Airship over the Pole by Garry Hogg: Post, Postscript Musings.

I was given my ex-public library copy of Airship over the Pole as a birthday gift some years ago.
I can't say I'm a fan of the Arctic/Antarctic exploration literature it was more the airship angle that interested me.

On first reading the book it struck me how much like a Hooting Yard story it seemed and how quickly one catastrophe can snowball into a catalogue of disasters.

Though I enjoyed the story I felt the telling of it was a bit 'vanilla' and started to do a bit of interweb digging as, prior to receiving the book, I'd never heard anything about this adventure.

I found Malmgren's two post crash suicide attempts had been left out of the story and I can't help wondering about his motivation to set out on, what seemed to me,  a hair-brained scheme to trek across the ice to get help.
Bit of a death-wish me thinks.

The shruggy shouldered attitude of the support vessel captain also seemed odd to me.
I'm really glad the little doggy made it out, but contrast it's good fortune with the fate of the huskies used by the sledge party.

I've posted all the photos included in the book on my Flickr page here:
Airship over the Pole in Pictures

I don't think I'll be typing out another complete book anytime soon.

Airship over the Pole by Garry Hogg Pt.12: Postscript.

So ends the story of the ill-fated Italia Polar Expedition.  During the months of August and September searches were made for the dirigible.  The first was undertaken by the icebreaker Krassin, at Nobile's urgent request.  But the search had to be broken off when she was diverted to the assistance of a passenger liner reported to be in trouble in northern waters.  Boris Chuckhnovsky made a series of flights in the direction of the North Pole, but returned each time with the report that he had found nothing.  Several small vessels, such as Braganza and Hobby, and a French boat sent out to look for traces of the Latham-47 hydroplane that had vanished with the explorer Amundsen on board, scoured the open water and as many of the leads as their captains could risk; but they saw nothing either.  No trace has ever since been seen of the wrecked dirigible, though planes continually fly "over the roof of the world" between Russia and Northern Canada and other parts in that bleak, inhospitable region of eternal ice and snow.

Among those who survived and were eventually rescued, Nobile's little terrier, Titina, escaped unscathed.  Thanks to the loving care of her master, and the generosity of the rest of the tent party in sacrificing a small portion of their scanty rations daily, she throve in spite of everything.  Perhaps her gaiety and courage did something to help maintain the spirits of the rest of the party against the continuous menace of despair that loomed so closely over them, threatening to take from them the very will to survive.

Of those who did survive, the youngest, Alfredo Viglieri, who took over command at the tent  when Nobile left, will be almost seventy, it he is still alive.  Natale Cecioni, nearest in age to Nobile himself, would be over eighty.  Nobile, who was born in 1885, is now well into his eighties.  And it is in connection with him that this great storey of courage and resolution has to end on a near-unhappy note.

Nobile had agreed to be taken from the Red Tent first only with the greatest reluctance.  He had been forced to do so by the authority of Lieutenant Lundborg.  It was his strong conviction that the master should always be the last to leave his sinking ship.  Although it was not a sinking ship, but a small tent manned by a group of men adrift on an ice floe, his place he felt was to be with them to the end.  But this was not to be.  Lundborg had his orders, and these had to be obeyed.

Unfortunately gossip was started - and no one can say by whom - that Nobile had deliberately asked to be given priority, had been insistent on being taken back to safety before anyone else in his party.  Once the gossip was set in motion it snowballed; nothing could stop it.  Lundborg might have been able to help, but the circumstances of his own crash landing at the Red Tent were not happy ones; in any case, he was killed in an air crash not long afterwards.

The story circulated not only in Italy but in Norway, where people were angered by the loss of their own Roald Amundsen on Nobile's account.  Other things began to be said about the leader of the Italia expedition.  He had, it was said, made wrong decisions, had risked good men's lives, had shown that he was undeserving of responsibility.  If it were not for him, so the feeling grew, the eight men who had died - six in the vanished dirigible, one on impact with the ice, one more during the terrible trek southward across the ice in search of help - would be alive and well to this day.

Poor, unhappy Umberto Nobile found himself shunned by his fellow men.  Articles appeared in various periodicals condemning him as a coward, a worthless individual; even, by implication - a murderer.

All that was way back in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  It hit General Nobile hard, wounded his pride, brought him nearer to despair than he had been even in the worst days when he had to endure, with a broken leg and arm, the discomfort of an ice-cold tent on a drifting ice floe, unable, apparently, to make contact with the outside world.  Back in that world, he was condemned - without, as he believed, the slightest justification.  As a result he became a recluse, shunning his fellow men.  He remained so for many years.

Happily, the time at last came when people's attitude towards him changed.  They recognised him for the great man he was.  And is:  for he is respected throughout the world of aeronautics and exploration for his great achievements in twice flying a dirigible over the North Pole.

Airship over the Pole by Garry Hogg Pt.11: The Icebreaker.

The Russian icebreaker, Krassin, displaced 10,000 tons and, with her 10,500 horse-power engines, was the most powerful icebreaker in Europe.  Though by no means a new vessel, she was well-equipped for the duty for which she had been designed and built.  Her bows and forepart were massively constructed, and sheathed with metal plating that would not have been out of place on a battleship.  Her most striking feature was the unusual height of her two funnels, which soared above her superstructure like truncated masts.  They were the only obvious indication of he age: vessels being built, even in Russia, in the twenties had the newer type of squat, thickset funnel.  But there was no doubt whatsoever about her power and efficiency.

On the day Biagi finally succeeded in getting a distress signal intercepted - the one that was picked up by the radio amateur in Archangel - Krassin was in port at Leningrad.  She was given orders to sail for northern Norway immediately to take part in the search for Italia's survivors.  This involved steaming westward down the Gulf of Finland, then southward down the Baltic and out into the North Sea.  She headed first for Bergen, where she took coal on board.  On June 24, the day after General Nobile had been taken from the Red Tent by the Swedish pilot Lundborg, the very day that Warning had to be abandoned by Sora and Van Dongen, Krassin steamed north from Bergen up the island-dotted west coastline of Norway, heading for Tromso and points north.

She carried a crew of 138 men in all, under her master, Captain Eggi.  But there were others than crew members on board.  The leader of the relief expedition was a Russian Professor of Arctic Studies named Samoilovitch, a man who had done a great deal of fieldwork in northern waters and was incidentally an old friend of Nobile.  A very important member of the relief party was the Russian airman, Boris Chuckhnovsky.  He and his crew of three, including his co-pilot Straube, were in a different category from the icebreaker's crew in general: after all, the ice-breaker was essentially the means of putting the three-engined Junkers within relatively easy reach of the castaways.  They had instructions to look out not only for the scattered groups of Italia's crew and for Sora's party, but for Amundsen and his party too.  Nothing had been heard from Amundsen for over a week, and anxiety on their account was increasing.

For all her 10,500 horse-power, Krassin was not designed for speed.  It took three days for her to cross the Arctic Circle, plunging through heavy seas and into weather that became progressively colder and colder.  On June 29, the day of Biagi's most urgent appeals from the Red Tent, when their ice floe was breaking up dangerously, and the day, too, when Captain Sora's small relief party ran into trouble with the break up of the ice over which their dogs were hauling their sledge, the icebreaker was off Spitsbergen, on the southern fringe of the ice.  She dropped her modest eleven knots to half that speed, and charged straight ahead.  It was for conditions such as these that she had been designed and built.

Life aboard an icebreaker can be, even for veteran crew members, a grim experience.  The steel sheathing in the forward part of the vessel, reaching aft almost to amidships, makes her virtually a steel chest; the steel is a sound conductor so efficient that speech becomes almost impossible between crew members as the din of crunching ice, the screech of ice blocks being torn apart and scraping down the vessel's side, mounts to a higher and ever higher pitch.  Members of icebreakers' crews have been known to collapse with nervous breakdowns as a result of the continued assault on their eardrums of the fiendish noise produced by the slow, relentless passage of the vessels as they carve their way through ever-thickening ice.

On June 30 the radio operator picked up a message giving the co-ordinates of the Red Tent.  These, and other data, were all carefully noted in the ship's log and plotted on the charts spread out across the wide chart table in the navigating room.  But the ship was in an area where the ice was thick enough to reduce her forward speed of a bare six knots to less than half that figure.  And later she was brought to a complete stop by solid ice well to the west of the position where the marooned party was estimated to be.  Not only was the ice sheet solid, without any apparent leads, but its thickness was increased by the piling of blocks of ice one upon another, where they had melted and broken off, been lifted by strong currents and frozen solid again.

Reluctantly, Captian Eggi altered course.  For some hours Krassin steamed along the edge of the ice field, her lookout men in the crow's-nest watching intently for any promising lead in the apparently unbroken field of solid ice.  At intervals one would appear, and the icebreaker be steered into it.  But after an hour or so of steady steaming she would be brought to a standstill again.  Her captain, highly experienced in ice breaking, would put her into reverse, and after use had eased herself a hundred yards or so clear, put her engines to full steam ahead.  Her steel-clad bows would crash again into the ice, to break a way a little farther, a little farther each time.  But this was a most uneconomical way of using the icebreaker; coal was being consumed at an alarming rate, yet she was making practically no headway.  Her master had to bear in mind the fact that, out in the Arctic ice fields, he would find no coaling stations; he must keep sufficient stocks in reserve for the voyage back to the nearest source of supply.  Calclations made at regular intervals indicated that, under these conditions, Krassin was using twenty tons of precious coal to advance less than a mile; and this process could take anything up to five hours.

Quite apart from the resistance of the ice, the vessel ran into other trouble.  On July 3, a week after crossing the Arctic Circle and only four days after encountering the first ice, her master had to accept the fact that she had not got the power that she should have.  Since the Chief Engineer reported that her three engines were in good shape, there was only one other possible explanation:  something must be wrong with her propellers.  So, a diver was dropped overboard into the ice-cold water to inspect.  He came up, almost frozen to death, and reported that one complete propeller blade had broken off and that the rudder also had suffered extensive damage from contact with the ice.

With a damaged propeller and rudder, and amid ice that seemed impossible to penetrate, Krassin was about as helpless as the various parties of castaways she had set out to rescue.  Professor Samoilovitch and Captian Eggi debated the various courses open to them: to return to base, defeated; to try to press onward with a partly disabled vessel; to try to make repairs on the spot.  Those were the only alternatives that presented themselves.  And while they were considering them the report came through that the coal reserves were down to barely half of what they had been at the last refuelling.  The greater part of the remaining coal, said the Chief Engineer, must be kept for the return voyage.

That decided it.  Krassin would stay where she was until repairs had been made to the best of the mechanic's ability.  Meanwhile, Chuckhnovsky's plane should be made ready for setting down on the ice to make its first reconnaissance flight.  During that time there was always the chance that a new lead might appear in the ice, and Krassin would be able to make better progress at a smaller expenditure of coal. So, appropriate orders were given, and work began at once.

While the airman and his crew were making their preliminary flight and the subsequent flight that so nearly ended in complete disaster, the icebreaker's crew worked like trojans to repair the rudder and propeller damage.  The ice had not broken up as much as Samoilovitch had hoped, but there did now seem to be a slight easing of its resistance.  On July 11, with her engines set at full speed ahead, her propellers and rudder in good order, the icebreaker was set to mastering the ice floe again.

Progress was still terribly slow.  Her captain estimated that they were not punching ahead at more than half a mile per hour.  The ice was never less than six feet thick.  Often the tumbled boulders of ice on the main sheet brought it up almost to the level of the deck rails.  Members of the crew not actually on duty leaned over the rails, watching the steel-clad bows cleaving the massive ice sheet spread out ahead of them as though challenging them to do their worst.  Even on deck the noise was shattering.  Any man wishing to communicate with another had to do so in sign language.

All that day the icebreaker stumbled ahead.  Her progress was a painful one of charging forward, being slowed inexorably to a standstill, reversing for her own length or more, and then charging forward again, to win another few yards.  Sometimes she would succeed in covering little more than her own length in half an hour's solid battering at the rampart of ice that interminably confronted her.  Dark smoke poured in clouds from her two tall funnels - visible proof of the tremendous drain on her fuel reserves that were being shovelled down below into her furnaces by the sweating stokers.

While Captain Eggi worried incessantly about the depletion of his coal bunkers, Professor Samoilovitch became more and more confident that success could not be far away.  The radio operator was in touch with the Italian base ship, and she in turn was receiving messages from the Red Tent, though the information was subordinate to the appeals for the stepping-up of all rescue operations.  The leads, Biagi reported, were opening up all around the ice floe on which they were marooned.  This was grim for the men in the tent, but hearing news for the captain of the icebreaker.  The farther north he penetrated, the easier conditions ought to become.

One afternoon Samoilovitch offered a prize of one hundred Russian roubles to the first member of the icebreaker's crew who should sight any of the castaways, whether the occupants of the Red Tent, or Zappi and Mariano, or Sora and Van Dongen.  Chuckhnovsky and his party were a different story.  They had radioed that all was well with them.  Since their position was well to the south of the icebreaker anyway, they could be picked up at leisure when she turned back after effected the main rescues.

At twenty minutes past five on the afternoon of July 11 a crew member excitedly yelled down from the crow's-nest that he had spotted a human figure far away across the ice.  His eyesight must have been exceptionally good, as no one was able to confirm his discovery for nearly half an hour.  But the man was positive.  He swore that it was no illusion.  There was a dark shape - it might even be two dark shapes, he thought - silhouetted against a hummock of ice.  He pointed steadily in one direction.  And after a while first one and then another of his companions believed that they too had seen the dark figure against the ice.  Then they were absolutely positive.

The order was given for Krassin's engines to be stopped.  Almost before the big icebreaker came to a stop, her bows jammed hard up against a wall of ice, a couple of rope-and-slat ladders had been lowered over her side.  A rescue party, which included the ship's doctor, scrambled swiftly down the ladders, and set off as fast as they could manage, tripping and slipping on the uneven, glassy surface, heading in the direction in which the dark shapes had been seen, three or four hundred yards from where the vessel now lay.

As they closed in, stumbling clumsily in their feverish haste to reach their objective, the figure of a man became clearer and clearer.  He was standing unsteadily on the ice, a gaunt, emaciated individual, with matted hair sticking out around his tattered headgear and a thick beard frozen to his clothing.  He made no attempt to move, but swayed there as the rescuers raced across the broken ice towards him.  Close beside him, at his feet, a second figure could be seen, lying outstretched and motionless, apparently lifeless.

"I am Zappi," said the gaunt, tragic-looking figure.  "From Italia.  This," and he pointed to the man lying at his feet, "is Mariano.  Malmgren -"  But he broke off on that name, and collapsed into the arms of one of the Russians.

Already the ship's doctor had dropped down on his knees beside the figure on the ice.  The man's eyes were half opened and there was a wild, haunted look in them.  At least that showed that  he was still alive.  The doctor signalled for a stretcher.  The crumpled figure of Mariano was tenderly laid on it and then picked up by strong and willing arms.  Four sailors went off with him at once towards the ship.  The doctor, who was in charge of the party, turned an inquiring eye on Zappi, who was standing, supported on each side by one of the crew.  "Malmgren?"  he asked.

Zappi shook his head slowly.  "Dead," he answered.  He pointed vaguely northward in the direction from which they had been coming when they were forced to stop.  "Back there."

Once on board the icebreaker, Mariano was the first to receive attention.  He was in very much worse shape than his companion.  Both of his legs were frostbitten.  One of them was in such a state of gangrene that the doctor knew immediately that the leg would have to be amputated as soon as it was possible to get him on to an operating table.  The other leg, and his two hands, might  with luck be saved.  The doctor had no operating facilities aboard Krassin; it was imperative to return to base with the least possible delay if the man's life was to be saved.

During the rescue a new message about the Red Tent's position had been picked up.  There was more information about the leads, too.  As a result, Captain Eggi gave orders for the icebreaker to be backed out of the lead she had so laboriously carved for herself and to be set on a new course altogether.

While on this new course, on the following day the lookout in the crow's-nest spotted two men on the ice, and signalled to the officer of the watch.  Binoculars were brought to bear,  co-ordinates checked, and the decision reached that the two men must be Sora and Van Dongen.  The captain's first impulse was to go to their rescue.  But in the interim he had received instruction to allow nothing to interrupt the prime object of their mission, the rescue of Viglieri and his four companions adrift on the ice floe.  Their condition, the latest message had emphasised, was quite desperate.

It was one of those decisions that the master of a ship is often called upon to make.  He has to weigh one factor against another, and decide, rightly or wrongly, what acton to take.  Eggi decided that two men he could see through his binoculars were in good condition, and safe.  He knew where they were, and could come back for them, as he would for Chuckhnovsky and his crew.  Moreover, Sora and Van Dongen obviously knew that they had been located.  This would give them the necessary encouragement to stick things out for a few more days, if need be.  His chief concern was the rescue of the occupants of the Red Tent.

So, Krassin moved on.  As many members of the crew as could be spared from their duties assembled on deck.  Every vantage point on the superstructure, including the funnels and the crow's-nest, was manned.  At a guarder to seven on the evening of July 12 a smoke signal was seen by all, rising like a dark shaft into the cold air.  A roar of cheering went up from a hundred men on Krassin's deck and crowed vantage points.  it was estimated that the column of smoke could not be more than four miles across the ice.  Captain Eggi had the icebreaker pointed in the direction of the smoke, and ordered full speed ahead.

Krassin vibrated throughout her length like a live thing as her powerful engines increased her speed through the loose ice from three knots to four, to five, to six, even to seven knots.  Her steel-sheathed bows clashed and clanged their easy through the rafts of floating ice that tilted and reared up alongside as though striving to climb onto her decks and attack her crew, sweeping all before them.  Ahead of the icebreaker the men could see the tent, with its zigzag stripes of red, a scatter of figures dotted about it,  and the strange sight of an up-ended plane close by.

At nine o'clock that evening, three hours after they had rescued Zappi and Mariano, Krassin came to a stop within a few hundred yards of the tent.  Instantly the ship's gangplank was lowered over the side.  Hardly had it been lashed into position before the first of the marooned party, Viglieri, with Trojani and Behounek close at his heels and Biagi only a few yards behind them, had reached it.

Samoilovitch raced down the gangplank and was the first to greet them.  They embraced each other in turn, hugging one another like bears, rubbing their shaggy faces together in their emotion, wringing each other's hands, speaking incoherently to each other, the words tumbling out through swollen lips.  They were still shaking hands and embracing each other when the figure of Cecioni, on a pair of crutches he had ingeniously constructed for himself out of the lengths of tubing originally used for the runners of the sledge, was seen hobbling manfully across the ice towards them.

The rescue at long last having been effected, there seemed less urgency than might have been expected about actually going on board the icebreaker.  Crew members wanted to be shown the tent in which the party had lived for seven interminable weeks since the crash on May 25.  Biagi was happy to show off the makeshift aerial he had constructed, the aerial without which in all probability not one of them would have been alive that day, and certainly the rescue would not have been possible.  Incidentally, the wrecking of Lundborg's plane had been a godsend to them, angry as they had been at the time.  It had been stripped and one of its wings had been converted into flooring for the tent, so that the occupants had been able to remain in it, high and dry, above the slowly melting ice.

Eventually, when everything had been inspected and the few belongings had been gathered up, they streamed on board the icebreaker.  There was a touching meeting between them and Zappi and Mariano, whom they had never expected to see again.  Viglieri was shocked at the condition of his naval colleague, Mariano.  He was only thirty years old, two years older than Viglieri himself, but looked twice that age, drawn and haggard with exposure and the protracted agony of frostbite in both legs. 

The suggestion was put to Captain Eggi that the icebreaker should continue on her way in the hope of locating the dirigible and the six men aboard who had vanished northward.  But neither Eggi nor Samoilovitch believed that there was a chance in a million that the crew could have survived.  Also, there was not enough coal in the ship's bunkers for further voyaging away from base.  And lastly, as the doctor said time and again, Mariano had to be taken to an operating table with the least possible delay if he was to have a chance of pulling through.

There remained the question of picking up Sora's party.  But fortunately, that same evening the radio operator received a message to the effect that the two planes flown by a Swede and a Finn had located them, made a successful landing on the ice, picked them up and flown them back to base.  Captain Eggi, therefore, had the satisfaction of knowing that his decision to leave them until he had effected the rescue of the occupants of the Red Tent had been justified.

There was also the question of Boris Chuckhnovsky and his crew on the ice with their Junkers plane.  The airman had radioed that they had provisions to last them at least two weeks and that they were in no danger whatsoever.  Still, their rescue was the captain's responsibility, and he turned next to that problem.

For two days the icebreaker ploughed her way back the way she had come, making slow progress because in many parts the ice she had broken up had re-formed and become as impenetrable a barrier as it had been on the outward run.  Worse, a snowstorm developed, and strengthened until it could be called a true blizzard.  Eggi and Samoilovitch became more and more concerned for the crew of the Junkers.  It was one thing to expect them to survive in the sort of conditions that prevailed on the day of they crash-landed, when fog was the only real hazard; it was another for them to endure blizzard conditions.

Krassin's foghorn was kept in continuos operation, the idea being that the marooned airmen would hear it and be encouraged in their ordeal.  On July 15, three days after the rescue of the occupants of the Red Tent, the blizzard showed the first signs of decline.  the snow became thinner, the wind dropped, the sky gradually cleared.  In the afternoon the lookout shouted down from the crow's-nest that he had spotted the Junkers.  He estimated it as being three miles distant across the ice.  There was no sign, he said, of any human beings but of course they were probably sheltering inside its roomy fuselage.

Once again Krassin altered course, ramming her battered bows into a new area of ice, but this time with a positive objective ahead.  After a mile or two of slow and noisy slogging into the ice, thicker here than it had been farther back, Captain Eggi rang down to the engine room to shut off the engines.  They were near enough, he considered, for a rescue party to make the final approach on foot.  He called for two volunteers and his call was answered by half the ship's company. Two men climbed down the lowered gangplank and set off on skis.  Almost as they did so, the snow began to fall again, blown by a wind that steadily increased in force.

Samoilovitch toyed with the idea of recalling them.  But he decided against it when Eggi ordered the foghorn to be sounded at frequent and regular intervals so that the rescue party as well as the men about to be rescued would be able to keep their sense of direction.

It was a long wait.  But, after what seemed an unreasonably long time to the icebreaker's crew, a party of men was observed, with Chuckhnovsky in the lead, heading briskly for the ship, the rest of his crew and the two other men on skis bringing up the rear.  So, all was well.  Now the last of the scattered groups of rescued and rescuers alike had been picked up off the ice and were safe.

There was one more problem for Captain Eggi to face.  If he steamed away immediately, in order to convey Mariano as quickly as possible to base, he would have to abandon the Junkers.  Chuckhnovsky was emphatic that it would not take long to get the plane on board.  Captain Eggi gave in.  Willing hands went to work.  Within a matter of two hours the plane was dismantled and hoisted on the deck, where it was lashed down until it could be stowed in the crate in which it had been packed for the voyage.  This could be done at leisure, while Krassin steamed southward.  

Four weeks after she had set out from Bergen on the first stage of her mission, the icebreaker steamed slowly into King's Bay.  It was July 19.  Her bows showed how she had had to battle with the ice.  There were deep scores in the steel sheathing; her stem was battered and dented.  And she had only a hundred or so tons of coal left in her bunkers.  The operation from the point of view of fuel had been touch and go.

Her crew lined the deck.  Aboard the base ship, Citta di Milano, at anchor in the bay, the Italian crew lined the rails, cheering wildly.  This was a tremendous moment.  They were looking at a Russian icebreaker that had on board their compatriots whom they had thought they would never see again.

Among those waiting to greet the returning party, no one was more excited than General Umberto Nobile.  He had badly wanted to join one of the rescue parties that had set out after Lundborg had brought him back to base from the Red Tent.  He had tried hard to obtain permission to go aboard the icebreaker, and had used his friendship with Professor Samoilovitch to bring pressure to bear on the captain.  But he was still a sick man, with a broken leg and arm still unhealed after having been neglected for so long, and permission had very naturally been refused.

It can be imagined with what excitement and emotion the rescued men were greeted when they were brought aboard the base ship from their temporary home aboard Krassin.  If only Mariano had been in better health their joy would have been unclouded.  As it was, while they exchanged news of what had happened during the four weeks since Nobile had been taken off the ice, and bathed and ate and drank like civilised men for the first time in nearly eight weeks, poor Mariano was taken below decks to the base ship's hospital.

There, almost immediately, his right leg was amputated.  Though the surgeon was skilled, the hospital was not equipped for a major operation.  Mariano had to undergo the amputation, not with a general anaesthetic, which would have put him out for several hours, but with a local anaesthetic.  This meant that he was fully conscious throughout the whole of the operation.  He bore the ordeal with immense courage, true to naval tradition.  He took the first opportunity of talking with his old companions, determined not to cloud the happiness they were feeling at their escape by dwelling on his own misfortunes.

His courageous gesture was in tune with the fortitude that had been shown by even member of the expedition from start to finish.  Italia, it is true, had vanished, never to be seen again.  Her six-man crew had gone with her to their death.  But others had survived: Nobile, with a broken leg and arm; Cecioni with a broken leg; Viglieri, Behounek, Trojani, Zappi and Biagi; Mariano, saved from death in the nick of time by an amputation.  They were living proof of the power of determined men to survive against almost overwhelming odds.

Airship over the Pole by Garry Hogg Pt.10: Planes in the Sky.

On the same day that Captain Sora, Van Dongen and Warning started out with their sledge to try to make contact with the castaways, one of the most famous of all living explorers arrived at Tromso, in northern Norway, to take part in the search.  He was none other than the veteran Norwegian, Roald Amundsen.

He had already had half a lifetime of polar experience.  At the age of twenty-five he was exploring the Antarctic.  A few years later, he had transferred his attention to the Arctic, and also made the perilous navigation of the dread North West Passage.  Then he returned to his first love, the Antarctic, in the famous three-masted schooner, Fram, now preserved at Bygdoy, near Oslo.  In 1911, he succeeded in reaching the South Pole.  Fifteen years later he accompanied Nobile aboard Norge, across the North Pole to Alaska.  He had thus had experience of polar exploration by land, sea and air.  Though he had quarrelled with Nobile, when the new reached him that the Italian and his party were marooned on the ice somewhere to the south of the Pole he was among the first to volunteer to go in search of him, the quarrel entirely forgotten.

He obtained the financial backing of a wealthy American, Lincoln Ellsworth, who had been a passenger on board Norge in 1926.  With this he chartered a big French Latham-47 hydroplane capable of carrying up to six persons.  With a French pilot and co-pilot, a radio officer and a mechanic, he set off to fly direct from France to the northern tip of Scandinavia and then, after refuelling, straight across the Barents Sea in search of the castaways.  He was then a man in his late fifties, the proud bearer of the title his fellow Norwegians had bestowed on him, "White Eagle of Norway".

It might be thought that, with such an experienced polar explorer as Roald Amundsen, success would have been swift if not immediate.  Actually, the last that was seen of the big hydroplane was when it headed out across the Barents Sea from the northern tip of Norway.  The lookout in a small whaler glanced up as its shadow passed over him, and waved.  The plane vanished over the northern horizon.  Rather surprisingly it was equipped with a very inferior radio transmitter.  Perhaps as a result, no messages were intercepted by any of the many radio operators on the alert at the time for messages from the Red Tent and other search parties.

We shall never know whether Amundsen and his party spotted either the tent, or Zappi and Mariano heading south on their lonely trek, or even the gallant three-man northward trek by Sora, Warning and Van Dongen.  Within less than a week the fact had to be accepted at the base, and farther afield in France, where the crew came from, and in Norway, where Amundsen came from, that the Latham-47 had run into trouble and must be presumed lost.  It had not been provisioned for a lengthy stay on the ice in the event of it being forced down.  In Norway and in France concern was quickly transferred from the question of the Italia's survivors to the plight of Amundsen and his companions.

For ten weeks nothing was seen or heard of the hydroplane or its occupants.  All hope of their having survived was abandoned.  Men speculated endlessly: the Latham-47 was well equipped for coming down on to any ice lead wide enough for its floats.  It was sufficiently strongly built to be able to come down on open water, and to survive even it the water was quite rough.  It could even stand up to a forced landing on ice, if the landing was not too abrupt.  What had happened to it?  Speculators could only conclude that there had been engine failure.  The plane had only one engine, though it drove two propellers, a "pusher" and a "puller" geared together.  A too rapid decent on to broken ice could have caused the plane to disintegrate, killing everyone on board.

Only one sign of the lost seaplane ever came to light.  A crew member of a small whaler fishing off the northwest coast of Norway spotted what looked like a barrel floating in the sea.  He reported this to the captain, who ordered the steersman to head for it.  They hauled in a seven-foot-long metal float, painted grey-blue.  This was later identified as having been one of the two wing-tip floats of the ill-fated Latham-47.  It was not dented.  This suggested that the seaplane had come down on water, not on land or ice.  The impact, obviously, had wrenched it off its mounting.  This indicated that the seaplane had made a forced landing, probably out of control.  In that case it would almost certainly have sunk.  Its crew, even if they could have escaped from the fuselage in time, would inevitably have perished of exposure, if they had not drowned.  The certainty of disaster was now established; the White Eagle of Norway had died in his gallant attempt to rescue the man he had quarrelled with two years before.

Apart from the Italia's disaster, the disappearance of Amundsen's plane with all its crew was the worst of the air disasters that resulted from this whole rescue operation; but it was not the only instance of a plane finding itself in difficulties.

On June 23 the Swede, Lieutenant Einar-Paal Lundborg, airlifted General Nobile and his terrier from the Red Tent and safely returned them to base.  There the injured man was carefully taken off the plane and carried indoors to be given, for the first time for exactly a month, the comfort, warmth and medical attention he so badly needed.  But before allowing himself to be taken away for treatment, he extracted a promise from the pilot of the Fokker that he would lose no time in returning to the site and taking off Cecioni, the other injured man, and then as quickly as possible, the remaining four members of the marooned party.  Lundborg assured him that he would do this as soon as he had snatched an hour or two of sleep while his plane was refuelling.  Nobile, still deeply distressed that he had had to agree to be taken off first instead of last, as he had planned, resigned himself to the inevitable.  He consoled himself with the thought that it would not be long before the whole party was reunited.

He was drifting off into an uneasy sleep and hour of two later when he heard the sound of the plane's engine starting up again.  So, Lundborg was on his way!  He lay there, somnolent, imagining the happy moment when, an hour or two later, the Fokker would touch down on the landing strip laid out for it;  and the even happier moment when he heard the plane return to base with Cecioni on board.

Six hours after he had taken off from the landing strip with Nobile on board Lieutenant Lundborg was approaching it for the second time.  The sound of his engine roused the five men in the tent.  They had been counting not just the hours but even the minutes until they should see the plane again.  An one, they scrambled out of the tent.  Cecioni dragged himself to the open doorway and twisted around the outside of the tent so as to be able to look up in the direction in which the others were now pointing.

Lundborg's small Fokker began to descend, circling the tent as though to get its bearings.  They knew he would have little difficulty, for he had already landed once, not many hour previously, and the landing ground was clearly marked out with the bright red parachutes.  Yet, as they watched, it seemed to them that he was making a very curious approach.  For one thing, if he was intending to touch down right away he was travelling much too fast.  Viglieri, who was in charge, was greatly worried: he felt sure that the pilot badly misjudging both his distance and his speed.  The thought occurred to him that it might not be Lundborg at all, although it was certainly the same Fokker military plane, with the three crowns inset in a white circle painted on the fuselage and the bold figure, 31.  Perhaps it was some replacement pilot, who had not understood Lundborg's instructions before leaving the base.

Then, to their horror, the plane's skis made contact with the ice.  Horror because, instead of doing so at the very beginning of the runway the skis made contact more than half way along it.  The plane skidded along the remainder of the runway, bumping and bouncing on the rough ice but, for the time being remaining on a fairly even keel.  But beyond the runway, beyond the last pair of marker flags, there was a hummock of ice four or five feet high.  As though determined to wreck herself, the Fokker headed directly towards it.  Though her engine had been switched off, she still had considerable momentum.  She hit the hummock fair and square.  Her nose crumpled against it; he tail lifted so that she turned a complete somersault and came to rest upside down with her tail high in the air.

Viglieri and Biagi, Behounek and Trojani raced from the tent to the scene of the crash.  There was a chance that the plane might catch fire and her pilot be trapped and burned to death.  As they came closer they saw a trickle of oil spill down the side of the fuselage; but there were no flames.  A moment later the pilot extricated himself and dropped down on the ice.  He was helped to his feet by Viglieri and Biagi, the first to arrive; but his legs crumpled again under him when they let go their hold on his arms.  His head waved uncertainly from side to side as though he was dazed.  He might well be.  Perhaps he had struck it on some part of the cockpit as the plane turned upside down.  He spoke thickly, his voice slurred, and they had difficulty in understanding him. But it was Lundborg all right.

By the time they reached the tent with him, Behounek at least knew what the matter was: he had obviously been drinking.  His breath smelt foully of alcohol.  How he had managed to pilot the plane from base to the camp site was a mystery.  But he did get there; and was a castaway himself, for the plane was obviously a complete wreck.  Again there were six men in the tent.

It took all Viglieri's power of command to prevent his companions from wreaking their wrath on the man who could have rescued them one at a time but who, having taken too much liquor, had become a helpless victim of circumstances like themselves.  Biagi radioed the news back to base.  Nobile, who had reckoned that within hours he would see the first of his companions returned by air from the Red Tent, fell, perhaps for the first time, into the bitterness of real despair.

June passed into July.  The weather over the Arctic deteriorated rapidly and unexpectedly.  Biagi radioed, not for the first time, that their situation was becoming desperate.  The ice floe on which the tent was standing was steadily breaking up; they had had to shift camp several times.  Trojani was sick with some mysterious complaint that they were unable to diagnose and for which there was not a sufficient variety of medicines to cure by experiment.

Biagi himself, who had been so fit and had been a giant of reliability all these weeks, was feverish and unsteady on his feet.  Viglieri was concerned for him even more then for Trojani, for he was the one expert left in the party, the man they had come to regard as indispensable.  Nobile was aware of this when he had arranged that Biagi was to be the last man taken off the ice apart from himself.  The other sick man was the newcomer, Lundborg.  But Viglieri suspected that his sickness was more moral than physical; after a week in the tent, he had come to his senses sufficiently to realise that it was his fault that they were still marooned and in such a plight.

The only note of hope that reached them was a message to the effect that a Russian icebreaker, with a plane on board, had left the port of Bergen on her way north to join in the search.  Also, one Swedish hydroplane and two Italian ones were standing in readiness to join in as soon as the deteriorating weather made it possible.  The occupants of the Red Tent, the message emphasised, must try to be patient.  Everything was being done to rescue them as speedily as possible.  The men looked at each other grimly; they had received all too many massages of this kind already; they would believe in their rescuers when they actually saw them.

On July 6, the six men were sleeping fitfully in the tent when the sound of a plane was heard.  As so often before, they scrambled out on the ice, craning their necks in the direction of the sound.  To their delight it was evident that the plane was not merely, like some of its predecessors, about to drop supplies, but was preparing to land.  It was a very small plane, smaller than any they had seen before.  Lundborg identified it as a British Moth.

The pilot made a remarkably good landing, and the six men rushed across the ice to greet him.  As he stepped out of the cockpit they recognised him at once as Lieutenant Schyberg, who had been Lundborg's co-pilot on his first flight, when they had taken off Nobile.  Lundborg greeted him warmly, wringing his hand, an inquiring look in his eye.  There was a rapid exchange of words between the two men, none of which were comprehensible to the Italians.  Then briefly, with hardly as much as a glance at the remainder of the party, Schyberg announced that he had come with orders to take Lundborg back to base.  He added briefly, as though it hardly mattered, that the Moth was too small a plane to accommodate a second passenger.

Angrily, Viglieri tried to pin him down.  What, he asked, was the position back at base?  What planes were being prepared for the expected airlift?  How much longer did he and his four companions, one of them badly injured, two others very sick, all of them suffering from their six weeks' ordeal on the ice, have to wait?

Schyberg was a man of few words.  He was possibly under orders to give to information.  It was rather from his attitude, from what he did not say, that the forlorn group of five frustrated men realised that their ultimate rescue was by no means as near as they had believed it to be.  In silence they watched Lundborg scramble aboard the plane.  It was ironic that he, of all people, should be the one to be taken back to base.  None of them waved as the small plane took off, circled the Red Tent once more, and headed back southward to vanish over the horizon they had scanned so often, so despairingly.  They knew that it was no use pinning their hopes on a return visit from Lundborg or Schyberg.

There was another plane in the air about this time, commissioned to search for, locate and, if possible, rescue the men marooned on the ice: the group of five in the Red Tent; Mariano and Zappi, somewhere to the south of the point at which they had had to abandon Malmgren; and Sora with Van Dongen, somewhere to the north of the point where they had had to abandon Warning, the unlucky Dane.  This plane was the big three-engined German Junkers, piloted by Boris Chuckhnovsky, a young airman who had already had a good deal of experience of flying in Arctic conditions and was an engineer as well.

His plane had not, like the others, had been land-based but had been loaded aboard the Russian icebreaker Krassin, to be taken as for north as possible by sea before being despatched accoss the ice.  On July 6 - the day Schyberg landed his Moth alongside the Red Tent and took off Lieutenant Lundborg - Chuckhnovsky decided that the icebreaker had taken him far enough north into the region of pack ice for him to make a preliminary reconnaissance in search of the castaways.  With the assistance of the ship's carpenter he opened the huge crate in which, for safety's sake, the plane had been stored on the icebreakers deck.  Then, with the help of his crew, all experts, he began checking the plane.  Meanwhile the carpenter organised a timber slipway on which to slide the plane down on the ice for assembly of its wings preparatory to take-off.  The wingspan was too great for the plane to be completely assembled on deck.

After many hours of hard work, the plane was lowered down the slipway and manhandled onto a suitable patch of ice.  There its wheels were replaced by skis.  By July 8, three days after the collapse of Van Dongen, when Sora had given up the attempt to march any farther and had settled down with his companion to await what seemed almost certain death, the plane was at last ready to take to the air.

Chuckhnovsky was the pilot.  He had with him a co-pilot named Straube, an observer named Alexiew, a mechanic named Schellagen and, rather surprisingly, since even in a big three-engined Junkers space was limited and should surely have been reserved for taking off marooned men, a cameraman.

The plane lumbered off on its specially fitted skis across the rough ice.  The intention was to make a preliminary flight, to check the condition of the ice in the area, partly for the benefit of the icebreaker, partly because the essential object of the search was to locate and organise the rescue of the castaways.  It was only a brief flight.  Within an hour or two the plane returned and touched down safely close alongside Krassin.  Chuckhnovsky reported that he had seen nothing at all of any castaways during the flight; he had, however, made detailed notes as to the number, size and direction of sea lanes in the ice field generally.

Then fog closed in again.  For two days it was not possible for the plane to take off.  Even if it had been able to do so, it would have been impossible to spot any of the castaways on the ice though such a thickness of low cloud.  Chuckhnovsky and his crew waited impatiently on board the icebreaker of the moment when they could set off again.  On July 10 the fog had lifted sufficiently for them to feel that a second attempt might hold promise of success.

The Junkers was loaded with as many supplies of various kinds as the pilot thought it would be safe to carry.  They were destined for the occupants of the Red Tent, and for either or both of the smaller marooned parties.  It was a provision that was to prove very fortunate for Chuckhnovsky's own party.  Then, for the second time the plane was manhandled into position for take-off.  The clear sky seemed to be beckoning them.  Chuckhnovsky gave the signal to his ground crew and the plane lifted into the air.  It was five o'clock.

Krassin's radio operator had his earphones clamped to his head: he had instructions to remain on constant duty until relieved.  At any moment a message might be flashed to him that he plane had sighted one of the groups of castaways, and immediate action might be called for.  There was also, of course, the chance that the plane itself might meet with trouble: ater all, Amundsen's plane had vanished without a trace three weeks before and had not been heard from since.  The fact had been casually mentioned to Chuckhnovsky shortly before he climbed into his pilot's seat, but he had cheerfully brushed the reminder aside.  He had absolute confidence that he was to be the man to locate the marooned men and return safely to base to make arrangements for their rescue, even if he did not accomplish it himself.

At six o'clock, an hour after he had left the icebreaker, Chuckhnovsky radioed back that he still had not seen a sign of any of the parties he was looking for.  A quarter of an hour later he radioed that a fog bank was building up and that he had reluctantly decided to turn back while there was till fair visibility.  Those on board Krassin did not need to be told about the fog.  It was already lying all about them, thickening with the passing of every quarter of an hour, and visibility from the icebreaker was less than a couple of hundred feet.

Then, suddenly, the radio operator was startled to hear an excited, staccato message.  He caught the two words "King Charles".  There was a gap.  Then two more words: "Malmgren's party".  That seemed to be all.  He was about to remove his headphones and shout to someone to take his message when he heard the beginning of something else.  He snatched at his pencil and pad and began to scribble the words as they came in.

It was a dramatic message: "Have located Malmgren party… Cannot locate Krassin, owing to fog.  Am attempting to land."  Strain his ears as he might, the radio operator heard nothing more.  His instrument had gone dead.  Everyone on board Krassin became increasingly filled with anxiety.  If Chuckhnovsky could radio what he intended to do, then surely, they thought, he could tell them that he had done it.  Since there had been no further message, they could only assume that he had crash-landed his Junkers and damaged his transmitter.  And perhaps - but the thought was too terrible to entertain - in crash-landing he and his crew had been killed.

The evening aboard the icebreaker dragged interminably.  The crew continued to speculate as to what could have happened, coming up with one suggestion after another, none of them at all convincing.  The basic fact remained that they had lost touch with the plane and her crew.  The radio operator remained steadfastly at his post, alert for any hint of a message coming through, refusing relief even to eat a meal.  He would snatch a mouthful of two as he sat at his instrument; that was all.

Then, shortly before midnight, his instrument came alive again.  Automatically he picked up his pencil, poising it for the first words that would follow the faint sound indicating that transmission was about to begin.  He picked up a very brief message; but it brought supreme reassurance to him, the Captain and the crew.  "We have landed… Uncertain exact position… Plane damaged… We are uninjured."

All, then, was well with Chuckhnovsky and his party.  But had they been successful in sighting those whom they had set out to locate?  The radio operator had the strong feeling that they were having difficulty with their transmitter, for the brief message had been staccato, halting, and so incomplete.  He knew that Schellagen, the radio mechanic, was a qualified engineer; with luck he would be able to get the transmitter into better working order.  In any case he would not leave his post - just in case further messages came in.

His patience was rewarded.  In the small hours of the morning messages began to flow once more, and to flow more certainly, and more strongly.  The occupants of the plane had sighted Malmgren's party, and were able to give their exact position.  In addition to giving the co-ordinates, Chuckhnovsky had assessed the men's predicament.  They were on a smallish ice floe, with wide leads all around them, so that they could not possibly escape.  He had dropped supplies to them, but each time the packages had landed wide of the mark and been lost in the water.  He had the impression that the men were in a very bad way.  They seemed to have no strength left.  There were two of them together.  A third man - at least, he thought it was a man - was located some distance to the north of the other two.  He had made no movement at all.  The general feeling aboard the plane was that he was dead.

The last part of the radioed message was simple and straight-forward.  They themselves had sufficient supplies to survive in their grounded plane for two weeks at least, probably more, and could therefore be ignored for the time being.  the all-important thing was for a rescue party to push through, or across, the ice to reach the two men before it was too late.  As for the so-called Red Tent, Chuckhnovsky reluctantly reported that the had seen no sign of it.  He could not help wondering whether the ice floe had broken up under it and the tent and its occupants had been lost.  There were so many sea lanes intersecting the ice that this seemed more than a mere possibility.

Airship over the Pole by Garry Hogg Pt.9: The Sledge Party.

Among the advance arrangements made by General Mobile before setting out for the Pole was the establishment on Spitsbergen of a squad of the famous Italian Alpini.  It consisted of eight members of the Sixth Alpine Regiment: men specially trained for action in mountainous and icebound terrain.  In addition to their ordinary military training, they were all expert skiers, accustomed to moving fast and continuously in the worst possible conditions.  They were capable of functioning in circumstances that would bring ordinary soldiers to a complete halt.  They had the toughness and sense of initiative and independence allied to discipline that characterises the commandos of today.  Their commanding officer was Captain Gennaro Sora, known throughout Italy as one of the country's most expert skiers.  He acted as ski instructor to the Alpini when no on active service.

Like everyone connected with the Italia expedition, he had the highest respect for Nobile - respect amounting almost to reverence.  Stationed near the hangar from which he and his men had helped to launch the airship, he became more and more certain during those long days of mysterious silence that something was amiss with Italia.  At intervals he suggested that a sledge party ought to go out across the ice to try to find out what had happened.  When the days extended into weeks, he could restrain his impatience no longer.  News had at last reached the base ship that the expedition had run into real trouble: that six men had vanished altogether, one had died, six were marooned in a tent, and three others had set out on a trek across the ice in search of help.  Captain Sora decided that this was the time for him to set out northward with the objective of meeting the smaller group and then of bringing help to the main party in the tent.

Meanwhile, however, the weather over Spitsbergen had deteriorated badly, so he had to content himself with making preparations for a sledge party when the weather would permit.  Because he was a serving officer, he first asked permission for this trek from army headquarters in Italy.  To his surprise and anger, his request was turned down.  His place, he was told, was at King's Bay, where General Nobile had given him a job to do; it was not up to him to act on his own initiative.  Sora fumed: this was a typical example of deliberate blindness among those not on the spot, who could only act according to rules laid down.

He was determined to undertake the trek.  As an officer, under army orders, he knew that he risked court-martial if he disobeyed those orders.  Nevertheless, so positive was he that it was his duty to attempt a rescue that he was prepared to ignore the risk of a court martial.  But he could not involve the soldiers under his command.  So, though they would willingly have accompanied him, and indeed begged to be allowed to do so, he ordered them to remain at the base.  He would have to find men from some other source to accompany him on his trek.

He first approached the master of the whaling ship Braganza, then at anchor in the bay.  The master willingly agreed to take him and his party as far north as possible, to the edge of the pack ice.  He then set about enlisting volunteers to accompany him.  Two would be sufficient, he thought.  And two were very readily forthcoming: a Dutchman named Van Dongen, a veteran explorer with plenty of experience of northern waters, and a Dane with the curious name of Warning.  Both men, like Sora himself, were men of fine physique and thoroughly fit.

On June 18, three days after Malmgren was left behind by Zappi and Mariano, and incidentally on the same day as Maddalena arrived at King's Bay in his S-55 Savoia hydroplane, Sora and his two companions were disembarked at the northern-most tip of Northeast Land.  They had with them a Nansen-type Norwegian sledge that had been tested out and was in excellent condition.  It was to be hauled by a team of nine huskies.  On the sledge were packed ample provisions, not only for the sledge party but for the men they hoped to find.  There was also a wide range of medical supplies, and Sora, like most Alpini officers, had some knowledge of how to use them.  Finally, the sledge carried a collapsible boat.  The three men knew well that by the second half of June there would be many wide leads to negotiate, and a boat was essential in they were to make any real progress.

During the first two days, they covered considerably more ground then Sora, in his most optimistic mood, would have dared to hope for.  Though the ice varied in quality and condition, and there were many soft and treacherous patches, the Nansen sledge rode it well, and the huskies pulled willingly.  Van Dongen and Warning appeared to stand up to the demand on their energies as well as the leader himself, who always kept himself trained to the highest pitch of fitness and did not carry an ounce of superfluous flesh on his muscular frame.

But on the third day out, just when they seemed to be moving fast and well, the Dane suddenly pitched sideways onto the ice, groaning with pain and clutching his stomach.  Sora at once brought the sledge to a halt, handed the reins to Van Dongen, and dropped to his knees beside the stricken man.  Warning groaned, and in between groans muttered that he had a stomach pain so violent that it doubled him up.  Sora suspected appendicitis, and had a moment of panic.  He had a good knowledge of first-aid, but this would be something outside his experience.  All he knew was that appendicitis neglected could develop into peritonitis; and peritonitis, if not swiftly and expertly treated by a professional, led inevitably - to death.  It was a frightening thing to have to face, out there alone in the wilderness of ice.

But Warning's attack ended as suddenly as it began.  He sat up, apologised for what had happened, staggered a little uncertainly to his feet, and declared that he now felt as right as rain.  He must, he said cheerfully, have eaten something that did not agree with him.  Sora was not as relived as he would have like to feel.  However, he tried not to show that he was worried, and took over the sledge again from Van Dongen.  the three men set off again, trying to make up for lost time.

Then for the second time, Warning collapsed suddenly, clutching his stomach,  unable to stifle the groans that came from his compressed lips.  Again the attack ended after a few minutes just as suddenly as it had begun.  But throughout all of that third day he continued to have these violent spasms, and Sora noticed with dismay that the intervals between the attacks became shorter and shorter as the day wore on.  And it was a long day: in the second half of June there was little of no difference in that latitude between the hours of darkness and the hours of light.

Reluctantly Sora decided that they had better break their journey completely for twenty-four hours.  This would enable the Dane to rest and recuperate.  After that enforced rest they started off again.  And in little more than an hour the Dane collapsed again.  There was nothing for it, if they were to continue their trek, but to put him on the sledge and let him be hauled by the huskies until he recovered - if he was going to recover.  Warning protested, but Sora curtly reminded him that, though he and Van Dongen were volunteers, he was the leader, and his orders must be obeyed.

Warning was a massively built man and unfortunately his weight was too much for the sledge in addition to the load it already carried.  It was not that it was too frail to take the load; it was simply that the ice was soft and the runners bit so deeply into it that the huskies were brought to a standstill time and again.  The only alternative was to remove as much as possible from the sledge and for the two men still on their feet to carry the load on their backs  - lightening the sledge by nearly the weight of the man who had to be carried on it.  As a result the sledge rode better; but Sora and Van Dongen were weighted down by almost intolerable loads, their boots sinking deep into the soft ice with every step they took.

Progress became so slow and laborious that Sora's optimism sank to a low ebb.  He could see no solution to their problem.  Even if they turned around, they would simply be faced with a four-day trek back to where they had disembarked from the whaling ship; and their mission would be a failure.  On the other hand, if they tried to continue at this slow rate they were unlikely to succeed in their rescue attempt either; moreover, with the passing of each day the ice was becoming more and more treacherous both for men on foot and for the huskies.

Finally the Dane himself made a decision.  Quietly but firmly he expressed his wish to be left behind, while the two fit men continued northward.  They could leave him, he said, with adequate provisions, his sleeping bag and other essential equipment.  When he felt well enough, he would turn around and make his way back to base as best he could.

Reluctantly, Sora agreed with the proposal.  He was realist enough to recognise that this was the only possible solution.  The Dane was sufficiently experienced to be able to look after himself.  He could subsist for two weeks on the rations they would leave him; and in that time he was certain to have recovered sufficiently to make his way back to within reach of help from the base.  One proviso, however, Sora did make: on no account was Warning to attempt to overtake them, no matter how soon he might begin to feel well again; those were his orders, and he made the Dane promise to obey them absolutely.  

So, on June 24, the day after Nobile had been taken from the Red Tent by Lieutenant Lundborg, Sora and Van Dongen whipped up their dog team and set off again, leaving the Dane with his store of provisions and such medicine as might be of use to him.  Also a revolver, in case he should be found by a bear.  They had shaken hands all round.  Whatever Warning may have been feeling, he was careful to give no indication of it as he said goodbye to his companions: they would all three meet again, soon, he said, in happier circumstances; he was only sorry he had proved such a failure and was no longer able to play his part in the rescue.

This was the first setback Captain Sora's small expedition was to suffer.  Unhappily it was by no means the last, as they discovered within two hours of saying their farewells.  They were overtaken by a blizzard that sprang up quite unexpectedly and blew with ever-mounting fury.  Visibility fell to a yard of two, and the huskies reacted accordingly.  They came to an untidy and tumultuous halt.  It was impossible to make and headway at all, and Sora accepted the inevitable.  The dogs were tethered to an iron stake and, as is their custom, curled up close together in a circle with their noses to the middle, well aware that for the time being their work of hauling the sledge was at an end.  Sora and Van Dongen made themselves such shelter as they could in the lee of the sledge, crawled into their sleeping bags and settled down to weather the blizzard.  Both men knew it was a bleak prospect.  Even in June, an Arctic blizzard could blow for days on end.  At least they were a little better off than their companion, as they had the sledge and the dogs, and there were two of them to exchange grumbles and speculate about their prospects.

The blizzard raged for two long days and nights.  To venture out from their makeshift shelter was an ordeal they went through as rarely as possible, though it was necessary at intervals to feed the huskies as well as themselves.  Sora was by no means easy in his mind about the dogs: when he went out to feed them there was a feel in the air about them that disturbed him.  When on the third day the blizzard had abated sufficiently for them to start out again he found that one of the huskies had a badly injured leg.  Possibly the sledge had run into it when they stopped suddenly at the onset of the blizzard.  Another husky seemed to be ill: it crouched motionless, almost lifeless, instead of springing into action as sledge-dogs usually do when the order for departure is given.  There was only one thing to do.  Sora took out his pistol and shot the two dogs, taking them some distance from their companions before doing so.  He knew that the effect on the others was unpredictable, and might hinder their progress.

So they started off again.  Now they had only seven dogs to haul the sledge, in worsening conditions.  On top of the already softened ice there was a thick blanket of snow which dragged at the sledge runners like a myriad tiny hands determined to impede its progress.

They had been on their trek for nine days.  Two of those days had been wasted while they sheltered from the blizzard; another full day had been lost while they tried to restore the Dane to health so that he could continue with them.  Before that, owing to his indisposition, they had been making slow progress anyway.  And, with a heavy sledge and only seven dogs to haul it, they were making even slower progress.  Two days later two more of the huskies fell sick and had to be destroyed.  A Nansen sledge, loaded with provisions and equipment, is not designed for hauling by only five dogs, however willing, even in good ice conditions.  Sora and Van Dongen had to put their shoulders to the sledge and help the huskies for hours at a time when the going was at its worst.  This additional strain took its toll of the two men.

Next day they were surprised to hear the sound of a plane coming up behind them.  It bore Norwegian markings.  A small package was dropped from it that contained cigarettes.  In the package was a note to the effect that the ice to the north of their route was badly intersected by leads; they were advised not to push on any farther.  Captain Sora was curiously annoyed at being given this advice, though it was obviously well-meant, and as a result of intelligent reconnaissance.  He felt, however, that since he was down on the ice he probably knew as much about it as anyone else.

So they pressed on.  But the ice was becoming more dangerous, more treacherous.  Not only was much of it broken, a lot of it had become heaped up in jagged reefs which the dogs, even with the help of the two men, had the utmost difficulty in negotiating.  Then suddenly, and without warning, the ice cracked across, with the leading pair of huskies on the far side and the three others, immediately harnessed to the sledge, on the near side.  Van Dongen was with the lead dogs, Sora with the sledge.

Sora yelled to his companion to jump back, hanging on to the lead dogs, before the gap became too wide.  Van Dongen attempted to obey, took a flying leap and landed safely beside him.  But in the confusion all five dogs spilled into the water.  Their harness began to break under the furious tugging among them.  It held long enough, in spite of the strenuous efforts of the two men, for the dogs to drag down the sledge into the water with them.  Still hanging on wildly to the sledge, Van Dongen too was dragged off the ice and into the water.  He sank until his head was barely above the surface.  The dogs milled frantically all about him.

Sora dug his heels into the ice, to get what leverage he could, and lay back on the part of the harness still in his hands in a desperate attempt to save his companion and, if possible, the sledge and the remaining dogs.  Fortunately the sledge, buoyed up by the sleeping bags, remained afloat.  Sora hung on for all he was worth, lying back like the anchorman in a tug of war team.  Van Dongen, by some miracle, managed to get a grip on the edge of the ice and, with superhuman strength, dragged himself bodily out of the water.  Then there was a jerk on the harness as the dogs milled about behind him, and he vanished below the surface for a moment.

Relinquishing the harness he had been hanging on to all this time, Sora deliberately plunged into the lead to help him.  Between them they managed to scramble out on the ice before their limbs froze stiff.  But it had meant letting go of the harness.  Three of the huskies disappeared and never came up again.  They managed somehow to drag back two others on to the ice.  With the dogs' help they managed eventually to haul the sledge back on the ice as well.  But this was largely because, as a result of the accident, much of its cargo had slipped off and had sunk out of sight.  The sledge was much lighter than it had been, but a large part of their provisions and equipment was lost forever.

Half-frozen by the icy water that had penetrated their thick clothing and boots, the two men assessed what was salvaged out of all that splendid cargo of provisions and equipment.  One sleeping bag; some spare socks; a sealed container of matches; a canister or two of drinking water; a supply of ammunition for Sora's pistol; and about a week's supply of pemmican and chocolate - if they rationed themselves severely.  It was a major disaster to the expedition.

They decided to abandon the sledge.  The supplies that were salvaged they could carry in packs on their shoulders.  There was no need for the cumbersome sledge.  Anyway, it was too heavy for the remaining couple of dogs to haul.  They debated as to whether to shoot the huskies.  Sora decided against it: the dogs could always provide food "on the hoof" if  the worst came to the worst, though husky meat did not make good eating.  Van Dongen was surprised to learn that Sora proposed to continue the trek, as ill equipped as they were, but he did not protest.

They erected the Nansen sledge so that it would be conspicuous.  Sora wrote a note on the cigarette package giving the date, July 1, and stating that he and his companion were heading northeastward; that the third member of their party, at his own request, had been left behind.  There was always the very real chance that their troubles were not yet over; it they ran into anything worse, and had to be rescued also, the information would be of some guidance to rescuers.

For the next couple of days, they slogged purposefully on across the ice, which steadily deteriorated.  Time after time they stepped into puddles that were invisible below the blanket of snow, sometimes up to their thighs, sometimes waist-deep in icy water.  They were careful to leave a space of a yard or two between them, walking in single file, so that if the front man fell in the other could stop in time and help him out.  With growing alarm Sora noticed that his companion became slower and slower in recovering from these frequent falls; he rarely spoke, not even answering remarks made to him.

On July 4 it was quite obvious that Van Dongen was not merely feeling the strain but was a sick man.  There was an unnatural brightness in his eyes.  He walked with the curious, uneven gait of a man whose limbs were not co-ordinated.  Once or twice he fell, and responded very feebly to Sora's efforts to get him on his feet again.  Then came the time when, having fallen, he simply refused to move.  Quite possibly he was physically incapable of getting up, but he has also lost all will to do so.  Sora coaxed him, then bullied hime, but without success.  The man had become as much of a casualty as the Dane had been when they eventually abandoned him two weeks earlier.

Van Dongen's condition grew steadily worse. It was apparent that unless a miracle were to take place, he must die.  With his clothing soaked through, unable to move about to keep his circulation going, there was little hope for him.  Sora himself had been feeling the strain, fit as he was and accustomed to hardship in grim conditions.  He had the strength to fend for himself, but precious little in reserve to support a sick companion.  He was glad he had left that note behind with the sledge: it seemed as though they would be as much in need of rescue as the others on the ice.  Their supply of food had dwindled to practically nothing.  The two dogs, which they had intended if necessary to kill for meat, had mysteriously vanished during one of the short spells of fitful sleep the two men had managed; so that last hope had gone.

By now the Dutchman was delirious.  His mind wandered.  He spoke of sighting planes, of lavish banquets, of sunny climes and a life of ease and pleasure.  All the things, in fact, remotest from the two men's grasp.  He had rare moments of lucidity, and talked quite normally with his companion.  But these would end abruptly, and he would be away in his dream world, talking again in a frightening fashion.  Sora felt desperately alone; perhaps more alone than he would have felt if he had been on his own and not tied to a companion who was out of his mind.

They had not the facilities for making any sort of camp.  Their clothes were so wet they gave almost no warmth.  They had one sleeping bag, wet from immersion, and not large enough anyway for more than one of them at a time.  Sora gave it to his companion, and hugged himself close alongside him, a prey to the wind that blew everlastingly about them.  Every now and then, he staggered to his feet and tried to take enough exercise to stimulata a little circulation; but on a poor diet and in such intolerable weather conditions the effort was too much for him, tough as he was.  Soon he was crouching down again beside Van Dongen, without hope.

Four days after Van Dongen's collapse, during one of his rare moments of sanity, both men heard the unmistakable sound of a plane overhead.  Sora scrambled to his feet and raked the sky.  Yes, there it was: a German Junkers, but with Russian markings on its wings and fuselage.

Sora made his way, tripping and stumbling, to a plle of ice, scrambled up to the top of it, taking off his anorak as he did so, and stood swaying there, waving his anorak like a banner over his head.  He even shouted aloud, startled at the hoarseness of his croaking voice and not realising how impossible it was for him to be heard.  Of course he was not heard.  Nor, apparently, was his violent waving seen.  For soon afterwards the plane swung away from its original direction, which would have taken it right overhead, and vanished over the horizon.

It was a savage disappointment to the two men.  Perhaps for the first time in the twenty days since they had started out, even Sora abandoned hope.  He could not know that the Junkers, flown by the Russian airman Boris Chuckhnovsky, developed engine trouble at the very moment that the pilot spotted them. He had turned hurriedly back, and subsequently crash-landed.  Sora can hardly be blamed for losing hope.  All the responsibility had been his.  He had undertaken the expedition at the risk of court-martial.  He had had to leave Warning behind.  For some time past he had had to do everything for Van Dongen as well as for himself; this had included the demoralising business of listening to the Dutchman's interminable delirious ramblings day and night.  He was now feeling ill himself, and pretty well at the end of his tether.  Nor was there anything else that he could do.

For three days he crouched there alongside his sick companion.  He scanned the sky by the hour for a sign of a returning plane.  None appeared.  Every few hours he gnawed a morsel of pemmican, making it last as long as he could so that the interval before the next "meal" would be that much shorter.  He continually wriggled his toes inside his boots, as though to assure himself that the anticipated frostbite had not yet attacked him.  He was tempted to urge his companion, in a moment when he was not delirious, to do the same.  But he realised that if Van Dongen was going to succumb at all to that bugbear of polar explorers, there was nothing whatever he could do about it.

By July 12, three and a half weeks since disembarking from the whaler, when they were both numbed by exposure and weekend by lack of food, so that they had virtually given up all hope of surviving, Sora's faith in miracles was unexpectedly rewarded.  Somewhere, far out across the pack ice which had defeated them, he saw, or believed he saw, a column of smoke - the last thing he had ever expected to see amid such desolation.

With a sudden access of strength and energy, Sora scrambled to his feet and made his way, more painfully this time, to the top of the hummock of ice from which he had tried to attract the attention of the pilot of the Junkers four days earlier.  Shading his aching eyes against the ice glare, he looked, and looked, and looked.  Yes it was unmistakably smoke.  What is more, it was smoke form a ship's funnel.  It must be an icebreaker, he thought.  Only an icebreaker could have penetrated so far into the wilderness of ice that surrounded the Pole.

He called excitedly to his companion, who at that moment was enjoying one of his lucid intervals.  Van Dongen struggled to his feet, new energy flooding his near-paralysed system.  Somehow he managed to stagger to the top of the ice hummock on which Sora was standing.  Sora reached out and steadied him as he reached the top.  Now both men could see the smoke, which definitely came from the two funnels of a vessel.  As they looked, there came a blast of a ship's siren.  They realised that they had been spotted by the lookout in the crow's nest.

Exausted as they were, they almost danced on top of that slippery hummock of ice.  Then they stood still again, striving to see what was going on.  They saw someone waving a flag.  It was the Russian flag, which confirmed Sora's belief that it must be a Russian icebreaker.  Only icebreakers could move where any other type of vessel however powerful would be brought to a standstill.  So, they were saved!  It would be only a matter of hours before they were on board.

For a moment or two they toyed with the idea of starting across the ice towards the vessel.  But Sora clamped down on the suggestion almost as soon as it entered his head.  The distance between them and the vessel was certainly much greater than it appeared: distances over ice were notoriously difficult to estimate.  What was more, there would almost certainly be wide leads along the way.  In fact, her very presence, with her powerful engines turning propellers, would set the ice floes in uneasy motion, breaking up the less solid sheets.  It would be folly to try to reach her on foot, without a sledge or a boat.

Better by far to stay where they were and await developments.  The ship's master would know best what to do.  He might attempt to bring his vessel nearer.  He might decide to put a shore party on the ice, with a sledge and dog team, to fetch them.  The important thing was - that the two castaways had been actually seen from the vessel; their presence was know to the crew.  It would only be a matter of an hour or two, or a little longer; they could afford to wait, and to wait patiently, knowing they had been located.  Unlike an aircraft, a ship would not turn around and vanish over the horizon!

They watched keenly.  For a time the vessel, with the pall of black smoke which had first attracted their attention, seemed to be moving slowly towards them.  Then, without warning, and to their bitter disappointment, she altered course.  Half an hour later she was farther from them than she had been when they first spotted the smoke.  Then even the smoke was so thin that it was no more than a smoke ghost.  Van Dongen and Captain Sora looked at each other in silence.  It was impossible to believe that such a thing had happened.   But it was true: it had happened before their very eyes.