Some days later, the company spotted a ‘very large mountain’ in the west, and set out across the ice ‘in the belief that we were advancing towards a new land.’ This was in fact an undiscovered island, and so was named Axel Heiberg Island after one of the expedition’s sponsors. A few days later, the group set up camp below two mountaintops for which they found it difficult to agree on a name:
Early in the morning a name more descriptive than tasteful had been suggested for them. Fosheim, who on several occasions had shown himself to be the most gifted advocate of modesty of the expedition, said nothing, but his face promised ill. He went on pondering all day, and when in the evening an allusion was made to the same name, he declared indignantly it would not do at all; it was too ugly. No, they should be called ‘The Two Craters’ (‘De to Kratere’), and so they are to this day. Virtue has had its reward.
Around Easter, the crew gave the new places they discovered names such as Paaskelandet (Easter Island), Skjærtorsdagskappet (Cape Maundy Thursday) and Langfredagsbugten (Good Friday Bay). They gradually made their way northwards and, as the land began to bend around towards the east, they made some observations to determine the westernmost point. ‘When I got back I found Isachsen observing for longitude, and as he had already been lucky enough to get a meridian altitude we had thus determined both the longitude and latitude of the spot,’ wrote Sverdrup.
One day, Sverdrup climbed up to a lookout point in order to ‘get a view over the ice’ and spotted ‘something greyish-blue far away in the west. What could it be? It must be new land.’ Isachsen and Hassel were sent west ‘to pay the new land a visit.’ There, they reached an island they named Amund Ringnes Island, but didn’t stay long–they returned to explore the south and east coasts of Axel Heiberg Island, and the sound between this and Ellesmere Island.
In April of the following year, 1901, Isachsen and Hassel turned back, making their way south across Amund Ringnes Island towards a high mountain that turned out to be on a neighbouring island already named North Cornwall by the British, and so named the sound between the two islands Hassel Sound. Not long afterwards they discovered a neighbouring island, which they named after Amund’s brother–Ellef Ringnes Island. From the southern tip of this island they spotted yet another island, which they named after the king of Denmark–King Christian Island–with Skagen as its northernmost point. The sound between the islands they named the Danish Sound. At the north-westernmost point they reached, Isachsen finally had a bleak, flat, scree-covered piece of land named after him: Isachsen Land, with Cape Isachsen as the final outpost.
The group set out on more excursions, and reached the expedition’s northernmost point when Sverdrup and Per Schei, the expedition’s geologist, travelled to Greely Fjord between Ellesmere Island and Axel Heiberg Island, and didn’t stop until they had reached 81 degrees 40 minutes north. Isachsen set off back towards North Cornwall, south of Amund Ringnes Island, to map the island’s northern coast. On 30 July 1902, the expedition began its journey back to Norway.
In April the next year, Sverdrup travelled to London to give a presentation to the Royal Geographical Society, who awarded him a gold medal for all he had achieved. After Sverdrup’s speech, one of the event organisers said: ‘We looked upon that part of the Arctic regions as so peculiarly our own that we spoke of it as if the Queen’s writ was free to run through it to the North Pole. But we can no longer make that boast; Captain Sverdrup has been there, and he has discovered other lands farther north, so that we cannot look for any immediate increase to the British Empire in that direction.’
Sverdrup believed that Norway should have laid claim to the islands he and his crew had discovered. Canada had neither explored nor laid claim to the area, nor settled any of its citizens there, and so in accordance with the rules of the day had no right to it. But King Oscar II had little interest in barren lands in the Arctic, and so no claim to the area was made–to Sverdrup’s great disappointment.
SVALBARDI | ‘When we look at the map and think about what the Kingdom of Norway once was, we must recognise that over time our country has been woefully reduced, parts of it given away, pawned off and forgotten,’ wrote Isachsen in an article about Arctic exploration. He was thinking of the Arctic islands–Bear Island, Greenland, Jan Mayen and Svalbard–that he believed had belonged to Norway in ancient times. And he wasn’t alone–towards the end of the 1800s an increasing number of historians asserted that Norway had ‘justified sovereignty and right of ownership of the Polar islands,’ basing their claim on the Norse sea voyages and settlements, and Icelandic chronicles that described a new land, Svalbardi–‘the cold coasts’–discovered in 1194 and identical to the group of islands Willem Barentzs sailed around 400 years later–or so the historians believed. Isachsen agreed, concluding: ‘All Norwegians would feel diminished to see the flag of a country other than Norway waving over Spitsbergen.’
After the Fram docked safely in Norway, Isachsen served for two years in the French Army. But when his desire to map more uncharted areas of the Arctic grew, he chose Spitsbergen–as the group of islands is still called to this day–and managed to equip two private expeditions to the area in 1906 and 1907.
Isachsen journeyed to north-west Spitsbergen, to Kapp Mitra, Kongsfjorden and Prins Karls Forland, where he and his crew pulled sledges containing 280 kilos of equipment across glaciers and up mountaintops in order to map the land. The expedition explored an area of almost seven square kilometres during just two brief summer months, sprinkling forty-nine Norwegian names across the region as they went. The Norwegianisation of Spitsbergen had begun.
After the expeditions, Isachsen and Fridtjof Nansen attended a meeting of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss the claiming of the islands by Norway. Everyone was rather constrained, but in 1909 Isachsen was given state support to undertake new expeditions, since Norway had interests in the north that included whaling, fishing, sealing, tourism and mining. The obtaining of accurate nautical charts and topographical and geological maps would make it possible to use the available natural resources more effectively, Isachsen believed, and the expeditions themselves would strengthen Norway’s position in the area.
The Norwegianisation of the area continued with a map Isachsen created in 1910. The English Geographical Journal had agreed to print the map, but the fact that Isachsen had given new Nordic names to all the places that had previously been named by the English and Dutch infuriated the journal’s editors. They printed the map with a note that many of the names differed from those on English maps. Others were also offended by the fact that Isachsen had named the sea between Norway, Iceland and Svalbard the Norwegian Sea, and so derisively referred to it as ‘that which Isachsen and certain Norwegians have chosen to call the Norwegian Sea.’
The First World War called the European borders into question, and in the spring of 1919 Isachsen was asked to travel to Paris to assist the Norwegian delegation during the peace negotiations. Here, the Svalbard Treaty gave the islands to Norway in 1925, and one of the first things the country did was change the area’s name from Spitsbergen to Svalbard in recognition of the theory that the islands were in fact the Svalbardi that had been discovered 731 years earlier. The Norwegianisation was complete–and the Dutch and William Barentzs dethroned.
This period of Norwegian history became known as one of Arctic Ocean imperialism. Expeditions were dispatched to the north and south to defend Norwegian interests–to Greenland, Franz Josef Land, Jan Mayen, Bear Island and Antarctica: ‘On Norwegian expeditions to Antarctic and Subantarctic regions, possession has been taken of several stretches of land in the name of the King of Norway […]. Bouvet Island was occupied on 1 December 1927 and taken under Norwegian sovereignty by royal decree on 23 January 1928, and Peter I Island, which was occupied on 2 February 1929, was taken under Norwegian sovereignty by royal proclamation on 1 May 1931,’ wrote Isachsen in the book ‘Norvegia’ rundt sydpollandet. Norvegia-ekspedisjonen 1930–1931 (‘Norway’ Around the
South Pole. The Norway Expedition 1930–1931). The expeditions had journeyed to these waters to undertake meteorological and oceanographic surveys to create maps for the whalers, and to look for Truls Island, the Nimrod Islands and Doghery Island–all of which were marked on maps but did not necessarily exist.
Norway had started whaling in the Southern Ocean in 1905. ‘The difficulties for the whalers were however not only that there were so few maps, but also that the few that were available were deficient and inaccurate,’ wrote Isachsen. After many accidents and shipwrecks, the Hvalfangernes Assuranceforening (Whalers’ Assurance Association) began to publish maps of the South Shetland Islands, South Georgia, the South Orkney Islands, the South Sandwich Islands and the Ross Sea. Later, they also began to publish maps of the hunting grounds. ‘To these maps, which show the entire ocean surrounding the South Pole, the whalers may add their experiences, currents, ice limits, banks and coasts. […] When the whalers come home in the spring, their new information will be collated and used to create new maps, which the whalers will then be able to take with them when they return to the south in late summer,’ wrote Isachsen.
EPILOGUE | At this time, the British disputed Norway’s right to Jan Mayen, claiming that their countryman Henry Hudson had discovered the island long before anyone else. Shortly before his death, Sverdrup would see the Norwegian authorities arguing with the British, asserting that in that case, Norway was entitled to the Sverdrup Islands, as they were now known. In 1930, the British chose to acknowledge Norway’s right to Jan Mayen–fourteen days after Norway acknowledged Canada’s right to the Sverdrup Islands.
A reconstruction of the world’s first map based on photographs taken from a plane–a map prepared by the British military prior to the attack on the Germans in the French village of Neuve-Chapelle in 1915. The map was regarded as a great success–although the attack didn’t go as planned, it laid the foundations for the use of aerial photographs in the creation of maps.
AS SEEN FROM ABOVE
Neuve-Chapelle, France
50° 35′ 4″ N
2° 46′ 52″ E
When the battle was over, more than 20,000 soldiers were dead, injured, missing or taken prisoner from the battlefield, and the village of NeuveChapelle was just a name on a map. Wednesday 10 March 1915 dawned with a light snowfall that soon thickened into damp fog; nonetheless, British aircraft took to the air to fly over enemy positions, bombing railway lines and advancing reinforcements while the artillery aimed their guns at the German targets. At 7.30 a.m. the British launched the biggest artillery attack in history, pulverising the German trenches. In his diary, British officer Herbert Stewart wrote: ‘The earth shook and the air was filled with the thunderous roar of the exploding shells. To the watching thousands the sight was a terrible one: amidst the clouds of smoke and dust they could see human bodies with earth and rock, portions of houses, and fragments of trench hurtling through the air.’ In just thirty-five minutes, the artillery fired off more ammunition than that used by 500,000 British soldiers over the whole three-year duration of the Boer War fifteen years earlier.
The First World War was not like previous wars. Industrialisation had given rise to a broad range of new, powerful weapons such as machine guns, grenades and poison gas, in addition to new vehicles including tanks, submarines–and planes. Prior to the battle, the Royal Flying Corps–the air arm of the British Army–had defied the weather to take a vast number of aerial photographs of the German positions. ‘My table is covered with photographs taken from aeroplanes. We have just started this method of reconnaissance, which will I think develop into something very important,’ wrote Brigadier General John Charteris a few days before the attack.
The photographs were placed side by side to create a mosaic of the landscape. The army–and the Royal Engineers in particular–then assisted the anti-aircraft artillery in creating a map based on the photographs, with red and blue lines denoting attack plans and artillery targets. This was the world’s first map based on aerial photographs.
THE WRIGHT BROTHERS | On 17 December 1903 a cold, light breeze blew across the long, flat beaches of Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina, USA, where four men and a teenage boy stood observing a group of inventors attempting to make a spindly-looking plane take flight. The inventors succeeded–Orville Wright covered a stretch of thirty-seven metres in twelve seconds in history’s first-ever powered flight.
Did Orville and Wilbur–the Wright brothers–consider this breakthrough the start of what would take human beings ever higher, until we would eventually crash through the atmosphere and travel out into space? Or were they simply two inventors with a good idea? Probably both. The plane that took flight that Thursday was the result of work the brothers had started as young boys in 1878, when they were given a toy by their father–a kind of helicopter made from paper, bamboo and cork, operated by an elastic band. After they played with it so much that it fell to pieces, they made their own.
The idea of humans learning to fly was in the air when the Wright brothers were growing up, and many inventors were experimenting with various devices. Hot air balloons were already well-established–the first successful hot air balloon flight had taken place as far back as the year 1783. Eleven years later, the French Army sent a man up in a balloon to obtain an overview of enemy positions, and in 1859 French officer Aimé Laussedat developed the first camera specifically created for mapping purposes. Clambering up and onto the church towers and roofs of Paris, he photographed easily identifiable locations at least twice and from various angles, and used the images to draw reasonably accurate maps. This work laid the foundations for photogrammetry–the science of ascertaining measurements from photographs. During the American Civil War, the northern states established the Union Army Balloon Corps, whose leader demonstrated photogrammetry techniques to President Abraham Lincoln in 1861 by floating 150 metres above the White House lawn. The United States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers used the view from hot air balloons to draw maps based on aerial observations.
Many people lost their lives during the first experiments with various aircraft. The Wright brothers concluded that an effective steering mechanism was the key to successful flight–Wilbur studied birds, and noticed that they changed the angle of their wingtips when turning to the left or right. The brothers believed that the same principle would work on aeroplanes, and after experimenting with gliders developed a system that enabled them to turn left and right, move up and down and roll from side to side–a system still in use today. The next step would be to attempt to take off in a motorised plane.
In 1908, the brothers travelled across the Atlantic–by boat–to demonstrate their invention to the sceptical Europeans. During a demonstration for the king of Italy, a film camera was attached to the aircraft for the first time and recorded a film clip, just under two minutes in length, of what almost nobody had ever seen before: the world–in this case an Italian village with cows, a man on horseback and the ruins of a Roman aqueduct–as seen from above.
The Italians were the first to use aircraft in warfare. After declaring war on the Ottoman Empire, they launched a reconnaissance mission beyond enemy lines in October 1911, and in the following November were the first country in the world to drop bombs from a plane. A year later, they took the first aerial reconnaissance photograph–the pilot was only able to take one image, since it was impossible for him to simultaneously operate the plane and change the glass plate (the medium used as film during this period).
The French were the first to develop an aircraft specifically for aerial photography. In 1913, the British magazine Flight reported from Paris Aero Salon that one of the planes in the exhibition was named the Parasol, because its wings were attached in a higher position than on other aircraft: ‘This arrangement has, of course, the very great advantage that an excellent view of the country is obtained, as the planes [wings] are above the pilot’s head, and he thus has an unrestricted view in a downward direction […] behind the observer
’s seat is situated a special camera, which is pointed straight downward, so that photographs may be taken while the machine is in flight. The camera is operated from the observer’s seat by means of a single string, which serves the double purpose of actuating the shutter and the plate-changing mechanism.’
AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY | The First World War started with the Germans marching through Belgium and Luxembourg, before they defeated French attacks and moved quickly towards Paris, where they took up a position just seventy kilometres from the outskirts of the city. British and French aircraft noticed that the German forces had split in two and so attacked in the gap, forcing the Germans to retreat to north of the River Aisne where they dug trenches to hold their ground–establishing both the Western Front and trench warfare, with each side locked into positions stretching hundreds of kilometres from the North Sea and Belgium, through France to Switzerland.
Upon arriving in France in August 1914, the British forces possessed three maps based on surveys performed during the Napoleonic Wars 100 years earlier: two of Belgium and north-eastern France and one of France alone. They planned to update the maps using traditional methods: ‘I hope none of you gentlemen is so foolish as to think that aeroplanes will be usefully employed for reconnaissance purposes in the air,’ said a general with the cavalry.
Members of the cavalry were used to acting as the army’s spies–venturing behind enemy lines and reporting on movements and reinforcements–but static warfare in the trenches provided no such freedom of movement. The plane therefore became the answer to the question of how to keep the enemy under surveillance.
Theater of the World Page 23
