CHAPTER XXIII 

SECOND AIRSHIP VOYAGE IN THE ARCTICS 

     In 1908 it was my duty to remain in the United States, representing my newspaper in the Presidential campaign of that year. But in 1909, having secured the necessary capital from among my friends, and Mr. Lawson having generously given me the use of the airship and all the Expedition property, without charge, I prepared for another aerial onslaught upon the Pole. How much trouble I could have saved myself if I had only known that Peary had reached the Pole before I sailed from America! 

     Vaniman was with me again. We had added another engine and another pair of propellers to the motive force of the airship. The old Frith­jof having been lost, with all of her crew but one man, the previous fall, after she had left our service, on the coast of Iceland, Consul Aagaard this year hired for me a new motor schooner, the Arctic. She was not a successful ship, very slow and uncertain. Again it was necessary to make two voyages. My brother Arthur went out in charge of the first trip, and with a poor ship and bad ice nothing but his resoluteness and courage enabled him to reach our camp at all. The skipper wanted to turn back to Norway, but my brother said: 

     "No, never. Walter ordered me to go to Camp Wellman, and to Camp Wellman we are going, if it takes all summer."

     Finally they managed to break through the ice, and bad news awaited them. There was brave old Paul Bjoervig, alone with the dogs! Again the fates had played him a cruel trick. He and his comrade were out hunting on the sea-ice one day during the winter, when an ice-cake turned turtle, a man fell into the icy sea, and was lost. Once more Bjoervig was the sole survivor of an Arctic wintering party.

     Worse still, from the Expedition point of view, was the ruin of the balloon house. During the winter it had been completely destroyed in severe storms. All that remained was a tangled mass of broken timbers, buried under moun­tains of snow. It looked like a hopeless task indeed, that of clearing away the wreck and building a new house and getting the ship as­sembled, inflated, and making a voyage during one short Arctic summer. But our men went at it. Fortunately I had sent up a cargo of timber and other building materials, fearing some such disaster might have befallen us. When Vaniman and I arrived, three weeks later, the Arctic having gone back to Tromso to fetch us, the wreck had been cleared, and my brother had his force working night and day building and erecting new arches. 

     Spurred on by promises of extra pay, and favored by good weather, our force of twenty mechanics rebuilt the huge structure with amaz­ing rapidity—much more expeditiously than a similar house was built at Atlantic City in the summer of 1910, though there the contractor had unlimited resources of men and materials to draw upon. Between the first of July and the middle of August the hangar or airship hall was finished, the America inflated and put in order, and everything made ready for the voyage. The new ship was larger and stronger than ever be­fore, equipped with two complete motors and, driving systems instead of one. Again we car­ried dogs, sledges, small boat, and enough provi­sions and fuel to enable the crew to stay out the whole winter, in case of need, making a comfor­table camp on the ice with the thousands of square yards of cloth of the balloon, and sledging back the following spring, the only season in which travel with sledges is fairly practicable over the Arctic sea-ice. 

     August 15, 1909, we started on the second voy­age the America had made over the polar sea. In the crew were Vaniman and I, cool-headed, resourceful Louis Loud, who is Vaniman's brother-in-law, and Nicholas Popoff, a daring and clever young Russian, who later took up aviation, and won the cup at Nice by a fine flight out over the Mediterranean and back. 

     Again we carried the leather equilibrator which had been so severely tested in the flight of 1907, when, in making our descent upon the Spitzbergen mainland through a snowstorm, the serpent climbed the rugged vertical glacier face, a hundred feet of sheer ice, wound in and out among the great boulders brought down in the moraine of the glacier, plumped deep into crev­asses and crawled out of them again, and was with us practically uninjured when the ship finally came to rest in the valley of ice. 

     This second voyage began propitiously. The weather was fine, a light breeze blowing from the south. At the wheel I steered her several times around the strait which lay in front of our camp to learn if everything. was in good order. All going well I headed her north. We passed out over Smeerenburg point of Amsterdam Island, where the Dutch whalers had a blubber-boiling station two centuries past. The equilibrator just touched the sands where the summer town reeked with whale oil and rum in the long ago. 

     One look back to our camp showed the men there waving their hats in excited glee and run­ning for the hilltops, the better to see the airship as she moved toward the northern horizon. It was with inexpressible joy we of the crew noted how strong and fast we were going north. The engine was running steadily. The ship was not pitching or rolling. The equilibrator seemed to be riding well. Helped a little by the breeze, we were making close to twenty-five knots per hour, northward, toward the Pole. 

     At last our three years of arduous work, our long vigil of worry and planning, our weeks and months of struggle against gales and all sorts of obstacles, seemed in a fair way to be rewarded. The ship we had so painstakingly built and per­fected was giving a splendid account of herself. 

     We had made a fine start. To the east the icy mountains and huge glaciers of the Spitzbergen coast glistened in the sunlight. To the north the ice-pack's white was looming in view. Far to the southwest our steamer, the Arctic, was headed our way, a dot on the waters, moving with such clumsy slowness compared with our ship of the air. Below us the dark green waters of the polar sea glided past, our equilibrator's lower end thirty or forty yards above them. 

     So elated were we, one and all, that we hallooed to one another, and laughed, and cracked ourjokes, Vaniman and Loud in the engine room smiling up at Popoff and me at the wheel. 

     I gave the helm to Popoff and prepared to take my "departure" from the land, as the basis of our dead reckoning. The whole north coast of Spitzbergen, with its sharp-pointed black peaks, its valleys filled with gleaming ice-fields, was rising to our vision, a wondrous Arctic panorama. 

     At the rate we were going we could reach the Pole in less than thirty hours! It is no wonder we were happy. 

     Remembering the compass derangement of 1907, I climbed to the upper deck, hung there suspended between the heavens and the earth, and noted with content that the reserve or stan­dard compass was steady and true, though the steering compass below was a little erratic, due to the vibration of the ship. Then I returned to the work of writing up the log and preparing the data for the navigation of the ship. 

     In a pause I looked over the side at the waters far below, now flecked with small fields of float­ing ice, the main pack being but a few miles farther north. At that instant I saw something drop from the ship into the sea. Could one be­lieve his eyes? Yes—it was the equilibrator. 

     The leather serpent, so thoroughly tested two years before, had played us false. It parted within a yard of the top, and plump down into the ocean went 1,200 pounds of our balancing device and its contents of reserve provisions. Relieved of this load, the America shot into the clouds.

     Instantly we all knew the voyage was at an end, that without the equilibrator the ship would soon become unmanageable. The provisions we could do without in a pinch, because we had more in the car. But the equilibrator was indispen­sable. 

     Vaniman sang out to me, "We'll have to fight our way back to Spitzbergen!" And seeing the look on my face, he-added, "There is no help for it—you'll have to do it."