The aerial age; a thousand miles by airship over the Atlantic Ocean; airship voyages over the Polar Sea; the past, the present and the future of aerial navigation

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Earth Exploration and Air Navigation ... 13

II Shipwrecked in Spitzbergen 21

Chapter I Earth Exploration And Air Navigation

For a century or more man has had two great aspirations in the field of progress — one to conquer the unknown parts of the earth, the other to conquer the air. He had already possessed himself of most of the surface of the globe, and now he wished to take possession of the remainder. He had learned to travel over the land, and to sail the sea. Now he wished to navigate the great atmospheric ocean which everywhere surrounds and covers the land.

It happened that my activities in the field of earth exploration brought me into the field of air navigation. At first, aerial navigation was with me only a means to an end, and the end in view was attainment of the North Pole — • to push farther and farther forward the frontiers of man's knowledge of the earth.

My plan and effort were to take the progress that had been made in the iaeronautic art and so adapt, develop and specialize it, that it could be made to achieve something in the world's work apart from mere experimentation in aeronautics alone. Up to this time all experiments in aerial navigation were for no other purpose than to demonstrate what could be done in the air. The attempt which was made by my associates and myself to travel through the air to the North Pole, instead of over the land, was the fii'st effort to put aerial navigation to actual use in the performance of valuable scientific work. Attainment of the Pole and exploration of the vast unknown region lying about it had come to be looked upon as a part of the task which the progressive and enterprising nations had taken upon their shoulders.

To reach the North Pole had been the ambition of man through the centuries. It was the last really great thing to be done in working out the destiny of man to explore, conquer, and know all of the earth that was given to him to live upon and to rule.

The quest of the North Pole — and the South Pole — is a law of gravity within man. It is the all-compelling instinct to know all of the unknown; it matters not where — ^in the depths of the sea, high in the air, in the mystery of the origin of life, in the greater puzzle of the hereafter, in the whisperings from the occult world.

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in the geologic records of ages past, in the minutiae of chemistry, in the vastness of the solar and stellar systems, in the infinitude of space — everywhere and as to everything, from the planets to atoms, man vrants to know, feels that he must know.

The North Pole stood as the center and symbol of a vast, unknown region. To make this unknown known was one of the highest ambitions of man. The utilitarian value of that knowledge is perhaps nothing. Its scientific value is a matter of opinion and discussion. But the true scientific spirit is: "Wherever in all the realm of physics there exists an unknown, a missing link, a dark spot, go find what is there, and discuss its value afterward in the light of the knowledge gained."

It had seemed to me that if we could make actual use of aerial navigation in the work of geographical research and the extension of knowledge simply for the sake of knowledge, that would be an achievement doubly worth while because it would combine and realize two of the most noble aspirations of mankind. And my faith that this achievement was practicable is stronger now than it ever was before.

The task was not an easy one. I never thought it was. Attainment of the North Pole by any method is extremely difficult. The best

I

proof of this is that the brave and resourceful men of many nations tried it for two centuries, without success. Recently it seemed to many of us the time had come to adopt new methods, to make an effort to substitute modern science for brute force, the motor-driven balloon for the muscles of men and beasts stumbling along like savages in their heroic struggle to accomplish the almost impossible. All such effort is worthy ; but not the least worthy, I think, is the one which tries to take a step forward from barbarism and make one science serve another.

Always keenly interested in all geographic exploration, and Arctic work in particular, about seventeen years ago I read again the story of a voyage toward the North Pole which had been made by the celebrated English traveler, Captain Parry, in 1827. He had reached North Spitzbergen with his sailing ships. Thence, in the summer season, with heavy ship's boats weighing a ton or more each, only ordinary sailors, and no special equipment, he had set out to sledge and pull the clumsy boats over the rough sea ice toward the Pole. Despite the handicap of heavy weights under which he had struggled, fair progress was made. Indeed, Captain Parry reached latitude 82:45 north, which stood as the record of man's northerly advance till Lockwood and Brainard of the Greely r

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expedition beat it about thirty miles in 1884, in North Greenland.

Believing that if Parry could do as well as this in the summer season, with such heavy boats, much more might be done with lighter craft and a more modern equipment, I visited Norway in 1893 to investigate conditions and possibly to pre nare for an expedition of my own. Consulting many Norwegian skippers who had sailed in. Spitzbergen waters, and gaining encouragement from them, I returned to America, secured the necessary capital, organized an expedition, chartered an old ice-steamer in Norway — she was named the Ragnvald Jarl — and built three boats of aluminum for use on the trip, with special sledges and other equipment designed to facilitate travel over the polar pack in the summer of the year.

In April, 1894, with three American companions, Charles R. Dodge, O. B. French, from the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and Dr. Mohun, we were at Aalesund, Norway, the famous fishing port of the west coast, getting our ship ready for her voyage. The remainder of our crew was made up of Norwegian scientific men, athletes, and sailors experienced in Arctic ice. April 30th we sailed from Aalesund, and four days later from Tromso. Though warned not to attempt to reach Spitzbergen so early in the year, we immediately steamed away from the Norwegian coast and set our prow to the northward. We were favored by an unusually open sea. Ordinarily, as I have since learned in many voyages to and fro, one cannot be sure of getting through to North Spitzbergen before the middle or latter part of June. This year we were able to reach and enter the Danish Strait, near the extreme northwestern part of Spitzbergen, May 10th, one of the earliest passages on record.

Spitzbergen is an uninhabited group of islands, some of them quite large, lying between the 76th and 81st parallels of north latitude. It thus extends about 350 statute miles north and south, and it has a breadth of about the same extent. It is true Arctic country. There is no foliage, save stunted brush in the southern part. The mountains are covered with eternal ice, and the valleys are filled with glaciers. Some grass grows in the sheltered parts during the short Arctic summer, and flowering poppies and mosses are seen here and there. Upon the ^ mosses many herds of reindeer live.

Spitzbergen was two centuries ago the seat of rich right whale fisheries. The catch of seal and walrus, killing polar bear, and gathering the down of the eider duck from their myriad nests in the rocky cliff, were other industries carried on by

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hunters, penetrating the wilderness of snow and ice with their little sloops from Norway, Holland, Russia, and Scotland. In the palmy days of the whale fisheries the Dutch established upon Smeerenburg point, a long strip of sand on the north shore of the Danish Strait, a summer city. And what a city it must have been ! The only industry was the trying out of whale blubber — ^hence the name, Smeerenburg. Hundreds of whaling ships made this port their rendezvous. Houses were built, and thatched with Dutch tiles. Cafes, dance halls, and worse places to get money out of the sailors existed. At times the population rose to three or four thousand souls, all men save a hundred or two women — of a certain class. There was much drinking and fighting, the country being then as now without laws or police authority or supervision. But this reeking city of blubber existed only in summer. In the autumn all went home to Holland, to come out and try their luck the next year. A large number of graves scattered about on Smeerenburg point and the adjacent lands, indicate the lawless life led by the denizens of that strange summer town, and their defiance of all laws of right living. At that time it was deemed almost sure death to attempt to endure a winter in Spitzbergen, and scurvy did claim for its

20 THt AERIAL AGE

victims a large per cent, of those who, caught by shipwreck or storm, were unable to get away in the autumn.

Scurvy is no longer a terror of the Arctics. Men winter far north in health and comfort if they only provide themselves with proper food, bathe occasionally and take a proper amount of exercise.

Chapter II Shipwrecked In Spitzbeegen

We paused but a few hours in the Danish strait, little thinking that moment that it was to be the scene of so much of our future activity, struggle and disappointment. We found on shore there a good Arctic house which had been built in Norway, taken down and reerected on the shore of the strait by an English sportsman named Pike, who had passed a winter in it hunting bear and foxes. Before proceeding farther north we established a depot of supplies in this house, to fall back upon in case of disaster, and left a man in charge of it.

As a result of this incident I a little later got my first taste of newspaper sensationalism and misrepresentation. The man we left in charge of our depot in Pike's house was a Norwegian scientist, who had asked to be permitted to remain there, as he wished to carry on geological work in the neighborhood. We offered to leave one man with him for comrade, but he objected to that, and preferred to remain alone. There was indeed no reason why he should not remain alone. It was perfectly safe. He had a good house, tons of provisions, a gun and dog, and was not likely to be lonesome, because in a month or so the sealing sloops from his own country would be running in there two or three a week, as was their habit in the middle of the summer. And yet upon returning to Europe in the autumn I was amazed to discover I had been charged in the press of Europe and America with having cruelly abandoned a poor Norwegian scientist to starvation at my depot! This astounding accusation had reached the press through a party of English sportsmen who had visited the camp in midsummer, found the Norwegian in good health but a bit lonely, and who on their return had reported it was necessary for them to give him supplies in order to save his life. Right savagely was I denounced for my wickedness by the good journalists of many countries. The facts were, of course, that the poor abandoned man had a house full of the best food money could buy — enough to have kept a score of men a whole year — and the only supplies his English visitors had given him to save him from starvation was a case of Scotch whiskey, not a drop of which was left by the time we were able to get back to the depot.

Still favored by ice-free seas, but threatened with shipwreck by a heavy storm, we steamed

CRUSHED BY THE ICE 23

northeastward along the north coast of Spitzbergen, and soon found ourselves at the Seven Islands, which are the most northerly of the Archipelago, just under the eighty-first parallel of latitude. But a few miles to the north lay the polar ice-pack which no ship can penetrate and navigate, and so we prepared to carry out the original plan of the expedition, which was to make headway over the pack toward the north with sledges knd our light aluminum boats.

We did indeed set out, and at first made fairly good progress along the land ice, looking for a place where the pack was not so rough and so much broken up for launching our little caravan upon the rugged frozen surface of the polar sea. But in a few days two things happened which seriously interfered with the success of the trip. A storm came out of the northwest, drove the pack-ice down upon the land with terrific force, heaping it mountain high, and, worse still, catching our steamship in a vice and wrecking it. Captain Bottolfsen, an experienced Arctic navigator, was j:esponsible for the safety of the ship. At Waldeirlsland, near where the great Nelson, then a midshipman, had killed a bear while with an English exploring ship years before, Bottolfsen had anchored the Ragnvald Jarl behind a projecting tongue of heavy ice, where it seemed she would be safe. But after we left the ship, and when the storm came down from the northwest, bringing the great ocean pack with it, that tongue had given way, the ship was caught in the jaw, great masses of ice went right through her hull as you would stick the tines of a fork through an egg-shell, and the Bagnvald Jarl was no more.

Messengers were sent out and overtook us some miles to the northeast. I hastened back to the ship, and found her a totaf wreck. She was held up only by the ice that had pierced her ; when this was withdrawn she was sure to sink to the bottom of the sea. I went aboard her, and with great difficulty made my way to what had been my cabin, but which was now a mass of wreckage, and where my trunk was swimming about in the water. Captain Bottolfsen and some of the sailors helped me rescue the trunk, all the time protesting that the ship was likely to go to the bottom at any moment. In that trunk I had my evening clothes, probably the only case on record of a dress suit being wrecked in the ice of the far north. It vm^ here because I had it with me in England and Norway ; had taken my trunk upon the steamer because I wanted the papers and other clothing it contained; and though I had no possible use for evening clothes in the far north had permitted

CRUSHED BY THE ICE 25

it to remain where it was as the easiest solution of the problem of what to do with it.

Upon shore Capt. Bottolfsen and his men had erected a house, half of timbers from the wreck, half of sailcloth, had installed therein the ship's galley, and were not so very uncomfortable. They had saved some of the stores, and were in no immediate danger of famine. Having assured myself they were safe, and after making an arrangement with Capt. Bottolfsen to take a small boat and proceed with a picked party to the south in search of a ship, I returned to my sledging expedition, running on Norwegian ski or snowshoes.

We decided to go on with our trip, though forced in prudence to modify the plan in important particulars, because our ship had been destroyed behind us, and there was no certainty of finding another. The same storm which had wrecked our vessel had piled the ice mountain high against all the islands in that part of Spitzbergen, making it impossible to get out upon the normal pack, where travel, though difficult, is still practicable. Advised by my Norwegian comrades that we might find better ice farther east, we traveled in that direction. After several days of arduous work, pulling our heavy sledges and boats, we found it necessary to abandon our sledge dogs and take to open water in our aluminum boats. These dogs were not a success. I had resolved to experiment with the draft dogs one sees doing such prodigies of labor in the towns of Belgium and Holland, and at Liege in the former country had bought two score of the beasts and shipped them to Norway. They endured quite well the voyage to the Arctic regions, and were strong enough to pull the loads. But they could not get accustomed to their strange surroundings. They were plainly homesick, just as I have seen many men when taken from their customary life and put into the somewhat lonely and trying work of the far north. Worst of all, these dogs suffered frightfully in their feet. The snow and ice worked in between their toes, drew the blood, and our trail for days was marked with streaks of red which hurt me perhaps even more than it hurt the poor beasts who left it there as they ambled along unwillingly with their loads behind them. It was a relief when open water and the need of taking to boats made it necessary to abandon them. Instead of leaving them to starve we mercifully shot every one of them.

This was toward the end of May. The temperature was about ten to twelve degrees below freezing. But for some of us it is not easy to give up old habits. I found it so with the habit

CRUSHED BY THE ICE 27

of bathing. Just before we came to the belt of open water requiring us to take to the boats there chanced to be near us, one day when we stopped for luncheon, sitting upon our sledges, a most inviting natural bath tub. The top layer of ice, about six feet in thickness, had parted and left an opening down to the older ice about eight feet in width and perhaps twenty feet in length. This crystal bath-tub had been partly filled with snow water, melted by the heat of the sun — for freezing in the shade and thawing in the sun is a common occurrence in the summer and late spring of the Arctic regions. This pool of purest water, glistening in the sunlight, proved too fascinating to be resisted ; and amid the astonishment of my Norwegians I stripped to the skin and had a five-minute dip in the limpid pool. It was cold, and that's the truth; but the most disagreeable thing about it was not the coldness of the water, but the snow squeezing up between my toes as I walked from the sledge to my icy tub and back again. Later on a number of us bathed in the Arctic Sea, diving off the ice, greatly to the astonishment of some seals that were swimming about hard by.

We went on as far as the Platen Island, lying off the coast of the Northeast Land of Spitzbergen. There we made a comfortable camp, finding plenty of driftwood that had come all the way from the rivers of Siberia with the currents of the Arctic Sea. A herd of reindeer walked into camp one day, and obligingly stood stock still till we had killed as many as we thought we should need. Poor innocent beasts. That part of the Arctic region is seldom visited by hunters because of the difficulty and danger of ice-navigation there; and these reindeer aj)- parently had never seen men before and knew no fear.

There iis a tradition that all the reindeer in Spitzbergen have descended from a herd of forty which Baron Nordenshiold of Sweden took to the north coast from Lapland about fifty years ago, thinking to use them instead of dogs to draw sledges over the pack-ice toward the Pole. One stormy night all his deer escaped, and thus his polar expedition was ruined. But I think the evidence is clear that reindeer had always existed in Spitzbergen. Whenever I have been along the coast I have found reindeer horns, some of them apparently hundreds of years old. In that country wood and bone rot very slowly. The skeleton of the Dutchmen we saw in their exposed graves about Smeerenburg point were so well preserved as to indicate but a few years of age, though they had lain there a couple of centuries.

Chapter III Struggling Against The Impossible

From the Platen Island we made a desperate effort to get out upon the polar pack and start toward the Pole. But it was simply impossible. The storm of which I have spoken had driven hundreds of millions of tons of ice down upon the land — an example of an irresistible force encountering an immovable body — and the result was mad chaos. Ice-blocks as large as houses piled high in the wildest confusion. Between them deep pockets filled with treacherous slush and brash ice upon which we could get no firm footing and through which the water could not be forced. We had many narrow escapes whilst working in this mass of frozen stuff over the deep sea. Many times we pulled one another out of the water. After these cold baths we went on with our work as if nothing had happened, not taking the trouble to change our soaked clothing for dry. It is nothing when you get used to it.

Defeated in the main purpose of our expedition, we had to think of returning to that part of Spitzbergen where we could hope to find a ship. So we started back for Walden Island. On the way we had many adventures. The advancing summer rotted the ice. For miles and miles we could make headway only by shoving the aluminum boats through the slush-ice, we half walking, half swimming alongside, jumping in the boat when we came to an open pool, out again and leaping from ice cake to cake in the broken-up fields. We were wet to the middle from morning till night. We did not mind it so much when the sun shone and the weather was fine. But it was pretty dreary work in wind and rain, and worse still in the thick fogs, so dense that we could not see much more than a boat's length.

It was particularly awkward to camp at night — as we were sometimes forced to do — ^upon ice so rotten that we could not step a couple of paces from the boats without danger of going down into the salt water underneath. Many such duckings we all had, and sometimes it was not easy to pull a man out after he had gone down in the ice to his middle.

One of my best and bravest Norwegians, Herr Alme, a fine athlete, broke a bone in his foot one day, leaping from one floe of ice to another. He suffered excruciating pain. That night, after his foot had been dressed by Dr. Mohun, I

AGAINST THE IMPOSSIBLE 31

found the poor fellow lying in his boat crying bitterly. When I asked him if he was suffering so much, he replied:

"My foot is easier, but the doctor says I can't walk for a month. That means I can't help pull the boat."

"Don't worry about that. We'll get along all right."

"But — ^but you won't leave me out here in the ice, will you?"

The secret was out. The brave boy knew we would have to drag him in the boat, making our work so much the harder. And he had actually feared we would abandon him to perish out there in the wilderness of ice !

Several polar bear — ^ice-bear the Norwegians always call them — we killed on the way, and so did not lack for an occasional meal of fresh meat. One day at luncheon, sitting on our boat and sledges, we saw an ice-bear trying to catch a seal. The seal was basking in the sun, by the side of his ice-hole; if he was sleeping, it was with one eye open for his mortal foe, the big white bear. The bear was approaching most stealthily. He had gone around to the leeward so that the wind should not carry scent of him to his prey. Hiding first behind one ice hummock and then another, he peered out to see if the seal were still asleep, and then slid along his belly in the snow, afraid of giving the alarm if he rose to his full stature. Thus he advanced perhaps three or four hundred yards, all the time showing more and more caution. At length he resorted to tactics which showed more than instinct and must be put down as animal reason. Apparently he realized that as he slid himself along through the snow he was well-nigh invisible because his coat was as white as the surrounding. "But my black nose!" he must have thought. "Will not the seal see that, and take the alarm?" And so this clever bear reached out with one of his forepaws, covered his black snout with his white foot, and shoved himself along with three legs.

At last there was no himimock between him and his intended victim. • With a mighty leap Mr. Bear rushed upon the seal. Just as it appeared to us the hunter had his dinner safe in his clutches, plump into the ice-hole rolled the dark, fat seal. No one ever saw a more angry bear. He stuck his head down into the hole, so deep that it seemed he could never get out again. When he realized he had lost his dinner his rage knew no bounds. He roared and tore up the ice and snow and snorted and even pulled out tufts of his own hair. After a time he cooled down. And soon it was evident he had made up his mind that if he couldn't get a square meal

AGAINST THE IMPOSSIBLE 33

he could at least have the next best thing — a nice bath. And so he wallowed for several minutes in one of these natural ice-pools like the one I had taken a dip in some weeks earlier.

Pretty soon he came round where he got our scent, and slowly and cautiously approached us. The polar bear is almost blind in summer. He depends vastly more upon smell than sight in hunting his food, which consists almost entirely of seal. But he could not quite make us out. He had never scented such game before. So he came up slowly, pausing every few rods to rise on his haunches and move his head to and fro in the air, sniffing and trying to solve the riddle. At this juncture Paul Bjoervig, one of our Norwegians—^you will read more about him in these pages— thought to play a joke on the visitor. Getting down in the snow in front of our sledges he crawled along on all fours, tlirowing out his arms in imitation of the flippers of a seal, and perfectly mimicking a seal's short gnmts. The bear >vas now close enough to see this bogus seal. This time he felt sure of his dinner I With ^ a mad rush he leaped toward Bjoervig, who was lying there in the snow laughing. As the bear rushed his prey two of our guns cracked and the beast turned in a flash and made off at a speed of about forty miles per hour. I had told the men not to kill him. We already had all the bear meat we needed; and, besides, I felt a sincere sympathy and admiration for this beast who had had the wit to cover his black snoot with his white paw while stalking the seal.

After some weeks of struggle we arrived at Walden Island, and found the sailors there all well in their camp. Capt. Bottolfsen had gone south in one of our aluminum boats to find a ship and summon help. After waiting some time, and seeing no signs that the ice was likely to leave the coast and permit a vessel to come to us, we started south with two aluminum boats and the heavy lifeboats which had been saved from the wreck of the Ragnvald Jarl. Storms came on, the ice was drifting violently to and fro, and we had many close calls from being crushed and wTccked. Once in the nick of time we managed to pull the boats upon an iceberg, while masses of ice were crashing together all about us. There we were held prisoners till the wind changed and permitted us to find a little open water in which the boats could be launched again. Finally we reached the edge of the drift-ice, and there found a sealing sloop which had come as far north as she could get looking for us. In her we returned to our depot at Virgo Bay, and thence to Norway.