Читать книгу The Ice Balloon - Alec Wilkinson - Страница 9

Among the first in the audience to rise and respond was the president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Clements Markham, who had been to the Arctic to look for Franklin. Markham said that clouds might keep Andrée from seeing the ground, or even from knowing whether he was above “land, ice, or snow.” Furthermore, unless Andrée descended, he wouldn’t be able “to collect natural history specimens,” or to take celestial readings to find out where he was. Finally, if the balloon ran into a cliff or an iceberg and was wrecked, how would he get back?

A British explorer of Africa named A. Silva White said that experiments he had conducted with balloons in Scotland had led him to conclude that they couldn’t be steered and that Andrée’s attempt was “foolhardy, and not one to be seriously discussed at a meeting of this character.”

General Adolphus Greely, the American who had spoken before Andrée, added that Andrée’s balloon would lose too much gas to complete the trip. If Andrée had solved the problem of permeability, “which has engaged the attention of some of the acutest minds in France and Germany,” and to which “money in great sums has been applied,” Greely hoped he would share it before he left. Moreover, the southerly winds that might carry Andrée to the pole would converge there and strand him. “As geographers, looking at these things from a practical point of view, and having some knowledge of air and currents,” Greely said, “this Congress should not give the weight of their influence or their endorsement to this expedition.”

While Andrée listened, he made notes with a pencil. When he returned to the lectern, he said that the discussion seemed to have “wandered somewhat out of the region of the methods by which I propose to make my polar journey.” He was aware of how hard flying a free balloon was, he said, but his balloon would control its course by means of guide ropes and a sail. The suggestion that fog might appear in his path had no support. The polar region was about the size of Europe, and as in Europe, there would be fog in some places and not others. He described a trip in the Baltic in which he had controlled his course.

Then he pointed a finger at several explorers. “When something happened to your ships, how did you get back?” he asked. Greely, on his expedition a decade earlier, had lost eighteen of his twenty-five men. “I risk three lives in what you call a ‘foolhardy’ attempt, and you risked how many?” Andrée continued, “A shipload.”

He crumpled the paper he had written his notes on and left the stage, arriving at his seat “wiping his brow and taking deep breaths like an athlete,” a witness wrote. Meanwhile the audience “cheered until the great hall of the Colonial Institute rang.”