The Ice Balloon. Alec Wilkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ condensed and the ground petrified, it makes faces to fade, eyes to weep, noses to run and change color, it causes the skin to crack and kills many beasts. Its earth is like flashing bottles, its air like stinging wasps; its night rids the dog of his whimpering, the lion of his roar, the birds of their twittering and the water of its murmur, and the biting cold makes people long for the fires of Hell.” Hell is a complicated notion for people in cold climates. When the Presbyterians went to Alaska in the nineteenth century they told the Indians about the fires of hell that burned perpetually, and the Indians thought it sounded pretty good, so the missionaries had to change hell to a place where it was always cold.

      An Arab writer named Shams ad-din Abû Abdallâh Muhammad ad-Dimashqi (1256–1327) described the Far North as a desert with no people in it. It had no animals, either, only great amounts of snow and darkness, and “around it the vault of heaven turns like a stone in a mill.”

      The Greeks believed that a people named the Hyperboreans lived at the top of the world, beyond the Boreas, the harsh northern wind that issued from a cave. Their territory was a paradise that could not be reached. The Hyperboreans were peaceful and just, they lived in the woods instead of living in houses, they never had wars, and they grew to be a thousand without becoming ill. When a Hyperborean had become tired of life, he or she would put on garlands of flowers, walk to the edge of a particular cliff, and fall into the sea. They cherished Apollo, who could transport to Hyperborea mortals who had lived especially pious lives. To worship him they had a sphere-shaped temple, which hovered on wings. Three brothers who were twelve feet tall were the priests. Every nine years Apollo visited, possibly in a chariot drawn through the air by swans. He played a kind of lyre, called the kithara, and danced for months without resting. When the priests offered their sacrifice and played music, immense herds of swans flew down from the mountains and landed on the temple.

      Other ancients thought that a miscellany of oddities and monsters lived in the North. A lost poem from the seventh century BC, called the Arimaspeia, was said to have been written by a figure, perhaps mythical, named Aristeas of Proconnesus. Aristeas said that he had traveled to the region of the northernmost people, called the Issedonians. The Issedonians told him that north of them lived the Arimaspians, who had long hair and one eye. North of them were Griffins, which looked like lions and had wings and beaks like eagles. The Griffins guarded the earth’s gold and often fought with the Arismaspians, who tried to steal it.

      Elsewhere in the North were the Meropians, whose territory shared a border with a country called Anostos, which means “No Return.” Anostos had no dark or light, only a reddish fog. There were two streams—the Hedone, which was the stream of gladness, and the Lype, which was the stream of sorrow. Each stream had trees on its banks. If you ate the fruit from the trees by the stream of sorrow, you shed tears until you died. If you ate the fruit by the stream of gladness, your desires were slaked and you got younger, but you lived life backwards and died as an infant.

      As for the Romans, Pliny in his Natural History described a territory in the north where the snow fell almost constantly and was like feathers. This region had no light, it produced nothing but frost, it was where the north wind lived, and it was cursed. The existence of the Hyperboreans should be accepted, “since so many authors tell us about them,” he wrote. Tacitus wrote that the sea in the North was still and sluggish and that the sun in rising from it made a sound that could be heard.

      By the fourteenth century, sailors believed that seas in the North had whirlpools so big that traveling into them was like falling into an abyss. In them lived plenty of fantastic creatures. The unknown writer of a thirteenth-century book called The King’s Mirror, a scientific treatise in the form of a dialogue between a man and his son, said that “the waters of Greenland are infested with monsters.” The merman was “tall and of great size and rises straight out of the water.” It had a head and shoulders and eyes and a mouth, “but above the eyes and the eyebrows it looks more like a man with a peaked helmet on his head.” Its form “looked much like an icicle,” in that it narrowed toward its lower half, “but no one has ever seen how the lower end is shaped, whether it terminates in a fin like a fish or is pointed like a pole.” The mermaid rarely appeared except before violent storms and was ugly to look at, with a “large and terrifying face.”

      Instead of whirlpools the author mentions “sea hedges,” which are three-sided, “higher than lofty mountains,” and box in the sea. “We have to speak cautiously about this matter, for of late we have met but very few who have escaped this peril and are able to give us tidings about it.”

      Among the region’s other attributes were the ice fields on the ocean, which he said were sometimes “as flat as if they were frozen on the sea itself,” and icebergs, “which never mingle with other ice, but stand by themselves.”

      To read these accounts is to feel that the world the explorers were to step into hadn’t yet been completely created.

      10

      Soon after Andrée got to Philadelphia, he “looked up the balloonist John Wise, an elderly man who had begun his career as a piano polisher,” he wrote. Actually Wise had started as a cabinet-maker and had then built pianos. At fourteen, from an article in a German-language newspaper, he got interested in balloons. In his twenties he built one from muslin and varnished it with linseed oil and birdlime, a sticky substance made from tree bark, that was used to trap birds. The mixture, Wise noted, was prone to combust spontaneously.

      Wise was also an innovator. He was among the first aeronauts to use draglines as a means for a balloon to maintain a stable height. He also invented the rip panel, which allowed a balloon to deflate quickly and safely for landing. Beforehand a balloonist had to climb through the rigging to the top of the balloon, and with his knees grasp the valve that released the gas. From his weight, the balloon would often turn upside down, which, depending on how hard it hit the ground, might not be so good for the balloonist.

      Wise had made roughly four hundred flights “and had had all manner of thrilling adventures,” Andrée wrote. “He had flown with them in sunshine, rain, snow, thunder showers and hurricanes. He had been stuck on chimneys, smoke stacks, lightning rods and church spires, and he had been dragged through rivers, lakes, and over garden plots and forests primeval. His balloons had whirled like tops, caught fire, exploded and fallen to the ground like stones. The old man himself, however, had always escaped unhurt and counted his experiences as proof of how safe the art of flying really was.

      “In order to convince a few fellow citizens who had been inconsiderate enough to doubt his thesis, Mr. Wise once made an ascent in Philadelphia, and while in mid-air he deliberately exploded his balloon. Then using the remains of the bag as a parachute he landed right in the midst of the doubters. What effect this had on them I do not know, but the old man himself felt better.”

      Wise believed that the wind blew predominantly from west to east, and with sufficient force and steadiness to transport a balloon carrying people and freight not only across America but also to Europe. Building a balloon to cross the Atlantic was, he wrote, “the dream of my lifetime.” The balloon he imagined had a basket shaped like a boat, in case he came down in the water. On the gunwales it had oars and hand-turned propellers. In 1859 Wise started the Trans Atlantic Balloon Corporation with two partners. The balloon they built they flew from Missouri to New York in twenty hours and forty minutes, a record. Two months later, the partners, flying from New York to Canada, crashed in the Canadian woods, and the balloon was destroyed.

      In 1873, Wise raised money for a second transatlantic balloon from the Daily Graphic, a New York newspaper. This balloon was accompanied by two smaller ones that carried extra gas and could also support someone making repairs to the balloon itself. Wise thought that a crossing to Ireland would take sixty hours and be almost absurdly perilous. “The discovery of the North Pole, which had recently caused Captain Hall’s death,” he wrote, meaning Charles Hall, who died in 1871 trying to reach СКАЧАТЬ