Friday, April 27, 2012

In the Arctic

The Ice Balloon by Alec Wilkins

At the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th, one of the Great Adventures and Explorations was the physical trip to the North Pole, magnetic and geographic. Another Great Adventure and Exploration was the discovery of the Famed Northwest Passage from the Atlantic Ocean Across Northernmost America to the Pacific Ocean. From the sixteenth century onward, Europeans and later North Americans attempted to make it to the North Pole or across the Northern Arctic Archipelago from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

The Great Problem of a Trip to the North Pole was the fact that there was no Northern Continent like the Southern Continent of Antarctica to hold the Pole. In the Northern Arctic, there was the ever moving ice and frozen sea that impeded any journey to the North Pole. Ships could go so far in some years and then not go there in other years due to the changing ice. Ships were caught in the ice and some never got free of it and had to be abandoned. Arctic Explorers had to factor that the endlessly moving and forming and re-forming ice could trap them in an Exploration Trip for years before they could get out or be found or rescued.

The ice like time gave Uncertainty to the Venture. What was there to begin with might not be there later or have become something else unexpected in the future.

In 1897, a Swedish explorer named S. A. Andrée with two companions named Fraenkel and Strindberg attempted to be the first people (not even the Native Peoples cared to venture that far into the Uncertain North for no great advantage or rewards for them) to make it to the North Pole. Mr. Andrée's mode of transportation was a Hydrogen Balloon.

In that age, Mr. Andrée had no means of communication such as radio, he was going to use carrier pigeons to notify others (his country men and newspapers and the Royal Geographical Society of Britain) of his progress. He would also put messages on buoys that he would throw over the side and use the shifting ice to send the buoys to the Whalers who were the only people other than some of the Native Peoples to go that far North with any purpose other than Exploration.

Mr. Andrée and his balloon and companions like many Arctic Explorers disappeared into the North and was never seen again. He and his companions were lost in the Arctic.

In 1930, a Norwegian Sealing and Science sloop named the Bratvaag stopped at White Island in the Arctic Ocean and found the remains of Andrée's Expedition to the North Pole. Mr. Andrée and his companions had lost their lives and their heads, really, their bodies had no heads. Some diaries and pictures and artifacts and headless bodies were all that remained on the ice and trapped in the ice.

This book is about how it all came to that and naught.

The book also tells the horrific tale of Adolphus Greely, an American Explorer of the Arctic, who led an expedition to find the Lost British Expedition of Franklin who was trying to find the Northwest passage. (That is what Arctic Exploration was, some body was always looking not only for the North Pole or the Northwest Passage but also for some one who got lost looking for one or the other of the two.) Mr. Greely's Arctic Adventure makes the movies, The Thing or Hostel, look tame by comparison. Anything that an Imaginary Alien or depraved people can do to a traveller, the Arctic and Nature can do worse.

One amusing thing about Mr. Andrée's expedition was the fact that his companion, Strindberg, was confused with the playwright, August Strindberg; and Paul Gauguin, the painter, wrote to friend that he didn't understand why August Strindberg had taken it in his head to go to the North Pole in a balloon. August Strindberg also received a letter from his wife imploring him not to go exploring in the North.

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