ELLSWORTH, AMUNDSEN, LARSEN AND FEUCHT WITH THE IMPLEMENTS WITH WHICH THEY MOVED 300 TONS OF ICE
ELLSWORTH, AMUNDSEN, LARSEN AND FEUCHT WITH THE IMPLEMENTS WITH WHICH THEY MOVED 300 TONS OF ICE
On the evening of the 14th, after our chocolate, and with a southerly wind still blowing—this was a tail-wind on this course and of no help to us—we decided to make a try. But we only bumped along and the plane made no effort to rise. What we needed to get off with was a speed of 100 kilometers per hour. During all our previous attempts to take off, forty kilometers had been the best we could do. Onthis trial we got up to sixty, and Riiser-Larsen was hopeful. It was characteristic of the man to turn in his seat as we jumped out and remark to me: “I hope you are not disappointed, Ellsworth. We’ll do better next time.” That calm, dispassionate man was ever the embodiment of hope.
LINCOLN ELLSWORTH AFTER THE TRIP
LINCOLN ELLSWORTH AFTER THE TRIP
That night it was my watch all night. Around and around the ice-cake I shuffled, with my feet thrust loosely into the ski straps and a rifle slung over my shoulder, on the alert for open water. Then, too, we were always afraid that the ice-cake might break beneath us. It was badly crevassed in places. Many times during that night, on my patrol, I watched Riiser-Larsen draw himself up out of the manhole in the top of the plane to see how the wind was blowing. During the night the wind had shifted from the south and in the morning a light breeze was blowing from the north. This was the second time during our twenty-five days in the ice that the wind had blown from the north. We had landed with a north wind—but were we to get away with a north wind? That was the question. The temperature during the night was -1.5° c. and the snow surface was crisp and hard in the morning. We now were forced to dump everything that we could spare. We left one of our canvas canoes, rifles, cameras, field-glasses; we even discarded sealskin parkas and heavy ski-boots, replacing them with moccasins. All we dare retain washalf of our provisions, one canvas canoe, a shotgun and one hundred rounds of ammunition.
Then we all climbed into the plane and Riiser-Larsen started up. Dietrichson was to navigate. The plane began to move! After bumping for four hundred meters the plane actually lifted in the last hundred meters. When I could feel the plane lifting beneath me I was happy, but we had had so many cruel disappointments during the past twenty-five days that our minds were in a state where we could feel neither great elation nor great suffering. Captain Amundsen had taken his seat beside Riiser-Larsen, and I got into the tail.
For two hours we had to fly through the thick fog, being unable either to get above or below it. During all this time we flew slowly, with a magnetic compass, a thing heretofore considered to be an impossibility in the Arctic. Dietrichson dropped down for drift observations as frequently as possible. The fogs hung so low that we were compelled to fly close to the ice, at one time skimming over it at a height of but one hundred feet. Finally we were able to rise above the fog and were again able to use our “Sun Compass.”
Southward we flew! Homeward we flew! One hour—two hours—four, six hours. Then Feucht yelled back to me in the tail, “Land!” I replied, “Spitzbergen?”—“No Spitzbergen, no Spitzbergen!”yells back Feucht in his broken English. So I made up my mind that it must be Franz-Josefs-Land. Anyway, it was land, and that meant everything!
Our rationing regulations were now off, and we all started to munch chocolate and biscuits.
For an hour Riiser-Larsen had noticed that the stabilization rudders were becoming more and more difficult to operate. Finally they failed to work completely and we were forced down on the open sea, just after having safely passed the edge of the Polar pack. We landed in the sea, after flying just eight hours, with barely ninety liters of gasoline in our tanks, one half hour’s fuel supply. The sea was rough, and we were forced to go below and cover up the man-holes, for the waves broke over the plane.
I had eaten seven cakes of chocolate when Feucht yelled, “Land ahead!” But I was now desperately ill and cared little what land it was so long as it was just land. After thirty-five minutes of taxi-ing through the rough sea, we reached the coast.
In we came—“in the wash of the wind-whipped tide.”
“Overloaded, undermanned, meant to founder, weEuchred God Almighty’s storm, bluffed the Eternal Sea!”
“Overloaded, undermanned, meant to founder, weEuchred God Almighty’s storm, bluffed the Eternal Sea!”
“Overloaded, undermanned, meant to founder, weEuchred God Almighty’s storm, bluffed the Eternal Sea!”
“Overloaded, undermanned, meant to founder, we
Euchred God Almighty’s storm, bluffed the Eternal Sea!”
How good the solid land looked! We threw ourselves down on a large rock, face upward to the sun,till we remembered that we had better take an observation and know for sure where we were.
It seems remarkable, when I think about it now, how many narrow escapes we really had. Again and again it looked like either life or death, but something always just turned up to help us out. Captain Amundsen’s answer was, “You can call it luck if you want, but I don’t believe it.”
We got out our sextant and found that one of our position lines cut through the latitude of Spitzbergen. While we were waiting to take our second observation for an intersection, three hours later, some one yelled, “A sail!”—and there, heading out to sea, was a little sealer. We shouted after them and put up our flag, but they did not see us, and so we jumped into our plane and with what fuel we had left taxied out to them. They were after a wounded walrus that they had shot seven times in the head, otherwise they would have been gone long before. They were overjoyed to see us. We tried to tow the plane, but there was too much headwind, so we beached her in Brandy Bay, North Cape, North-East-Land, Spitzbergen, one hundred miles east of our starting point at King’s Bay.
We slept continuously during the three days in the sealer, only waking to devour the delicious seal meat steaks smothered in onions and the eider-duck egg omelets prepared for us.
The homage that was accorded us upon our return to civilization will ever remain the most cherished memory of our trip. We took steamer from King’s Bay for Norway on June 25th, after putting our plane on board, and nine days later arrived at Horten, the Norwegian Naval Base, not far from Oslo.
On July 5th, with the stage all set, we flew N 25 into Oslo. It was difficult to realize that we were in the same plane that had so recently been battling in the midst of the Arctic ice. Good old N 25! We dropped down into the Fjord amid a pandemonium of frantically shrieking river craft and taxied on through the wildly waving and cheering throngs, past thirteen fully manned British battleships, and as I listened to the booming of the salute from the Fort and looked ahead at the great silent expectant mass of humanity that waited to greet us, I was overcome with emotion and the tears rolled down my face. At that moment I felt paid in full for all that I had gone through.