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, 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.