That afternoon he took a long walk alone. The ship’s company had trooped over to Villaen to see the Christmas tree that Aage Bertelsen had put up and to drink coffee—but Wegener was in no mood for company and went outside.
Today I conferred for a long time outside with the dead-still air, (it is now blowing again) and enjoyed the silence of the polar night. How cold and silent lie these hard rock hills—once polished by enormous natural forces! Nothing moves. Even the sea lies in icy rigidity glittering under the moonshine that penetrates, with difficulty, through a veil of ice crystals. So it is along the whole endless extent of the East Coast of Greenland. Only in that black speck down there, in the Danmark, the sight of which, with its masts leaning over to starboard, is so familiar to me, is there life and movement. Otherwise silence, nothing but silence—dead silence. Only one natural force is at work here, and it works quietly but incessantly—the cold. Its goal is to turn all Nature to stone. Slowly but inexorably the ice-crystals grow, and the running drop freezes. The air itself becomes more and more sluggish. At the moment, it seems as if this work is complete. A living animal in the picture before me would be unthinkable, outrageous. The ice begins to groan and ache. The tide is coming in. The pulse of the sea still penetrates this icy armor. But will the cold succeed in silencing even this life spring? The dogs suddenly make their presence known, destroying the picture. Now I notice that in my light clothing my ears are almost frozen, that poetry must give way once more to reality. But I plan to afford myself this pleasure in the future more often. For this to happen, of course, I must be alone, completely alone.”118
6
The Arctic Explorer (1)
GREENLAND, 1907–1908
This is really a gypsy life we lead. We are pinned down by bad weather, and have eaten an unbelievable amount, from which fact one can see that our daily rations, morning and evening, are insufficient, at least for conditions like this. So I stuff myself as full as I can. My foot wraps under my kamiks have, remarkably enough, held together. I can now change them for the dry pair. My finger [badly frostbitten] is now better—most of the skin has sloughed off. Countless minor injuries, all healing well.
Wegener’s Journal, 18 April 1907
In late December 1906 Mylius-Erichsen had accepted and reviewed Wegener’s scientific plan for 1907, but in January Mylius told him that he would not, after all, play a significant role in the “Great Sled Journey to the North,” the excuse being that there were “not enough good dogs.” Wegener would instead be allowed, at most, to make some maps of the regions immediately north or south of Danmarkshavn. This was simply another in an endless string of changes of mind and of plan on Mylius-Erichsen’s part, and Wegener, resigned, took the disappointment in stride: “It will be interesting anyway, when I get to do some independent cartographic work.” What was harder for him to bear was a growing sense of isolation from the rest of the expedition. He still could not comprehend the Danish way of doing things. They had partied incessantly at Christmas, but “the New Year began without ceremony, just punch and cake and ‘Happy New Year and thanks for the Old.’ There were no speeches. I cannot imagine on a German expedition the leader not seeing and taking the opportunity to say something about the results achieved and the prospects and hopes for the expedition.”1
Wegener drew up a new year’s assessment of his own work and congratulated himself on what he had attained. He was proud of his meteorological station and data collection, as well as the monthly twenty-four-hour measurements in the crow’s nest (taken also simultaneously on the deck and at sea level—with the stark temperature contrasts in the first 50 meters [164 feet] above the surface). He was certain they would arouse interest in Europe. The yield of aerological data, from his kites and balloons, was “respectable,” and he hoped to crack the problem of midwinter flying to get more records in the coldest months in winter 1907/1908. The atmospheric electricity measurements had been a disappointment, but there was still hope, and he had the solid magnetic observations from Germania Haven. Then there was the harvest of photographs of cloud forms and inversions, as well as landscapes. “Of everything that 1906 brought me, these [magnetic observations and photographs] matter most to me. And is not this personal scale ultimately the only standard?”2
Yet, notwithstanding his Christmas resolution to “go it alone,” he fretted at his marginal place in the expedition, a separation reinforced by his inability to speak or be understood in Danish. He could see how things could be improved and knew he could be playing a substantial role if only “I had the use of my voice!” Unable to play a steering role in this expedition, he dreamed of expeditions to come. He indulged himself frequently in reveries of what it would be like on a future German expedition: “What a joy it would be to work in those circumstances.” And what a joy it would be to be listened to, and someday even to be obeyed. He fantasized about the independence of command but admitted to himself, “When I get back I’ll still be too young to lead an expedition, but perhaps I could go with Drygalski to the Antarctic, and make sled trips there.”3
He was, indeed, still too young to lead, as he often had reason to note. Even Freuchen, his nominal assistant, went his own way. Freuchen was in charge of changing the paper on the thermograph at the remote station, the “Thermometerberg” on the 132-meter (433-foot) hill inland from the shore station. Because Freuchen (like Wegener) was stubborn about obtaining measurements, he had badly frostbitten his forefinger. Wegener then ordered him to wait for a break in the weather before changing the paper, so as not to injure his hand further, but Freuchen paid him no heed, even enlisting Mylius-Erichsen to go with him—and of course he again badly froze his finger, which reddened and lost all feeling. Wegener just gave up and rationalized it away: “He’ll live through it somehow,” he wrote in his diary; “everyone has to learn through his own experiences.”4
The work was always his solace. In January, he managed to get kites with meteorographs aloft on six different days, and each time he got his apparatus back with an intact record. He was determined to obtain a full calendar year of aerological observations in 1907, and to this end, as a part of the scientific plan he filed with Mylius-Erichsen, he had enlisted the ship’s engineers in helping him man his kite winch. Both Ivar Weinschenck (1880–1963), the first engineer, and Andreas Koefoed (1882–1951), the second, would work with him throughout 1907 in maintaining and operating the winch. Once trained in the scientific part of the enterprise, they would be able to send up some balloons or kites while Wegener was away doing independent cartography.
Although the aerological results were encouraging, they were brutally difficult to obtain, as the following suggests:
Even those familiar with the special difficulties of night ascents accomplished in Europe can scarcely begin to imagine how much force of will it takes to carry out these measurements here—the primitive equipment, the complicated manipulations and tinkering connected with the hauling out and assembly of the kites, the attaching of the measuring apparatus, the temperature and wind measurements and so on, all of it done in pitch darkness and deeply drifted snow at temperatures more than 20° below zero [−4°F] with winds that, even if they are rarely more than 10–15 m.p.s. [23–33 mph] still in Arctic regions have to be classified as storm-winds. The results are invariable: after a short time one is forced, with the lantern blown out, with frozen fingers, toes, or nose, and with eyes glued shut with snow, to stumble back to the house.5
Such difficulties were daunting, but the work outdoors was preferable to what had now become the bane of Wegener’s existence: sewing. Mylius-Erichsen had set everyone (except those already in the north laying down depots) to work at sewing—sleeping bags, provision bags, clothing. It was one of the expedition’s plotlines that they should “live off the land,” and they had all agreed to work at nonscientific tasks on board the ship. Yet this was more than Wegener and many of the others had counted on. In early February the morale of the expedition, already low with winter depression, fe
ll lower still, and the discontent with Mylius’s leadership, or lack thereof, was as obvious as it was ominous. Wegener, in his diary, put his finger on the basic problem: Mylius-Erichsen was not a scientist. He was interested not in science but in geographic discovery and exploration and the planning and recording of his own exploits. He didn’t know enough science—any science—to talk with the scientists on their own terms and thus encourage and advance their scientific work. Because he was not interested in science, he sacrificed it at every turn to advance his own goals. “It is a fundamental misuse of the expedition’s resources,” wrote Wegener, “and has forced everyone indoors. Koch sews like his life depended on it, and cares not at all about his science. The painters don’t paint, they sew.”6 At least, he consoled himself, he was allowed to do his sewing in the “Villa,” far from the turmoil and racket of the ship, and beyond earshot of the increasingly vocal arguments taking place there.
The time spent with needle and thread at least gave an opportunity for thoughts of the future. Wegener was making “career plans” and, as is often the case in the young, these shifted easily and often. The magnetic observations, with which he had recently been so pleased, now seemed a bore. “Meteorology, especially meteorological optics and flying kites, is still the field in which I excel, and which I pursue with the greatest willingness and enthusiasm.”7 He was also increasingly drawn to the idea of going to the South Pole and was making expedition plans with Koch. As they sewed their way through the month of February, Wegener grew more and more entranced with the idea and put together an elaborate expedition plan, in which Koch encouraged him. While Koch was an experienced dog driver, his Icelandic cartographic experiences had given him even greater respect for the capacities of the Icelandic Pony. He had tried to bring them along on this trip, though the attempt was forestalled by the lack of room for transport. (Shackleton would use them in Antarctica with success.) It was a great pleasure for Koch and Wegener to plan a compact, highly organized expedition with scientists in charge—a fitting contrast to the sprawling and often rudderless enterprise in which they were currently enmeshed.8
Wegener was now convinced that his future lay in polar exploration and travel, and his inspiration was a blend of personal ambition and nationalistic fervor. Lack of polar success had been a sore point in Germany since the 1860s, when August Petermann had funded the ill-fated Germania Expedition, in whose faltering footsteps Wegener had already trod. As late as 1899, at a meeting in Berlin to promote Drygalski’s Antarctic plans, the great geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905) lamented that “men of German nationality have been no more than supporting players” in polar exploration, and he bemoaned equally “the paucity of candidates in Germany suitable for the task of leading an expedition, willing to risk everything, absolutely determined, yet of solid scientific worth.”9 Wegener himself wondered, as he sewed, “Is it really impossible for Germans to carry through a successful polar expedition? I believe,” Wegener confessed to his journal, “that my determination to take part in this expedition will be decisive for the course of my life. The winter night is now over [the Sun reappeared on 9 February] and in place of my weariness I am convinced, more than ever, that I will ‘stand to the colors.’”10 In his own mind, he was cast in a new role: a German polar expedition leader-in-training, someone who would someday raise the German flag in polar regions.
Wegener’s patriotic and nationalistic feelings turned his mind toward the future, but the Danmark Expedition already had a nationalistic purpose of its own. Overtly, it was designed to produce “Glory for Denmark” and so on, but less obviously it was also there to lay sovereign claim for Denmark to this huge stretch of the coast of Greenland and its adjoining waters. It was the latter aim that had helped finance the expedition and gained for it royal patronage. With Norway’s independence from Sweden in 1905, Norway was in a position (as a sovereign state) to lay claim to Northeast Greenland, where Norwegian sealers, whalers, and fishermen had toiled for centuries. Moreover, the American explorer Robert E. Peary (1856–1920) had for years been moving relentlessly up the northwestern coast of Greenland to its tip (Cape Morris Jessup, N 83°39′, in “Peary-Land”) and had established a verifiable U.S. claim east of it at Cape Clarence Wycoff (N 82°05′). Mylius was aware that Peary had left the United States in summer 1905, to make a bid for the North Pole from Greenland in spring of 1906. These territorial disputes were substantial. These close competitions go far to explain Mylius’s willingness to suspend all scientific work in winter 1907, in the service of logistical support for his plans of exploration and “conquest.”
In spite of his sewing duties, as the daylight increased, Wegener’s ability to pursue scientific work grew with it, and he seized every moment, including the time he might otherwise have devoted to his journal. This document, never ample, holds only about ten cursory entries for the first three months of the year. This literary drought could be expected given his rising spirits: expedition journals and diaries, in general, become prolix when things are going badly, and they dry up when the work is intense and things are going well. In February Wegener managed ten kite ascents, and the Teisserenc de Bort meteorograph, in use since October, continued to perform beautifully. On the last day of the month he fulfilled his quota of sleeping-bag sewing, spent five hours sending up and winching down a kite, and then stood the monthly twenty-four-hour weather observation watch in the crow’s nest. This duty would have fallen normally to Peter Freuchen, but his hand was still so badly frostbitten that he was incapable of taking the readings.
In March, in the midst of final preparations for the trip north, Wegener still pushed the aerology program fiercely. He was avidly investigating that part of the atmosphere we now call the “boundary layer” or the “friction layer,” where wind speed and direction are strongly influenced by the frictional drag of the surface of Earth and the temperature is influenced by the heat flux (and convective turbulence) close to the ground. This layer typically extends up about 600 meters (1,969 feet), above which height one enters the “free atmosphere.” At Danmarkshavn, Wegener was discovering that the boundary layer usually topped out at about 500 meters (1,640 feet), above which the prevailing northwest wind blew steadily. Consequently, he could lower the altitude of the average flight, saving both time and excruciating struggle with the rimed and frozen cable, and still obtain an accurate record of the prevailing wind and, where the air was stable, of the layering. His thermograph was still picking up dramatic temperature inversions, a record enhanced by the need of the men to rest frequently as the kite was winched down, giving the thermograph residence time at successively decreasing altitudes.
Of greatest interest to Wegener was the complexity of the atmospheric layering, which made a mockery of the notion of a convectively mixed and adiabatically simple lower atmosphere. He had, at Lindenberg, played a minor but real part in the documentation of the tropopause and the stratosphere, and he had written a paper on the turbulence at the boundary of an inversion a kilometer or so above the ground. Now he was extending those observations to atmospheric phenomena much closer to Earth’s surface. On 21 February he had observed, in the face of the rising Sun, a series of refraction anomalies and associated mirages caused by complex layering in the first tens of meters above the surface: the Sun was distorted and appeared to be made of several parallel bands offset from the disk. Such observations were a way of documenting the layering very close to the ground, where the aerology apparatus was useless and one could only observe, sketch, and photograph—the last being his favorite method.11
At the very least his observations were providing ammunition for those (like his teachers) who argued for the absolute necessity of the aerological approach to atmospheric physics. Surface observations reflected the effects of the topography and its temperature and were no guide at all to the “free atmosphere” a kilometer above, or even the character of the boundary layer more than a few meters above the measuring station. One could not proceed on the basis of
“theory”—one had to measure. More than this, however, Wegener was carrying out the most thorough aerological investigations ever attempted in high latitude and extreme (surface) cold. Even if these observations brought no theoretical novelty (though they might yet do so), they were a station record that would give the first annual summary of the behavior of the atmosphere—up to a kilometer above the surface—within 15° of the pole. For the time being, his task was not to sort out the phenomena and find the simplicity behind the complex appearances, but rather to document apparent complexity to a degree that it could not be ignored.
With the arrival of March, Wegener found himself suddenly caught up once more in the expedition. His “minor role” was now to be a “major role”: Mylius-Erichsen had changed his mind again. Wegener had signed on to this expedition as a physicist and a meteorologist, but he had admitted to having done some geology, and it was in the latter role that he now found himself cast as a player in the ten-man team making the “Sledge Trip to the North.” There was a real geologist along on the expedition, Hakon Jarner (1882–1964), and neither the expedition records nor Wegener’s diary indicate why Wegener rather than Jarner was chosen for the role of geologist in the northern trek. Jarner had made a number of sledge journeys in the fall while Wegener was hanging about Danmarkshavn. It would appear that Koch, who shared with Mylius-Erichsen the choosing of the sledge teams for the push north, had his way here and had intervened strongly on behalf of his friend and now, in some sense, his protégé.12
Wegener found himself wishing at this time that he had brought along on the expedition something to read. He didn’t mean novels; he meant evolutionary theory and cosmology, subjects of great scope “especially suitable for expeditions such as this, and especially when you have the opportunity, after reading, to discuss with others what you have read.” He wished he had some Darwin to read, some Haeckel, or even Bölsche’s popular evolutionism, as well as some astronomy and cosmology books.13 Wegener was an idealist and a Kulturträger—a “bearer of the culture”—and at Danmarkshavn he found himself lacking the literary and philosophical tools he needed to integrate this great quest he was on with these larger cultural and historical themes. He wanted to see his work not just as “exploration” or “physics” but as a part of the great struggle of mankind to understand its place in the world: something he and his generation could say to themselves without a hint of irony; he missed the books that would set his activity in this expansive context. “I don’t have any use for novels,” he wrote; “I don’t find any release in them.”14
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