Death Porn
Review: Alec Wilkinson, The Ice Balloon: S.A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (Knopf, $29)
Wine score: 88 / Pennies per page: 12.1 / Review copy supplied by publisher
One of the more endearing traits of certain nineteenth-century adventurers was their tendency to view survival under extreme conditions as a test of character. They were particularly drawn to the Arctic, which they saw, accordingly to Alec Wilkinson, “as a region of severe—even sacred—purity”:
The path in the Arctic had two ends: arrival or death, which of course was its own arrival. And it was imagined to be the cleanest death, nearly conceptual, a wasting away slowly, an exhaustion relaxing into sleep, it was said; a perishing, an erasure, which was essentially different from a mauling or a withering amid fits of fever or the weakening effects of a larva or parasite that had worked its way through the bloodstream and the body. A man was believed to have his wits in the Arctic until nearly the end…
The Arctic, in other words, unlike the soft, sinful, insinuating tropics, was the perfect platform on which to perform feats of high moral perseverance. It was a region where good breeding, firm resolve and a flask of brandy were thought to suffice to keep a man alive, even when the mercury fell to fifty below zero. And if they failed to be enough, well, there was no better way to die.
Scores of northern novitiates might have disputed this proposition from bitter experience. Consider, for example, the party led by the American, Adolphus Greely, which found itself stranded off Ellesmere Island in the early 1880s.
Greely, a tall, bespectacled signal corps officer, “liked discipline, didn’t like gambling and forbade his men to curse.” He was made of sterling material, then. His previous exposure to wintry conditions consisted of a three-day prairie blizzard. Not much to be going on with, but this was not unusual for the times. Some among his superiors decided he had fortitude and fibre enough, if called on, to see his men through frozen hell, if that was what lay in store for them. Of course, it was.
Greely: with lunch on a leash
They were left to make scientific observations in a camp a thousand miles above the Arctic Circle. When, after a year, the supply ship didn’t appear to pick them up, they struck off across the ice equipped with boats and sledges. (Also silver, linen and, among other amusements, a copy of The Pickwick Papers.) They had a back-up plan, a secondary rendezvous, even a third one. Supplies were stashed at reachable sites to sustain them. They located one of these caches and survived a first tough winter. It was bracing, certainly, and they all felt better for what they had gone through. Still, as the summer wore on, they found themselves scanning the horizon anxiously.
Long story short: the horizon stayed disconcertingly vacant. No ship came. A second harsh winter added sheen to their already burnished mettle. Another summer spent searching for signs of rescuers proved bootless.
They began to be concerned.
And so they struck out again. After a horrendous passage through snowstorms and across pack ice, Greely and his charges found themselves huddled in a jerry-built lean-to on the lip of a ridge overlooking a bay in the middle of absolutely nothing. The purity of the environment was incontrovertible – if absolute virtue is equated with emptiness. It was, if you like, a test of character.
Some went crazy. Others froze to death. One man, Elison, lost his fingers and his feet to frostbite. A buddy tied a fork to the stump of one hand so he could shovel food into his mouth. This worked for as long as there was food to shovel.
They had long ago consumed their dogs. So they ate bear meat and seal blubber when they could catch and kill it. Then they ate the skin and the hair. They ate tiny Arctic shrimp until the net broke. Then they ate lichen and moss and shoe leather. They had a tiny store of more palatable provisions but no one was strong enough to guard it. Some, doubtless of weaker character than the rest, resorted to theft.
And then they started eyeing one another.
*
Wilkinson’s book focuses on the strange and surprising tale of a Swedish adventurer, S.A. Andrée, who reckoned that scrambling across frigid water and broken ice in pursuit of Arctic glory was an avoidable bother. He proposed to reach the Pole by floating above all terrestrial obstacles. It was an utterly daft idea. No one had kept a balloon aloft for the thirty or so days he estimated were needed. No one had come close to such prolonged levitation. Hydrogen, the gas of choice, was highly flammable. It expanded drastically in the heat of the sun and contracted in shadow: a passing cloud could cause the balloon to plummet like ballast. There was no way to steer it, although Andrée had a notion he could tack across air currents by manipulating sails. He couldn’t. The list of other unsolved technical problems was nearly endless.
On a July day in 1896, he and two companions tried anyway.
They stayed up for three days. They came down hundreds of miles from their intended destination. They did okay for a while, having packed a boat along with good wine and tasty victuals. They celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Swedish king’s reign with “seal steak and ivory gull fried in butter and seal-blubber, seal-liver, -brain and kidneys” washed down with wine and followed by “gateau aux raisin.” They did not omit to sing the Swedish national anthem. But they were hauling sledges weighing hundreds of pounds across broken ice, almost inconceivably hard labour, and gradually they weakened. Eventually they wound up on the edge of a large, featureless, snow-covered mound, appropriately named White Island. They died there. I’m not giving anything away: Wilkinson reveals their fate in the first few pages.
All three men on the flight kept some sort of record but none was much of a diarist. They left nothing to indicate what did them in, whether it was cold, hunger, sickness or a bear’s predation. Their remains, which were not recovered until more than thirty years later, yielded few clues. Unlike members of Greely’s party, however, there was nothing to suggest they noshed on one another.
Wilkinson writes spare, understated prose, letting the bizarre and sometimes gruesome content convey mood and emotion. The paucity of primary material about Andrée’s flight means that we get a lot about Greely and other fairly well-known Arctic sagas. The three-and-a-half-page guide to ice terminology seems particularly superfluous. Still, Wilkinson has smart things to say about the impulse to explore and its strange rewards and he writes well. The Ice Balloon is a good read, especially if you like bad ends.
