Man-hauled sledges (Zugschlitten) had advantages and disadvantages, Wegener decided. The greatest advantage was that the entire time you were under way, nature was before your eyes, rather than the rear ends of a team of dogs. Because you didn’t have to keep your eyes on the dogs (and your whip ready), you could contemplate what was before you. Sledges also were clearly superior in uneven terrain—dogsleds of Greenland design were heavy and intended for flat sea ice, not inland hills and valleys.
Where there were no dogs, there were no dogfights, no wet and impossibly snarled dog harnesses to untangle. The food boxes and leather goods did not have to be stacked at all times so the dogs couldn’t get at them. One didn’t spend every third or fourth day hunting for something to shoot and butcher to give to the dogs. The result was that “you have a lot of time at your camp site. Setting up and knocking down the tent takes no time at all, and leaves a lot of time for taking photos, making measurements, sketching, writing in one’s journal.”58
On the other side of the books was the reality that if there are no dogs along to pull the sled, you become the dogs. Four men pulling a single sledge move at a pace no single one of them desires. The weight is still the weight. On this particular trip they set out with a sledge and gear and provisions weighing 350 kilograms (770 pounds), which meant that each man was pulling 87.5 kilograms (192.5 pounds). It was too much, and on every substantial climb (there were many) they had to break the load in half to be able to pull it.59 Other than the weight, their troubles were the usual troubles so familiar that they endured them without comment: four men trying to sleep in a three-man tent, cold that was just bearable, the reindeer sleeping bags that grew more sodden each day, the monotonous food and not enough of it.
Storestrømmen itself, their first taste of the Inland Ice, was something new. They ascended a glacier on the ninth day of travel and found the surface of the main ice stream to be very rough; it looked like the surface of a sea with heavy swell that had been suddenly frozen. As they moved west, the surface became rougher—all the normal features of a glacier were exaggeratedly huge. They met ice hummocks 10 meters (33 feet) tall—features that normally were only 1 or 2 meters (3–7 feet) high. The official record of the expedition noted laconically that “the ice was full of cracks and fissures covered with snow, so that the men could not see them until they fell in.”60
Eventually, after five days of hard hauling and frequent falling, they established a base camp on the ice stream, unable to budge their sledge further. Wegener and Weinschenck went west on foot. The Inland Ice ended in a cliff adjacent to the ice-free land, a frozen vertical scarp of about 25 meters (75 feet). After much searching, they found a way down and hiked to and climbed one of the nunataker—the steep, rocky hills of what was apparently a huge tract. In the far distance there were many more mountains and a great inland lake filled with icebergs.
Already in March there were alpine plants to collect, fossils were abundant, and the unusual rock itself was eagerly sampled. As in the previous spring, when he had been in the North, these small gestures of natural history seemed so important. The collecting, the photographic documentation, and the cartography were the only things that separated them from some sort of extreme tourism, wildly exhilarating as that might be. Wegener, in particular, seemed to want a scientific rationale to mark each step. He believed deeply in scientific exploration. In any large frame of analysis the scientific results of this and most of the life-threatening trips he took that year were entirely negligible—nothing fundamentally new turned up on any of them. It was the aura of science that connected his daily activities to the great energetic themes of his Berlin Lebensphilosophie and made them meaningful.
They returned to Danmarkshavn on 3 April, to learn the news that they had expected but dreaded—Mylius-Erichsen was dead, as were Lt. Høeg Hagen and Jørgen Brønlund. Koch had gone north with Tobias Gabrielsen in early March. They found Brønlund’s body at the depot in Lambert’s Land. The dispute over where Mylius and Hagen died, why they died, and whether they might have been rescued by a timely effort began immediately and (in Denmark) still goes on today. Brønlund had arrived at the depot in Lambert’s Land at the end of November, a month after the relief party had come looking for him there. At that time Mylius and Hagen were already dead. But all three men were still alive when the search party set out, and even after its return to Danmarkshavn. Indeed, had the search party, stymied by open water at the Mallemukfjeld, tried to go further north by land behind the headland, by mounting the Inland Ice … what then? This sort of speculation haunts every expedition fatality in the Arctic even after all the principals have passed on.
The remorse, recrimination, and second-guessing tore at the crew’s coherence and morale. Plans were floated to send an expedition north to find and recover the bodies, but these had to be given up—not enough dog food, and too far to travel by man sledge. Wegener was deeply moved by Brønlund’s suffering and by his courage as he waited for certain death, making a last entry in his journal, and leaving it and Hagen’s maps where they might easily be recovered. He had used some of the food and fuel at the depot, but his feet were too badly frostbitten to go on, and he couldn’t find his way in the dark. This much was known because Koch had translated Brønlund’s journal from Greenlandic to Danish on the way back, and Wegener later copied the translated extracts into his own journal.61
It occurred to Wegener that this would be a good time to relieve Freuchen at Pustervig. The plan had been to have a companion for Freuchen there at all times. This worked well in the fall and early winter but had failed in the depths of the winter dark: no one wanted to face the wolves, among other things. Freuchen had begun to suffer badly, battling hallucinations and talking to his kitchen implements. Wegener was not exactly at loose ends, but the aerology program had ended with the loss of the last working meteorograph the previous November. He had spent the winter tinkering, on and off, with the remains of two broken meteorographs, trying to assemble a working instrument from them, and he had succeeded.62 Yet there was no appetite for work at Danmarkshavn, and cooperation was hard to come by. With the death of Mylius-Erichsen the decision had been made by Koch and Trolle to go home as soon as the ice broke—the attempt to cross the Inland Ice would have to wait for another expedition.
Wegener was actually taking his own advice. He was of the opinion that a change of scene at regular intervals, with new work, was an antidote to winter depression, and he would even have encouraged competition between teams of scientists rotating in and out of the station to see which team could do the most scientific work. These suggestions he prudently confided to his diary, however: they would have struck his fellow expedition members as the ravings of a madman.63
His first day completely alone at Pustervig was 9 May. “It is a strange feeling, to be so utterly alone under these conditions. Today I heard the cry of a snow grouse while out on a short ski trip, and this was my only encounter with the organic world of our planet—that’s not much!”64
On the next morning, around 11:00 a.m., the valley fog lifted and he made a snap decision to climb the mountain and make the 400- and 800-meter temperature observations before coming back to complete the daily 2:00 p.m. station log. He put on his Tyrolean hobnailed boots and took off. He made it to the 800-meter station and back in two hours. “The rock-climbing was child’s play, and in spite of the fact that I took the time to admire the wonderful vistas, I was back more than an hour sooner than the others [who have made the climb] though naturally you cannot do what I did wearing kamiks.”65
Wegener standing in front of the margin of the Inland Ice of Greenland in late March 1908, encountered while traveling with the group that discovered Dronning Louise Land, a large ice-free area within the inland ice cap. Note that the ice appears as rock, with sedimentary layering, dark coloring, and flow bands. From J. P. Koch and A. Wegener, “Die glaciologischen Beobachtungen der Danmark-Expedition,” Meddelelser om Grønland 46 (1912): 1–79.
He was bursting with manic energy and competitive spirit, not the first Artic traveler to feel that rush of enthusiasm and possibility when twenty-four-hour sunlight replaces twenty-four-hour darkness. In the afternoon, after his observations, he went out again, this time with his crampons and his ice axe, to try a more difficult route to the top. He found a couloir (a steep gully) in the mountain wall, filled with compact snow, the fruit of many avalanches. It was “murderously steep,” but the snow conditions were perfect for his crampons and axe, and the climb was “like going up a staircase.” He made it to the top in three hours and descended in half that: “coming down I was completely one with the crampons and the axe, and descended with a speed that was at times remarkable.66
Two days later, he decided to climb it at night, or rather the deep twilight of the midnight hours, so as to be able to take pictures of the sunrise from the summit. He was taking unbelievably reckless chances climbing alone and untethered under these conditions, but he seemed not to care. He found another couloir to climb, “steeper even than the last one.” He ran out of snow halfway up and had to pick his way over a section of rock, but when he arrived at the top, he decided it was “all in all an easy and delightful route.” He remembered that the northwest face of the Monumentberg was a sheer and overhanging cliff that he had admired from below when mapping in the fjord. He decided to go and have a look from above. He got as close to the edge as he dared (about 2 meters [7 feet]) and looked down. “I believe myself to be entirely free of vertigo, but it spooked me good and properly when I looked down from this unbelievably sheer cliff. It was by a wide margin the most amazing piece of rock I have seen on this expedition.… I rolled a big rock over the edge. It disappeared immediately and I listened attentively for the sound of the impact. It seemed to take an eternity until I heard it land. It gave me goose bumps all over my back.”67 He was in love with the place and climbed it again and again, taking photograph after photograph, framing up vista after vista for his color camera.
He was a man on holiday—from the expedition, from his preoccupations with work, from himself. Kept off his mountain by several days of heavy weather, he read a novel—“the only one here”—though a year before he scorned all novels as providing no release. But something much deeper was at work in him.
Mostly I sit here in the hut and ruminate, smoking pipe after pipe of this awful expedition tobacco. I wonder often about myself, how can I sit here for so many hours and do nothing? I smoke, I listen to the cheerful hiss of the spirit lamp that is my stove, and my reveries carry me from one end of the world to another, from the South Pole with its unexplored continent, to Zechlinerhütte where the lilacs will be blooming just now, to Berlin, to my parents, to Lindenberg. Whether everything will look the same to me when I get back home? Where is Kurt? How are my parents? And then I’m off again, the Chilean Andes, South Africa, New Zealand. It is going to be very hard for me going back there—to bourgeois society, and that indoor clutter, home. It is going to be horrible, to be presented here and there like a polar bear with a ring in his nose. I will in any case see that I do whatever I can to keep from giving any public lectures, or writing newspaper articles.68
He was discovering that he didn’t want to go home, and perhaps not even back to Danmarkshavn. “I’m now completely at ease with being alone, and can’t find anything unpleasant in it.”69 There was so much to see everywhere he went. He wrote in his journal like a man awaking from a dull dream to the fullness of possible experience. “The summer is coming on with force. The dwarf willows have fat buds and even catkins, and just now I saw in the midday sun two fat flies tumbling over each other on the wall of the hut.”70
His diary on the return trip from Pustervig to Danmarkshavn reads like a dream journal. Lundager met him at the halfway point with a sled to help transport the scientific equipment. They traveled at night through dense ground fog that created fantastic mirages. There was a thick coating of hoarfrost on the sea ice—cruciform needles more than a centimeter in length. He wanted to stop and photograph them. “On a future expedition, one could study all the forms taken by the snow cover on the sea ice, especially the ones formed by the wind. It appears here in every possible form from great regular wave systems to the most delicate textures, like moiré fabric.”71 Here was his old fascination, the development of disturbances at any sharp and level boundary surface between two substances of different densities. Here it was the density difference not of ice and snow, but of snow and air. Snow was a form of ice light enough to be sculpted by wind. “When I work up my meteorological results, I’ll have to pay careful attention to the different forms of precipitation.”72
Back at the ship, no one had made any measurements (other than simple station meteorology that almost did itself) since his departure. “I have got the air-electrical apparatus going and have hounded Hagerup into making the magnetic measurements.”73
Wegener started up his kite and balloon flying again with the cobbled-together instrument he had remaining. Even in the mild June weather he had trouble getting anyone to help him, finding himself once again in opposition and an outsider. “Ever since we lost Mylius-Erichsen,” he wrote, “there are some members of the expedition who speak of the [scientific] work with the greatest possible contempt. You can’t cheer them up and they won’t help. I can’t say that I’m all that enthusiastic about the work myself … but between feeling that, and saying loudly to all and sundry that your work is Humbug, is a big step, and, it seems to me a fatal step for men forced to live together in the narrow confines of an expedition.74
With Mylius dead, Wegener’s circle of friends was small indeed. Koch had taken Freuchen with him to do more glaciology on the Inland Ice, knowing how keen Freuchen was for the experience. Lundager, his companion in the Villa, was strong enough to help with the winching, but as Freuchen later remarked admiringly, “he was good company, but I have never met a stronger, nor a lazier man.”75 In any case the window for botany on such an expedition was small, and Lundager was taking it. Wegener was thus often left to this work himself; never one to shirk, he pressed on with the aerology doggedly, making eight ascents in June and five in July.76 He also got one record for free. Hendrik and Tobias, hunting on the drift ice southeast of Cape Bismarck on 1 July 1908, found the meteorograph (“Teisserenc de Bort No, 334”) lost the previous November when the cable had snapped; though the instrument was ruined, the record was readable, and this brought his expedition total to 125 flights spread over eighteen months.
The Danmark came free of the ice on 2 July, and the mosquitoes arrived on the third. They had fashioned bags of mosquito netting to wear over their heads, and Bertelsen and Wegener had taken one of these and made a butterfly net from it. “Since yesterday evening the two of us have worked intensively together—catching butterflies. We have caught nine different species.”77 With the breakup of the pack ice proceeding apace, it was now a waiting game: they would leave when they could. On the tenth three Norwegian sealing ships hove into view and anchored off Cape Bismarck—their first contact with the outside world in two years. There was mail for the expedition, including a letter for Wegener from his parents. “Crammed full of news, most of it good. Thank God things at home are this good, it makes me ever so much happier about the prospect of going home.”78 On 13 July there was open water; waiting until the last moment, Wegener packed up his electrical and magnetic instruments and built a cairn on the site of his magnetic observatory. While waiting for Trolle to decide whether he had enough open water, he began to work up the scientific results of the expedition and produced a concise summary of them and sent them off on the seventeenth with the Norwegian sealers.79
It wasn’t until the twenty-first that Capt. Trolle saw enough open water to suit him and sailed out of Danmarkshavn, not to the east, and home, but straight north. Admiral Georg Amdrup, in his terse, relentlessly upbeat, and laudatory official account of the Danmark Expedition, published in 1913 in English for the widest possible circulation, said of this decisi
on, “The energy of the Expedition did not fail, right up to the very last. Trolle desired to supplement his hydrographical series as much as possible … and he specially wanted to make these investigations as far north as possible.”80 It doesn’t take much imagination, however, to see that they were going north to find Mylius’s and Hagen’s bodies and recover their journals. According to Brønlund’s journal, their bodies lay on the ice at the Nioghalvfjerdsfjord (N 79°) between Lambert Land, where Brønlund had died, and Hovgaards Ø to the north.
Trolle made good progress going due north, covering 70 kilometers (43 miles) in the first two days. By the twenty-fourth they were already at latitude 78° north, and in the early morning fog, turning east to avoid pack ice, they rammed a large floe, the shock of which cracked their boiler and brought them to a halt. Weinschenck worked constantly on the boiler for the next few days, as they alternately looked for an opening in the ice through occasional dense fog and moored to large floes to make major repairs. Trolle made the decision to give up the “hydrographical investigations” and sailed the ship toward open water in the southeast. With the boiler functional but leaking, and the Danmark already twice pinched in pack ice, he had the survival of the ship to think about and turned for home.
On the way home Wegener did what he always did—took meteorological measurements; there was no time when he ever seems to have found the weather uninteresting. As they proceeded east, the condition of the boiler worsened, and on 15 August, low on coal and with their boiler cracked and rusted out, the ship was towed into the harbor at Bergen Norway. Freuchen recalled, “The first day on shore we went wild and behaved like savages.” While they continued to celebrate, they began to realize, via the steady stream of visitors, reporters, and dignitaries, that they were famous. One of the first to make a visit on board and congratulate them was the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1872–1928), who was preparing, he said, an expedition of his own with the Fram to reach the North Pole.81 This, of course, was a ruse—he had already decided to go south, to beat Scott to the South Pole, though he had told no one.
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