We came down in a little lagoon among the ice-floes, taxied over to a huge ice-cake, and, anchoring our plane to it, jumped out with our sextant and artificial horizon to find out where we were. Not knowing what to expect, I carried my rifle, but after our long flight I was a bit unsteady on my legs, tumbled down into the deep snow, and choked up the barrel. Our eyes were bloodshot and we were almost stone-deaf after listening to the unceasing roar of our motors for eight hours, and the stillness seemed intensified.
Looking around on landing, I had the feeling that nothing but death could be at home in this part of the world and that there could not possibly be any life in such an environment, when I was surprised to see a seal pop up his head beside the plane. I am sure he was as surprised as we were, for he raised himself half out of the water to inspect us and seemed not at all afraid to approach, as he came almost up to us. We had no thought of taking his life, for we expected to be off and on our way again towards the Pole after our observation. His curiosity satisfied, he disappeared, and we never saw another sign of life in those waters during our entire stay in the ice.
Our observations showed that we had come down in Lat. 87° 44′ N., Long. 10° 20′ West. As our flight meridian was 12° East, where we landed was, therefore, 22° 20′ off our course. This westerly drift had cost us nearly a degree in latitude and enough extra fuel to have carried us to the Pole. As it was, we were just 136 nautical miles from it. At the altitude at which we had been flying just before descending, our visible horizon was forty-six miles; which means that we had been able to see ahead as far as Lat. 88° 30′ N., or to within just ninety miles of the North Pole. We had left civilization, and eight hours later we were able to view the earth within ninety miles of the goal that it had taken Peary twenty-three years to reach. Truly “the efforts of one generation may become the commonplace of the next.”
When we had finished taking our observation, we began to wonder where N 25 was. We crawled up on all the high hummocks near by and with our field-glasses searched the horizon. Dietrichson remarked that perhaps Amundsen had gone on to the Pole. “It would be just like him,” he said. It was not until noon, however, of the 22nd that we spotted them from an especially high hill of ice. The N 25 lay with her nose pointing into the air at an angle of forty-five degrees, among a lot of rough hummocks and against a huge cake of old blue Arctic ice about forty feet thick, three miles away. It was a rough-looking country, and the position of the N 25 was terrible to behold. To us it looked as though she had crashed into this ice.
We of the N 24 were not in too good shape where we were. We had torn the nails loose on the bottom of our plane, when we took off from King’s Bay, so that she was leaking badly; in fact, the water was now above the bottom of the petrol tanks. Also, our forward motor was disabled. In short, we were badly wrecked. Things looked so hopeless to us at that moment that it seemed as though the impossible would have to happen ever to get us out. No words so well express our mental attitude at that time as the following lines of Swinburne’s:
“From hopes cut down across a world of fears,
We gaze with eyes too passionate for tears,
Where Faith abides, though Hope be put to flight.”
That first day, while Dietrichson and I had tried to reach the N 25, Omdal had been trying to repair the motor. We dragged our canvas canoe up over hummocks and tumbled into icy crevasses until we were thoroughly exhausted. The snow was over two to three feet deep all over the ice, and we floundered through it, never knowing what we were going to step on next. Twice Dietrichson went down between the floes and only by hanging onto the canoe was he able to save himself from sinking. After half a mile of this we were forced to give up and return.
We pitched our tent on top of the ice floe, moved all our equipment out of the plane into it, and tried to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. But there was no sleep for us and very little rest during the next five days. Omdal was continually working on the motor, while Dietrichson and I took turns at the pump. Only by the most incessant pumping were we able to keep the water down below the gasoline tanks.