The Ice Balloon. Alec Wilkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ To meet the dignitaries who would be waiting for him, he brought a tuxedo.

      Every newspaper of substance in Europe and North America carried word of his leaving. The headline on the front page of the New York Times said, “Andrée Off for the Pole.” A British military officer called the voyage “The most original and remarkable attempt ever made in Arctic exploration.” For novelty and daring, the figure to whom he was most often compared was Columbus.

      Then, having crossed the horizon, he vanished, the first person to disappear into the air.

      It may be the strangest image in the annals of exploration—a dark gray orb in a white landscape. My wife found it in a slim English book from 1948 called Ballooning, by C. H. Gibbs-Smith, Companion Royal Aeronautical Society. The twenty-eight pages of text refer to prints, woodcuts, engravings, and photographs that range chronologically from “The First Public Balloon Ascent, Annonay, 1783,” to “World Altitude Record. 1935.” In between are “Death of Madame Blanchard, 1819” (fall from balloon); “An Alarming Experience in Gypson’s Balloon, 1847” (lightning); and “The ‘Zenith’ Tragedy, 1875” (crash). Plate 28 is the orb on its side, with two men contemplating it as if detectives sent to determine the circumstances.

      All around the balloon is white from snow and ice, and the sky is white from fog, so there is no horizon, and only a fine line, which the balloon delineates, between the background and foreground. The photograph is not entirely in focus, which makes it appear to be more a print than a photograph, and so somehow obscurely unrealistic, or, on the other hand, realistic in an exaggerated way.

      When my wife showed me the image, I assumed it was staged, a Victorian entertainment of some peculiar kind, a lark in an alien landscape, because a balloon couldn’t be where this one appeared to be any more than an airplane could be on the moon. And if it wasn’t a stunt, I could view it only with a sense of dread for the two men in it. Their craft is wrecked, the landscape is forbidding, and something about the static quality of their forms makes their situation seem utterly hopeless. The caption said, “Andrée’s balloon on the ice.” Who was Andrée, I wondered? How had he come to be standing beside this ruined contraption, and where was this forlorn place? What had he intended? And what happened to the men in the photograph? Had they made their way safely home? And if they hadn’t, how was it that this photograph existed?

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      Except for the bottom of the sea or the center of the earth, the North Pole, at the end of the nineteenth century, was the world’s last mysterious destination. For decades before the South Pole was visited—in December of 1911 by Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian—it was known to reside on land, whereas no one knew what lay at the end of where the compass needle pointed. Some thought a temperate sea; some thought more ice; some thought mountains and islands; and, oddly concretizing the inner life, a remnant of early-nineteenth-century believers, called Hollow Earthers, thought a hole there led to an interior world. (The Tropics, on the other hand, while not entirely revealed, had at least been comprehended; no one, for example, thought that they might enclose a frigid desert.)

      To go to an unknown place on the earth that might take a year to reach and come back from, using the fastest means possible, is no longer within the capacity of human beings, but between 1496 and 1868 roughly 135 expeditions went to the Arctic, predominantly from Europe. Until 1845 they were mainly looking for a way to get to the East, a trade route, and their attempts were described as voyages of discovery, even though they were made in the service of commerce. The men who took part were passionate to see what no one else had seen. They were filling in the map, not always accurately, but honorably, and one after another, the ice turned all of them back.

      A northern passage had become necessary in 1493, when Pope Alexander VI divided the world, East and West, between the Spanish and the Portuguese, leaving the British, less powerful, unable anymore to reach China or India by sailing around Africa. Following the orders of Sebastian Cabot, a Venetian who, under Edward VI, was “Governour of the Mysterie and Companie of the Merchants Aventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Island, and Places Unknowne,” they tried sailing above Russia, a northeast passage, because a map of the period suggested that China and India were closer to England than they actually were. In 1553, Cabot sent three ships to China, two of which got caught in the ice off eastern Lapland, which was uninhabited. According to Sir John Barrow, writing in 1818, in Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions, their crews of about seventy men “perished miserably from the effects of cold, or hunger, or both.” The third ship reached a place where, according to Richard Hakluyt, in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in the early seventeenth century, there was “no night at all, but a continual light upon the huge and mighty ocean.” From the White Sea, near St. Petersburg, the captain trekked fifteen hundred miles south to Moscow, met Ivan the Terrible, who was pleased to see him, and established a trade route. In 1556, another English expedition to China made it to Novaya Zemlya, roughly three thousand miles north of the border of Iran and Afghanistan, encountered ice and fog, lost nerve, and turned back. Only one more English expedition went east, in 1580. It consisted of two small ships, one of which was lost.

      Martin Frobisher, who made three voyages between 1576 and 1578, was the first Englishman to look for a passage west. Because Magellan had found a way between the Atlantic and the Pacific by sailing south of the Americas, Frobisher believed that he would find one by sailing north. On his first voyage Queen Elizabeth I waved to him from a window as he sailed down the Thames. Weeks later he and his crew met Eskimos in kayaks and from the strangers’ Mongoloid features concluded that they were close to China. Five Englishmen went ashore and didn’t come back, so Frobisher seized an Eskimo and brought him to England, where he died of a cold. The other artifact Frobisher came home with was a shiny black stone that was somehow taken for evidence of gold. It is not clear how this supposition arose—possibly Frobisher began it cynically as a means of raising money for another voyage—but English speculators embraced it, and Frobisher was sent to get more. Elizabeth named the territory Meta Incognita, which means “worth unknown.” Frobisher returned with two hundred tons of the substance.

      On his third trip Frobisher left England with fifteen ships and a hundred settlers to establish a mining colony. Three ships were to stay with the colony, and the other twelve were to load up with black stones and return to England. On the way over a storm off Greenland sank the ship that was carrying a lot of their food and the materials for the house that would see them through the winter. When the crew reached shore and took stock of their loss, they realized they couldn’t stay. They spent a few days loading up with stones, sailed home, and arrived to learn that the stones from their last trip had been discovered to be iron pyrite, which was not even worth smelting and was eventually crushed for roads. Frobisher was in disgrace, though he revived himself five years later by a marriage that made him rich and by joining up with Sir Walter Raleigh and seizing a Spanish ship, the Madre de Dios.

      The first man to try to reach the pole was Henry Hudson, in 1607, who believed that the most efficient way to travel to the East would be not to thread one’s way among icebound channels and bays of ice, but to go over the top of the world. Hudson was persuaded, as many geographers had been for centuries, that the ice formed only a species of blockade, and that past it was an open polar sea that possibly was temperate. On a voyage in 1610, pressing his crew to continue, he was overthrown. They put him and his son and a few sympathizers in a small boat, and they drifted off, through the bay that had been named for him, and were never heard from again.

      After about 1847 most journeys to the Arctic were essentially search parties looking for the British explorer Sir John Franklin, who became the most famous man ever to be lost there. He was fifty-nine when he left England in May of 1845, having been sent to determine whether the part of Canadian coastline that was still unvisited, a little more than three hundred miles, completed the Northwest Passage. He had two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, which were last seen by a whaler in Baffin Bay, off Greenland, in late July. Franklin СКАЧАТЬ