feelings. But I know that if I once let such a feeling live, it would become so strong that I dare not give in to it.вЂќ An acquaintance wrote in a letter that AndrГ©e appeared to have remained a bachelor for the sake of his mother, and for a while they lived with each other. When AndrГ©e was asked why he had never married, he said of any woman who would be his wife that he would not вЂњrisk having her ask me with tears in her eyes to abstain from my flights, and at that instant, my affection for her, no matter how strong, would be so dead that nothing could ever bring it back to life.вЂќ

Figures from history occasionally rise up from the page as if they had merely been waiting, sometimes impatiently, for someone to speak to them. AndrГ©e comes to life a little resentfully, as if interrupted. Through his devotion to his mother he may have been restricted emotionally from mature relationships with women. It is also possible that he was indifferent to showing, or incapable of expressing, any true warmth to another person, except in the narcissistic fashion of a child. His great mechanical abilities and inclinations toward solitude suggest a temperament that does not effortlessly engage in conventional exchanges, one that might easily be confused or defeated or embittered, and might find objects and tasks more agreeable than people. Not all of us want the same things from life. The mainstream forces its preferences on the minority, partly to sustain those preferences, but that doesnвЂ™t necessarily lend them any substance. Nowhere in AndrГ©eвЂ™s writings or in the descriptions of him is there an indication of any but a cold-blooded sort of introspection, a capacity for assessing the success or failure of objects and tactics. The territory of feelings seems not to have been hospitable to him.

The only relationship with a woman that AndrГ©e was known to have conducted was an affair with a woman named Gurli Linder, who became in the early twentieth century an admired critic of childrenвЂ™s literature. (Linder wrote the portrait of AndrГ©e in The AndrГ©e Diaries.) The affair, which occupied the last few years before he leftвЂ”Linder in her brief writings on the matter says 1894 was their best and most untroubled yearвЂ”was conducted so openly that LinderвЂ™s husband, a professor, asked her to behave with more restraint lest she embarrass him among their friends.

14

In 1875 an Arctic explorer named Karl Weyprecht, who was from Austria-Hungary, suggested that a series of polar outposts be established by various countries so that science could be done and the results of it shared. Weyprecht felt that polar exploration had become glamorized by its rigors and heroes, and by the pursuit of the unknown at the expense of the intellectual work it might better be doing. WeyprechtвЂ™s plan led, in 1882, to the International Polar Year, in which eleven nations established fourteen outposts, twelve in the Arctic and two in Antarctica. SwedenвЂ™s outpost was on Spitsbergen. It was overseen by Nils Eckholm, a meteorologist, and, on the recommendation of Professor Dahlander, AndrГ©eвЂ™s physics professor, it included AndrГ©e, one of whose tasks was to use a device called a portable electrometer to make notations concerning electricity in the air. The delegation arrived in July of 1882. AndrГ©e was second in command.

No photographs I am aware of show AndrГ©e using the portable electrometer, but from the directions for its use, contained in the paper вЂњInstructions for the Observation of Atmospheric Electricity,вЂќ by Lord Kelvin, published in 1901, it is easy to imagine a solitary figure in the daylight of an Arctic summer standing by a tripod about five feet tall. The tripod is not less than twenty yards from any structure that rises above it (вЂњsuch as a hut or a rock or mass of ice or ship,вЂќ Kelvin wrote). To prevent sparks from static electricity leaping from his fur cap or his wool clothes he has covered the cap and his arms with tinfoil attached to a fine wire he holds in the hand that touches the electrometer. The electrometer has its own metal wire to which a lit match is attached, and while the match burns he makes readings by keeping a hair between two black dots, which he has sometimes to squint to see. AndrГ©e performed the task with such resourcefulness, overcoming technical complications that defeated some of the other nations, and so assiduouslyвЂ”he made more than fifteen thousand observationsвЂ”that the Swedish findings were considered the best among all the nations.

The International Polar Stations, 1882вЂ“1883

Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

According to The AndrГ©e Diaries, вЂњAndrГ©e also endeavored to find a correlation between the simultaneous variations of aero-electricity and geo-magnetism. вЂњThis has been hard work,вЂќ he wrote Dahlander, вЂњfor it has been necessary to calculate about 5000 values of the total intensity of geo-magnetism.вЂќ Meanwhile he made notes about the patterns of drifting snow, which he published in 1883 in вЂњDrift Snow in the Arctic.вЂќ Furthermore, to determine whether the yellow-green tinge that appeared in a personвЂ™s face at the end of the Arctic winter was a result of the personвЂ™s skin having changed color in the dark or of his eyesвЂ™ having been affected by the arriving light, AndrГ©e allowed himself to be shut indoors for a month. When he finally went out, it was clear that the pigmentation of his skin had changed. Before his confinement, AndrГ©e wrote, вЂњDangerous? Perhaps. But what am I worth?вЂќ His diligence did not seem to make him well liked, however. His journals often mention that the others are not doing their work properly or are misbehaving, and that he is the only one comporting himself correctly.

вЂњWhat shall I do when I come home?вЂќ AndrГ©e wrote in his journal. In 1885 he was made head of the Technical Department of the Swedish Patent Office in Stockholm, a position he held until he left for the pole. As a kind of ambassador for science and new technology, he traveled in Europe looking for useful patentsвЂ”he went to the worldвЂ™s fairs in Copenhagen and in Paris, in 1888 and 1889вЂ”especially patents that might reduce drudgery for people who did factory work; he had a social conscience and a conviction that science and new inventions ought to make life less burdensome, that the most useful innovations were applied ones. If peopleвЂ™s lives were easier, he believed, they would be happier, and society would be better, with the result that there would be even more innovations. The man he worked for liked him but thought he was stubborn. He was amused at having pointed out to AndrГ©e that while laws and regulations sometimes prohibited innovations they were nevertheless essential, and having AndrГ©e reply that any law that prevented an innovation was wrong. AndrГ©eвЂ™s personality was forceful, and his approach to social and legal change was not subtle. A few years before he left for the pole, he was a member of the municipal council and introduced a motion that the day for people who worked for the city should be reduced to ten hours from twelve, and that the womenвЂ™s day should be eight hours instead of ten. The proposal failed quickly, and before long, and largely as a consequence, AndrГ©e lost his position on the council.

Between 1876 and 1897 when AndrГ©e left for the pole, the telephone, the refrigerator, the typewriter, the matchbook, the escalator, the zipper, the modern light bulb, the Kodak camera, the gasoline combustion engine, Coca-Cola, radar, and the first artificial textile (rayon) were invented; the speed of light was determined; X rays were first observed and radiation detected in uranium; and Freud and the Austrian physician Josef Breuer began psychoanalysis with the observation in a paper that вЂњHysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.вЂќ Almost quaintly, AndrГ©e embraced modernity by trying to use a half-ancient conveyance in an innovative way.

15

The first balloon plans patented were patented in Lisbon in 1709 by a Jesuit father named Bartolomeu GusmГЈo. From a balloon, cities could be attacked, he said; people could travel faster than on the ground; goods could be shipped; and the territories at the ends of the earth, including the poles, could be visited and claimed.

Seventy-four years later the first balloon left the ground with passengers, in France. It was built by the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Г‰tienne. As children they had observed that paper bags held over a fire rose to the ceiling. Using hot air, their first balloon went up without passengers in the country. Their next went up from Paris with a sheep, a duck, and a rooster, because no one knew what the effect of visiting the upper atmosphere would be, or if there was any air in the sky to breathe. Their third balloon went up with two people. The king wanted the first passengers to be criminals, who would be pardoned if they lived, but he was persuaded that a criminal was unworthy of being the first person in the air, and two citizens went instead.

The hydrogen balloon was developed almost simultaneously by a member of the French Academy named Jacques Charles, who had heard of the Montgolfier brothersвЂ™ first balloon and mistakenly thought it had used hydrogen. From the place where the Eiffel Tower now is, he sent up a balloon thirteen feet in diameter, also in 1783. Benjamin Franklin was among the audience. The first balloon to go up in England went up in 1784, and the first to crash, when its hydrogen caught fire, crashed in France in 1785.

George Washington watched the first American ascent, in 1793, by a Frenchman who flew from Philadelphia to a town in New Jersey, which took forty-six minutes. Probably the first ascent north of the Arctic Circle was made by a hot-air balloon in July of 1799, built by the British explorer Edward Daniel Clarke, who was visiting Swedish Lapland. He planned the ascent as a kind of spectacular event, вЂњwith a view of bringing together the dispersed families of the wild Laplanders, who are so rarely seen collected in any number.вЂќ Seventeen feet tall and nearly fifty feet around, and made from white satin-paper, with red highlights, the balloon was constructed in a church, вЂњwhere it reached nearly from the roof to the floor.вЂќ To inflate it Clarke soaked a ball of cotton in alcohol and set the cotton on fire.

The balloon was to go up on July 28, a Sunday, after Mass. The Laplanders, вЂњthe most timid among the human race,вЂќ Clarke wrote, were frightened by the balloon, вЂњperhaps attributing the whole to some magical art.вЂќ The wind was blowing hard, and Clarke thought it would ruin his launch, but so many Laplanders had showed up he вЂњdid not dare to disappoint them.вЂќ The Laplanders grabbed the side of the balloon as it was filling, and tore it. They agreed to remain in town, with their reindeer, while it was mended. Meanwhile вЂњthey became riotous and clamorous for brandy.вЂќ One of them crawled on his knees to the priest to beg for it.

When the balloon was released that evening, the LappsвЂ™ reindeer took off in all directions, with the Lapps running after them. It landed in a lake, took off again, then crashed. The Lapps crept back into town.

Hydrogen balloons are absurdly sensitive to air pressure, temperature, the density of their gas, and the weight they have aboard. Pouring a glass of water over the side of a balloon, or a handful of sand, will make it rise. A shadow falling on it will cause it to descend. A balloon has an ideal (and theoretical) equilibrium, at which it would float indefinitely, assuming it didnвЂ™t lose gas through the envelope, but that point is impossible to sustain because the balloonвЂ™s circumstances keep changing. A rising balloon doesnвЂ™t slow as it approaches equilibrium; from momentum, it continues. Having passed the point of stability, it sheds hydrogen, because the gas has expanded as the pressure of the air has lessened, and the balloon sinks, passing the point on its fall. Shedding the perfect amount of ballast at the ideal rate might settle the balloon exquisitely, but shedding weight also causes the balloon to rise. If it rises too quickly the only corrective might be to release hydrogen, which the pilot would rather retain. Part of the skill of flight, particularly of a flight that is to last a long time, is to manage the altitude with sufficient temperance that little gas or ballast is lost. Enough ballast must be kept to land the balloon properly. Theoretically a balloon might be operated more stably at night, since the temperature does not change as clouds intersect the sun.

Someone traveling in a balloon never feels the wind, or hears it, because he is advancing at the same speed. Early aeronauts, enclosed in silence, used to feel not so much that they were moving as that the land below them was approaching.

16

While AndrГ©e was in Spitsbergen at the Swedish station, making measurements and shut in darkness, the American delegation to the International Polar Year was on Ellesmere Island, opposite the northern end of Greenland, on Lady Franklin Bay. Their camp was about six hundred miles from the pole, and the northernmost of all the nationsвЂ™ camps. The twenty-five members lived in a hut which was sixty feet long and seventeen feet wide and which they had built and called Fort Conger, after a Michigan senator named Omar Conger, who had supported Arctic research. The officersвЂ”there were four of themвЂ”slept at one end, and the enlisted men at the other. The expedition was to make scientific observations and also to search for the Jeannette, which had left to discover the pole in 1879, and disappeared.

The delegationвЂ™s leader was Adolphus Greely, who had asserted at AndrГ©eвЂ™s talk in London in 1895 that although AndrГ©e might reach the pole, the Arctic winds, which at that elevation blew only north, would strand him, and then said that the congress ought not to support such a plan.

Adolphus Greely

In Three Years of Arctic Service, a fantastically understated title, Greely described some of his comrades at Fort Conger, all of whom had volunteered. Lieutenant Frederick Kislingbury, вЂњin a service of over fifteen years, had a fine reputation for field duty,вЂќ Greely wrote. James Lockwood вЂњhad served eight years, almost always on the frontier, and was highly recommended as an officer of sterling merit and varied attainments.

вЂњEdward Israel and George W. Rice, in order to accompany the expedition, cheerfully accepted service as enlisted men. The former, a graduate of Ann Arbor University, went in his chosen profession as astronomer, while the latter, a professional photographer, hoped to add to his reputation in that art by service with the expedition. Sergeants Jewell and Ralston had served long and faithfully as meteorological observers; while Gardiner, though of younger service, was most promising. Long and hazardous duty on the Western frontier had inured the greater part of the men to dangers, hardships, and exposure.вЂќ

РљРѕРЅРµС† РѕР·РЅР°РєРѕРјРёС‚РµР»СЊРЅРѕРіРѕ С„СЂР°РіРјРµРЅС‚Р°.

РўРµРєСЃС‚ РїСЂРµРґРѕСЃС‚Р°РІР»РµРЅ РћРћРћ В«Р›РёС‚Р РµСЃВ».

РџСЂРѕС‡РёС‚Р°Р№С‚Рµ СЌС‚Сѓ РєРЅРёРіСѓ С†РµР»РёРєРѕРј, РєСѓРїРёРІ РїРѕР»РЅСѓСЋ Р»РµРіР°Р»СЊРЅСѓСЋ РІРµСЂСЃРёСЋ (https://www.litres.ru/alec-wilkinson/the-ice-balloon/) РЅР° Р›РёС‚Р РµСЃ.

Р‘РµР·РѕРїР°СЃРЅРѕ РѕРїР»Р°С‚РёС‚СЊ РєРЅРёРіСѓ РјРѕР¶РЅРѕ Р±Р°РЅРєРѕРІСЃРєРѕР№ РєР°СЂС‚РѕР№ Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, СЃРѕ СЃС‡РµС‚Р° РјРѕР±РёР»СЊРЅРѕРіРѕ С‚РµР»РµС„РѕРЅР°, СЃ РїР»Р°С‚РµР¶РЅРѕРіРѕ С‚РµСЂРјРёРЅР°Р»Р°, РІ СЃР°Р»РѕРЅРµ РњРўРЎ РёР»Рё РЎРІСЏР·РЅРѕР№, С‡РµСЂРµР· PayPal, WebMoney, РЇРЅРґРµРєСЃ.Р”РµРЅСЊРіРё, QIWI РљРѕС€РµР»РµРє, Р±РѕРЅСѓСЃРЅС‹РјРё РєР°СЂС‚Р°РјРё РёР»Рё РґСЂСѓРіРёРј СѓРґРѕР±РЅС‹Рј Р’Р°Рј СЃРїРѕСЃРѕР±РѕРј.

Если текст книги отсутствует, перейдите по ссылке

Возможные причины отсутствия книги:
1. Книга снята с продаж по просьбе правообладателя
2. Книга ещё не поступила в продажу и пока недоступна для чтения

Навигация

Читать онлайн книгу "The Ice Balloon"