The next morning, a Thursday (as if such a thing mattered there and then, and if it could be called a morning, with day consisting of a faint band of red on the far southern horizon), the party set out to do something, anything, to get themselves out of the tent and put some meaning back into the excursion. Koch’s program was, as Wegener noted in his scrawled diary, already “drowned,” but there was still work that could be accomplished.103 This was important to Wegener, who still measured everything by the amount of scientific work performed. They hiked a short distance along the peninsula on the east side of the harbor and searched throughout the forenoon for the cairn built by Captain Koldeway in 1870, purported to contain record of the Germania Expedition. From a scientific standpoint this was not essential, but the leaving and the finding of such communications had enormous emotional importance for members of polar expeditions. It was a way of making contact with history, of creating a human context for their own action in the midst of a dark void. If the Danmark group could not, on this try, extend Koldeway’s geodetic measurements, they could at least connect with his history and perhaps leave a mark of their own for others to find. In this aim, however, as so often on this trip, luck deserted them. They found the spot, but the cairn was broken open and there were no documents inside (they were never found, though many subsequent expeditions made the attempt to discover them).
That night a storm came down from the north and pinned them in the tent all the next day. As difficult as it was to move about in the cold outdoors, it was harder staying in the tent in their sleeping bags; they were cold, hungry, and dispirited. Wegener did not even bother to make a diary entry.
As the storm blew itself out toward evening on the twenty-fourth, Wegener and his companions had a pleasant surprise as Jørgen Brønlund appeared suddenly at the tent flap. The news was good. Mylius-Erichsen had located the depot at Bass Rock. This was no ordinary depot. It had been prepared in 1901 as a cache of emergency supplies for the Baldwin-Ziegler Expedition and had been checked by a support ship in 1905. Brønlund produced tobacco, of which he had found a huge parcel; he was delighted: like all the members of the Expedition except Peter Freuchen, he was a heavy smoker. More important, from the standpoint of Wegener and the others, was the hoard of chocolate candy Brønlund delivered. They were starved for fat and sugar and had been living on coffee, sausage, and dried fish for weeks. They stuffed themselves with as much as they could eat.
Brønlund and Thostrup left at noon the next day to help Mylius-Erichsen transfer the contents of the depot to a place where they could be ferried back to Danmarkshavn. Now it was just Wegener and Koch, and they could begin to do some science together. Wegener especially wanted to measure the magnetic declination (horizontal variation) and inclination (vertical variation) at Germania Haven. The German expedition in 1870 had made very accurate and extensive measurements of these two quantities, and Wegener wanted to learn the amount of variation in both after thirty-five years. Most of this interest was scientific, but some was also a desire to be part of the (short but very proud) history of German polar science. There was an additional personal reason: Wegener’s old professor at Berlin, Förster, had helped plan the 1870 Germania measurements; they were an extension of his interest in the aurora. Wegener, in preparation for this work, had spent a great deal of time in early October at Danmarkshavn working with a self-recording declinometer, making adjustments and corrections. That instrument, he hoped, would run continuously while he was in the south, and he could then compare simultaneous readings of declination at Danmarkshavn and Germania Haven.
The study of Earth’s magnetism intersected with a subject Wegener knew a great deal about and cared about as well: the motions of Earth’s poles. The geographic North and South Poles of Earth do not coincide (except accidentally) with Earth’s magnetic poles, and continuous measurements had shown a long-term and erratic migration of the magnetic poles—much larger than the modest oscillations of the pole of rotation Wegener had observed in Berlin with Marcuse. Declination measurements aimed to grasp Earth’s magnetic behavior by mapping its motions and currents, just as in the study of the circulation of the ocean and the circulation of the atmosphere, but polar offsets of all kinds, and especially long-term migrations of the poles, were of interest in their own right.
The instrument that Wegener and Koch employed was a magnetic theodolite. This was, in most respects, a standard astronomical theodolite, and Alfred knew very well how to use these instruments; he had evaluated them and even constructed them. The modification that allowed this instrument to perform its special function was a tiny magnetic needle suspended from a fiber inside a glass tube perpendicular to the theodolite mount. Glued to this fiber was a tiny mirror with a scribed line across its face that reflected a scale marked off in submillimeter divisions of the 360 degrees of the compass. To use the instrument (in this case), one aimed the theodolite telescope at Polaris, the North Star. Then one released the magnetic needle to rotate freely, and as it came to rest, one read off the angular difference between the true north and the magnetic north, visible through the telescopic eyepiece as a reflected compass reading.
The observations were simple in theory but quite difficult under these conditions, as Wegener recorded in a trembling hand in his notebook. It was so cold (−15°C [5°F]) that their hands shook as they tried to adjust the instrument: “It was agony to observe in the cold weather.” Because it was an older theodolite without an electromagnetic damper (to lock the needle of the compass immediately once it came to rest, pointing to the magnetic north), every bump or jostle caused the needle to oscillate, and they had to wait for it to come to rest again. Sometimes even the wind started it oscillating again, and there was a good deal of wind. Usually such measurements were taken in a protected area like a hut; here they were out in the open. It was, moreover, so dark that they could barely see the reflection of the mirror scale in the light of the small lamp on the theodolite base.
Koch did what he could to help, but after about two hours he became severely hypothermic and began actually to go into shock, and Wegener had to take him back to the tent. Koch shivered uncontrollably and could not get warm in his frozen sleeping bag, wetted in the accident fours days earlier. There was a little heat from the paraffin stove, but not enough to get him warm. Finally, in the early morning hours, in the shelter of the tent, and with the help of a lot of coffee, Koch began to revive.
Alfred took the time to assess the measurement program in his notebook and to make the calculations from their scant observations (eight in all). Only four of these were at all reliable, and they showed a lot of variation—indicating not compass variation but “more noise than signal.” Without chronometers (they had all stopped) they could neither measure the longitude nor be sure of the time, and Koch seemed too ill to be able to help without risking his life.104
The next morning Koch was significantly better, and they spent a full day measuring the declination and inclination of the compass. That night Wegener took a walk in the moonlight alone: “It made an extraordinarily strong impression on me. I had, here, for the first time in my life, that feeling of desolate, inconsolable loneliness that has so many times descended upon men in polar regions, and brought their work to a paralyzed halt.”105 This feeling of loneliness was intensified by the surroundings. Wegener later told Achton Friis that he had thought constantly about the German expedition while at Germania Haven, where the ruins of the old magnetic observatory stood in the dark twilight like the shattered battlements of some old castle. He also told Friis how he had thought “how often, from this place, in the hostile winter night, must their [the Germans’] eyes have longingly swept the southern horizon, where that glowing-red band of light told them a comforting fairy-tale of the mild sunshine of their faraway homeland.”106
Wegener and Koch were intensely relieved when Thostrup arrived on the evening of the twenty-eighth and broke up their brooding reverie. Thostrup had wonderful news: time to leave! Moreover, he was laden
with spoils from the American depot: dry sleeping bags, blankets, socks, and even finnesko—those marvelous reindeer-skin overboots of Lapp design, which could fit over several pairs of socks and were lined with a dry grass that wicked moisture away from the feet. Best of all, Thostrup had brought another hoard of candy, on which they feasted before sleeping dry and warm for the first time in many days and nights.
The trip back, begun the next morning, turned into a race against the cold. The temperature hovered near −30°C (−22F°). They drove relentlessly, covering nearly 60 kilometers (~38 miles) a day, and on one day more than 80 kilometers (~50 miles) in slack wind and clear skies. The dogs were pulling well, and the moonlight behind the clouds created, for imaginations starved of visual stimulus, “a fantastic scene. Koch hit the nail of the head when he said he wouldn’t have been surprised to see fire issuing from the muzzles of the dogs [with their breath coming in great clouds]. The other sleds slid by noiselessly in the darkness, like ghosts, scarcely visible, and the pale light like that one sees at home before a breaking tempest.”107 Wegener, exhausted, was repeatedly jarred from this Faustian dream as he fell asleep while driving his dogs and was pitched off his sled, waking with a jolt and having to rise and run after it. They arrived “home” near midnight on 4 December, having covered 315 kilometers (~200 miles) in five days.
Reflections at the Turn of the Year
The rest of December was a curious time for Wegener. His mood swung wildly between episodes of furious energy and bouts of apathetic immobility. He pressed on with his scientific program, but he was becoming uneasily conscious of the fact that his scientific results so far were meager and that he had not made a single real discovery. He could see now what Koch had seen long since: that the structure of the expedition worked against serious science; the venture was only nominally scientific and was in reality entirely directed to Mylius-Erichsen’s dreams of great geographic discovery in the following spring. Wegener was learning a great deal, but already, with twenty months still to go before the Danmark left Greenland, he began planning his next expedition.
He spent much time observing himself and his companions and thinking about the winter-night depression that plagued them all and that was proving so deadly to systematic scientific work. “It is a remarkable phenomenon,” he wrote. “It all turns on a single point: deprivation of visual stimuli. One finds such relief if one detects, at midday, the mountains of the surrounding environment, even if only in outline—what an astonishing impulse to action one draws from even a single glimpse!” He found the same phenomenon indoors: “It is extraordinary the lengths to which one goes to find some visual stimulation. With all-consuming interest one examines the photos one has made, and pages restlessly through every available book. How one loves the pitiful petroleum lamp, which hangs over the desk—and how one hates all outdoor work in the blackness.—I think that for any future expedition one should plan, for the winter-night, work that must be accomplished by lamplight.” Thinking of his color camera, he imagined what relief they would all obtain from a slide projector: “It would provide the stimulation we so lack.”108
When not thinking about the psychological constraints on arctic science, he had ample time to reflect on the state of his aerological program. October had been good, though the eleven flights had been costly in effort and frostbite. November, however, had produced but a single ascent, and when he tried a kite ascent on 17 December, the first in more than a month, the results were depressing—he could not get the kite aloft, in spite of tremendous efforts. Looking back over his experiences, he felt lucky to have any winter observations at all: “if you add bad weather to the prevailing darkness—it is almost impossible [to send up kites].… I completely underestimated the difficulties of the winter night. Objectively, these are quite extraordinary, due to the primitive state of my equipment. If I had a decent kite-house, one I could work in, that would help a lot.” Not for the first time he bemoaned the lack of help: “If I had here an interested assistant, as I had in Lindenberg, then I could be sure that in his free time he could take care of the little details, the sum of which lead to insurmountable difficulties. Koch is also annoyed at the lack of a real assistant.”109
Wegener’s hypothesis of lack of “visual stimulus” as a cause of Energielapsus (loss of vitality) in the winter night got a good test on 15 December with a brilliant display of the aurora borealis. Even Brønlund, who had lived in Greenland all his life, said he had never seen anything like it. Wegener reported that in the next days he was “murderously energetic,” and this energy led him, indeed, to one small but real discovery.
On the night of 21 December—the winter solstice—he spent some time observing the Moon, then in its first quarter. He noted that its margins were sharply deformed and that the stars were twinkling (szintillieren) with exceptional brilliance, more than he had ever seen. Something similar had happened near the end of September, and he had noted it in his diary.110 Now he took down off the shelf his copy of Marcuse’s Handbook of Geographic Position Fixing for Geographers and Explorers (1905) and copied out, into his weather diary, Marcuse’s remark that “experience had shown that the higher the latitude, the more the stars twinkle, and more in winter than in summer, and that this must be accounted for in calculating a star’s zenith distance.”111
Wegener had concluded that atmospheric inversions in the first tens of meters above the ground were causing the apparent deformation of the Moon’s disk and the exaggerated twinkling of the stars. He had noted such inversions in kite flights from September on; they were among the most interesting findings in his aerological work thus far. “It is small wonder that in winter and in polar regions such inversions occur, which, with their multiple layers and wind speeds, cause variation in the refraction [of the incoming Moon or starlight].” This was pleasant enough, as well as of some import for his and Koch’s geodetic work, and even allowed him to mention his own work on Helmholtz waves to himself. What interested Wegener most, however, was the sense that he was right and the experts who had written his textbooks were wrong. “The generally accepted method [for reducing the refractive anomaly], as in Pernter’s Meteorl.[ogische] Optik and also Markuse [sic] by comparison of the air temperature and water temperature for observations made at sea is completely idiotic. One must see … that the air and water temperatures have nothing to do with one another, whether measured at the height of the deck or in the crowsnest. The correction-chart on page 58 of Marcuse, reprinted from Koss, with azimuthal wind speed and air-water [temperature] difference is the summit of ridiculousness.”112
The mood that produced the above remarks, at once euphoric and combative, stayed with Wegener the rest of the month of December. He was transfixed by the aurora and tried feverishly to figure out a way to study it. The night watch in the crow’s nest, previously such a burden, now seemed a wonderful opportunity:
I’ve seen the northern lights often enough now that I have a vivid impression of them. When one sees this magnificent phenomenon for the first time, even while being mesmerized by its beauty, one has the sense of being hopelessly overmatched. What am I to measure of this never-still optical phenomenon, playing across the whole sky? No sooner do I aim my theodolite at the exact spot, than the Northlight is gone before I have even made an adjustment, only to reappear in a completely different part of the sky. If I expose a photographic plate, it darts away before making any impression on the plate. It defeats all our instruments!113
Wegener’s desire for an auroral picture became an even bigger joke among the crew than Jørgen Brønlund’s and Achton Friis’s as-yet-frustrated desires to shoot a bear. Peter Freuchen, already harboring the literary ambition that would make him one of the most popular nature writers of the next half century, was in charge of orchestrating the Christmas celebration, and this included a special number of the expedition’s “newspaper,” the “Polarpost.” His effort comprised a variety of goofy and entirely spurious communications, such as the following notice, purporte
dly from Mylius-Erichsen: “Given the currently worrisome shortage of food for the dogs, we will hold a lifeboat drill at 9 am sharp tomorrow.”114 Wegener came in for some kidding, too. Freuchen had aided Wegener in developing the blank negatives that always just missed the aurora, and on the first page of the Polarpost Freuchen therefore included a black square entitled “Kohlenschleppen” (Coal-Hold) with the note, “From the Polarpost’s photographer, Dr. Alfred Wegener, whose specialty is color photography, we have the below-presented extremely well captured photograph of the inside of the coal hold on board the Danmark.”115
Wegener was not normally thin-skinned, but he seems not to have been amused, nor did he partake willingly in the Christmas festivities. On Christmas Day he wrote, “I survived Christmas Eve with my stomach reasonably intact, but ‘one shouldn’t praise the day till evening comes.’ Tomorrow is another day off and the day after too. Only then will this excessive gluttony cease.”116
After the midday meal, he returned to the Villa and worktable, but now his thoughts were of home, and he was struggling with conflicting emotions even here, which led to the following passage in his diary:
Today they [my parents and Toni] will all be home in the usual way with friends, and Kurt will naturally have taken the holiday with them. What will that home look like to me when I return? I think I will send my first telegram with some apprehension. But I also feel that any sentimentality [I experience at my return home] will hardly suffice to hold me back from coming out here again. Out here there is work worthy of a man, work that gives life meaning. Let the weaklings stay home and get all the theories in the world by heart; here outside, to stand face to face with Nature and look it in the eye, to test the keenness of one’s sense in probing Nature’s riddles, gives life a meaning I had never even dreamed of.117
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