CHAPTER XIX 

"A SCIENTIFIC VILLAGE IN THE ARCTICS" 

     In June, 1906, we were able to send Frithjof from Tromso, Norway, in charge of Major Hersey, with a full cargo of timber, machinery and supplies, and more than a score of work­men. They were instructed to land at Virgo Bay, Dane's Island, and there begin at once the erection of the buildings needed by the Expe­dition. Thus again was the site of Andree's ill-fated enterprise to be the scene of strange activity, denoting man's restless search for the unknown. The Frithjof made a good voyage, but found the Dannish Strait full of ice, and a landing of the timber and material was effected only with great difficulty. Some snowstorms—a snowstorm may come any day of the year in that region—also delayed operations. But as soon as possible they took their cargo ashore and at once sent Frithjof back to Tromso to fetch the airship and my party. 

     But I was having troubles of my own, and plenty of them. The contractor of the airship, M. Godard, had been delayed by strikes, and was, unable to finish the mechanical part of the ship in time to permit the motor trials which had been agreed upon. In fact, the principal motor —there were to be two engines—was not deliv­ered by the manufacturers, and I soon found myself facing these horns of the dilemma : To hold the contractor to his bargain, and have no airship to take to Spitzbergen; or, go in with money and energy and try to help him finish his work. American like, I decided upon the latter course. I bought a Clement 50-60 horse­power motor at a high price and had it imme­diately installed. A day was set for testing out the machinery, and all the aeronautic world of Paris, and many scientific men, government offi­cials, ambassadors and others of distinction, came to witness the trials. 

     M. Godard was by trade a balloon-maker. In that branch of the art he excelled, and the huge balloon he had built for us was of excellent material and workmanship. He was not so for­tunate in his mechanical construction. The car, or "nacelle," was of wood reinforced with steel —a platform about thirty feet in length and five feet wide. Upon it were placed the motors and machinery. Each motor was to drive a pro­peller of wood with canvas facings placed at either end of the car. A tent-like roof gave protection to the crew from wind and weather, and a huge basket was to be swung underneath the car for carrying supplies of gasoline and pro­visions. 

     Though far from being satisfied with many of the details of this installation, rather than have the Expedition postponed one year, I de­cided to accept it, hoping to get it all in better order with our own staff of mechanics at Spitz­bergen. So much time had been lost that in order to catch the Frithjof at Tromso, and reach our base at Spitzbergen early enough to have a chance to finish our work of preparation and get a voyage that summer, it was necessary to charter a special train to carry the airship from Paris to Antwerp, where the steamer Frigga was waiting to carry the cargo to the south Norwe­gian coast, thence to be taken on 1,000 miles to Tromso in the far north. We sent our own men with the cargo to make sure everything was properly handled, caught every connection, and July 4th left Tromso with everything aboard the Frithjof. 

     Tromso is one of the most northerly towns in the world. It is near the 70th parallel of north latitude, which places it in about the same latitude as Cape Farewell, the southern end of Greenland, and the northern shores of Alaska. The chief industry of the place is fish­ing, though there is a little agriculture. Among the 5,000 inhabitants are some of the most de­lightful people in the world, and the society there is refined and elegant. The climate is pe­culiar. In winter there are about eight weeks during which the sun does not rise at noon. At that period the people light their lamps or turn on the electric light when they get up in the morning, and keep them burning till they go to bed at night. In mid-summer, of course, there is a period of the same length throughout which the sun does not set at midnight, and weeks more in which the nights are almost as light as day. In these darkless nights of mid­summer the Tromso people roam the streets, row in the strait, climb the mountains, spend much time in the beautiful city park which lies on the hills above the town. They sleep little in the light period, but make up for it all in the dark winter. 

     After a quick voyage we arrived at Virgo Bay, July 8th, and had expected to see our build­ings well under way, especially the big balloon house, about which we were most anxious. But to our surprise and disappointment, only the living house and the machine shop had been erected. Major Hersey had named the place "Camp Wellman," but it was as yet only the beginning of a camp. Our men were still living in Pike House, and our workmen continued liv‑ ing there. Next day the staff members moved into our own house, doubtless the best house ever put up in the far north. It has an outer corri­dor for stores, surrounded by double walls. The enclosure within is lighted by overhead windows, and also has double walls, with air-space between. Thus the habitation is always warm and dry, even in the depth of the Arctic winter—quite a contrast with the damp, freezing den in which we passed a winter in Franz Josef Land. There is a well-equipped kitchen, and a fine bath-room with a porcelain tub. 

     Great was my surprise upon arriving here to see on shore a little green tent over which a German flag was flying. They told me its oc­cupant was a Berlin newspaper correspondent who had said he knew me. In a short time Herr Otto von Gottberg, a famous correspond­ent representing the Berlin Lokal Anzeiger, came up and greeted me. We were indeed old friends, and had sat at the same table at Went­worth Hotel, Portsmouth, during the Russo-Japanese Peace Conference. Herr Von Gott-berg had been sent up here to report our Expedition for his paper, and had chartered the little Express steamer, under the command of Captain Theodore Lerner, a well-known Arctic traveler and sportsman, for the voyage. Herr von Gottberg was at first very anxious lest I should not permit him to remain, having ab­sorbed from American papers the false notion that we were working this Expedition as an ad­vertising affair, and that therefore we might not wish the representatives of other newspapers to be present to get information. We quickly informed him of his error and of the fact that he was welcome to stay as long as he wished. 

     From now our work was pushed with great energy. The first thing to do was to select a site for the big balloon house. The reader will un­derstand that an airship, with its complicated mechanical adjustments and the long and labori­ous process of inflating it with hydrogen, must be sheltered from wind and weather whilst it is being made ready for a voyage. Otherwise it would be threatened with destruction by every strong wind that came along. It was not easy to find a good site for so large a house in the little bit of bare ground we had at the foot of the hills. And the site we decided upon had to be prepared by blasting out many feet of eternal ice, and also great rocks as large as small houses. It was difficult work. Then the foundations had to be prepared. For this part of the structure we drew upon the timbers which remained of the wreck of Andree's balloon house, a few hundred yards distant. Meanwhile Frithjof had to go back to Norway for a third cargo of materials. 

     The Arctic summers are short. It is impos­sible to get through the ice and reach Spitz­bergen before the middle of June in an average year, and one must get away early in September, unless he wishes to run the risk of being caught for the winter by the ice coming down upon the coast. Spitzbergen is most favorably situated for a far northerly advance by ship during the summer. The prevailing winds are northeast, and to the westward of the Archipelago runs the great Arctic current southward between Spitz­bergen and Greenland, the chief outlet of the Arctic Sea. The ice fields have a tendency to move to the westward, and in summer there is lit­tle ice on the Spitzbergen coast and much on the Greenland side. Usually ships not built for ramming ice can reach our headquarters in July and August, and advantage of these conditions is taken by the managers of shipping companies to send their tourists to the real Arctics. Every year we at our base were visited by tourist ships, hundreds of visitors descending upon us with their cameras, their autograph hunting and their innumerable questions. These tourist ships even venture to run north to the edge of the ice-pack, and have been known to pass the 80th parallel, which is farther north than Franklin, Kane and many of the early Arctic explorers were able to get on the American side of the globe, where no such favorable conditions for navigation exist. 

     Our force of men worked hard all summer, but were unable to finish the balloon house and the other buildings in time to make it possible to inflate the airship and get it ready for a voyage. The Engineer Liwenthaal had under­taken to complete the balloon house within three weeks after reaching our base. It was all he could do to finish it in nine weeks. My experi­ence with engineers and constructors in charge of the details of operations has invariably been that they may be exceedingly skillful so far as technique is concerned, but few of them can form any adequate idea either of the time required for an operation or the cost thereof. 

     This balloon house was no small job. It had to be built of arches fashioned on the spot, bent and bolted together on bending frames. As fast as the arches were finished they were raised by means of a huge pyramid or derrick manned by a score of men. When the arches were all up they were moved to their proper places and bridges or spans thrown across to bind them to­gether. The whole was covered with nearly an acre of strong canvas prepared in Norway for the purpose. The structure was 210 feet long, 85 feet wide and 85 feet high. The floor was completely covered with boards. It would not have been finished the first summer if I had not, in hopes of being able to complete it and get the airship inflated and tested, taken the responsibil­ity of reducing the number of arches from nine to five. This weakened the structure, and got us into trouble the following summer, but at the time it seemed to be the only thing to do. 

     When all our work was finished we had a liv­ing house, a well-equipped machine shop, a bal­loon house, a hydrogen gas apparatus, a boiler house, a pumping house, and had upon the ground nearly two hundred tons of gas-making material. The London Illustrated News called it "Mr. Wellman's scientific village in the Arctics." Such it was, but unfortunately the sum­mer was at an end, and it was impracticable to go on with the real work in view, which of course was inflation of the America, as our airship was named, and a voyage in her through the air. Though we had struggled with all our strength to get results this first summer, and were unable simply because of the magnitude of the operation and the short season in which the work could be carried on, in some way an impression was spread by the yellow journals that we were pur­posely delaying the voyage which we had come up here to make! 

     While waiting in the vain hope that the bal­loon house might be completed I had put the mechanical staff to work setting up the car of the airship, installing the motors and testing out the machinery by actual running. It was well we did so. And as it turned out it would have been impossible to make an airship voyage that year even if the buildings had been finished in time, because the mechanical part of the America was a failure. The motors could not be made to work right, the driving gear went to pieces, and the propellers could not stand even half of the strain which it was designed to put upon them. 

     During this summer we were favored with visits not only from a number of tourist ships, but by the Prince of Monaco. He came to our little port with his magnificent yacht, the Prin­cesse Alice, and spent several days with us, hav­ing us out to dinner, and accepting the rude hospitality of our house in return. We found the Prince a charming man, democratic and companionable. He has done splendid work in scientific exploration of the deep seas, in Spitz­bergen surveys, and other scientific pursuits. He had with him Prof. Hergesell, of Berlin, who has done so much in the way of exploration of the upper air by means of captive balloons carry­ing recording instruments, and smaller balloons set free to go to great heights and also carrying recording instruments with them, these being usually recovered with their records after the balloons have burst and descended. Prof. Her­gesell made many observations in our neighbor­hood, and informed us that if we could send our airship up to an altitude of about ten miles we should find there a wind blowing two hundred miles per hour toward the Pole, but that the temperature would be seventy to eighty below zero. 

     We also enjoyed the visit this summer of a Dutch war vessel which had been sent to Spitz­bergen by the government of Holland instructed to gather up the remains of the Dutch sailors which had lain for two centuries upon and near to Smeerenburg, to give the bones decent inter­ment, and to erect a suitable monument over the spot. This task the officers of the vessel carried out to the letter ; and thus all that remains of the whaling city of two centuries ago is a huge com­mon grave and a neatly decorated and inscribed stone over it. We found these Dutch officers charming gentlemen, and their visit made an agreeable break in the routine of our lives. 

     Early in September we returned to Europe, resolved to renew the campaign the following spring.