Realm of Ice and Sky by two-time National Outdoor Book Award-winning author Buddy Levy is a thrilling narrative of polar exploration via airship―and the men who sacrificed everything to make history. Read the featured excerpt below!
PRELUDE
To rise from the earth and into the sky and soar freely aloft had been dreamed of and desired since humans first began watching birds wing and hover overhead, their effortless dance in the wind a wonder and an envy. Over the centuries, from the Greek mythology of Daedalus and Icarus to Leonardo da Vinci, the ideas and visions of how humans might harness the air took myriad forms, depicted in stories and drawings and even in fabricated prototypes.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, manpowered flight was in its fledgling stage. Balloons of various types, including hot air and hydrogen, had been flown in France for the last hundred years, but these could not really be steered or navigated, and were thus at the mercies and whims of the wind. Pure, true flight would require power and the ability to control direction.
By the early 1900s, the free-floating balloon was about to be supplanted by two new experiments, the airship (motorized, lighter-than-air balloons, also called dirigibles) and the airplane (at the time, “aeroplane”). Airships developed first, gaining international attention when wealthy Parisian businessman M. Deutsch de La Meurthe (the so-called “Oil King of Europe”) began, in 1900, offering a prize of 100,000 francs for the first motor-propelled dirigible that could fly from the Aero Club grounds at St. Cloud around the Eiffel Tower and back—a distance of seven miles—within thirty minutes. Thousands of fascinated French and international spectators and journalists came to watch these competitions, and a global airship craze ensued.
During the same period, in a much less public way, the Wright brothers were testing powered, winged, and piloted “heavier-than-air” flight in their Wright Flyer in late 1903. They flew 120 feet in twelve seconds on their first successful flight, 175 feet on their second, and 200 feet on their third. By then, the largest dirigibles being built by Germany’s Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin were over four hundred feet long. With the first airplane flying only half the length of the largest dirigible, at this moment in aeronautical history, the airship was clearly orders of magnitude ahead in the flight race.
Into this exciting aerial milieu, in a strange but not entirely unexpected confluence, entered the Arctic explorer and the race for the North Pole. The North Pole remained the holy grail of human discovery, one of the last remaining blank spots on the world’s maps. During the period that [Realm of Ice and Sky] covers (1900–1928, primarily), the North Pole had yet to be reached. Land-based and ship-based attempts, nearly all using teams of sled dogs, had all come up short, always after terrible misery and sometimes at the cost of lost limbs and lives.
In the span of three decades, three men—American Walter Wellman, Norwegian Roald Amundsen, and Italian Umberto Nobile—would try to fill in that blank spot on the map at the top of the world, and they would do so not by the traditional, long-tried and always failed dogsled method, but by airship. Realm of Ice and Sky is a serial history of the aerial explorations to reach the summit of the Earth. It is not the history of a single voyage but rather is a history of a single type of voyage—airborne, in experimental “lighter than air” flying machines called airships or dirigibles.
The aerial explorers would innovate and experiment and risk their own lives and the lives of their crews in a dangerous, deadly quest to be first to fly to the North Pole.
There would be joy and sorrow, tragedy and suffering.
There would be disaster.
There would be triumph.
PROLOGUE
“Aerial navigation will solve the mystery of the North Pole and the frozen ocean.”
—Walter Wellman, 1893
Camp Wellman. Danes Island (Danskøya),
northwest Spitsbergen—September 2, 1907
Whitecaps lashed against the icy shoreline of Norway’s Smeerenburg Sound. Beyond the roiling bay, knobby peaks thrust from the sea up to four thousand feet, their craggy faces lined with snow. Aquamarine icebergs—some carved into archways and tunnels, some like spired castles—drifted shoreward, driven by the wind. In the mountain valleys, great glaciers groaned and rumbled, cascading to the sea, calving into the water with echoing roars.
The dim light of early morning revealed an enormous oblong form rising from the bay like an ominous gray cloud, but it was nothing that came from land or sea. It was a man-made thing—a giant gas-filled balloon emerging from a massive wooden hangar, guided out by three dozen men clinging to taut draglines and cables. It was the airship America, a spherical, 185-foot-long, 50-foot-wide dirigible inflated with 274 thousand cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen, powered by a single sputtering 750-pound, 75-horsepower gasoline engine. In the airship’s gondola rode three men: the visionary expedition leader Walter Wellman; engineer Melvin Vaniman; and navigator Felix Riesenberg. They were attempting something perilous and untried in history: to fly a motorized airship to the North Pole, and to somehow, with luck, return alive.
The men, all Americans, were exhilarated by the prospect of being first to the North Pole, an achievement promising fame, national pride, wealth, and polar immortality. But they were fearful, for the 1,500-mile flight would be America’s maiden voyage. The airship was untested. Some in the press had called the attempt a “suicide mission,” while others lauded the men for their bravery. What everyone knew for certain, however—including the three men aboard the America—was that their chances of dying on the journey were likely greater than their chances of surviving it.
Though it was dangerously late in the season to strike out toward the North Pole, the winds were the most favorable they’d been in a month, blowing consistently from the south. Should anything go wrong—and as Walter Wellman knew firsthand from his previous over-ice sledge attempts at the north’s holy grail, something always went wrong—he and his crew and dogs would be marooned on moving sea ice with the “Long Night” of polar winter approaching. In the coming months of near-total darkness, they’d be forced to winter over on the grinding pack ice, a terrifying prospect. Few polar explorers had survived winter on the moving, fracturing sea ice hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle.
Wellman’s airship now hovered, fully inflated, its eleven-and-a-half-foot steel propeller whirring. Poised to fly north, Wellman was deeply aware of the risks to himself and his two crewmen. He had explored the Arctic on and off for more than a decade, on various expeditions questing for the North Pole. From his multiple expeditions, he had learned much about the Arctic, including that it would always try, one way or another, to kill you. Nearly fifty years old, Wellman was very lucky to still be alive. On one previous polar expedition, he had fallen into a deep crevasse and had been miraculously rescued. Once, he had been attacked by a polar bear, and was saved only when his sled dogs came snarling to his defense, driving the bear away. Another time, he had broken his shinbone on a jagged ice ridge and faced amputation of his leg, which he refused. He was now reliant on a cane, a grudging reminder of his mortality.
There was nothing typical about Walter Wellman as an Arctic explorer, and his experimental airship was only the most recent example of his unusual nature and innovative ideas and approach. Wellman was an unlikely Arctic explorer in other ways too. He was among the most famous men in the world, a well-connected Washington insider, a celebrated and prolific journalist who frequently hobnobbed with the most powerful men in the country, including President Theodore Roosevelt, who supported his Arctic expeditions. Only recently, Wellman—who wanted to be the first not only to reach the North Pole but also broadcast his achievement to the world in real time—had built a series of wireless telegraph stations in the Arctic for that express purpose: one to be installed on the airship America, one on Danes Island, and one on mainland Norway.
To illustrate that the new, revolutionary Marconi wireless communication technology would perform this far north, Wellman had sent the following message to President Roosevelt:
ROOSEVELT, WASHINGTON:
GREETINGS, BEST WISHES, BY FIRST WIRELESS MESSAGE
EVER SENT FROM ARCTIC REGIONS.
WELLMAN
Along with wireless telegraphic communication, Wellman had also experimented with other novel but unproven techniques in polar travel, including using newly invented lightweight aluminum boats for crossing open leads in the sea ice and the use of ultra-concentrated foods for light, high-calorie rations. He had even tested gas-powered “motor-sledges” (dubbed “gasoline dogs”) to replace some of the many dogs required for long and arduous sledge journeys.
But it was the motorized airship that was the most experimental, the most pioneering, the most dangerous, and the most controversial of Wellman’s many “firsts.” No one had yet dared to attempt flying a highly combustible, engine-driven dirigible to the North Pole, for the airship had only recently been invented. Yet Wellman had been planning and scheming since the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont had made history in 1901 (and won that year’s 100,000 franc prize!) by flying his 108-foot- long dirigible seven miles over Paris, circling the Eiffel Tower to the cheering of thousands of spectators. The flight was an international sensation, and although Santos-Dumont remained aloft for only thirty minutes, Wellman saw the immense potential of the airship. He had also read every sea captain’s logbook and every expedition journal written about the Arctic and attempts to reach the top of the world.
Ten years earlier, the Swedish aeronaut S.A. Andrée and two compatriots had departed from this very spot on Danes Island, on the northwestern coast of Spitsbergen in Örnen (Eagle), a non-motorized hydrogen-filled balloon. They’d hoped that steady, consistent winds from the south would propel the balloon across the roof of the world and all the way over the pole to Alaska. But on that day in 1897, they had vanished into the misty Arctic air, and no one had seen or heard from them since, except for a few cryptic notes delivered by passenger pigeons early in their flight. Wellman understood he could learn from Andrée’s mistakes, first and foremost by adding an engine to his craft, making it a powered, steerable airship rather than a mere passive balloon. He had also consulted with the still-living legends in polar travel, including Norway’s hero Fridtjof Nansen and America’s Robert Peary, who was at this very moment also preparing for his own ship-based attempt at the North Pole.
It was Robert Peary who was foremost on Wellman’s mind as he prepared to cast off into the frozen unknown. Peary, a veteran explorer of the last two decades, had the previous year set the world record for “Farthest North,” reaching 87° 6´ N in 1906. Now, the dauntless fifty-one-year-old Peary, who had lost eight toes to frostbite in a previous attempt, was organizing one final voyage, and most in the global exploring community believed Peary had the best chance of winning the prize. Nansen himself had told President Theodore Roosevelt, “Peary is your best man; in fact, I think he is on the whole the best of the men now trying to reach the Pole, and there is a good chance that he will be the one to succeed.”
Wellman begged to differ. Certainly, he respected Robert Peary’s accomplishments. They’d met by coincidence at the White House in early December of 1906, each having a separate, private audience with President Roosevelt. The meeting between Wellman and Peary was brief and convivial, but Wellman strongly disagreed with Nansen’s assessment of who might reach the North Pole first. He had staked his personal finances, as well as the considerable backing of financiers, his own reputation, the reputation of his newspaper the Chicago Record-Herald, and now his life on it. Wellman could see what many others could not: the world was changing. Technology was advancing at a breakneck pace, the last two decades having witnessed the development of wireless communication, the automobile, the airplane, and now the airship. At that moment, it remained anyone’s guess as to whether the airplane or the airship would ultimately achieve dominance of the skies for commercial passenger travel. The airships of that time held several advantages, including substantially larger payload capabilities and much greater range. Their potential of a catastrophic fire was not yet fully appreciated, however.
Wellman understood that the race to the pole against Peary stood for much more than just polar bragging rights: it heralded the changing of the guard, and a shift from the traditional man-and-dog-over-ice approach to the use of the newest available technologies in polar exploration and scientific discovery. Wellman had said as much: “Recently it seemed . . . the time had come to adopt new methods, to make an effort to substitute modern science for brute force, the motor-driven balloon (airship) for the muscles of men and beasts stumbling along . . . in their heroic struggle to accomplish the almost impossible.”
The rivalry with Peary represented something greater still: with instantaneous wireless correspondence, in the age of competing media and big-name newspaper battles, the intrepid reporter stood to make the scoop of the century, one to rival the famous meeting between Stanley and Livingstone in Africa. Should Wellman succeed, he would not only join the pantheon of the greatest polar explorers but would achieve journalistic immortality as well. It was a seductive combination.
For his part, Robert Peary had publicly expressed doubt about Wellman and the use of airships for polar travel, believing such craft too flimsy for the brutal Arctic conditions. Peary had been quoted in The Washington Post on May 4, 1907, calling Wellman “a mere interloper in the ‘science’ of Arctic exploration.” Peary also referred to Wellman disparagingly as a “charlatan” and a “hot air voyager.”
Wellman had too much pride and bravado to take these insults without response. He fired back to The New York Times, “It is not unnatural for one man to have no faith in the scheme of another man, but the difference in this case is that I am acquainted with both the sledging and the airship methods. Commander Peary is probably the most experienced sledger who has started in quest of the pole, but he does not know by actual experience the possibilities of the airship. Personally, I have no faith in the over-the-ice method of reaching the far north as it is now carried on . . . I believe that the airship is the only solution to the problem.”
So, the die was cast. With the consent of his two companions Melvin Vaniman and Felix Riesenberg, Walter Wellman was borne aloft in the 115-foot-long steel control car, riding below the great hydrogen-filled envelope, shouting commands over the noise of the wind and the motor. Packed tightly in the control car were also a few sleds, a small boat, food to last ten months, and nearly six thousand pounds of gasoline for the engine. After being walked from the hangar, the America was towed into the middle of Smeerenburg Sound by the small steamer Express and held steady at an altitude of about five hundred feet above the icy water.
“Cut the line,” Wellman yelled, and Felix Riesenberg cast the line off, watching it slither through the air and splash into the water next to the Express. America soared above the sea, now flying on its own for the first time. “Half-speed,” Wellman bellowed, and just above the sound of the engine they heard faint cheers from the crew assembled below at Camp Wellman, who waved and tossed their hats in the air.
“Head her north . . . full speed!” Wellman barked to Riesenberg behind the wheel, and America churned through rising mist and fog, heading due north toward the mountains and the polar ice pack beyond. Snow began to fall, the large flakes collecting on the rubberized cotton and silk envelope. From the control car, Wellman looked down from their great height and watched the sea fade away below them, until they were encased in a ghostly expanse of whiteness, disappearing into a frozen realm of ice and sky.
