Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  The survivors’ first act was to erect the tent and carry the invalids to shelter. Their second was to radio an SOS to Spitsbergen. There was no answer. When next they tried, the instrument went dead. They spent that first night huddled in discomfort – nine men and a dog in a tent designed for four, the space being further cramped by the bulky radio, which they had brought inside in the hope that their body heat would warm up the batteries. It was a misty night and bitterly cold. That it wasn’t raining and the wind was mild were their only comforts.

  The following morning they made two important discoveries. The first was a case of astronomical instruments, complete with tables, which would allow them to find their position once the mist cleared. The second was that the radio had responded well to its night in the tent and was now working perfectly. A brief opening in the cloud allowed them to take a sighting – they were just north of 81°, between the 26th and 27th meridian, which placed them 180 miles from King’s Bay and 50 miles north-east of Spitsbergen’s second largest island. The radio operator, Giuseppe Biagi, sent an SOS to this effect; but once again there was no reply. In order to conserve the batteries he did not transmit continuously, but sent a message at five minutes to the hour, every other hour, throughout the day and night. Still there was no answer. Biagi ran tests to see if the transmitter was faulty, but everything seemed to be in order. He was puzzled that no one heard their calls, particularly as the reception was so clear that, on the evening of the 26th, they were able to pick up the nine o’clock news from Rome. Nothing had been heard from the Italia for 24 hours, said the announcer, and there was concern as to its fate. Receiving cost nothing in terms of battery power, so Biagi listened frequently. He was even able to pick up a message from the Citta di Milano. ‘We imagine you are ... between the 15th and 20th meridians E. of Greenwich,’ it ran. ‘Trust us. We are organising help.’ Any relief expedition in that direction would have been fruitless, as Biagi tried to transmit. Again there was no answer.

  They cooked their first meal of pemmican. The result was an unpleasant yellowish gruel. They had experimented with it in Italy and were so disgusted that they had given it to a dog – which had also rejected it. It tasted no better now, but in the circumstances they devoured it ravenously. That same evening the wind swung to the north-west. If they had still been in the air it would have brought them to King’s Bay within two or three hours. But they were not in the air, as they were reminded when there came a long roar and a juddering of the tent. The same wind that might have carried them to safety was now disrupting the floe on which they were camped. Ideally, they would have moved to a safer place, but no piece of ice could be guaranteed firmer than another and, besides, they had no transport. A sun sighting the following day showed they were being pushed east towards Franz Josef Land. They had food for two months, at a ration of 300 grams per man per day, but without boats, skis, dogs or sledges all they could do was sit passively and consume their daily allowance. Their only hope lay in the radio, from which Biagi continued to transmit at two-hourly intervals. If just one message got through, the rescuers would be able to send a plane to collect them. If, that is, a plane was available.

  Back at King’s Bay, Captain Giuseppe Romagna of the Citta di Milano was uncertain how to act. He did have a plane, but had been forbidden to use it by Italo Balbo, the air minister who had previously sneered at Nobile’s flight and was unwilling to aid it in any way. Despite his transmission, Romagna had no real idea of Nobile’s whereabouts and, even if he had, he had no authority to search for him. There were others, however, who saw the Italia’s disappearance as a call to arms. Across Scandinavia and Europe, aeronauts gathered with serious intent. Amidst their ranks, Roald Amundsen suddenly materialized. Casting aside his detestation of Nobile, he persuaded the governments of Norway and Sweden that they had the expertise to rescue the castaways. The veteran explorer urged ‘the utmost speed and urgency’ in launching a sea-air expedition to search for the Italia. The governments listened and towards the end of May seven ships left Sweden, each equipped with an aircraft. The Russians chipped in with a massive icebreaker, the Krassin; and Italy donated a small 350-ton sealer, the Braganza.

  The pilots had one objective: to find Nobile. Amundsen had, maybe, another: to find whatever polar landmass the Italians might have missed. There was a sadness to his resolve: he had made polar exploration his life’s career; now there was so little left to explore he wanted one last moment of glory on the ice. ‘If only you knew how splendid it is up there,’ he remarked to an Italian journalist. ‘That’s where I want to die. I shan’t complain if death takes me in the fulfilment of a high mission, quickly and without suffering.’

  The news that the survivors received on the radio was discouraging. They were heartened to learn that rescue was on its way, but they were downcast when they heard that the search would extend no further than North-East Island, whose outline they could just discern to the west. On 28 May the Swedish scientist Malmgren approached Nobile with a plan: he and two others would walk over the ice to North-East Island, from where they would try to intercept the rescuers. His arm was not broken, just badly bruised, so he was fit for the journey. He estimated it would take them 15 or 16 days to cover the 20 miles. Nobile was at first reluctant but, with the ice being carried towards Franz Josef Land at a rate of 14 miles per day, Malmgren’s suggestion seemed their best hope. Not that it was much of a hope, however: when he asked the Swede in private how he rated his chances compared with those of the men who were to stay at the tent, Malmgren replied, ‘Both parties will die.’

  Malmgren left on the evening of 30 May with two of the Italia’s navigators, Commanders Filippo Zappi and Adalberto Mariano. They carried a small amount of pemmican, a knife, an axe and a pack of letters from those they left behind. They could also have taken a sledge. Cecioni, despite his injuries, had manufactured one from the debris of the control cabin. But it was too unwieldy; on an experimental trip it took them more than an hour to drag a 100-pound load a distance of 40 yards. Even without it they made poor enough headway. For two days Nobile followed their progress through binoculars. When he lost sight of them they had advanced less than three miles. As he recorded, drily, ‘That wasn’t much’.

  While Malmgren’s group vanished towards Spitsbergen, Biagi continued to send SOS signals, in both English and Italian. To optimize the chance of somebody – anybody – hearing, he used the same wavelength as that of the Eiffel Tower, then not just a tourist attraction but a functioning radio mast, to which most Europeans tuned for the 8.00 p.m. time signal. He received no answer – the men on Spitsbergen and on the Citta di Milano, assuming the Italia was lost, had jammed the air with speculative reports of Nobile’s death – but on 3 June he caught a garbled message from Rome. The Soviet embassy had informed the government that a farmer in Archangel, who happened to be an amateur radio ham, had picked up one of Biagi’s signals. He had been able to make little of it, but had heard what he thought was the word ‘Petermann’. The nearest place of that name was Petermann Land – which did not in fact exist, but which was believed to be near Franz Josef Land. It was of no help to the castaways. Neither was a second report that they caught on 7 June, in which an American ham claimed to have received a message saying that the Italia had crashed on a mountain and the crew were living in its wreckage. He gave their position as north of the 84th parallel. On the same day, however, they received a message from the Citta di Milano: ‘Heard you clearly, receiving your SOS and coordinates.’ Anticipating an air rescue, the survivors found an unbroken glass ball of red dye and smeared its contents over the tent to make it more visible. The colour faded after a few days, but from then on their home became known as the ‘Red Tent’.

  By now a total of six nations had joined the search for Nobile. Eighteen ships, 22 planes and 1,500 men were searching the pack. And they were looking not only for the Italians but for Amundsen. He had taken off in mid-June and had not been heard of since. Presumably he too was stranded on the ice. O
n 18 June an Italian pilot, Major Umberto Maddalena, spotted the Red Tent, and five days later a Fokker ski-plane landed on the ice to airlift Nobile and his dog to safety. The pilot, Lieutenant Einar Lundborg of the Swedish Air Force, apologized for not being able to take more than one man, but promised to return in a short while to evacuate the others. When Nobile protested that he should not be the first to leave, Lundborg assured him that all would be fine: within a day and a half the entire contingent would be at Spitsbergen. It would take, at most, four easy flights. Lundborg was overconfident. He delivered Nobile safely, but on his next landing the Fokker overturned, and although he escaped without injury the plane was beyond repair. Thus, in his leather flying gear, the Swedish pilot found himself an inhabitant of the Red Tent.

  Lundborg’s stay was brief and unsettling. To everyone’s bewilderment, he immediately advocated a retreat over the ice to Spitsbergen. When that was rejected, he hovered restlessly until 6 July, when a second Swedish plane, piloted by Lieutenant Birger Schyberg, landed near the Red Tent. Abandoning most of his belongings, Lundborg ‘fled almost in panic’ to the plane, assured the stunned survivors that he would be back, and then took off, never to be seen again. There were to be no more plane landings. By now the weather was so unpredictable and the ice so slushy that the pilots refused to fly. The same conditions, however, would assist the Russian icebreaker. It was on the Krassin, therefore, that the rescuers pinned their hopes.

  The Krassin had left the Vega on 24 June, carrying a stern order from Moscow: ‘[with] energy, discipline, staying power, zest and courage on the part of all... there must be unconditional success’. It also carried a commissar to make sure there would be no backsliding. The Soviets’ fear of failure was greater than their fear of the ice. Where the Swedes had considered conditions too treacherous for safe flying, the captain of the Krassin simply unloaded a Junkers ski-plane onto the ice and told its pilot, Boris Tchukhnovsky, to find the Red Tent. The huge five-crew Junkers took off on 10 July, and by the following morning it had crashed on one of Spitsbergen’s remote eastern capes. Its occupants were alive and unhurt, with plenty of food, but it meant that yet another party was marooned. Before his descent, however, Tchukhnovsky had spotted a column of smoke from the Red Tent, and radioed its coordinates to the icebreaker. He had also seen a group of men on a floe surrounded by open water. At first they were unsure how many men there were: one crewman thought he had seen five, in which case it could be either Amundsen and his crew or the lost men of the Italia; another said he saw only one; but when Tchukhnovsky circled the floe he saw two men waving makeshift flags, and a dark shape that he presumed was a third lying motionless on the ice. It could only be Malmgren’s party. His last message was, ‘Don’t stop for us. Go to Malmgren’s aid soonest.’

  From where the Krassin lay the men were at most 18 miles distant. The ice, however, was six feet thick, and initially they moved at an average of one and a half miles per hour, sounding the ship’s siren at regular intervals. Later the pack opened, and at 5.20 a.m. on 12 July they spotted the men. It was Malmgren’s party, as Tchukhnovsky had guessed, but Malmgren was not there, only Zappi and Mariano. They were surrounded by debris, some of which Tchukhnovsky had obviously mistaken for a man because, when questioned, the Italians said that Malmgren had been dead for a month: he had collapsed from his wounds and from the exhaustion of walking over the pack. They also said that they had not eaten since 30 June. While Zappi and Mariano were bathed and fed, the Krassin steamed towards Tchukhnovsky’s coordinates for the Red Tent. Late on the afternoon of the same day they dropped a ladder and took aboard the last surviving members of the Italia.

  The postmortem of Nobile’s expedition was a sad business. Nobody talked of the new ground he had covered. Nobody, even, took much interest in the cause of the Italia’s crash. They were more excited by Nobile having been the first to be evacuated by Lundborg. It was held widely in Italy that this was not how a leader should act and that the only honourable course of action was for him to shoot himself. Those on the scene protested that he had ‘been coaxed out on false premises’, but their voices counted for nothing. The pressure was so intense that Nobile fled Italy and accepted a post as airship designer in the Soviet Union. His disgrace was eclipsed only by the rumours surrounding Malmgren’s fate. Malmgren had died: that much was clear. How he had died, however, and what had happened to his body, remained a mystery. The Krassin’s doctor noted a peculiar discrepancy between Zappi and Mariano: the former had 12 items of clothing, the latter only five; Zappi seemed well-fed and, despite claiming not to have eaten for almost a fortnight, was discovered to have had a meal the day before his rescue (the doctor examined his faeces); on interrogation, the Soviets learned that Mariano had spent much of the time snowblind; they also reported that the Italians had held hurried, secretive conversations before collaborating on their story of Malmgren’s death. The suspicion – unproven – was that Zappi might have eaten Malmgren.

  Most damning was the extraordinary manner in which the Italia’s rescue had been carried out. The bravery of those who took part could not be questioned; but when the statistics were examined it was hard to tell where valour stopped and foolhardiness began. Of the pilots who had gone in search of Nobile no less than three had had to be rescued themselves: apart from Lundborg and Tchukhnovsky, a Russian named Babuskin had also gone missing. Largely forgotten in the aerial drama was a two-man sledge party that had crossed the ice from Spitsbergen to find Malmgren: it, too, had become stranded and needed rescuing. On the journey from Spitsbergen to Europe an Italian plane also crashed, killing all three men on it. And then there was Amundsen. Since he left Spitsbergen on 18 June in a Latham float plane, with one Norwegian and four Frenchmen, nothing had been heard of him. It was presumed he must have crashed; but nobody thought he was dead, merely that his radio – far weaker than the little emergency set carried by the Italia – had put him beyond contact. After all, other planes had come down and their crews had survived despite having no knowledge of survival on the ice. Amundsen was undoubtedly on a floe or some distant cape, using his much-vaunted Arctic skills to keep himself and his companions alive. On 31 July, however, one of the Latham’s floats was discovered on a small island off Norway. Later a fuel tank also bobbed ashore. It had been punctured and repaired with a wooden plug, and had probably been used as a replacement for the lost float. The trick had been known to work before; but this time, obviously, it had not. Amundsen and his five companions were dead. More people had died trying to rescue Nobile and his men than had died on the Italia itself.

  Nobile’s expedition provided a fitting coda to the heroic age of polar exploration. The heroes – men like Amundsen, Nansen and Scott – had been inspired partly by Sir John Franklin, whose tribulations and ultimate disappearance in search of the North-West Passage had set a benchmark for those who would follow. Amundsen had admitted openly that Franklin had been his role model, the man whose example started him on a career as an explorer. In terms of men lost and of the expense and incompetence of the multi-national rescue missions, Nobile’s expedition had been an abbreviated version of Franklin’s. And like Franklin’s it had ushered in a new era. By 1928 most of the heroes were either dead or in retirement; of the few still in service Amundsen had been the last remaining giant. Amundsen was now gone, as were the goals that he and his fellows had set themselves and the methods they had used to achieve them. After centuries of human endeavour, future exploration would rely on the combustion engine.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  In the absence of source notes it seems redundant to itemize every letter, diary and scrap of archive material. The following, therefore, is a list of books that I have found most directly helpful. Those wishing to research any explorer in greater depth should first address the secondary sources: they are not only accessible but contain fuller bibliographies than can be given here. Alternatively the primary sources will take you straight to the horse’s mouth.

  PRIMARY SOURCES
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br />   Abbruzzi, L. Farther North than Nansen, Howard Wilford Bell, London, 1901

  —(trans. W. Le Queux), On the ‘Polar Star’ in the Arctic Sea (2 vols), Hutchinson, London, 1903

  Amundsen, R., The South Pole (2 vols), John Murray, London, 1912

  — My Life as an Explorer, Heinemann, London, 1927

  Armstrong, A., A Personal Narrative of the Discovery of the North-West Passage, Hurst & Blackett, London, 1857

  Andrée, S., The Andrée Diaries, John Lane, London, 1931

  Burton, R., The Lake Regions of Central Africa (2 vols), Longman, London, 1860