Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  Over succeeding decades people hurled themselves at Everest. Trusting to the experiences of Norton and Odell, they refused to take oxygen and they all failed. In 1952 a British expedition finally overcame the various cols and ridges to stand on top of the world. They used the same siege technique that the 1924 expedition had pioneered, and they used oxygen. Not until 1978 did Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler complete an oxygen-free ascent, to be followed by Messner’s famous solo climb in 1981. Between 1924 and 1952 there was a large gap; between 1924 and 1978 an even larger one. What had happened during those years to make the last thousand feet so insurmountable? Was it the mountain, the weather or the men? Had the national – or international – stock diminished so rapidly that nobody had the same powers of endurance as climbers like Norton, Somervell and Odell? The answer was probably Mallory and Irvine. They were the first to die at high altitude on Everest, and their deaths were a psychological block to those who came after. It did not matter that Mallory was a terminally forgetful climber, nor that Irvine was an amateur. They hovered, like Banquo’s ghost, behind every Everest expedition.

  When Edmund Hillary famously said, ‘We knocked the bastard off’, there was a brief hiatus before Everest became everyone’s. Its conquest was not easy, but if it had been done once it could be done again. Like the Matterhorn, it had lost its mystique and the road was open for all. It remained a difficult hill – as witnessed by the scores of frozen corpses that can still be found on its slopes – but it was now seen much as it had been in 1924: high, but not impossible. By the late 1990S it had become an extreme tourist destination, where people who had never climbed a hill in their lives could be escorted to the summit for a sizeable sum of dollars, with every expectation of returning alive.

  Still the search for Mallory and Irvine went on. An ice-axe was found below the North-East Ridge in 1933. In 1975 a Chinese climber reported an ‘English dead’ at approximately the same height as Camp VI. In 1991 two oxygen bottles were found at the foot of the First Step. Odell’s report had led optimists to assume that the pair were on the Second Step, but perhaps they were far lower, as was suggested in 1999 when an American research expedition found Mallory’s bleached but perfectly preserved corpse on a field of rubble below the First Step. It lay face down, and its right leg was badly broken. Poignantly, they were able to establish its identity by the name-tape sewn into the jacket.

  The images of Mallory’s remains make rough viewing. For how long had he survived with his broken leg? How, why and when had he fallen? And what had happened to Irvine? None of these questions can be answered. The 1975 Chinese expedition mentioned a body sitting, or sleeping, with a hole in its face. This was clearly not the body the Americans had found. Was it Irvine? If so, what had happened to the two men? Had Irvine become stuck, whereupon Mallory had gone down on his own? Or had Mallory fallen first, leaving the inexperienced Irvine stranded on a ledge? And when, above all, had they fallen? Was it before or after the summit? The Americans did not find Mallory’s Kodak camera – he might have given it to Irvine, or it might have bounced down the hill – but when somebody does find it, and if its film has not perished, it will answer one of the great questions in the history of exploration: did Mallory and Irvine get there first?

  BY AIRSHIP TO THE NORTH POLE

  Umberto Nobile (1928)

  In 1903 the Wright brothers’ Kittyhawk made its first tentative leap into the air. Two decades later, following a period of astoundingly rapid technological advance, humankind’s mastery of the skies was established. The aeroplanes that clattered above Europe and America during the 1920S were unreliable, uncomfortable and dangerous. Their supremacy, however, could not be denied. They made mockery of the land below. What did an aeronaut care for mountains, rivers and jungles? All distances were now ‘as the crow flies’. Indeed, the crow barely got a look-in, given the speeds at which modern planes flew. Planes, however, had one drawback: the size of their fuel tanks limited them to short hops between prearranged depots. For sustained, long-distance flights, therefore, people turned to dirigibles. Better known as Zeppelins, after the German who had pioneered their development, these propeller-driven behemoths were, to many, the way of the future. A honeycomb of hydrogen-filled bubbles, contained within a carapace of silk and powered by an internal combustion engine, the Zeppelin combined the economy of a balloon with the directional capability of a plane. It had its own problems: it could make little headway against adverse winds, and the hydrogen was dangerously flammable. Nevertheless, disasters were rare, and by the mid-1920s Zeppelins were a common sight above every major Western city.

  Mechanized air travel was a boon to Arctic explorers. In 1925 Roald Amundsen and his American sponsor, Lincoln Ellsworth, made an attempt on the North Pole in two Dornier seaplanes. Taking off from Spitsbergen, they reached 88° N before engine failure forced them to return (leaving one Dornier behind on the ice). The following year Richard Evelyn Byrd followed their route in a Fokker and was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honour as the first airman to reach the Pole. Doubts were cast on his claim, and the consensus today is that he did not reach his goal. A few days after Byrd’s return, however, a joint American-Italian-Norwegian expedition left Spitsbergen on a three-day flight that took them safely across the Pole to Alaska. The craft in question was a Zeppelin, the Norge, purchased second-hand by Amundsen and Ellsworth, and piloted by the Italian dirigible expert Colonel Umberto Nobile. The expedition was hailed as a triumph: it had made the first Arctic crossing, had made the first undisputed sighting of the North Pole, had proved the durability and overall excellence of Zeppelins, had boosted the international standing of Mussolini’s infant fascist state (on landing, Nobile was ordered to make a tour of immigrant communities in the US – ‘Italian colonies’, as II Duce called them), and had demonstrated how puny the earth’s natural obstacles were to men of the air. It had also answered a nagging question: did there exist a continental landmass in the vicinity of the Pole? Peary had reported no such thing, and Amundsen believed firmly that he had attained 90°N. But Peary had been a crawler on the ice; Amundsen was now a gladiator of the sky. In the Norge he had hoped to cap his traverses of the North-West and North-East Passages, and his attainment of the South Pole, with the discovery of the world’s northernmost island – perhaps even to lower a rope ladder and name it after himself. However, when the Norge reached the North Pole Amundsen could see nothing but ice. It was maybe this disappointment that sparked a bizarre animosity towards Nobile. On his return Amundsen accused the Italian of being a nervous, incompetent pilot who knew nothing about the Arctic, was ignorant of the most basic survival skills and was a dwarfish popinjay to boot. Nobile was, certainly, small in stature, excitable and fond of uniforms, and had no experience at all of surface travel in the Arctic. He had, also, a sentimental attachment to his pet terrier, which accompanied him everywhere and which, in times of emotion, he would clasp to his chest. But he was a reasonably confident pilot and knew more about Zeppelins than Amundsen ever would. Ignoring the latter’s attack, Nobile left the now bankrupt Amundsen to fulminate while he prepared his own, purely Italian expedition to the polar regions.

  Nobile’s plan was not to make a second headline dash to the Pole (though another visit might be useful) but to undertake a series of flights from Spitsbergen which, over time, would explore the 1,500,000 square miles of pack that remained unknown to science. Besides scanning the ice from above, he also wanted – weather permitting – to land small teams on the relatively uncharted islands, such as Severnaya Zemlya, that lay above the Russian coast. These teams could be picked up at a later date or could make their way home across Siberia. The craft in which he intended to perform these deeds was the Italia, a 384-foot-long dirigible whose three engines totalled 750 horsepower and produced a top speed of 70 miles per hour. It was not the machine he had had in mind: he had envisaged a dirigible three times the size, with a bigger gondola and far greater lifting power; but the Italian Air Ministry had refused him th
e resources. Still, the Italia was slightly more efficient than the Norge, and once Nobile had made a few modifications – new anti-freeze, new gas valves, better insulation, rubber strips to protect the canopy from ice shards spat out by the propellers – it was fit for Arctic service.

  Nobile attracted his share of critics. Russian scientists, whose experience of the theory and practicalities of Arctic flight stemmed from before the Great War, pointed out that the Italia was undersized: its gondola was too small, its engines could not match the force of Arctic gales. They said, repeatedly, that Nobile should reconsider his idea of landing parties on Siberian islands: the winds would be too strong for a safe landing, let alone a safe retrieval; he did not realize how hard it was in the Arctic to spot men from the air; a retreat through Siberia was difficult at the best of times and without proper preparation equivalent to a death sentence. In all, they concluded, the enterprise was ‘extraordinarily risky’. The air minister, Italo Balbo, thought the programme a waste of time: Italy’s new fascist regime could be promoted more effectively and with far greater pomp by, say, sending a squadron of planes to Argentina. Even Mussolini had doubts: when Nobile first outlined his ambitions, he replied, ‘Perhaps it would be better not to tempt Fate a second time’.

  In the end, however, Mussolini signalled his approval. The prospect of demonstrating yet again Italy’s aerial supremacy in the Arctic was too tempting. Equally alluring was the fact that the Italian government had nothing to lose: the idea was Nobile’s; the funding was supplied almost entirely by the city of Milan and the Royal Geographical Society. If Nobile succeeded the government could bask in his glory; if he failed it could deny responsibility – after all, it was a private enterprise to which it had contributed little more than its good wishes. And the project did have a certain altruistic attraction: unlike so many of his predecessors, who had pretended to be acting in the name of science when really they were engaged in a race for the Pole, Nobile hoped his programme would be of genuine scientific and geographical benefit. As Mussolini told him, ‘This enterprise is not one of those destined to strike the popular imagination, like your 1926 expedition. But it will attract the attention of the scientific world. I see that there is a great deal of interest in it abroad.’

  Nobile hired three scientists – one Italian, one Czech and one Swede – plus two Italian journalists, an Italian wireless operator, four Italian navigators and 18 Italian crew. Having learned from his experience on the Norge, he wanted as few foreigners as possible. He approached the polar veteran Fridtjof Nansen, who advised him on equipment for the land parties, the provisions he should take to combat scurvy, and the basic necessities he would require for survival should the Italia crash on the pack. Nobile followed the broad thrust of his instructions – with the exception of Amundsen, Nansen was the most experienced polar traveller alive – but made a few amendments of his own. He did not take dogs, for example, because although they were indisputably the best means of sledge travel he had no space for them in the Italia. Neither did he take the lightweight tents suggested by Nansen, preferring instead heavier and better insulated models. Similarly, he rejected the Norwegian and British brand of pemmican for a recipe more suited to Italian tastes, substituting peas for rice, oatmeal for raisins, potatoes for sugar and onions for vegetables, and increasing the percentage of dried meat and fat.

  Nobile’s final piece of cargo was an oak cross, dedicated by the Pope, with which he was to consecrate the North Pole. With this aboard, and having had final audiences with the King of Italy and Mussolini, Nobile was ready to fly. On the evening of 19 April 1928 the Italia rose from its moorings at Milan airfield and steered north for Spitsbergen. Eighteen days later, having flown a total of 3,200 miles through unexpectedly rough weather, it was at King’s Bay – the spot from which Nobile had departed two years previously on his trip to the Pole – where two ships, the Hobby and the Citta di Milano, were unloading the fuel and provisions he would need during the coming months.

  For his first flight, on 11 May, Nobile planned an epic journey across Greenland to the mouth of Canada’s Mackenzie River. Unfortunately, bad weather and a broken rudder cable forced him back to King’s Bay after only eight hours. His second flight, to Severnaya Zemlya, was more successful. The Italia took to the air on 15 May and returned three days later after a journey of more than 2,000 miles. To Nobile’s chagrin, strong winds had prevented him reaching his goal, but he had flown over the north coasts of Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya and had traversed some 48,000 square kilometres of undiscovered ice. Moreover, the Italia had behaved perfectly, and during much of its flight had been navigated by radio – the bearings being sent from a transmitter at King’s Bay – a relative novelty for the time and of enormous value in the featureless Arctic pack.

  Five journalists had assembled at King’s Bay to report on Nobile’s expeditions. But as Mussolini had pointed out, the Italia’s programme was not the stuff of headlines. However successful the flight to Severnaya Zemlya may have been, it was of limited interest to the wider world. It was Nobile’s third foray that caught the journalists’ attention: a voyage over the quadrant of ice stretching north from a line between Spitsbergen and Greenland. That Nobile would be traversing an unknown part of the globe was immaterial. What was news was that he would be crossing the North Pole, where he would deposit the Pope’s cross, the flag of Milan and a five-pound note that an English woman had sent him with the request that it be left on top of the world.

  At 4.00 a.m. on 23 May the Italia again rose into the air, carrying a reduced crew of 16 men and Nobile’s pet dog. Within 14 hours it was above Cape Bridgman on the north coast of Greenland, and shortly after midnight on 24 May it was at the Pole. The crew toasted their success in mugs of egg nog, dropped flags, offloaded the Pope’s wooden cross – so bulky that they had some difficulty pushing it through the door – played patriotic songs on a portable gramophone and cried, ‘Nobile for ever! Long Live Italy!’ They shook hands solemnly and sent victorious radio messages to Spitsbergen. Then at 2.20 a.m. they turned south, following the 25th meridian that would lead them back to Spitsbergen. They expected no difficulties – a view that was shared by the press at King’s Bay: ‘To fly in the polar zone is like eating bread and butter,’ remarked one man. ‘In Europe the natural conditions are considerably more difficult.’

  The Italia flew uneventfully south, the weather seemingly in its favour. There was a north-west wind and, despite banks of thin fog and the formation of ice on the radio antennae, the journey proceeded smoothly. After a few hours, however, the weather turned sour. The wind changed to the southwest, thick mist obscured their vision and, after a brief debate as to whether they should abandon Spitsbergen and head for Alaska or Siberia – the decision was no – Nobile took the ship to within sight of the pack in order to check their speed and drift. The news was not good: they were down to 25 miles per hour (despite an airspeed indication of 60) and they were being pushed to the east. The wind had now turned into a gale, covering the craft with ice and hampering radio transmission. At 10.30 on the morning of 25 May the operators at King’s Bay received a message that the Italia had been delayed by strong winds, was low on petrol, and could not be expected home until later that afternoon. It was the last message they would receive. About what happened next there is an extraordinary lack of information. As a contemporary historian lamented, ‘No one could explain exactly how the catastrophe occurred’.

  By 3.00 a.m. on 25 May Nobile’s navigators estimated they were within 120 miles of the north coast of Spitsbergen, but were being pushed continually east. At about 9.30 a.m. the elevating rudders jammed – nobody knew why – sending the ship nose-first towards the pack. When they were 250 feet above the ice they managed to fix the rudders, at the same time throwing out ballast so that they rose to perhaps 2,500 feet before restabilizing at 1,500 feet. It must have been about this time that the Italia transmitted its last situation report, detailing a position of 180 miles north-east of King’s Bay.
But then there were inexplicable difficulties with the gas, one end of the Italia – by some accounts the bow, by others the stern – rising higher than the other. Despite adjusting the valves, nothing seemed to stabilize the dirigible and, to everyone’s bewilderment, although gas pressure remained high the Italia began to sink rapidly. All three engines were turning at their fastest, the rudders were at maximum elevation, but still they descended. Of the succeeding minutes there survives only a picture of confusion. Unable to believe the rate of descent, Nobile threw out a glass ball of red dye and counted the seconds until it burst on the snow. This rudimentary altimeter, which he had packed in case his instruments proved faulty, showed only too well how accurate they were. Within minutes of its impact the Italia collided with the pack. The stern engine broke off, as did the control cabin, whose occupants were flung onto the ice. Relieved of its burden, the Italia rose lopsidedly into the air and skittered northwards, trailing lengths of fabric and twisted metal. Before it vanished from sight Nobile saw the face of Sub-Lieutenant Ettore Arduino peering from one of the broken catwalks.

  Nobile had been badly gashed on the head and had broken both an arm and a leg. His second officer, Filippo Zappi, had broken a wrist. A Swedish scientist, Finn Malmgren, had sustained heavy bruising down his left side and had possibly broken an arm. A mechanic, Natale Cecioni, had broken a leg. Five others, however, had escaped without injury, and Nobile’s dog scampered happily about the place. Around them were strewn the contents of the control cabin and, not far off, the cabin itself, a crumpled aluminium box. A 50-metre red stain showed where the Italia’s glass altimeter balls had burst, one by one, as the cabin had been dragged over the snow. Among the wreckage were bits and pieces of the survival kit Nobile had packed on Nansen’s advice, including a tent, an 18-kilogram box of pemmican, a Very pistol with flares, boxes of matches, a Colt revolver with 100 cartridges and, best of all, a radio. Near the remains of the stern engine and its accompanying gondola sat a mechanic, Vincenzo Pomella, who was, to judge by his posture, reaching for a shoe that had been torn off his foot. But when they came closer it was apparent that he was dead. Of the Italia’s 16-strong crew, nine in all were definitely alive. Of the remainder, except for Pomella, they had no clue. Shortly after the crash a column of smoke rose on the horizon. Some said that the airship had blown up. Others, optimistically, suggested the crew were offloading excess petrol drums to keep the ship in the air. The truth was beyond their reckoning. They had no means of transport and no travelling gear, and were too battered even to contemplate a rescue mission. Nothing was ever found of the Italia, nor of the half-dozen men it contained.