In August 1905, when Mina Hubbard mapped Labrador on her pioneering expedition, Brooklyn Eagle reported one of the “most amazing Arctic missions” – a trip to help rescue the American explorer Anthony Fiala and his team, who were trapped in the cold atmosphere for almost two years, trying to reach the North Pole.
Chartered by American industrialist William Ziegler, who had made a fortune in baking powder and vowed to use it to fund as many efforts as it took to reach the North Pole, the three-masted ship Fiala was crushed by a thin ice sheet just four months after leaving Norway. Although the In America you couldn't move anymore, the ice thought that the ship didn't sink but it got stuck in its place.
The men rushed to salvage their belongings, but when another storm engulfed the disaster in January, most of their food and coal disappeared with it.
They escape over the ice, build a camp, and do the daily work of survival, but not before setting up an observatory and setting up all their scientific instruments.
Days of bleeding turned into weeks, months, and seasons as they kept hoping for redemption. The few remaining conditions were exhausted. They lived on walrus and bear. All the while, they kept checking. It kept their spirits up, this stubborn, hard work of painting a picture of that unknown world with numbers and figures to reveal its full face.
In what seems to be a miracle in the history of polar exploration, only one in thirty-five men would die in the twenty months they spent as prisoners of the ice.
Although their time in the Arctic has been relegated to the sidelines of history as a failed expedition in terms of the sponsor's stated goal of reaching the North Pole, I see it as a triumph of both science and the human spirit. While winning is a finite game, played for the joy of winning, curiosity is a never-ending game, played for fun, in Richard Feynman's beloved phrase. The test in the work of learning is always greater and more enduring than the test in the service of nailing the flag on behalf of the ruler, because the work of knowledge is inexhaustible and has an endless reward. (“The world of education is vast, and the power of the human soul is limited!” wrote the pioneering astrologer Maria Mitchell the year Anthony Fiala was born. “We reach out and suppress every emotion, but hold only a thin curtain that hides the infinite from us.”)
Two years after their rescue, the main scientist of this expedition – William J. Peters, whose basic research on geomagnetism created the current understanding of the Earth's magnetosphere – published a 630-page report of their scientific results. Fiala himself wrote the introduction, encouraging the reader to imagine the conditions, which many of us cannot imagine, in which the work was done – a plea that sounds like a small manifesto of the living scientific spirit:
The difficulties encountered in carrying out the work in the northern regions must be met in order to be properly appreciated. Storms are more common in winter, and observers, on their way to and from observatories and instrument shelters, often have to crawl on their hands and knees in the face of strong winds, drifting snow particles, low temperatures, and winter darkness. The sincere and unselfish cooperation of all concerned is amply demonstrated by the execution of the great detail work reported in this volume.
Among the endless tables of astronomical, meteorological, and oceanographic data is a series of careful observations of the aurora borealis lasting several months – a landmark contribution to the science of the magic of our planet. Three nights – December 23, 1903, January 2, 1904, and January 23, 1904 – appear as a series of breath-taking plates that capture both the drama and subtlety of the Northern Lights.
Couple that with Frederick Cook's moving account of surviving an icy captivity elsewhere, and revisit the science of how the aurora borealis casts its spell.
HT Romance for books
