The plan of the expedition was simple; the execution would be difficult. They would sail on their chartered sealer the Godthaab, with their ponies and equipment, with the intention of being put ashore at Danmarkshavn; this would allow them to make use of their knowledge of the terrain. Then would come the hard part: transporting 20,000 kilograms of baggage 150 kilometers (93 miles) inland to Dronning Louise Land, to establish an overwintering station on the Inland Ice. In the following spring, they would attempt a 1,200-kilometer (746-mile) traverse from the northeast to the southwest, hoping to emerge near the depot at Upernavik on the west coast of Greenland, laid down in anticipation of this expedition, in 1911, by Lundager.
If it proceeded as planned, the expedition would take slightly more than a year: the summer for training in Iceland, a late summer and early fall arrival in Greenland, and an overwintering from October to April. This would be followed by a concerted push diagonally southwest across the ice cap, hoping to emerge in the early summer, before the ice melted and made travel difficult, as it had thirty years before for Nansen. The group would then have a few months to pack up, find a ship, and return to Denmark. They could arrive home no later than the end of October, for Wegener had an appointment he could not miss: his marriage to Else, which under no circumstances was to take place later than 1 November 1913. This was a promise he intended to keep.
12
The Arctic Explorer (2)
GREENLAND, 1912–1913
Kamerater:
Comrades:
hen over Sne og Is
There over snow and ice
vor Vej mod Vest fører hjem
To the west lies the way home.
Vi vover Livet mod højest Pris
We wager our lives for the highest prize
at bringe i Sollyset frem
To bring to the light of day
vor Saga af Rimtaagens Dis.
Our saga, out of the ice and fog.
JOHAN KOCH, “On the Inland Ice,” 19 May 1913
The expedition’s departure from Copenhagen was smooth, although there was the usual flurry of activity at the end. Since the expedition was under “Royal Protection,” there were the obligatory speeches, as well as a public send-off to be arranged. The press had taken some interest in the assembly and disassembly of the prefabricated “Borg,” but neither Koch, nor Wegener, nor Lundager had an appetite for publicity, nor facility in arranging it, so they were entirely spared the circus atmosphere that had accompanied their departure from Copenhagen in 1906. On the very day that Wegener departed for Iceland, Else departed for Oslo, to begin her eleven-month residence with the Bjerknes family: her own “expedition.”
Also in sharp contrast to their departure in 1906 was the rapidity of their progress once at sea. In 1906, with breakdowns, engine trouble, loading and off-loading of stores, and other distractions, the trip from Copenhagen to Iceland had taken almost three weeks. In 1912, on a commercial steamer bound for Aukureyri, it took only twelve days, including even a stopover in Bergen, Norway, and three days beset by fog. On 12 June 1912, the three arriving members met up in Iceland with their fourth, Vigfus, and the expedition could be considered to be really under way.1
It was shrewd of Koch to have planned so much time in Iceland in June. It was not just a matter of learning to drive the horses. Wegener and Lundager were soft from years of urban life and needed the physical exercise and training; Wegener had done no real physical work since his military training the previous summer. Iceland provided good versions of the kinds of terrain over which they would have to drive the horses. They could use the extensive lava fields as proxies for the stony shoreline around Danmarkshavn, along which the horses would pack their fodder and much other equipment. On the Vatnajøkul ice cap, even in June the climate conditions were those of the Greenland interior: fog, snow, and freezing temperatures.
Two days after their arrival, on 14 June, they set out to work the horses in the volcanic terrain, stopping to climb a volcano and look at the activity of the sulfur springs. Wegener needed the exercise, and he commented on the astonishing strength of Vigfus in a letter to his parents. “We will,” he wrote, “have use for strong legs in Greenland.”2 On the nineteenth, with fewer horses and this time unguided, they took an eight-day trip onto the Vatnajøkul ice cap. This was valuable practice: they enjoyed a full suite of inclement weather, including wind, rain, and fog. Though it was high summer, when the sky cleared the temperature at night was below freezing, and at the northern margin of the ice cap there was fresh snow. The terrain was difficult, with much gain and loss of elevation and a precipitous and uneven ice surface at the margins of the ice cap.3
After traversing the ice cap, they encountered more volcanic terrain, which was extremely difficult but good practice in finding a way that would not damage the horse’s feet, always a concern on such sharp rocky surfaces. It was also a good place for learning to select a line of advance and an angle of slope which would not cause the horses’ shoes to slip on the smooth rock. It was exhausting but necessary, and Wegener wrote to his parents on 1 July, the day of their return to Aukureyri: “Today at noon we returned, healthy and lively from our trip and found the Godthaab here, on which we will travel to Greenland.”4
Wegener himself may have returned from this trip feeling “healthy and lively,” but not so Andreas Lundager. Sometime between their return to Aukureyri and 4 July, he announced to his companions that he was going to withdraw from the expedition. He was too old, he said, at forty-four, and had found the training expedition to be so physically taxing that he doubted he could perform up to standard on the full expedition in Greenland. “Both of them [i.e., Koch and Lundager] are so reasonable, to draw the necessary conclusions, without caring how it looks outside.”5 In other words, they would not put a bold face on it and try to muddle along; rather, they would replace him immediately. After some discussion, Koch’s choice was one of the mates on the Gothaab, Lars Larsen (1886–1978), who was extremely strong and mechanically adept. Wegener noted in his letter to his parents on 4 July that they had to have a fourth man, not for the crossing of the Greenland ice cap, for which three people would be better, but because all the rations and the work plans were carefully divided four ways, especially with regard to getting up onto the ice cap. Wegener fretted about this, having calculated that the advantage of a fourth person to move supplies onto the ice cap would be very nearly canceled out by the extra weight of supplies required to maintain him. Regardless, they would have a fourth, and it would be Larsen.6
Into the Ice
Shortly after the return to the north shore of Iceland from the training expedition, Wegener packed up his sea trunk with mementos and presents (he had bought Else a filigreed knife in the Faroe Islands, to be given to her at Christmas). He also sent along a very carefully written (one gauges the status of the recipient by the quality of the penmanship) letter to Ernst Elstner, the dean at Marburg, thanking him for his support, announcing their departure within a couple of days, and estimating that they would be in the Greenland pack ice “at the most in eight days.”7 In fact, they arrived much sooner. Even though they sailed far to the northeast, passing to the east of Jan Mayen Land (a full degree of longitude east of Iceland) in order to obtain a high northing before reaching the pack ice, they ran into the pack in the late evening of 10 July, only four days out. Fortunately, they broke through the pack to open water on the morning of the eleventh at latitude 74° north and sailed in open water at the pack ice margin another full day, turning and sailing directly west into the pack on the twelfth.
The pack ice off Greenland, which they entered on 13 July, was thick and difficult to navigate. This was always hair-raising, though the Godthaab had a stronger engine than the Danmark, and they had great confidence in their helmsman, Wegener’s old sledding companion from 1907, Gustav Thostrup, who served as ice pilot. The ice forced them to the south and then far to the east, and it was only on the fifteenth that they were able to turn back to the west. Th
ey were forced farther south, moving away from their destination at Danmarkshavn, and not until the eighteenth were they able to proceed west again. Finally, around midday on the nineteenth Thostrup spied an open lead to the northwest, and within forty-eight hours, in reasonably open water, they found themselves making landfall at Danmarkshavn.
As the ship steamed through the open lead, Alfred hurriedly completed a letter to his parents in his cabin and enclosed his German translation of Koch’s account of the trip to Vatnajøkul for publication in Petermanns Mitteilungen.8 Always the photographer, he had taken a number of photos of the sea trip, which he enclosed with greetings to all, writing, “Now comes the most difficult part of our program, the transport trip towards Dronning-Louise-Land. I am certain however, that everything will go smoothly.” 9 This final phrase deserves an honorable mention in an anthology of “Famous Last Words.”
Their landfall at Danmarkshavn was emotional to a degree that surprised them all. They arrived on a beautiful day, with a cloudless sky. Koch, not normally expressive, was quite overcome. He said that he and Wegener just stood there staring from the lookout atop the mast. Every ravine, every stone, every curve in the shoreline of the fjord seemed to welcome them like an old friend.10 Wegener, Koch, Thostrup, and the captain went ashore with Vigfus and walked up the slope to the old “Villa.” The inside of the hut, which they had left in such good order four years before, was a shambles and filthy. Ejnar Mikkelsen and his companion Iverson, who had made an expedition in the intervening time to try to find the lost diaries of Mylius-Erichsen, had stopped here on their return from the north, and the Villa gave every evidence of their desperation and depression.11 Wegener and the others could not bear it; not only did they leave, but they asked the captain to take the ship as far west as he could go. Navigating inshore, they were able to gain 10 kilometers (6 miles) into Dove Bugt, a place called Stormkap, and here they began to unload the ship. They were delighted to be able to penetrate to this well-known anchorage, which saved them at least 10 kilometers of hard ground.12
The elation at penetrating into the fjord was short-lived, however. The next morning, 23 July, a powerful föhn wind began to blow and break up the pack ice in the fjord; it threatened to trap the ship, and the unloading had to be suspended while the ship returned to Danmarkshavn, which was reliably ice-free. They hurried to unload the rest of the supplies at Danmarkshavn. The ship had a good hoist and canvas slings fitted to the horses. One by one they were lowered into their barge, Schachtel (the Box), and ferried to the shore. This barge, 10 meters (33 feet) in length, was the sort of beamy towboat one sees everywhere in the canals and quays of North Europe, particularly in Denmark, even today. They had a motorboat, 6.5 meters (21 feet) in length and with a 4-horsepower engine, to pull it.
After off-loading, they led the horses to a mossy knoll, where there was fresh grass, thinking that the horses might like to graze, after a steady diet of fodder on the sea voyage, and that perhaps they needed to move around a bit. Move around they did. When Vigfus and Wegener went to check on the horses several hours later, they were gone. They were nowhere in sight, except for three standing nearby, which Vigfus (with some foresight) had hobbled; the other thirteen had completely disappeared. Vigfus and Wegener hurriedly assembled sleeping bags, food, and guns and rode off in pursuit. On the stony ground the horses left no trail. They found three of them by a small lake later that afternoon, and the next day they found three more back at the harbor. Rounding up the rest of the horses took six full days, and this was just a taste of what was to come. The best that Wegener could say about this entire excursion is found in a brief note from the twenty-seventh: “Last night I slept very well, as the wind drove away the swarms of mosquitoes.”13
Map of the transport routes (land and water) in the fall of 1912 between Danmarkshavn and Kap Stop, and from there to winter quarters on Storestrommen Glacier (marked “Borg”). The legend indicates motorboat (dot-dashed line), pack horses (dotted line), and horse-drawn sleds (plus signs). Note the long roundabout route to the north taken by Sigurdsson and Wegener to skirt open water. From J. P. Koch, Gennem den Hvide Ørken: Den danske Forskningsrejse tvaers over Nordgrønland 1912/13 (Kjøbenhavn: Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag, 1913).
No sooner had Wegener and Vigfus taken themselves off in pursuit of the delinquent horses than the engine in the motorboat died. Fortunately, the ship had not left yet, and they were able to hoist it from the water, so the Godthaab’s machinist could work on it. While the boat was being repaired, Koch took the opportunity to go back to the “Villa.” He was not sentimental by nature, but the state of their old house ate at him. He couldn’t stand the filth and disorder in which Mikkelsen left the place, and he returned there in the afternoon with Larsen and spent several hours cleaning and reestablishing it until it once again felt like “home,” even though it would not be their home.14
Here is the gist of the transport plan, which one can follow on the accompanying map. They had devised two parallel transport systems. The first would move baggage on the backs of the horses along the shore; this was to be accomplished by Vigfus and Wegener. The second transport system was the motorboat and barge, and this was the responsibility of Koch and Larsen. The redundancy was essential for several reasons. The wooden barrels containing petroleum, as well as the sleds to be drawn by the horses, could not easily be transported by the horses, as there was no possibility of dragging heavily laden sledges across the rocky summer shoreline. Even the lighter sledges, drawn empty across the rock, would (and later did) suffer damage to the runners and their fastenings; there was no question of loading these either. The horses, on the land route, would carry their own fodder compressed into large “hay sacks.” This was no small task, as fully half of the 20,000 kilograms (44,092 pounds) of expedition baggage was horse fodder: 6,000 kilograms (13,228 pounds) of hay, and 4,000 kilograms (8,818 pounds) of a kind of “horse pemmican” devised for Koch by a professor of agricultural sciences in Denmark, Harold Goldschmidt. It was an interesting mix of corn, rye, wheat, molasses, and fat, and it was heavy.15
Since there was a tremendous mechanical advantage to moving things by barge as opposed to overland, the plan was to move the expedition’s supplies to a series of appointed rendezvous along the shore; the idea was that Koch and Larsen would move successive loads of supplies (the petroleum barrels, boxes, and sleds) as far to the west as possible and off-load them, before returning to Danmarkshavn for more. Reference to the accompanying map shows that the horses were forced, by open water, at what was roughly the halfway point of the boat trip, to a “long way round” to the west and then to the south to Kap Stop. This was the final destination of the bifurcated transport system, as the expedition members assumed that by the time they had ferried and packed their material by both boat and horses this far to the west they would be forced to rely on the boats alone over the last stretch of open water, which they christened Borgfjord. This was the plan.
This conception of how things should go was a realistic concession to their expected difficulties and the realities of the terrain. In practice, its execution was much more difficult than they had imagined, from beginning to end. Wegener’s journal entries and Koch’s diaries, later collated in book form, tell a story of frustration, mishap, bad luck, miscalculation, and unforeseen obstacles. Their tale was at once typical of polar travel and yet especially poignant because these experienced polar travelers had worked so hard to devise a system that would avoid the obvious missteps made by other expeditions with which they were acquainted, including their own previous expedition to this part of Northeast Greenland.
Rather than tell this story, day by grim day, week by grim week, and month by grim month, a digest of the principal difficulties will do. Koch divided his account of this part of the expedition into two sections: motorboat trips and land transport. They might well have been entitled instead “Struggles at Sea” and “Struggles on Land.”16
Let us begin with the struggles at sea. The tro
uble began on the first day of the voyages and did not cease until the abandonment of the boat and barge on 4 September. The route they followed Koch and Wegener had been over many times, and Koch had mapped it not just as a reconnaissance but also as part of the survey of the Danmark Expedition. Route finding was therefore not a problem. The problem was Greenland. At the far western edge of Dove Bugt, along whose shores they traveled, was the great Storestrømmen Glacier that flowed north to south. Here it met another great glacier tongue, Bistrups Brae, flowing in the opposite direction. Their confluence formed an ice tongue at 90° to both flows, which calved icebergs at Breda Brae, near the final depot at Kap Stop. The wind here blew either from the west, off the ice cap, or from the east and the ocean. If it blew from the west, it pushed the surface water with it, and the underpowered motorboat and its overladen barge had to struggle to make any headway. The tidal ebb and flood in this area was anywhere from 0.5 to 2 meters (1.6–6.6 feet) for an ordinary diurnal tide, which meant that some combination of west wind and ebbing tide could easily overpower the forward motion of the boats. On the other hand, a strong easterly wind, which helped propel the boats inland with a favoring tide, also drove pack ice from the mouth of Dove Bugt into the narrow channel by the shore; the ice could stack up so rapidly from the west shore outward that forward motion into the ice became impossible.
Alfred Wegener Page 54
