South with the Sun Page 3

  Blizzards hit the region. The Lena River froze, and deep snow covered the tundra. De Long stayed with the crew and sent two of the strongest men off to find help.

  Chief Engineer Melville and his thirteen crew members were far more fortunate. They managed to reach the village of Little Borkhia in Yakutsk. Melville immediately gathered a rescue party—a combination of his crew and the Russian people from Siberia. They found two survivors from De Long’s crew, and with their directions took off to search for the others.

  The Jeannette’s crewmen drag their boats over the Arctic ice, attempting to reach Siberia, June–August 1881. Engraving by George T. Andrew after a design by M. J. Burns.

  They found Lieutenant Commander De Long and his men. All had died.

  De Long and his crew had mapped uncharted areas of northern Siberia and became heroes to the Russians and Americans. The survivors brought back scientific data about the flora and fauna. It seemed like a huge price to pay, but something else happened, far beyond the realm of man, something wonderful and mysterious.

  As spring came to the north, the Lena River thawed, and the water in the river shallows warmed quickly in the constant Arctic light. The river flowed north, gathering strength as the tundra thawed, and more water traveled farther north and quickly melted the Arctic ice pack.

  Timbers, planks, equipment, torn clothes, and other artifacts from the Jeannette rose up to the ocean’s surface on the spring currents and drifted across the vast polar seas. These pieces of life from the Jeannette would become clues for Arctic exploration.

  CHAPTER 3

  Nansen Returns

  The earth rotated closer to the sun and warmed the Norwegian mountains and the deep fjords. The saltwater inlets between the mountains and the warm breezes swirled and carried the high twitters, chirps, and songs of birds through the tall white birch and fuzzy evergreen forests, and the islands of snow on the steep Norwegian farmlands melted into silvery rivulets of sweet water that softened the earth and swelled the seeds in the soil. The sun’s energy pulled the seeds from their jackets, and the land grew bright and fragrant with pink roses and delicate wildflowers and tender green wild grasses and grains. Roald Amundsen stood at the head of the Christiania, now Oslo, Fjord.

  It was May 30, 1889, and Amundsen was waiting for the return of Fridtjof Nansen, who, along with his five-man crew, had been the first to cross from east to west the unexplored regions of the Greenland ice cap. Amundsen’s heart was pounding in his chest. He was not alone. The entire city of Christiania, now Oslo, had come out to welcome Nansen home. It was a high holiday in Christiania, all shops and businesses were closed, and the city was ablaze with decorations.

  Crowds of people rimmed the edges of Christiania Fjord, making more visible from the sea the small scalloped-shaped bays, wavering inlets, and rocky points. People waited and talked excitedly as they strained to see Nansen. Amundsen could hardly contain himself. He had been fascinated by polar exploration, since the Arctic during his lifetime was as remote and unknown as outer space is today.

  Amundsen had read about all the early forays into the polar regions in accounts by the polar explorers. At age eight or nine, Amundsen became interested in John Franklin, a British explorer, who had attempted to be the first to sail through the Northwest Passage, a sea route that linked the Atlantic and Pacific. Amundsen studied John Franklin’s accounts of his attempt: “I read them all with fervid fascination which has shaped the course of my life.”

  Amundsen was enthralled with Franklin’s stories about the blizzards he and his men endured, their hunger that became starvation, and the resolve Franklin exuded that encouraged his crew to survive. Amundsen began dreaming of becoming a polar explorer, but he kept his dreams secret, especially from his mother. She had other plans for her son; she wanted him to study medicine and become a doctor.

  In order to become an explorer, Amundsen knew he had to prepare and train. At every opportunity, he skied long distances along the hills and over the mountains around Christiania. He strengthened his muscles and increased his endurance. He slept with the windows in his bedroom wide open during the coldest nights of the Norwegian winters and was considered to be a freak for doing so. His mother questioned his motives. He told her that he liked the cold fresh air and didn’t tell her that he was conditioning his body to endure the extreme cold. She would not have understood. But he sensed that Nansen would. He became a great fan of Nansen’s, and he learned all that he could about him.

  Nansen was tall, lean, flexible, and strong. He was blond and blue-eyed, with a deep intensity. His face was oval, his complexion fair, and he had an appealing smile. Nansen was born in Store Frøsen, near Christiania, on October 10, 1861. His father was a prosperous, respected attorney, with a personal sense of duty and unwavering integrity. His mother ran the household. She was athletic and strong-minded. She spent her free time reading and learning, always wanting to improve her mind. She was the one who encouraged Fridtjof and his brother Alexander, and Nansen’s half brothers and sisters, to love the outdoors.

  Fridtjof Nansen was a natural-born athlete, and he excelled at every sport he attempted. He was a great swimmer and tumbler, but he attained a level beyond any other athlete in skating and skiing. Nansen broke the world record for the mile in skating, and he won the national cross-country skiing championships twelve times. He also showed a great capacity for endurance and self-confidence. In one day, with limited gear and only his faithful dog, he skied fifty miles through the pine forests and open fields of Norway.

  From the very start, Nansen was fascinated by the Arctic. In 1882, when he was twenty-one years old, he was invited along on a sealing ship, the Viking, and during his time on board, he recorded observations of ice floes, ocean currents, winds, and polar animals. They sailed off the coast of Greenland, an island that seemed to always be veiled in fog. When Nansen got one glimpse of Greenland, that was all it took. He knew he had to go there. He had to explore the island.

  No one inhabited the east coast of Greenland at that time, and no European had ever crossed the interior ice fields. Nansen knew he had to attempt it. Most people thought Nansen was out of his mind—it couldn’t be done, it was too dangerous, he would surely die—but he was confident and began to formulate a plan. He gathered together a team of strong, disciplined, athletic men from across Norway: Otto Sverdrup, a retired ship’s captain; Oluf Christian Dietrichson, a first lieutenant in the Norwegian infantry; and Kristian Kristiansen Trana, a peasant from northern Norway, as well as Samuel Johannesen Balto and Ole Nielsen Ravna, two men who were Sami people—nomadic reindeer herders.

  Nansen believed that the best way to cross Greenland’s interior was skilobning—cross-country skiing. He selected special skis for what he thought the snow would be like, and paired the skis with lauparsko—Norwegian boots. The soles of the boots were composed of pliant leather that was turned up along the sides and toe and covered the upper area of the foot. His team wore well-shrunk thick woolen stockings and, over them, goat’s-hair socks as a way to keep the feet warm and repel the moisture outside. He also brought Norwegian truger—snowshoes that resembled tennis rackets. He redesigned them to make them smaller so they could be used later in the spring.

  Fridtjof Nansen, Bergen, Norway, 1887. Nansen studied zoology, researched nerve anatomy, and designed the Nansen bottle for collecting water samples. He studied the movement of currents in the Arctic Ocean and life within the northern waters.

  Nansen also redesigned the sledges. These were what his team would use to carry all of their equipment and provisions, and they needed to be lightweight, maneuverable, and strong, but also flexible. He studied those that had been used on previous expeditions and made improvements on the Norwegian ski kjaelke, a low hand sledge on broad runners that was strong and light and moved well on all kinds of surfaces. He added elements from the sledges used to rescue the Greely expedition a few years before.

  His sledges were made of wood; the runners on the bottom were elm
or maple covered with thin steel plates. They were nine feet six inches long and one foot by eight inches wide. The front and the back of the sledges were turned up to add strength and flexibility. Each sledge weighed twenty-eight pounds.

  Nansen knew that the sledges would need to be steered on the ice and snow and around crevasses when they were moving fast downhill, so he added central line plates that were like a keel. These keels worked as long as they lasted, but they would be torn off by rough ice.

  He had two small boats constructed for landing onshore.

  For provisions, Nansen chose food that would be light in weight. He brought pemmican, dried meat; pea soup; Gruyère cheese; sugar; and a Swedish biscuit called knäckebröd. He also brought chocolate. Not just bars of chocolate, but meat-powder chocolate that when mixed with hot water served as a hot high-protein energy drink that warmed the body.

  He believed that he and his team should live as naturally as possible, especially in an extremely cold climate where they would be physically exerting themselves. He thought artificial stimulants and narcotics might help the mind and the body for a period of time, but afterward, there would be a price to pay: the body would be artificially stimulated to do more work, but the following day it would be exhausted. He did pack some alcohol for medical purposes.

  Nansen was concerned about snow blindness, or a temporary form of blindness caused by the sunlight’s reflection off the snow. His friend Adolf Nordenskiöld, the Swedish professor whom Lieutenant Commander De Long had searched for in the Bering Strait and beyond, gave Nansen his thick goggles made of smoked glass that completely covered the eyes to protect them from the intense light reflected off the snow.

  Water would be needed throughout the trip, so Nansen redesigned a cooker that would melt snow for water and warm the interior of the tent. He also had two three-man sleeping bags made out of reindeer skin. The men would share the bags on the expedition and would mutually benefit from one another’s body heat.

  He acquired the best sextant he could find for navigation and three compasses for testing magnetic deviations, a barometer, chronometer watches, a medical chest, and four sledges that weighed two hundred pounds each when they were fully loaded.

  In June 1888, Nansen and his five men and two boats traveled as guests on board the Jason, a seal-hunting ship. After six weeks of seal hunting on the Arctic ice, Captain Jacobsen of the Jason sailed for Greenland. When Nansen saw the coast of Greenland, he said it was like going to a dance and “expecting to meet the choice of one’s own heart.” It would be a dance getting to land, but not anything like Nansen anticipated.

  Nansen and his crew lowered their boats. The crew on board the sealing ship bid them an apprehensive farewell.

  They thought they would quickly reach shore after rowing for two or three hours. But they got caught in a strong current they couldn’t row against, and suddenly they were in ice floes that were ramming together and piling up on top of one another. Both of the boats were threatened with destruction. Sverdrup, the retired ship’s captain, dragged his boat up on an ice floe, and Nansen headed toward one of the open pools. At every moment they were in danger of being crushed. Eventually, after considerable effort, they reached a large open pool of calmer water. They continued drifting, and Nansen and his crew weren’t sure where they were.

  They were near land, west of Sermilikfjord, and Nansen could see the rocks onshore and the mountainside. It seemed like a simple thing to get ashore, but there was more ice. Nansen and the crew dragged their boats onto an ice floe, and a sharp piece of ice cut through Nansen’s boat. Sverdrup patched it as well as he could, but he wasn’t sure if it would float, so Nansen and his crew remained on the ice floe. The skies grew dark and gloomy, and cold rain poured down upon them in torrents. They crawled into their sleeping bags and posted one man to stand watch in case the ice opened and they could row ashore.

  But the current shifted from a westerly direction to the south and increased in speed and carried them farther away from shore. Nansen had known about the current but hadn’t realized its strength, otherwise they would have put in farther east, off Cape Dan. They were twenty miles offshore. In spite of their challenges, Nansen sketched pictures of Greenland, and wrote about the glorious evening, the beauty of the northern lights, and the land that looked so near but, with the water currents, was so difficult to reach.

  During the night the swell grew larger and began to break over the ice floe. The ice was shifting, grinding upon itself, and they were being carried out to sea. The floe beneath them had split in two. It was only about forty yards across. They moved camp to another floe, and the waves grew larger and columns of water were forming in the air. Nansen divided the provisions and ammunition into two boats in case one sank. Once again the evening became calm, and Nansen wrote:

  Beautiful it is, indeed with these huge long billows coming rolling in, sweeping on as if nothing could withstand them. They fall upon the white floes, and then, raising their green, dripping breasts, they break and throw fragments of ice and spray far before them on to the glittering snow, or high above them into the blue air. But it seems almost strange that such surroundings can be the scene of death. Yet death must come one day, and the hour of our departure could scarcely be more glorious. (The First Crossing of Greenland, 121)

  For twelve days they drifted on the precarious ice until one morning they woke and saw open water and the shore. The water remained open the whole way except for two small sections of ice, and they landed on Kekertarssuak Island. Nansen wrote that it was as if they had escaped the sea and he now believed that they could begin their trek across the ice cap.

  They were more than three hundred miles south of their initial position. They had to make up that difference, and they had to row north along the east coast of Greenland to be able to gain access to a route that would take them across the ice cap. They pushed north, chopped their way through the ice with axes, and used boat hooks to pull the icebergs apart to create gaps they could pass through. They had to move quickly and push the boats through the ice before the gaps closed and crushed the boats. They continued working their way north.

  When they reached Cape Bille, north of Puisortok, they heard human voices and barking dogs. The Inuit, who were camped there, came out in kayaks and met them with big smiles, and a group of men showed them where to land. The Inuit invited them into one of their tents. Nansen was disgusted with the way the air smelled. And he was surprised to discover that inside the tents the Inuit wore few if any clothes. The Inuit were just as fascinated by Nansen as he was by them, but Nansen and his crew were exhausted. They returned to their own tent, and for the first time in a couple of weeks slept deeply on solid ground.

  They continued to work their way north and stopped to have dinner off Mogens Heinesens Fjord. They found the ruins of two Eskimo homes and stretched out on the grass to sun themselves, then took some Greenland flowers to remember their evening there. They continued northward past huge icebergs, and, as they neared the Nagtoralik Islands, Nansen noted the beauty of the nearby icebergs that were hollowed out to the extent that a ship could pass through the hole. Nansen wrote:

  In these cavities were marvelous effects and tints of blue ranging to the deepest ultramarine in their inmost recesses. The hole formed a floating fairy palace, built of sapphires, about the sides of which brooks ran and cascades fell, while the sound of dripping water echoed unceasingly from the caverns at the base. When one comes across icebergs of this kind, which happens now and again, a wealth of beauty is found in fantastic forms and play of colour which absorbs one’s whole imagination and carries one back to the wonders and mysteries of the fairyland of childhood.

  On August 5, they struggled through the pack ice, which continued all along shore for as far as they could see. They passed Kutsigsormuit and stopped to take a sighting. Sixty feet ahead an enormous block of ice broke off from an iceberg and hit the sea with a thundering roar. If they had not stopped when they did, they would have peri
shed.

  On August 15, Nansen and his crew hauled their two boats out of the water and placed some food and ammunition in the boats, along with Nansen’s description of their expedition so far, which would provide a note for those who might need to come searching for them. The sun was too bright during the daytime, and the snow was soft, so they traveled west in the sunshine of evening toward Christianshaab.

  They dragged their two-hundred-pound sledges up the mountainsides to the top of the Greenland ice cap, and they traveled across rough ice and snowfields laced with bottomless crevasses. They suffered. The ropes they used to pull their sledges felt as if they seared their shoulders. Yet in spite of the enormous challenges, Nansen saw the uniqueness of this world and wrote about its exquisite beauty.

  Or when the moon rose and set off upon her silent journey through the fields of the stars, her rays glittering on the crest of every ridge of ice, and bathing the whole of the dead frozen desert in a flood of silver light, the spirit of peace reigned supreme and life itself became beauty.

  They reached an altitude of 7,930 feet measured by barometer. If they ascended any farther, it would be difficult to continue their measurements, since they were enduring constant winds and bitter cold of up to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And the ice from their breath covered their beards and faces, so it was difficult for them to open their mouths to speak.

  There were days when the snow driven by wind fell so fast and heavy that they had to stay for as many as three days in their tents. Nansen used a sextant and map for navigation, and as he adjusted their course he decided to aim for Ameralik Fjord, to the south of Godthaab. Dragging the sledges each day was exhausting, so they made sails from pieces of the tent floor, rigged them to the sledges, and skied beside their wind-driven sledges.