(From a photograph)
A little while after Sverdrup had left us, Mogstad also found it necessary to turn back. He had thought of going with us till the next day, but his heavy wolfskin trousers were, as he un-euphemistically expressed it, “almost full of sweat, and he must go back to the fire on board to get dry.” Hansen, Henriksen, and Pettersen were then the only ones left, and they labored along, each with his load on his back. It was difficult for them to keep up with us on the flat ice, so quickly did we go; but when we came to pressure-ridges we were brought to a standstill and the sledges had to be helped over. At one place the ridge was so bad that we had to carry the sledges a long way. When, after considerable trouble, we had managed to get over it, Peter shook his head reflectively, and said to Johansen that we should meet plenty more of the same kind, and have enough hard work before we had eaten sufficient of the loads to make the sledges run lightly. Just here we came upon a long stretch of bad ice, and Peter became more and more concerned for our future; but towards evening matters improved, and we advanced more rapidly. When we stopped at 6 o’clock the odometer registered a good 7 miles, which was not so bad for a first day’s work. We had a cheerful evening in our tent, which was just about big enough to hold all five. Pettersen, who had exerted himself and become over-heated on the way, shivered and groaned while the dogs were being tied up and fed, and the tent pitched. He, however, found existence considerably brighter when he sat inside it, in his warm wolfskin clothes, with a pot of smoking chocolate before him, a big lump of butter in one hand and a biscuit in the other, and exclaimed, “Now I am living like a prince!” He thereafter discoursed at length on the exalting thought that he was sitting in a tent in the middle of the Polar Sea. Poor fellow, he had begged and prayed to be allowed to come with us on this expedition; he would cook for us and make himself generally useful, both as a tinsmith and blacksmith; and then, he said, three would be company. I regretted that I could not take more than one companion, and he had been in the depths of woe for several days, but now found comfort in the fact that he had, at any rate, come part of the way with us, and was out on this great desert sea, for, as he said, “not many people have done that.”
The others had no sleeping-bag with them, so they made themselves a cozy little hut of snow, into which they crawled in their wolfskin garments, and had a tolerably good night. I was awake early the next morning; but when I crept out of the tent I found that somebody else was on his legs before me, and this was Pettersen, who, awakened by the cold, was now walking up and down to warm his stiffened limbs. He had tried it now, he said; he never should have thought it possible to sleep in the snow, but it had not been half bad. He would not quite admit that he had been cold, and that that was the reason why he had turned out so early. Then we had our last pleasant breakfast together, got the sledges ready, harnessed the dogs, shook hands with our companions, and, without many words being uttered on either side, started out into solitude. Peter shook his head sorrowfully as we went off. I turned round when we had gone some little way, and saw his figure on the top of the hummock; he was still looking after us. His thoughts were probably sad; perhaps he believed that he had spoken to us for the last time.
Our Last Camp before Parting from Our Comrades
(From a photograph)
We found large expanses of flat ice, and covered the ground quickly, farther and farther away from our comrades, into the unknown, where we two alone and the dogs were to wander for months. The Fram’s rigging had disappeared long ago behind the margin of the ice. We often came on piled-up ridges and uneven ice, where the sledges had to be helped and sometimes carried over. It often happened, too, that they capsized altogether, and it was only by dint of strenuous hauling that we righted them again. Somewhat exhausted by all this hard work, we stopped finally at 6 o’clock in the evening, and had then gone about 9 miles during the day. They were not quite the marches I had reckoned on, but we hoped that by degrees the sledges would become lighter and the ice better to travel over. The latter, too, seems to have been the case at first. On Sunday, March 17th, I say in my diary: “The ice appears to be more even the farther north we get; came across a lane, however, yesterday which necessitated a long detour.[1] At half-past six we had done about 9 miles. As we had just reached a good camping-ground, and the dogs were tired, we stopped. Lowest temperature last night, -45° Fahr. (-42.8° C.).”
The ice continued to become more even during the following days, and our marches often amounted to 14 miles or more in the day. Now and then a misfortune might happen which detained us, as, for instance, one day a sharp spike of ice which was standing up cut a hole in a sack of fish flour, and all the delicious food ran out. It took us more than an hour to collect it all again and repair the damages. Then the odometer got broken through being jammed in some uneven ice, and it took some hours to mend it by a process of lashing. But on we went northward, often over great, wide ice-plains which seemed as if they must stretch right to the Pole. Sometimes it happened that we passed through places where the ice was “unusually massive, with high hummocks, so that it looked like undulating country covered with snow.” This was undoubtedly very old ice, which had drifted in the Polar Sea for a long time on its way from the Siberian Sea to the east coast of Greenland, and which had been subjected year after year to severe pressure. High hummocks and mounds are thus formed, which summer after summer are partially melted by the rays of the sun, and again in the winters covered with great drifts of snow, so that they assume forms which resemble ice-hills rather than piles of sea-ice resulting from upheaval.
Wednesday, March 20th, my diary says: “Beautiful weather for travelling in, with fine sunsets; but somewhat cold, particularly in the bag, at nights (it was -41.8° and -43.6° Fahr., or -41° and -42° C.). The ice appears to be getting more even the farther we advance, and in some places it is like travelling over ‘inland ice.’ If this goes on the whole thing will be done in no time.” That day we lost our odometer, and as we did not find it out till some time afterwards, and I did not know how far we might have to go back, I thought it was not worth while to return and look for. It was the cause, however, of our only being able subsequently to guess approximately at the distance we had gone during the day. We had another mishap, too, that day. This was that one of the dogs (it was “Livjægeren”) had become so ill that he could not be driven any longer, and we had to let him go loose. It was late in the day before we discovered that he was not with us; he had stopped behind at our camping-ground when we broke up in the morning, and I had to go back after him on snow-shoes, which caused a long delay.
“Thursday, March 21st. Nine in the morning, -43.6° Fahr., or -42° C. (Minimum in the night, -47.2° Fahr., or -44° C.) Clear, as it has been every day. Beautiful, bright weather; glorious for travelling in, but somewhat cold at nights, with the quicksilver continually frozen. Patching Finn shoes in this temperature inside the tent, with one’s nose slowly freezing away, is not all pure enjoyment.