That night, at their first bivouac, almost 24 kilometers (15 miles) from Danmarkshavn, Mylius-Erichsen commended Wegener on how well he had coped with the dogs, admitting to the bashfully pleased novice that he was surprised at his success. Wegener, aware of his position, thanked Mylius-Erichsen for his help and professed his earnest desire to learn from him how to be a good dog driver. He wrote in his diary, “This little bit of flattery was not too far from the truth.”85 He had to win Mylius-Erichsen’s good opinion if he was to have any chance of participating in the sled journey to the north, or in any forays onto the Inland Ice; all his efforts were directed to making a good impression.
On the evening of the second day, they arrived at the Walrus Spit and disturbed a pack of wolves “in the midst of their evening meal,” having torn their way into the remaining cache of walrus meat. Their howling, Wegener learned, was exactly like that of the dogs—“just as if there was another expedition nearby.” Their time at the spit was brief, and they loaded what they could carry of the walrus meat on the sledges and set out again the next morning.
Wegener, on the return trip, actually exhibited a modest talent for driving dogs. He learned to harness them to the sledge in the fanwise array used by Greenlanders. He learned how to use commands to make the dogs run in good order (and to use the whip to keep them from crossing and tangling their traces). He learned how to make the team jump up and run, as well as how to stop. Rather than congratulating himself, however, he was filled with admiration for the dogs, astonished to discover how much they liked to work. “It is unbelievably interesting how anxious they are to pull the sled. It is quite moving. Hour after hour they run like this without stopping, as if their only thought was to pull the sled.”86 He also learned, with Mylius’s help, to tell one dog from another and to see their individual personalities. All this was to the good, in and of itself. It brought him down from numerical abstraction to the world around him and anchored him in everyday life, a life he had to master if he was to have any significant part in the exploration of Greenland.
What might have passed as a triumphal return was canceled by events at Danmarkshavn. While Mylius and Wegener had been in the interior, safe under the lee of Germania Land’s mountains, the first great winter storm had come down on the coast from the north. Freuchen, Wegener’s assistant, informed him as soon as he climbed off his sled that, in the hurricane-force winds of the past two days, the entire weather station they had constructed on the “Thermometerberg” at 132-meter (433-foot) elevation a half kilometer away from the “Villa” had been blown away and all the instruments destroyed. There was more. The kite-house Wegener had made of packing crates had collapsed, demolishing three kites. His main thermograph and hygrometer had stopped working. There were other casualties—the leather roof on his magnetic station had blown off, and his instrument was now buried in snow and frozen; the same had happened to Koch’s astronomical observatory. He could not even get into the Villa by the doorway, as the entryway had drifted full; he had to enter through the loft window until they could dig the house out. It was three days of constant and exhausting work before he could get back to his diary to note, ruefully, “Yesterday and today we saw—probably for the last time—a trace of the Sun.”87
He was energized by his trip with Mylius, however, and even the destruction of some of his instruments could not dismay him. He also noticed, with some relief, that he was not the only one suffering depression. He looked at his bunkmates in the Villa with new eyes. Aage Bertelsen, the painter, was so depressed that he couldn’t even get out of his bed. Lundager (the botanist) could interact easily, but he didn’t rise until noon and was very quiet. Even Koch was having a taste of it, after a big fight with Mylius-Erichsen.88 After this shouting match, Koch fell into a funk that lasted several days—a long time for him—and he and Alfred discussed the psychology of the winter depressions, how they could be set off by some trivial encounter or event and send one into a tailspin of indefinite duration in which work became agonizingly difficult. Koch’s opinion was that it was a direct effect of the darkness and that one could not expect to get through the winter without adapting to the darkness by sleeping more—and that this was acceptable as long as one could get up and do some work each day.89
Alfred put most of his energy in the following days into preparing for the trip south. He sewed himself a pair of Kamiks (fur overboots) out of reindeer skin “that would have fit an elephant,” and he extended the length of his sleeping bag, having discovered at Hvalrosødden that he couldn’t stay warm in it. He worried about his instruments, which had suffered frost damage, and worried about having to suspend all his observations for several more weeks, but mostly he worried about getting frostbitten on the sled trip. He confided to his diary, though not to Koch, that he thought the trip too long, too dangerous, and too late in the year. Yet he still had to prove himself to Mylius if he wanted a part in the northern exploration the following spring. “It is going to be hellish … the trip will be seen as having been especially difficult—and rightly so. Our normal temperatures are already −20 to −22 degrees [−4° to −8°F], and by 1 December (we have to count on being gone that long) it will go drop to −25 [−13°F]. There will certainly be days of −30 and −35 [−22° to −30°F].”90 These predictions turned out to be harrowingly accurate.
Sled Trip to Germania Haven
Wegener’s sled trip south to Sabine Island, the site of the Koldeway Expedition of 1870–1871, lasted from 13 November until 4 December, and it gives a good snapshot of the hardships and dangers endured in expeditions of this kind, in return for the most meager sort of scientific results. It was also one of the very few (and perhaps even the first) “winter-night” trips undertaken by European explorers; Mylius-Erichsen always had his eyes open for any bankable “first.” Wegener was to come back from it a changed man—harder, more confident, and much more realistic about what he could hope to accomplish.
The trip started on 13 November, having been held up for nearly a week by storms. The party consisted of six men, each driving a sled. Wegener’s group incorporated himself, Koch, and Gustav Thostrup, the second mate of the Danmark. The other group had Mylius-Erichsen, Karl Ring (the ice pilot), and Jørgen Brønlund, Mylius’s long-time Greenland traveling companion. They began well, and with the wind at their backs and the dogs rested, they flew south.
Wegener had the usual troubles of a novice and felt keenly his uselessness the first night as they camped. He still knew almost nothing about setting up the tents, finding the appropriate gear in the pitch dark, assembling the stove, managing and feeding the dogs, or stacking the provisions and gear where the dogs could not get to them. He also found, on the next day, that his imagined “talent for driving dogs” was a still-unrealized possibility; he had trouble restraining his young team. When the party reached a food depot at Cape Pechsel, 80 kilometers (50 miles) south along the coast, an extra crate of provisions was added to his sled to slow his dogs down. Now his inexperience with sled driving created the opposite problem, and his dogs slacked off and fell back, so that Koch and Thostrup constantly had to stop and wait for him. In the midst of his troubles, he found moments of aesthetic pleasure: “It was fascinating to travel at night, completely alone, when one could see, at most, 100 meters. The sleds glided soundlessly across the flat snow and ice desert. Above all I had the impression that I was floating in a boundless void. I had to stare at the 16 hard-working hind legs of my dog team to convince myself that we were actually moving across the snow with our usual speed.”91
Conditions worsened on the third day, and before long they were in the midst of the “hellish” trip he had feared. Mylius had prudently led them away from the coast onto thicker ice; even in November the action of the tide was capable of breaking up the inshore ice and leaving dangerous open leads of water. The consequence of accepting the safety of older, thicker ice was, however, that they soon ran into “pressure ridges”—walls of ice several meters high and badly broken, like
stone rubble. As they approached the inshore island known as “Haystack,” Wegener’s inexperience took its toll, and he toiled miserably. Koch was patient, noting charitably in his diary that “the ice around Haystack was easy enough to get over, but presented difficulties to those unpracticed in managing dogs and sledges.”92 Even where Wegener could follow the others into gaps and low spots in these ice ramparts, his sled repeatedly lurched forward from the pull of the overeager dogs and then went off balance and slid backward, smacking into his legs and running over his feet.
In the afternoon of the third day, as he struggled to catch up to Mylius and Brønlund, he was only able to overtake them because their sleds had collided and their dogs had become entangled. As they untangled the harnesses, the dogs signaled the presence of a bear, and Mylius and Brønlund grabbed their guns and ran off to shoot it, leaving Wegener with three sleds of excited, wildly baying dogs. Brønlund shot the bear and called for Wegener to come help them. Suddenly Wegener found himself, in the dark, at −20°C, helping to skin and butcher a polar bear. As he worked, he noticed that the wind was picking up and the temperature dropping, and within moments it was snowing hard. With a storm in the offing, they had now to find shelter, and so they drove the sleds toward the shore of Haystack to camp on land. They pushed their sleds uphill, looking for shelter, and finally pitched their tent in the lee of some large rocks. The wind gusts were frequent and powerful, and as they were unloading the sled, a blast of air picked up Wegener’s sleeping bag and carried it away. He ran after it and found that it had blown up onto a rock overhang, where it fluttered in the wind like a flag, and he had to wait there until it dropped back to earth.93 When he got back to the camp and turned to the sled again, he noticed that one of his prized “elephant-kamiks” had also blown away.94
The next day, the sixteenth, was worse still. It was overcast, pitch-dark, and windy, with blowing and drifting snow. Brønlund advised staying put, but Koch, anticipating the next storm, wanted to get farther south, and Mylius agreed. They set out along the shore of the mainland on the “ice foot,” the belt of ice that forms along a shore between the high- and low-tide marks. Such travel, when available, had the advantage of snow cover, and therefore stability for the sled runners, without the struggle entailed by pressure ridges farther out over the water. At one point, however, an obstacle forced Mylius to leave the ice foot and drive onto the new, glassy, inshore ice, and before he could do anything to prevent it, the wind took his sledge and began to blow it away from the shore across the nearly frictionless ice, dragging the dogs with it. Wegener and Thostrup, following closely, soon found themselves in the same predicament, unable to get traction for their sledge runners, “at the mercy of the wind and with no semblance of control.”95
If Wegener’s group was having a bad time, Koch, Ring, and Brønlund were worse off. No sooner were the sleds under way again than Koch had an accident. “On continuing through the screw-ice [pressure ridge] to reach the land, Koch was so unfortunate as to fall down from the top of a hummock over his own sledge. One of the sledge uprights struck him in the breast just at the spot where he was carrying 2 chronometers in a bag against the bare chest. The glass of one of them was broken with the blow, and the chronometer at once stopped.”96
If Brønlund had not been there, the groups might never have found each other. It was snowing hard and blowing a gale, and Koch’s and Ring’s eyelids were so glued together by the snow that they could barely see. Then Brønlund stopped and shouted to them that his dogs had scented something (not a bear) that could only be the tracks of the others. Koch thought he was making an ill-timed joke, but Brønlund left them (and his sledge) and disappeared into the dark, returning in fifteen minutes with the news that he had found sledge tracks on a patch of snow-covered ice that led onto the land. Following a trail only Brønlund could see, they soon arrived at the camping place: “We had just pitched our tent in the lee of a huge boulder, and were making some coffee,” wrote Wegener, “when to our joy, up came the other party, who had found us by virtue of Brønlund’s keen senses.”97
Things could have been worse, and they soon were. That night a blizzard set in and blew furiously for two days, trapping them in their tents. At least this allowed some variety in their diet. They had been living throughout the trip on boiled dried codfish, bread, butter, pemmican, and coffee. On the seventeenth, with time to kill, they made a blood pudding with macaroni and had some dried fruit—a seemingly small thing, but under such pressure any slight variety becomes a notable event.98 Toward evening of the eighteenth they were able to emerge and repair their sleds, the lashings of which had worked loose and were in need of daily attention.
The nineteenth was clear and calm, and they felt the bitter chill in the air as the temperature dipped to −28°C (−20°F). It took two hours of walking about with a lantern to round up the dogs, which had scattered to find shelter from the wind; eventually they found most of them, but not all—two dogs had run away completely, a bad sign.99 When they finally got going again, they had good luck, driving south across relatively smooth ice for almost 85 kilometers (52 miles), to the southwest corner of Shannon Island, in a single day. Here the groups, by prearrangement, split up. Mylius went east with Brønlund and Ring to search out depots and food caches from previous expeditions on Shannon Island. Koch, Thostrup, and Wegener headed south to Germania Haven.
Wegener was learning rapidly about traveling in these conditions. He had seen the outcome of trying to push on in bad weather: danger, disorientation, overexertion, and little progress. He liked and admired Koch, but he recognized the danger latent in his impatience and his tendency to press on when it was neither wise nor safe to do so. (Wegener could also rest easy about that chronometer incident a month before—now that Koch had smashed one as well.) Mylius-Erichsen, for all his faults as an expedition leader, was an experienced polar traveler. “Mylius-Erichsen’s Principle—and I think it a very good one—is to travel only under good conditions, not stay out too long a time, but travel as fast as you possibly can.”100 This last condition was important now, as it stayed bitterly cold and it cost them much to move. Wegener was already losing weight—he could feel it—and only some of this was dehydration; the rest was the stark inability of their rations to match the metabolic cost of their exertions.
Pushing their reluctant dogs hard, by midnight they were within a few miles of their destination, and on their way to learning one more lesson about the danger of “staying out too long.” Koch, anxious to reach Germania Haven to make camp, took the group off the difficult ice foot along the east coast of Sabine Island and onto the new, glassy ice on Pendulum Strait. With the wind at their backs they moved very fast—Koch far out in front, Thostrup off to Wegener’s right. Wegener noticed that the ice was getting thinner (darker) but holding them well—then suddenly he heard Koch yelling, and Koch appeared out of the blackness and threw himself on Wegener’s dogs to stop them, as Wegener pulled back on the sled, stopping it just before a lead of open water. Koch’s dogs had seen it just in time and stopped, but his sled had swung around them and was now in the water, floating. Everything on it was soaked—his sleeping bag, the food crates, the toolbox. Worse, without thinking, Koch had tried to grasp the iron runner of the sled to pull it out of the water, and the runner, at −20°C, had blistered the inside of all his fingers on one hand—freezing it and rendering it useless. With Thostrup’s help they hauled the sledge out of the water. Of course, everything wetted froze solid in a matter of minutes. They had a terrible time getting ashore—the ice foot was so broken up that the sleds could not pass over it, and they had to unload all three sledges and carry their loads, one box at a time, over the ice jumble at the water’s edge, often falling through thin ice into the shallow water. It was hours past midnight when they threw themselves down to sleep.
Wet and exhausted by their struggle to set up a bivouac, they slept until near midday; when they awoke, they used the faint light off to the south to look for a way past the
open water. There was none—lead after lead opened away across the full width of the strait. It would be impossible to reach Germania Haven from the east side of the island. It would be necessary instead to go completely around it: back north, then west, then south again, hoping to approach Germania Haven from the west—a trip of at least 60 kilometers (~40 miles). There was no alternative. After a hurried meal of pemmican and coffee, they set out.
They drove back north along the shore of Sabine Island, and things went well until afternoon, when they turned west and south into Clavering Strait, between the island and the shore of Greenland. When, after more hours of struggle, they reached the south shore of the island, a few miles west of where they had stood twenty-four hours before, they found themselves once again on new, black ice—now so thin that each footfall of the men and the dogs caused the microorganisms in the seawater to phosphoresce—“which added an air of pure fantasy to the whole situation.”101
Koch was afraid that they were going to fall through the ice and perish, so he pulled them inshore as far as they could go, stopping frequently to probe the ice thickness with his large knife. At 11:00 p.m. they finally saw the ruins—like old barrows—of the German observatory buildings looming out of the darkness. They pitched their tent next to the ruin of the German magnetic observatory. As they were bedding down at 2:00 a.m., Koch, exhausted, pulled out his two remaining chronometers to wind them—his nightly ritual—and discovered, to his shock and immense frustration, that they had both stopped. Nine days of intense, dangerous struggle—for nothing. Without chronometers it was impossible to make a geodetic measurement of the longitudes. The entire trip was, from his standpoint, futile, wasted, superfluous.102 They had arrived at Germania Haven and not fallen through the ice, but the geodetic work and the principal scientific point of the trip had been lost. What to do? Koch was severely hypothermic and frostbitten and could not get warm in his wetted/frozen sleeping bag.
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