The South Pole, Roald Amundsen [free children's ebooks online .txt] 📗

he was given the task of trying to construct a thermograph out of the hygrograph and the disabled thermograph; this was just the job for him. The production he showed me a few hours later made my hair stand on end. What would Steen say? Do you know what it was? Well, it was an old meat-tin circulating inside the thermograph case. Heavens! what an insult to the self-registering meteorological instruments! I was thunderstruck, thinking, of course, that the man was making a fool of me. I had carefully studied his face all the time to find the key to this riddle, and did not know whether to laugh or weep. Lindstr�m’s face was certainly serious enough; if it afforded a measure of the situation, I believe tears would have been appropriate. But when my eye fell upon the thermograph and read, “Stavanger Preserving Co.‘s finest rissoles,” I could contain myself no longer. The comical side of it was too much for me, and I burst into a fit of laughter. When my laughter was subdued, I heard the explanation. The cylinder did not fit, so he had tried the tin, and it went splendidly. The rissole-thermograph worked very well as far as -40� C., but then it gave up.

Our forces were now divided into two working parties. One of them was to dig out some forty seals we had lying about 3 feet under the snow; this took two days. The heavy seals’ carcasses, hard as flint, were difficult to deal with. The dogs were greatly interested in these proceedings. Each carcass, on being raised to the surface, was carefully inspected; they were piled up in two heaps, and would provide food enough for the dogs for the whole winter. Meanwhile the other party were at work under Hassel’s direction on a petroleum cellar. The barrels which had been laid up at the beginning of February were now deep below the snow. They now dug down at both ends of the store, and made a passage below the surface along the barrels; at the same time they dug far enough into the Barrier to give the requisite height for the barrels. When the snow had been thrown out, one hole was walled up again, while a large entrance was constructed over the other. Stubberud’s knowledge of vaulting came in useful here, and he has the credit of having built the splendid arched entrance to the oil-store. It was a pleasure to go down into it; probably no one has had so fine a storehouse for petroleum before. But Hassel did not stop here; he had the building fever on him in earnest. His great project of connecting the coal and wood store with the house below the surface nearly took my breath away; it seemed to me an almost superhuman labour, but they did it. The distance from the coal-tent to the house was about ten yards. Here Hassel and Stubberud laid out their line so that it would strike the passage round the house at the southeast angle. When they had done this, they dug a gigantic hole down into the Barrier halfway between the tent and the house, and then dug in both directions from here and soon finished the work. But now Prestrud had an idea. While the hole remained open he wished to avail himself of the opportunity of arranging an observatory for his pendulum apparatus, and he made a very good one. He did it by digging at right angles to the passage, and had his little observatory between the coal-tent and the house. When all the snow was cleared out, the big hole was covered over again, and now we could go from the kitchen direct to the coal-store without going out. First we followed the passage round the house — you remember where all the tinned provisions stood in such perfect order — then, on reaching the southeast angle of the house, this new passage opened out and led across to the coal-tent. In the middle of the passage, on the right-hand side, a door led into the pendulum observatory. Continuing along the passage, one came first to some steps leading down, and then the passage ended in a steep flight of steps which led up through a hole in the snow surface. On going up this one suddenly found oneself in the middle of the coal-tent. It was a fine piece of work, and did all honour to its designers. It paid, too — Hassel could now fetch coal at any time under cover, and escaped having to go out of doors.

But this was not the end of our great underground works. We wanted a room where Wisting could store all the things in his charge; he was specially anxious about the reindeer-skin clothing, and wished to have it under a roof. We therefore decided upon a room sufficiently large to house all these articles, and at the same time to provide working-space for Wisting and Hanssen, who would have to lash all the sledges as fast as they came from Bjaaland. Wisting elected to build this room in a big snow-drift that had formed around the tent in which he had kept all his stuff; the spot lay to the north-east of the house. The Clothing Store, as this building was called, was fairly large, and provided space not only for all our equipment, but also for a workshop. From it a door led into a very small room, where Wisting set up his sewing-machine and worked on it all through the winter. Continuing in a north-easterly direction, we came to another big room, called the Crystal Palace, in which all the ski and sledging cases were stored. Here all the provisions for the sledge journey were packed. For the time being this room remained separate from the others, and we had to go out of doors to reach it. Later, when Lindstr�m had dug out an enormous hole in the Barrier at the spot where he took all the snow and ice for cooking, we connected this with the two rooms last mentioned, and were thus finally able to go everywhere under the snow.

The astronomical observatory had also arisen; it lay right alongside the Crystal Palace. But it had an air of suffering from debility, and before very long it passed peacefully away. Prestrud afterwards invented many patents; he used an empty barrel for a time as a pedestal, then an old block of wood. His experience of instrument-stands is manifold.

All these undertakings were finished at the beginning of May. One last piece of work remained, and then at last we should be ready. This was the rebuilding of the depot. The small heaps in which the cases were piled proved unsatisfactory, as the passages between the different piles offered a fine site for snow-drifts. All the cases were now taken out and laid in two long rows, with sufficient intervals between them to prevent their offering resistance to the drifting snow. This work was carried out in two days.

The days were now fairly short, and we were ready to take up our indoor work. The winter duties were assigned as follows: Prestrud, scientific observations; Johansen, packing of sledging provisions; Hassel had to keep Lindstr�m supplied with coal, wood, and paraffin, and to make whip-lashes — an occupation he was very familiar with from the Fram’s second expedition; Stubberud was to reduce the weight of the sledge cases to a minimum, besides doing a lot of other things. There was nothing he could not turn his hand to, so the programme of his winter work was left rather vague. I knew he would manage a great deal more than the sledge cases, though it must be said that it was a tiresome job he had. Bjaaland was allotted the task which we all regarded with intense interest — the alteration of the sledges. We knew that an enormous amount of weight could be saved, but how much? Hanssen and Wisting had to lash together the different parts as they were finished; this was to be done in the Clothing Store. These two had also a number of other things on their programme for the winter.

There are many who think that a Polar expedition is synonymous with idleness. I wish I had had a few adherents of this belief at Framheim that winter; they would have gone away with a different opinion. Not that the hours of work were excessively long, the circumstances forbade that. But during those hours the work was brisk.

On several previous sledge journeys I had made the experience that thermometers are very fragile things. It often happens that at the beginning of a journey one breaks all one’s thermometers, and is left without any means of determining the temperature. If in such circumstances one had accustomed oneself to guess the temperature, it would have given the mean temperature for the month with a fair degree of accuracy. The guesses for single days might vary somewhat from reality on one side or the other, but, as I say, one would arrive at a fair estimate of the mean temperature. With this in my mind I started a guessing competition. As each man came in in the morning he gave his opinion of the temperature of the day, and this was entered in a book. At the end of the month the figures were gone through, and the one who had guessed correctly the greatest number of times won the prize — a few cigars. Besides giving practice in guessing the temperature, it was a very good diversion to begin the day with. When one day is almost exactly like another, as it was with us, the first hour of the morning is often apt to be a little sour, especially before one has had one’s cup of coffee. I may say at once that this morning grumpiness very seldom showed itself with us. But one never knows —

one cannot always be sure. The most amiable man may often give one a surprise before the coffee has had its effect. In this respect the guessing was an excellent thing; it took up everyone’s attention, and diverted the critical moments. Each man’s entrance was awaited with excitement, and one man was not allowed to make his guess in the hearing of the next — that would undoubtedly have exercised an influence. Therefore they had to speak as they came in, one by one.

“Now, Stubberud, what’s the temperature to-day ?” Stubberud had his own way of calculating, which I never succeeded in getting at. One day, for instance, he looked about him and studied the various faces.

“It isn’t warm to-day,” he said at last, with a great deal of conviction. I could immediately console him with the assurance that he had guessed right. It was -69�F. The monthly results were very interesting. So far as I remember, the best performance the competition could show in any month was eight approximately correct guesses. A man might keep remarkably close to the actual temperature for a long time, and then suddenly one day make an error of 25�. It proved that the winner’s mean temperature agreed within a few tenths of a degree with the actual mean temperature of the month, and if one took the mean of all the competitors’ mean temperatures, it gave a result which, practically speaking, agreed with the reality. It was especially with this object in view that this guessing was instituted. If later on we should be so unlucky as to lose all our thermometers, we should not be entirely at a loss. It may be convenient to mention here that on the southern sledge journey we had four thermometers with us. Observations were taken three times daily, and all four were brought home in undamaged condition. Wisting had charge of this scientific branch, and I