CHAPTER XI 

FIGHTING TO THE NORTHWARD 

     The 17th of March we set sail from Ft. McKinley on our sledge trip to the farther north, taking Paul Bjoervig with us. It was a hard life. For eleven successive days we had temperatures ranging from 40° to 48° below zero. The winds were worse than the cold. In such work as this one needs all his vitality, all his endurance, all his physical and moral resistance if he is to keep going. Three days later we were approaching the 82nd parallel on the eastern shores of Crown Prince Rudolph Land--a large island which had once been visited by man. Now the light was increasing, and we hoped to be able to travel still more rapidly, though up to this time we had done fully as well as we had expected. Our loads were getting lighter and more easily handled. The dogs were better trained and much more serviceable than at the beginning of the journey. 

     Better still, ahead of us, glistening in the sun, we could plainly see the outlines of islands hitherto unexplored and unknown. Eager indeed were we to get to them, and beyond them out upon the great Arctic Sea, to 84°, 87°, 88°, and even ninety did not seem wholly impossible in case we were willing to take some little risk about ever getting back again. 

     In view of what has happened and what I have tried to do since this Franz Josef Land effort, it is rather curious to go back to my journal of those days and find what I wrote then. Wit­ness the following extract: 

     "It is only by sledging that any one now proposes to reach the North Pole. The old idea of an open polar sea and the navigation of the very top of our earth in a ship is abandoned. After Andree's disastrous attempt to find a royal aeronautic road to the Pole, no one else is likely to try that method. The plan of all modern Pole-seekers is to get as far north as possible with a ship, establish headquarters upon the land and then make a dash for the Pole and back again with dog sledges. Nansen varied this plan by leaving his ship when she had drifted farther north than man had ever been before, within 415 statute miles of the Pole; and if he had had a supply depot in north Franz Josef Land to return to, so that he could prudently have remained longer in the field, he might have made the ninetieth degree. 

     "To march from an outpost in any of those far northern lands to the Pole and back is a very large order; but there are men of experience who still think it can be done. How difficult the task is only those who have actually attempted it can know. The popular idea is that the feat may be performed if only one will give enough time to it ; that he should push one depot of sup­plies out beyond another, advancing step by step, through a chain of such stations, till the Pole be reached. 

     "This would all be very well if we had the land to work upon. If we had land running to the Pole from lower latitudes, say the eightieth parallel, attainment of that objective of man's adventurous ambitions would be a simple mat­ter. But we haven't. So far as we know, there remains between the most northerly land and the Pole about 500 miles of sea. It is possible to travel over the ice which covers this sea, rough and shifting as it is; but it is useless to establish depots there, for the odds are a hundred to one they can never be found again. Returning from his attempt to reach the Pole, Dr. Nansen made no effort to find the Fram, because she was drifting to and fro, though at no time could she have been more than 150 miles from him, and the probabilities are that on his southern journey he passed within thirty or forty miles of her. 

     "The season of the year through which one can travel over the ice-sheet is limited. The winter months are too dark and the summer months—oddly enough—are too warm. The best season is from about the first of March to the end of May—say a hundred days in all. Before March, the sun is far below the horizon and the gloom too dense. After May the snow is too soft and sticky, and the ice too much broken up. It is true that some traveling might be done in October and early November, after the snow has hardened again, and this suggests the plan of using the 100 days of spring for reaching the Pole, and the autumn for returning to headquarters. 

     " But it must be remembered that, after once leaving the land and taking to the sea-ice, no game can be had; everything the travelers eat, and the fuel for melting ice and cooking food, must be carried with them. The more they carry the slower they must travel. Two pounds a day is the minimum ration per man, of the most approved modern "condensed" food. This means 200 pounds per man for a journey of 100 days, to say nothing of weight of sledges, instruments, tent, fuel, sleepingbags, and packing. With the help of dogs this much may be carried, and the period of absence from land may be extended to 125 or even 140 days, though at first the loads will be very heavy. If, however, a party sets out on a journey of nine months' duration, nearly 600 pounds per man would represent the minimum load simply of food for men alone and excluding all other things, among them the sustenance of the dogs—clearly an impossible burden. 

     "So there is nothing for it but a quick journey out from the land and back again. It makes no difference whether the base used be North Greenland, Franz Josef Land, or a ship that has drifted into the inner polar sea—it is necessarily "a dash for the Pole," and nothing but a dash. It is, practically, a campaign of 100 or 115 days, beginning in the midst of the Arctic winter and ending at the commencement of summer. The man who can get his base established just right; who can so organize his party and so arrange his weights and his motive power as to be able to cover an average of 10 miles a day, and who can manage to avert all serious accidents, has the Pole within his grasp. 

     "Ten miles a day, a mile an hour, seems very little. But try it once if you want to know how, difficult it is. Our party was as well organized as any party could be. We had the best of everything and not too much of it. Simplicity is the first essential of a successful sledge trip. Yet work as hard as we could, we made an average of only six miles a day, about the same as Nansen and Johansen had made. Of course our loads were heaviest these days, for we were carrying four months' supplies. 

     "Each of the five of us had a sledge and a team of dogs. Much of the road was very rough. The previous fall, before the ice had frozen solidly, northeast winds, driving down against the land, had smashed the floes into a forest of hummocks and ridges. Between these elevations there were pockets of deep snow. Winding in and out, up and down, over and through these obstacles, we made our painful way by dint of much lifting, shoving, pulling, and an incessant shouting at the poor dogs."