By 10 October Rasmus Villumsen, Wegener, and Loewe had only covered 19 more kilometers (12 miles). They took a day of rest and discussed their situation. Loewe and Wegener agreed that they could not, at this rate, reach the station at Eismitte before Georgi and Sorge departed; Wegener was at his low point and suggested to Loewe that they might not make it to Eismitte at all, or even push forward to meet Sorge and Georgi successfully. They decided that if they had to turn back, they would do so at kilometer 230 (mile 143), based on their remaining rations.
On 14 October they took another one-day rest at the 200-kilometer depot. They now had too many dogs for the amount of dog food remaining, forcing them to kill some dogs, skin them, and store the meat to feed the remaining dogs. They also rearranged the depot and checked on the meteorological instruments. The latter seems to have put Wegener’s mind at ease somewhat, and they talked about the question of whether Georgi and Sorge would leave Eismitte. Loewe clearly remembered that Wegener hoped they would not, while Loewe thought that they would. Wegener said he very much wanted them to stay on, because he wanted to go back to the West Station. He also told Loewe that, one way or another, they had to find their way to Sorge and Georgi, as the uncertainty about their fate, if Wegener and Loewe came back without them, would be “intolerably disturbing to the work of the station.”82 Loewe may not have known this, but Wegener was motivated here by his memory of the winter of 1907/1908, when the rescue party had returned without Mylius-Erichsen and Hoeg-Hagen. The Danmark Expedition had collapsed into recrimination and infighting that lasted until the following spring. Wegener never wanted to be part of anything like that again.
The three men now battled on through deep snow, taking ten days to reach milepost 208 on 24 October. Loewe said that by now their clothes and sleeping bags were getting wet, and he had developed very painful frostbite on the tips of his fingers, from the work of untangling the dog harness. The temperature had been falling steadily, and it was never higher than −40°C (−40°F). They had to have a talk about what to do. Had Georgi and Sorge left on the twentieth, as they said they would, they should have met each other by now, as the Eismitte crew would be traveling downhill with the wind at their backs and would have had to cover only 67 kilometers (42 miles) in six days, or only 7 miles per day. Loewe was sure they had decided to stay and overwinter. Rasmus at this point had lost all hope and wanted to turn around, but Wegener would not hear of it so close to the end of the trip, and eventually Rasmus relented.83
In the later afternoon of the twenty-fifth, as they were still camped at the 208-mile point, Wegener suggested to Loewe that they go for a walk. It was between three and four in the afternoon, already dusk at this time of year, but the wind had dropped. They could see night advancing toward them, a clearly demarcated line on the ice to the east. Wegener then began to talk to Loewe in a way Loewe had never heard before (“Wegener spoke openly as he did but rarely”), about the nature and destiny of mankind. As they walked back and forth, Wegener told him of his belief that there was purpose behind human evolution, that human liberation was a direct result of the growth of knowledge, and that the expansion of human knowledge was the ideal that inspired all his actions. “As the darkness meanwhile fell,” Loewe remembered, “and sledges, dogs, and camp lay as dark shadows under the glittering firmament, the gleaming arch of the northern lights, a symbol of such faith as his, led our gaze to its colored bands and along its mazy forms into infinity.”84
Wegener had seen how depressed Loewe was, and he took him for this walk not least to inspire him to go on. One cannot help remembering Wegener’s Christmas star-gazing walk alone in the Greenland darkness in 1906, a quarter of a century earlier. He had then said that someday, if he led such an expedition, he would do what he could to inspire the others, and that he would survive, that these stars were “his stars.” Now, back in Greenland, only a week before his fiftieth birthday, he had remained true to this faith: he had survived, and if he no longer felt he possessed these stars, he felt himself part of a scheme of evolutionary development in which all of this merged into one.
So they pushed on, with Wegener doing most of the outside work with Rasmus, as Loewe by the twenty-seventh had lost all feeling in his toes. He says that Wegener massaged his feet for “hours on end,” but to no avail, as the feeling in his toes never returned. He also remembered that “Wegener’s energy was marvelous—he was always the first up—and so was the skill with which he avoided getting frostbitten although he did a lot of work with his hands bare.”85
From 26 to 30 October the mean temperature was −50°C (−58°F). The dog pemmican had frozen so hard that it had to be broken with an ax. Their breath immediately froze into ice crystals and fell to the ground. There were only a few hours of daylight, and they always pitched their tent in the dark. The tent could not be kept warm even with the stove burning. They ran out of dog food on 28 October, at 377 kilometers (234 miles) inland, and ran out of fuel for their stove the next day. On the morning of 30 October, at a temperature of −52°C (−62°F), they arrived at Eismitte. They had been traveling at high altitude on the ice cap—2,000 to nearly 3,000 meters (6,500–9,800 feet)—at temperatures far below zero, in deep snow, against strong winds, for forty days.
Rasmus arrived first, and Wegener and Loewe a few minutes later. The arriving party discovered that Sorge and Loewe had excavated a huge multiroom dwelling in the firn, using saws to cut rectilinear walls. They had cut and repositioned squares of the dense recrystallized snow as if they were wooden blocks. They had used packing cases to make tables, desks, and flooring; they had a workbench, a balloon room, and storerooms. They had built a tower above ground for weather observation and for launching balloons and had established a complete station for the meteorological instruments. They had erected their tent inside the main cavern to keep meltwater off them as they worked.
It was −5°C (23°F) in the underground shelter—47°C (85°F) warmer than where the three travelers had just been; it felt nearly tropical to them. Sorge and Georgi saw at once how badly Loewe was frostbitten on his toes, fingers, and face, and they massaged his feet and hands and put him in a dry and warm sleeping bag. Sorge remembers most of all Wegener’s miraculous appearance: “he looked as fresh, as happy, and fit as if he had just been for a walk.… Wegener kept exclaiming, ‘You are comfortable here! You are comfortable here!’ over and over again.”86
Wegener was flooded with relief and even with a sense of joy. From the moment he entered their ice cave, he knew that Georgi and Sorge intended to stay, that the expedition would be a success, that they would survive the winter, that they would overwinter in the middle of the ice cap, and that all the effort and suffering and pain had been worth it. Wanting to be sure of what his emotions already told him, he asked them directly: if you think it’s too risky, if you don’t want to stay on, I’ll stay here with Loewe. No, they responded; they would stay. It is exactly what he wanted most to hear. He wanted to go back to the coast to be at the West Station; he wanted to be able to tell the scientists there that Georgi and Sorge were well, were dug in, and were determined to succeed.
Both Georgi and Sorge later remembered that he questioned them closely for many hours, as he ate and drank coffee. They rested in between bouts of eating and coffee drinking. Wegener wrote for hours in his diary. He asked to see their meteorological records and all the scientific observations they had made up until then regarding the strata in the ice, and he made detailed notes. Sorge was surprised to hear Wegener speak of a second springtime crossing of the ice, not to Scoresby Sound and the Eastern Station; that had always been in the plan. This was a new crossing that Sorge had not heard of, south to Angmagssalik. This was the plan that Georgi had presented to Wegener before he left on 15 July. Wegener asked them for a list of supplies that such a trip would require, and he stuck that list into his diary, promising to send those supplies in the spring.87 This was Wegener’s way of saying “thank you” to Georgi for what he had done, in spite of all the fa
ilures of transport, to make the expedition a success by staying at Eismitte.
They calculated the remaining food and fuel at the station. Wegener suggested (“he thought it best”)—he always “ordered” by asking—that Loewe should stay; if anything should happen on the way back, such as if the dogs should die, or if they had to ski or walk out, then Loewe would surely die. In fact, there was enough food and fuel that they could keep Loewe and also spare two cases of food and a canister of stove fuel—weighing 300 kilograms (185 pounds); with Wegener and Rasmus each driving a sled with only half that load plus the dog food, and dividing the remaining seventeen dogs between them, they should be able to move very fast, going downhill with the wind at their backs.88
On the night of 31 October, with Rasmus dozing by the stove and Loewe sleeping fitfully, bothered by his (intensely painful) frostbitten feet, now that they had warmed up, Wegener spoke for quite a while with Georgi and Sorge. Georgi remembered this conversation so well that thirty years later he could quote it verbatim. “I know you are downhearted,” he said, “and because you don’t have your equipment, your scientific work will be sketchy compared to what you wanted. But the fact that you have spent the winter here in the middle of Greenland, even without any particular results in research, doing only the simplest and most routine measuring, is something which is worth all that has gone into this expedition.”89 Georgi added to his recollection, “Who knows if it was not this encouraging word that helped us psychologically to get through that winter?”90
The next morning, 1 November 1930, was Wegener’s fiftieth birthday. They celebrated with him. Wegener and Rasmus put on their sledging clothes, went upstairs, and roused the dogs and fed them. The dogs were sluggish but responded to encouragement and food that had been thawed and wetted inside Eismitte. Georgi brought out the movie camera, Sorge grabbed a still camera, and then Sorge photographed Georgi filming Wegener and Rasmus. Then Sorge took a portrait of Wegener and Rasmus. Wegener looked determined; he had already been outside for an hour or more, and his mustache was frozen with ice; Rasmus looked anxious to get going. They harnessed the dogs and waved farewell, and Georgi filmed them disappearing in the half-light; after only a few seconds, they were over a hummock, down a slope, and gone.
Wegener and Rasmus were now in a race for their lives. The temperatures were still brutally low, around −50°C. Wegener’s plan, as he had described it to Sorge and Georgi, was to race with two sleds as far as the halfway point and then consolidate the remaining healthy dogs onto one sled that Rasmus would drive, while Wegener skied. Things, however, went bad quickly, and dogs began to die, unable to pull, and had to be abandoned earlier than they had imagined and hoped. Already at the 284-kilometer (177-mile) point they tossed away a case of dog pemmican. At the 254-kilometer (158-mile) point, just short of halfway, Wegener abandoned his sledge, and from that point he was on skis. This was probably 8 or 9 November.91
Perhaps four days later, at kilometer 189 (mile 118), they camped for the night. In the evening, with the stove going, with his heavy clothes off, and brushed free of snow, perhaps while waiting for dinner or making notes in his diary, Wegener suffered a massive heart attack and fell over dead, his eyes wide open. Just like that, his life came to an end. Under the immense stress of skiing at high altitude for days on end, his injured heart simply gave out.
Rasmus, who at twenty-two had already seen many men die, prepared Wegener for his grave. He dug a hole in the snow, and into that hole he put down a sleeping bag and a reindeer skin, and on top of that he put Wegener’s body, sewn into two sleeping bag covers. On top of that he put Wegener’s fur clothing and another reindeer skin and then buried him in the snow. He then stuck his skis into the snow to mark the spot, along with a broken ski pole. Rasmus then took Wegener’s pipe and tobacco, his diary, and his fur gloves and pushed on toward the coast and safety.
Alfred Wegener and Rasmus Villumsen preparing to depart the Mid-Ice Station and race back to the coast. This photo was taken was on 1 November 1930, Wegener’s fiftieth birthday. It was −50°C (−58°F). Photo courtesy of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven.
Rasmus made it as far as kilometer 168 (mile 105), and he camped there for several days, leaving behind a hatchet that Wegener and he had taken from Eismitte for chopping dog food.92 From there he vanished. He never made it back to the coast, and all trace of him, as well as of Wegener’s diary containing all his entries from 10 September onward, disappeared into the ice with him. His body has never been recovered.
No one knew they were dead until 7 May, when the first propeller sled arrived at Eismitte, driven by Kraus, with Johann Villumsen, Rasmus’s brother, as a passenger. They barely made it, as they had a fuel leak, but Kraus accelerated and, approaching Eismitte, saw two figures waving to them in the snow. Only two! Kraus wrote, “I turn [the sled] in a circle and stop the sledge on the hard snow of its own track. Gears in neutral; I leap out and throw my arms around Sorge. In one breath we ask for Wegener. The silent answer tells us both all.”93
That night the dogsled party under the command of Weiken also arrived. Weiken saw the tents pitched beside the tower of Eismitte but felt “a sinister stillness, not a soul to be seen.” He rushed up to the tent shouting “What’s the matter!?” Loewe limped out and said, “Wegener and Rasmus left for the West on the first of November, so they are dead.” Kraus set up the radio and was able to contact Godhavn by noon on 8 May, with a message to be relayed to Germany, announcing that Wegener was dead.94
The propeller sleds left immediately for the coast on 9 May, taking Loewe with them. They arrived at the West Station thirty-four hours later, having covered the same distance (only sixteen hours of running time) that Wegener had covered in thirty-nine days. Weiken, Sorge, and five Greenlanders with dogsleds left Eismitte that same day, and a few days later, on 12 May, they saw at kilometer 189 Wegener’s skis crossed in the snow, with a broken ski pole between them. They dug down less than a meter below the snow surface of November 1930 and there found Wegener’s body. “Wegener’s eyes were open, and the expression on his face was calm and peaceful, almost smiling. His face was rather pale, but looked younger than before. There were small frost bites on the nose and hands, such as are usual in journeys like this.”95
Wegener’s grave, May 1931. “Wir haben Wegener gefunden. Tod im Eis.” (We have found Wegener. Dead in the ice.) Photo courtesy of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven.
They examined him and deduced that Rasmus must have taken his pipe, tobacco, and diary; noting that there was no snow on his beard and mustache and that his clothes were dry, they determined that he must have died in his tent. The Greenlanders with Weiken and Sorge sewed up his body in the bags, as before, and reburied him in the ice. They built a large mound of blocks of firn and covered it with a Nansen sledge, making a cross of his broken ski pole.96
While the search for his body was still under way, the New York Times ran a front-page headline on Sunday, 10 May 1931: “Wegener Given up as Lost in Greenland’s Ice Fields; Three Aides Found Safe.” This headline and the breathless dispatch that accompanied it contained many details of Wegener’s struggle to resupply Eismitte. It included pictures of the pony sleds, photos of sledges at Eismitte, and a picture of Wegener, in his furs, standing next to one of the propeller sleds (a photo taken the previous August).97 The following Thursday, 14 May 1931, another headline followed: “Wegener Gave Up His Life to Save Greenland Aides; Left so Food Would Last.”98
Weiken, Sorge, and the Greenlanders, having reburied Wegener in the ice, arrived at the West Station on 16 May, and two days later they sent a telegram to Schmidt-Ott at the Notgemeinschaft, detailing the finding of Wegener’s body and describing their unsuccessful attempts to follow Rasmus’s trail.99 Schmidt-Ott sent the telegram, along with his condolences, to Else in Graz on 19 May.100
Two days later, the story exploded onto the front page of newspapers around the world; there was not a major newspaper in Europe or North America that did not
carry the report. It was once again front-page news in the New York Times on Thursday, 21 May 1931: “Wegener’s Body Found in Greenland Waste; Died Peacefully, Buried in Furs by Native.” It was the full story of the finding of Wegener’s body, and the “native” was soon identified in the story as Rasmus, who was described as Wegener’s “faithful companion” and praised for the care with which he had buried Wegener “deep in the snow.” Interestingly enough, Wegener was identified in the story not only as a great Arctic explorer (he was being compared everywhere to the other greats who had lost their lives in the Arctic, including Scott and Amundsen) but also as “a noted geologist.”101
The following day, the New York Times wound down its coverage with yet another front-page headline story: “Wegener’s Widow Asks Burial in Greenland Hills for Him.” The story notes that there had been a plan in Germany to send a battleship to bring Wegener’s body home and to bury him with military honors, but that Else “has decided that the body of her husband should not be brought back to Germany but buried in the mountains in Greenland at a spot overlooking the vast stretches of the Inland Ice where he met his death. Germany’s president, von Hindenburg, and its Chancellor, Brüning, and other high officials have sent letters of condolence to his widow.” The Times also proclaimed, “The German press and official quarters deeply mourn the death of Dr. Wegener who is praised as a genius with an incomparable imagination.”102
In Berlin, Kurt Wegener was packing his Arctic clothing and equipment; the expedition plan specified that if anything “happened” to Alfred, Kurt would take over as the leader of the expedition. Further, when the expedition was done, he was to take charge of editing the scientific reports, compiling the history of the expedition, and, as importantly, editing the film of the expedition. With the latter work some years off, Kurt was, in the meantime, hurrying to Copenhagen to catch the first ship to West Greenland.
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