That settled, now Georgi had a new demand: he wanted to reserve ownership rights in any photos and movie film that he might shoot on the main expedition; the Notgemeinschaft was absolutely unwilling to allow this. Georgi had refused to sign his expedition contract, hoping to force the hand of the authorities. Time was running out, and toward the middle of March, when everyone was departing either for Berlin or for Copenhagen to get ready for the final departure for Greenland, Wegener wrote to Georgi. Georgi remembered this letter many years later and quoted it thus: “We may sometimes have to give way despite our convictions, but when we come home triumphant, laden with new scientific knowledge, then such legal quibbles will be of as little importance as a scrap of paper!”29 Wegener continued, “You will certainly not, because of a passing ill mood, make a decision which for many years, perhaps for your whole life, would cloud the memory of our expedition. I believe rather—at least I hope—that when you reach such a point you will bury the hatchet and grab a camera instead and re-affirm the principle which I too have used to smooth away many a difficulty during my expeditions: Whatever happens the cause must not suffer in any way.”30 On the night before their departure, Georgi signed his contract. Loewe, who had been waiting to see what Georgi “got” from Wegener, was satisfied, and he also signed. Now, they could all leave for Greenland.
Greenland, 1930–1931
They left for Greenland on 1 April 1930. Wegener wrote in his diary early in the morning: “Today at 10 AM the Disko will depart.… Some farewells, the group shot for the book and then, only then the thread is cut, then begins the expedition. I have the overwhelming feeling that I’m escaping from a swarm of bees. Uff!”31 The “bees” were questions and requests: “Will the hay reach the boat in time? … In my contract we have to change this and that.… Shall we take the big barometer?” This diary entry, with twenty-five or thirty such humorous and exasperating questions, was his first record of the expedition under way.
After a stop in Reykjavík, Iceland, to pick up Vigfus, his assistants, and twenty-five ponies, they sailed directly to West Greenland, arriving in Holstensborg on 15 April, where everything was off-loaded onto the dock to await the Gustav Holm, an exploring ship with thick ice sheathing which would take them to Umanak. George Lissey, the engineering student from Hamburg whom Wegener had hired as a surveying assistant, spent his time on the dock counting the number of crates in their mountain of baggage and told Wegener that he had counted 2,500, which Wegener noted was “a figure that horrified everybody. But if we count each packet as weighing 45 kg that comes to 100,000 kg which is exactly what we’re supposed to have.”32 The Gustav Holm was a smaller ship than the Disko, and it seemed impossible that they would get everything on board, but they did.
It took only two days (27–29 April) to get them to Godhavn, where the expedition really began. The news was not good about the ice further north, as it appeared that it was so thick that they would reach neither Umanak nor Kamarajuk in the ship. Wegener was pleased to see the Krabbe, launched the previous day and ready to come alongside. It was −16°C (3°F) and snowing. Wegener noted, “The Greenland summer is not here yet.”33 As soon as the Krabbe was ready, Loewe, Holzapfel, and Jülg, along with Friedrichs and Kraus (the machinist and the mechanic), departed for Quervainshavn. The first three were to make a dogsled journey to check the snow depth markers the reconnaissance expedition had left the previous year, and then drive their sleds north on the ice to Scheideck, while Friedrichs and Kraus would bring the boat north after dropping them off.34
On 4 May Wegener wrote, “Now the difficulties begin.” The ice was too thick for them to force their way into Umanak Harbor. The governor of the colony at Umanak, Dan Møller, came out to the ship by dogsled to tell them that the ice extended quite far north and had not gone out at Kamarajuk or even Uvkusigssat. They sailed north and found this to be true, so on the next day they began to off-load everything onto the ice. A call went around to all the local Greenland settlements that the expedition was paying for dogsleds to carry the material to Uvkusigssat, 10 kilometers (6 miles) away over the ice, and soon, Wegener said, “Greenlanders had streamed over the ship.”35
Sorge and Georgi, who knew the lay of the land, took off immediately with Greenlanders on dogsleds to check the ice conditions at Kamarajuk. Wegener was resigned: “Now we must make up by hard work what fortune has denied us.”36 He hoped at least that once there gear was on the beach at Uvkusigssat the pony sleds could haul it to Kamarajuk. But fortune had not yet finished with its denials, and Sorge and Georgi returned with bad news: the ice in the inner part of Kamarajuk Fjord was so rotten that you could put a stick through it. They immediately winched the huge crates holding the propeller sleds onto the ice, attached them to the dog teams, and made for Kamarajuk, 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) distant. They returned the next day, 7 May. They had just barely managed to get the propeller sleds on the beach, and on the return trip they had several times gone through the ice themselves; it was so thin that even the weight of the dogs could break it apart.37
Now they were on shore at Uvkusigssat and could do nothing but wait for the ice to go out. They established camp along the shore, near their mountains of goods, and were delighted with everything. The tents had wooden floors, real tables, and real bunks with mattresses of dry hay and down sleeping bags. They set up the lightproof seismograph tent for a dark room and strung up a radio antenna. They were snug, cooking, unpacking, and enjoying the warm temperatures, only −1°C (31°F). By the fourteenth Weiken was making gravity measurements, and Georgi had set up a workshop to repair all the meteorological instruments damaged in transit.38
Two weeks later, they were still stuck in Uvkusigssat. The ice had gone out around Umanak, and when the Krabbe arrived, they sailed it there to make arrangements with a Capt. Olson—whose schooner, the Hvidfisken, had wintered in Umanak—for their late-arriving gear to be shipped to Uvkusigssat. On 30 May Wegener finally could stand it no longer and made a trip to Kamarajuk, which took twelve hours, beginning with the dogsled, then pulling sledges themselves, going along the shore on a light wicker sledge, and finally inflating the collapsible boat to cross over the last section of open water. Everything was deep in snow, but they managed to push the motor sledges across a stream onto the snowfield at the foot of the glacier so that they would not be caught on open ground once the melt began.39
Unloading the Gustav Holm at Uvkussigssat. The motor sleds have been taken off as well as much of the gear. In the foreground are some of the ponies taking a rest break between hauls across the six miles of ice to the shore. Photo courtesy of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven.
On 3 June, their twenty-fifth day of waiting, they learned that Loewe’s sled at Quervainshavn had been too heavy and the snow too deep and he had turned back; Wegener sent the Krabbe south to pick him up. Wegener was now extremely nervous. By 13 June Wegener could once more stand it no longer, and when Capt. Olson arrived with the Hvidfisken, they agreed that two days later they would try to break through the ice by ramming it. This effort availed them nothing. Finally, on the thirty-eighth day in Uvkusigssat, they were roused at 1:00 a.m. by the Greenlander keeping watch, who shouted that the “ice is going out!”40 They arrived to find only about 500 yards of ice left blocking the way into Kamarajuk, and they made several attempts to blow it apart with dynamite, all of which failed. Then suddenly, after twelve hours of work, the ice parted not far away from them, and the ice began to flow out of its own accord into the ocean. Wegener wrote, “How indifferent Nature is to our puny achievements.”41
The Struggle to Ascend the Glacier
Not until 25 June were they able to ferry all of their 2,500 boxes to the beach at the foot of the glacier at Kamarajuk using Krabbe and Hvidfisken both. Now began the work that would take them the rest of the summer, getting their belongings to the top of the glacier, to Scheideck, and onto the Inland Ice. They would establish a series of depots on the glacier, using ponies with packsaddles, dogsleds, and themselv
es and the Greenlanders as porters. Herdemerten was going to try to blast a roadway in the middle section of the glacier, where it was serrated with crevasses and ice hummocks. George Lissey, ever enthusiastic, said, “We all became transport workers and slaves from sunset to sunrise—for we worked at night; during the day it was too hot for man and beast in the burning glare of the sun on the glacier.… To us Polar novices everything seemed very unlike our idea of an expedition; it was much more like erecting some building in the mountains. Scientific work was out of the question. Nothing but transport, transport, and still more transport.”42
Map of the Kamarajuk Fjord and Glacier, showing the various routes and places discussed in the text. The ice-free land on the map is shaded. From Kurt Wegener, Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse der Deutsche Grönland Expedition Alfred Wegener 1929 und 1930/31, vol. 1, Geschichte der Expedition (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1933).
By 15 July, after three weeks of strenuous and very unpleasant work, enough of Georgi’s gear had been carried to the top of the glacier for Wegener to be willing to send him out with ten Greenlanders and Loewe and Weiken. Loewe and four others would turn back at the 200-kilometer (125-mile) depot; Georgi, Weiken, and the rest would go on to the 400-kilometer (250-mile) point, where they would begin to establish the Mid-Ice Station.43
At this point Georgi made the request of Wegener that he be allowed to remain alone at the central station, now christened “Eismitte” (Mid-Ice). Georgi recalled that Wegener was reluctant to give him permission to stay alone at the 400-kilometer station. Georgi did not say why Wegener objected but suggested that the latter was short of men at the West Station, and that he (Georgi) had then made the argument that the meteorological instruments, once set up, would have to be tended.44 There were other reasons as well that Wegener might have been reluctant. He was not entirely convinced that the 400-kilometer point was the best location, and as late as 5 August he was thinking that the station should be moved back 50 kilometers (31 miles) toward the coast, to the 350-kilometer (217-mile) mark, to make transport easier; this would cut off 100 kilometers (62 miles) round-trip for each supply mission.45 Moreover, for Georgi to leave for the Mid-Ice Station and not return to the west coast at all was essentially for him to “secede” from the expedition, relieving himself of all transport work, while the others would be forced to forgo their scientific work in order to support him. This is exactly the sort of outcome that Loewe had feared and objected to the previous December. Finally, Georgi seems to have proposed to Wegener that he (Georgi) should mount an expedition to East Greenland at the end of the following summer; it was psychologically indicative of Georgi’s desire to get away completely from this expedition.46
Ascending the Kamarajuk Glacier. The chaos of the moraine is to the left, and the narrow ice road may be seen just above the span of dogs. Note how small the load on the sled is: the steepness of the ascent meant innumerable small loads, taking much additional time. To the right of the man with the whip is visible a porter with a backpack—much of the 20,000 kilograms of material was carried up in this way. Photo courtesy of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven.
Wegener also noted in his diary on 17 July that Georgi’s sled trip had been held up because of “Georgi’s endless packing (essential).”47 When Georgi finally set off, at the end of the first day the Greenlanders said that the sleds were too heavy for the dogs in the deep snow, and they would not go further. Georgi, with the greatest reluctance, removed half a ton (450 kilograms) of supplies from the sleds.48 When they had reached the halfway point a few days later, they had to reduce the loads again, leaving another 160 kilograms (350 pounds) at the 200-kilometer depot.49 The snow was deep and soft, and the going was hard, quite different from the experiences reported by all the expeditions since 1912 about the middle of the ice cap. Everything at all times was more difficult than anyone had imagined; this seemed to be the fundamental law of this expedition.
After Georgi’s sled group departed for the ice cap, for everyone else it was “more transport.” By now the crevasse zone of the glacier had melted so much that it was no longer passable by ponies, and on 22 July Wegener began, with a large team of Greenlanders, to build a road over the moraine with a series of switchbacks on which the ponies could work as pack trains. By the twenty-sixth, it was all but finished, and Wegener was delighted. He enjoyed working with the Greenlanders, of whom he said, “It is splendid to see how the Greenlanders work. European workers would not have done so much; they would not have moved so quickly. So we have one [a road]; the result far surpasses my expectations.”50 Once across the moraine, they could circumvent the crevasses entirely, and it looked as if things were beginning to go well.
Expedition in Crisis—August 1930
Wegener’s elation was short-lived. By 5 August he found that the morale of his expedition was beginning to fail, with much less work getting done each day, and he also found the first louse on his shirt—“nasty but not surprising, for living in such close contact with the Greenlanders makes infection almost inevitable.”51 Wegener was at this time overmastered by the sheer bulk of everything he had to do. He was the only one who could deal with the Greenlanders, and he had to pay them, drink coffee with them, negotiate with them, and direct their work. As a result, he was often at the beach, as well as having to take the Krabbe to get supplies at Umanak. Because he had to spend so much time on transport and building the road over the moraine, he had little time for large-scale organization, and while he left much to Sorge and Loewe, they complained (in their diaries) of a lack of direction and organization. Sorge said that Wegener always wants everyone to be “active” but doesn’t take any time to assess the situation or actually consult. Loewe also complained that “he settles arrangements regarding work for the next day in private conversations of which others only learn by chance.”52
Getting the motor sleds to the top of the glacier was a terrible job and took a week of effort by almost everyone; they had to be hand winched up a 70° slope. The men were doing no science and had not even (by the end of July) set up a meteorological station, though the instruments were there at Scheideck and Holzapfel was working hard at it.53 There were no general meetings to organize the work, and Wegener began to see that things were indeed in danger of falling apart.
The ponies had begun to founder; they had already lost three. The loads were too heavy, the bolts on the boxes tore out, and everything had to be lashed with rope to their saddles. The men were also in trouble. Jülg was so overstressed that he was close to collapse, Lissey had sciatica, and Wölcken was so exhausted that he couldn’t work and had to go to his tent. Vigfus had rheumatism and had lost two teeth while shoeing a pony that managed to kick him in the face. Jon Jonsson had terrible stomach pain and had begun to vomit blood. He would have to be evacuated to Umanak. Moreover, Wegener discovered (to his horror) on 9 August, when he returned to the beach after finally getting the motor sleds to the top of the glacier, that they had only twenty days of hay and five to ten days of fodder left, about which he exclaimed, “A catastrophe!”54
Wegener’s very extensive diary entries for this period of time exhibit the same volatility as the weather and the work, as the fate of the expedition seemed constantly to hang in the balance because of the immense difficulties of transport. First, there was too much ice in the ocean to get through, and then too much snow melt on the glacier to make solid footing. The glacier road was finished, just in time to be abandoned for the road on the moraine.
Wegener was aware of what was happening. “So the crisis is still on or if you like, getting more intense. The expedition’s prospects are clouded over. We are not going to deceive ourselves and go on working as if all were going well.” Wegener wrote in his diary that same night (9 August), “I still feel rather desperate. The Mid Ice Station really depends on the motor sledges functioning, the transport journeys can only be carried out with difficulty, and now the pony stores are threatened. Since I found that louse the difficulties have grown in a ve
ry worrying way. Since I found that louse!”55
Wegener then, perhaps understandably, began to be away from the expedition and the glacier transport for longer and longer periods. He took more and more voyages in the Krabbe, to find hay, to make purchases in Umanak, to deliver Greenlanders back home who did not want to work any longer, and to try to hire their replacements. He spent days fussing with the Krabbe’s engine, which was misfiring. His diary is full of entries about his success and failure in acquiring hay for pony fodder. Back at Kamarajuk, things were still functioning, but the mood was black, and Wegener was more and more distant, as his notions of success and failure were now focused on how much hay he could collect for the remaining ponies.
After Wegener’s departure, the men—injured, frustrated, overworked, and (in their own minds) leaderless—began to find fault with one another and to break down. Anyone who has discovered heretofore invisible faults in a friend on a weekend camping trip can readily extrapolate to the intensity of bad feeling generated in an arduous and dangerous polar expedition in utterly remote, foreign, and uncomfortable surroundings, with cold, wet, and lice joining anxiety, fear, backbreaking labor, perpetual discomfort, boring food, dirt, stench, snarling dogs, wind, rain, treacherous ice, equipment failure without hope of replacement, absence of adequate rest, absolute lack of privacy, homesickness and isolation, and the disconcerting effects of endless light, all in the presence of a group of peers not chosen by oneself, in a context in which failures of schedules and supply and exigencies of time, weather, and locale must pit the scientific responsibilities of expedition members—and the members themselves—against one another. The potential for bad feeling is enormous and has to be controlled by acts of self-discipline which further sap emotional and physical resources.
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