BY BALLOON TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD
Salomon Andrée (1897)
Air travel, it was agreed by almost every explorer, was the technology of the future. This opinion was shared very particularly by those who had experienced the harsh climates and landscapes of the polar regions. If one could only fly, distances that would otherwise take years could be covered in days and the back-breaking business of sledging could be obviated. Unfortunately, at the end of the 19th century humankind could not fly. Or, more precisely, it could not fly very well. For centuries enthusiasts had tried to make ballooning a dependable means of getting from A to B, but the secret had always eluded them. The trouble lay first in the technology that kept the balloon aloft – the use of hot air meant that fire was an omnipresent threat – and secondly, the impossibility of steering, for however much balloonists claimed that they flew, all they really did was drift at the mercy of the wind. Nor could they drift very far, because their supply of hot air was limited by the amount of fuel they carried in the basket. By the late 1800s the first problem had been solved: by using hydrogen instead of hot air, balloonists could stay up for as long as gas remained within the canopy. But steering remained a problem. Until, that is, Salomon August Andrée turned his mind to it.
An employee of Sweden’s Patent Department, Andrée was a born tinkerer, fascinated by technology and particularly by ballooning. In a series of experiments he found that if he draped ropes over the basket so that they dragged along the ground he could make a balloon drift in more or less whatever direction he wished. A rope to one side led the balloon one way, a rope to the other led it another way. These drag ropes also acted as ballast, ensuring that the balloonist was always in control: if the balloon tried to rise the weight of the ropes and their friction against the ground would bring it back to a safe and controllable distance above the surface. Perchance the drag ropes might catch on an obstacle, but Andrée had the answer: his ropes were equipped with screw fittings; all one had to do was lean over the basket and twist until the trapped section came free. After several experiments, in which Andrée discovered he could do almost anything with a balloon save go into reverse, he announced his intention to fly to the North Pole from Spitsbergen.
The Arctic community was sceptical. What would happen if the wind changed direction, if the balloon lost gas, if it crashed? Andrée replied that he would take sledges with which he could travel over the pack to the nearest landmass, be it Spitsbergen, Franz Josef Land or an as yet undiscovered Arctic continent. But what if he was unable to reach land? In that case, Andrée said forthrightly, he would drown. Amidst the oohs and aahs he took the opportunity to criticize previous expeditions: over the last 70 years Arctic exploration had cost hundreds of lives and millions of pounds; his expedition was relatively cheap, and even if it failed the only casualties would be himself and the two others he intended to take with him. Why should anyone object? When they did object Andrée silenced them with an irrefutable argument: ‘Dangerous? Perhaps. But what am I worth?’
In the summer of 1897 the Eagle – the largest balloon the world had ever seen – rose within a wooden scaffold on Danes Island, to the north of Spitsbergen. For miles around the seabed was stained red from the effluent of iron filings and sulphuric acid that had created the 170,000 cubic feet of hydrogen necessary to inflate the 818 square feet of silk squares linked by 86 miles of stitching. Andrée and his two companions, Knut Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg, waited impatiently for the right flying conditions until finally, on 11 July, the wind swung to the north. At 1.43 p.m. the three Swedes climbed into the basket and Andrée gave orders for the ground crew to cut the ropes. The Eagle rose swiftly to 300 feet then, caught in an icy downdraught from the nearby mountains, dropped so abruptly that the basket touched the sea. Andrée and his team threw out ballast and soon the balloon was at 1,600 feet, speeding towards the Pole. However, the spectators who had come to cheer the balloonists to victory were aghast to see that the Eagle’s three drag ropes were still coiled on the shore. From whatever cause, whether they had caught on a rock or whether the screw linkings had rotated during the sudden dip, their lower sections had come free. What with the sand he had jettisoned during his plunge, and the loss of the ropes, Andrée was now bereft of 1,500 pounds of ballast. More disastrously, he was no longer able to steer.
The loss did not appear to concern him. He had taken two rudimentary means of communication: a coop of homing pigeons and several cork buoys intended to mark his progress across the pack but also capable of holding messages. On 15 July one of the pigeons landed on a Norwegian sealer. A crewman shot it at once, but before it was cooked the captain managed to retrieve the slip of paper it carried. Dated 13 July, it reported that all was well and that Andrée was at 82° 2’ N – in two days he had travelled further north than Nansen had in six months. A buoy was later recovered by a Norwegian woman combing the beach for driftwood. It, too, brought optimistic tidings. At 10.00 p.m. on 11 July the Eagle was at 830 feet, and the going was fine: ‘Weather magnificent. In best of humours...’ Alas, the buoy was not found until August 1900, by which time nothing had been seen of the Eagle for three years. It would be another three decades before the world discovered what had happened to a flight that Andrée had estimated would take only a few days.
In 1930 a Norwegian sealer, the Bratvaag, dropped anchor off White Island to the east of Spitsbergen. It would not have done so were it not for a group of scientists who had come along for the ride and who insisted that they needed to study the island’s glaciers and rock formations. Their investigation stopped before it had even started. On landing, they found the remains of a campsite. Its contents had been scattered by polar bears, but amidst the debris were three skeletons, several rolls of undeveloped film and a number of waterlogged journals. Here were the remains of Andrée’s expedition to the North Pole.
From what forensic specialists were able to piece together, Andrée, Fraenkel and Strindberg had been unfazed by the loss of their guide ropes. They had whisked northwards in complete confidence that they would soon be at the top of the globe. They joked, laughed, cooked a Chateaubriand steak on a special device that they lowered from the basket (fire being inadvisable directly beneath so much hydrogen) and had the very best of times. They were disconcerted by the way their balloon reacted to drops in temperature: when the sun was obscured by cloud the gas contracted and the basket bumped over the ice; but when the cloud passed they jumped hundreds of feet into the air. These shifts were of brief duration, and any discomfort caused by the bouncing of the basket could be avoided by climbing into the ring that connected it to the balloon. When Strindberg did so he declared the experience ‘confoundedly pleasant’. On 12 July, however, a mass of dark cloud appeared on the horizon. Unable to steer, Andrée could only wait and watch as the Eagle drifted into it. As before, the basket began to strike the ice. The distance between each bounce depended on a wind that was now strong, now weak, and which switched at random from north to south. They threw out ballast and, when that failed to lift them, equipment and provisions. It did little good. At 11.20 p.m. the Eagle sank low enough for the stubs of its guide ropes to wrap themselves around a block of ice, and came to a halt less than 200 feet above the pack. Andrée told Fraenkel and Strindberg to get some rest while he kept watch through the wee hours. Amidst the rattling of the lines, the flap of fabric and the dispiriting patter of rain on the canopy, he composed his journal entry. The first lines were a masterpiece of understatement. ‘It is not a little strange,’ he wrote, ‘to be floating here above the Polar Sea.’
It was not only strange but perilous. They were stranded above an unexplored sector of the Arctic, had jettisoned most of their food to keep themselves in the air, and, worst of all, the balloon was beginning to sink. Ever since it had been inflated, hydrogen had been seeping from the miles of stitching that linked the balloon’s silk squares. Of itself, this was not a worry: Andrée was confident that their journey would be over before the loss became apparent. M
ore distressing was the way the hydrogen contracted in the cold, and how, despite every precaution, rain and fog froze on the canopy. The balloon’s reduced lifting power could not cope with the accumulation of ice. On 13 July the wind switched, the ropes disentangled themselves and the Eagle resumed its course. But the weight on the canopy had become so great that its progress could hardly be called flying. By 5.30 on the morning of 14 July, after four and a half hours scraping over the ice, Andrée released the remaining gas and all three jumped out of the basket.
They were at 82° 56’ N, 29° 52’ E, on a field of ice riven by open leads and pressure ridges. The temperature was below zero. Their thin ballooning clothes offered no protection against the wind. They had no experience of life on the Arctic pack and their supplies were sufficient for a few months at most. It was 192 miles to Spitsbergen and 210 miles to Franz Josef Land, the two places where they could be sure of finding provisions and, eventually, transport to safety. Andrée was not a man to panic. Reviewing their situation, he decided to head for Franz Josef Land where, although the journey might be longer, the chance of meeting a whaler was greater and where, even if the fleet had left for the winter, they could at least find shelter in the remains of Frederick Jackson’s camp at Cape Flora. Accordingly, they loaded three sledges with 200 pounds of food and a canvas boat, and began the long haul south.
It was hard going yet, remarkably, they had no doubt they would survive. ‘I am in excellent health,’ Strindberg wrote in his journal. ‘We are sure to come home by and by.’ By 4 August, however, Andrée found that, although they were walking south-east, the pack was carrying them due west. Accordingly, he changed his plan. They would head instead for Spitsbergen, which he expected to reach in six or seven weeks. Turning about, they plodded north-west. Aided initially by favourable winds and good conditions, they became even more confident. ‘We asked ourselves in silence if we might not possibly journey on in this glorious way to the end,’ Strindberg wrote. Not if the Arctic could help it. Six weeks into their trek the drift changed direction, pushing them south-east at tremendous speed – in the course of three days they were carried 60 nautical miles in the direction from which they had come – and by mid-September Andrée announced they could no longer expect to reach either of their goals. They would have to winter on the ice.
It could have been worse, Andrée judged. Their sledges were in reasonable shape, and they still had the canvas boat for emergencies. They were fit and healthy, apart from Fraenkel, who suffered from unaccountable bouts of diarrhoea. All they had to do was make a shelter and shoot enough seals and polar bears to last them until spring. This they did, constructing an ice-brick igloo on the thickest, solidest-looking floe they could find, and bunkered down for the season. In his ingenious fashion Andrée constructed a net with which, if their stocks of meat ran out, he proposed to trawl for plankton. ‘Our humour is pretty good,’ he wrote, ‘although joking and smiling are not of ordinary occurrence.’
On 17 September, the drift having carried them capriciously to the west, salvation appeared. It manifested itself as a block of white that remained in the same position no matter how the pack moved. If it was a glacier, and it could be nothing else, they were approaching an island. Once on solid land, their chances of survival would be greatly improved. Consulting his charts, Andrée saw that it was called New Iceland or, more commonly, White Island. The floe drifted slowly towards it, hovered at a distance of 1,000 yards and then, capriciously, sped south-east until the island vanished over the horizon. On 1 October the floe broke up, forcing the three Swedes on to a fragment that measured no more than 80 feet in diameter. A few days later, however, the drift was carrying them north-west, and once again the glacier was within sight. ‘No one had lost courage,’ Andrée wrote. ‘With such comrades one should be able to manage under, I may say, any circumstances.’ It was the last sentence that the experts in Tromsø were able to decipher.
From the remaining scraps of paper and the evidence collected by the Bratvaag, a sorrowful tale unfolded. Andrée’s team had erected a tent, had secured it with boulders, had lit a signal fire, and had begun their long wait. Then they had died. The cause was probably trichinosis, a parasitical disease carried by many animals, including the polar bears whose flesh they had been eating for several months. Strindberg had gone first: his body was discovered beneath a tomb of boulders. Fraenkel had maybe been next: he was found on the shore, possibly having expired while dragging driftwood to the fire. Andrée’s skeleton, knocked about by bears, lay against the rocks that had once supported the tent. His bones gave no clue as to how, or when, the ever-optimistic aeronaut realized that his dream had become a nightmare.
ACROSS THE SAHARA TO THE CONGO
Fernand Foureau (1899–1900)
By the end of the 19th century France very much wished to link its colony of Algeria with those in Central and West Africa. Unfortunately, the intervening stretch of territory was the Sahara, the world’s largest and bleakest desert. So far every attempt to raise the tricolour over this inhospitable waste had ended in disaster. Singly and in groups, French travellers had either been thwarted by the terrain or, more usually, murdered by its nomadic inhabitants, the Tuareg. When, in 1880, a column of French infantry under Colonel Paul Flatters marched south to negotiate with the Tuareg it was slaughtered almost to a man. In an age of imperial progress this was an unheard-of state of affairs: if other nations, Britain in particular, could seize countries around the world – in the case of India a whole subcontinent – seemingly at will and with little hindrance, then France should be able to do likewise with the Sahara. That it had not yet managed to do so was considered, in some quarters, an insult to national honour.
But even the most jingoistic supporters of Saharan conquest agreed that the task would be difficult. This dry wilderness was nigh impassable to a conventional army with its many men and long supply trains. And however great such an army’s firepower might be, it was of little use against the hit-and-run tactics favoured by the Tuareg, and of no use at all against the dunes. The mountain stronghold of the Hoggar, for example, lay almost 1,000 miles south of Algiers and was surrounded by acre upon acre of trackless sand and rock in which only the Tuareg knew how to survive. With their knowledge of the wells, their skill with camels, their ability to navigate by the stars and the sun, and their centuries-old experience of life in one of the world’s most hostile climates, they were absolute masters of their environment. No European could match them. Yet if the Sahara could not for the moment be conquered, it could at least be crossed. This was the dream of many men, but none pursued it so avidly as Fernand Foureau.
An Algerian settler turned explorer, Foureau made his first foray into the Sahara in 1879. Since then he had mounted 11 expeditions, and had crossed more than 13,000 miles of uncharted wilderness. But although acknowledged as France’s most seasoned desert hand, he had never been able to reach the Hoggar and had never realized his greatest ambition: to traverse the Sahara from top to bottom. In the late 1890S, however, thanks to a bequest from the Geographical Society of Paris, and with the offer of arms and money from the French government, he embarked on a journey that was to take him not only across the desert but thousands of miles further to the Congo River.
On paper, Foureau’s expedition was a scientific one; and he did, indeed, take several scientists with him. Most of his assistants were later found to be too young, too incompetent or simply surplus to requirements, and were therefore sent home. Their absence did not worry him overmuch (he was quite capable of making the trip without them), but it laid bare the expedition’s true, covert purpose. While Foureau wanted to make a peaceful journey from one side of the Sahara to the other, his military escort, under the command of Major François Lamy, had different objectives: the first was to show the Tuareg that French soldiers could cross the desert if they wanted to; and the second was to reach Lake Chad, where Lamy’s force would combine with two other columns – one sent from Senegal, the other from the Congo �
� to establish French sovereignty over the region.
The Foureau-Lamy expedition that left the northern oasis of Biskra in October 1898 comprised 381 men, two Hotchkiss 42-mm cannon with 200 shells apiece, and an assemblage of 1,004 camels to carry food, water and ammunition. As leaders of the largest, most powerful foray France had ever made into the desert, both Foureau and Lamy were confident that the Tuareg would not dare attack them. Initially, their assumption proved correct: the caravan plodded unopposed to the Hoggar, where the Tuareg, having eyed Lamy’s rifles and artillery, showed every sign of friendliness. They even went so far as to offer advice for the next stage of the journey: the white men should be careful, they said, because they were about to enter the Ténéré, an exceptionally cruel stretch of desert; also, if they survived the crossing, they should be aware that the people on the other side of the Ténéré were not necessarily as friendly as themselves. Neither Foureau nor Lamy paid as much attention to the Tuareg’s warnings as they should have.
Foureau and Lamy had fallen prey to the old delusion that size was all. In Europe this might have held true, but in the Sahara, where wells were infrequent and often foul, and where pasture was minimal, it was small, rapid parties that had the best chance of survival. The Foureau-Lamy expedition was vast and slow, travelling only as fast as its troops could march. En route to the Hoggar, camels died as they struggled over mile after mile of sand and harsh rock. The men, too, started to complain: the route was tougher than they had anticipated; the water was tainted; and, above all, the rations were insufficient. It had been arranged that extra provisions would be sent from the north, but they never arrived on time and sometimes did not arrive at all. It had also been hoped that the expedition would be able to shoot game and buy food from caravans moving in the opposite direction. But game was scarce and the few caravans they met sold them only dates and the occasional sheep. As the men became hungrier and hungrier they devoured the newly dead camels with avidity – often without cooking them properly, for firewood, like everything else in the desert, was in short supply. To hunger was added the boredom of routine: the same loading of the camels in the morning, the same dreary slog during the day, and then the same unloading of the camels in the evening, to be repeated the next day and the one after. To tedium was added physical hardship: boiling days, nights so cold that their water froze in its containers, and a terrain so rugged that sometimes they had to blast a passage with dynamite. There weighed on them, too, the oppression of moving through a landscape of black outcrops and sandy ravines, in which the only signs of humanity were circles of fist-sized stones that marked the graves of those who had died there thousands of years before.
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