for belief. Would Ambrose Bierce have been carrying a picture of
himself about the wastes of Mexico? Perhaps, if it was on a passport or
other credentials. In that case General Urbina must have known whom
he was shooting. And would a guerilla leader, with much more of the
brigand about him than the soldier, have shot a man like Bierce, who
certainly was worth a fortune living and nothing dead? I must beg to
doubt.
Nor do the other details ring true. If the captured Americano was
Ambrose Bierce, one of two things must have happened. Either he would
have resorted, to save his life, to invective and persuasiveness, for
which he was remarkable, or he must have shrugged and been resigned.
This Bierce was too old, too cynical, too tired of living and
pretending for valedictory heroics. And he was too much of a soldier to
wince. For this and another reason the story of his execution will not
go down.
Unhappily, the tale of a distinguished victim of the firing squad
asking that his face be not disfigured is a piece of standard Mexican
romance. According to the tradition of that country, the Emperor
Maximilian, when he faced his executioners at Queretaro, begged that
he be shot through the body, so that his mother might look upon his
face again. Hence, I suspect the soldierly Mexican _raconteur_ of
having been guilty of a romantic anachronism, perhaps an unconscious
substitution. If the man whom Urbina shot had been Ambrose Bierce, he
would neither have knelt, nor made the pitiful gesture of asking the
inviolateness of his face.
Adolphe de Castro, who won a lawsuit in 1926 compelling the publishers
of a collected edition of Bierce’s writings to recognize him as the
co-author of “The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter,” has within the
year published a version of Bierce’s end[11] that has some of the same
elements in it. Bierce, says de Castro, was shot by Villa’s soldiers at
the guerilla leader’s command. Here is the story condensed:
[11] “Ambrose Bierce as He Really Was,” _The American Parade_, October,
1926.
Bierce was with Villa at the taking of Chihuahua in 1913. After this
fight there was nothing for the novelist-soldier to do and he took
to drinking _tequila_, a liquor which causes those who drink it any
length of time to turn blue. (Sic!) Bierce had with him a peon who
understood a little English and acted as valet and cup companion. When
he was in his mugs Bierce talked too much, complained of inactivity and
criticised Villa. One drunken night he suggested to the peon that they
desert to Carranza. Someone overheard this prattle and carried it to
Villa, who had the peon tortured till he confessed the truth. He was
released and instructed to carry out the plan with the Gringo. That
night, as they started to leave Chihuahua, the writer and his peon were
overtaken by a squad, shot down “and left for the vultures.”
Though Vincent Starrett[12] records that Villa flew into a rage
when questioned about Bierce, a reaction looked upon by some as
confirming Villa’s guilt, others have pointed out objections that seem
insuperable. The break between Carranza and Villa did not follow until
a long time after the battle of Chihuahua, they point out, and Bierce
must have been alive all the while without writing a letter or sending
a word of news to anyone. Possible but improbable, is the verdict of
those who knew him most intimately.
[12] “Ambrose Bierce,” by V. Starrett.
So, applying the critical acid to the whole affair, there is still the
mystery, as dark as in the beginning. We may have our delight with the
dramatic or poetic accounts of his end if that be our taste, but really
we are no closer to any satisfactory solution than we were in 1914.
Bierce is dead, past doubt. That much needs no additional proof.
His fierce spirit has traveled. His bitter pen will scrawl no more
denunciations across the page; neither will he sit in his study weaving
mysteries and ironies for the delectation of those who love abstraction
as beauty, and doubt as something better than truth.
My own guess is that he started out to fight battles and shoulder
hardships as he had done when a boy, somehow believing that a tough
spirit would carry him through. Wounded or stricken with disease, he
probably lay down in some pesthouse of a hospital, some troop train
filled with other stricken men; or he may have crawled off to some
water hole and died, with nothing more articulate than the winds and
stars for witness.
XVI
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CENTURY
No account of disappearances under curious and romantic circumstances,
or of the enigmatic fates of forthfaring men in our times, would
approach completeness without some narration of one of the boldest and
maddest projects ever undertaken by human beings, in many ways the
crowning adventure of the nineteenth century. Particularly now, when
a circumnavigation of the earth by airplane has been accomplished,
when the Atlantic has been bridged by a dirigible flight, and men have
flown over the North Pole in plane and airship, the heroic and pathetic
story of Doctor Andrée and his attempt to reach the top of the world by
balloon is of fresh and abiding interest.
No one who was not alive in the late nineties of the last century
and of age to read and be thrilled, can have any conception of the
wonder and excitement this man and his voyage caused, of the cloud of
doubt and mystery which hung about his still unexplained end, of the
rumors and tales that came out of the North year after year, of the
expeditions that started out to solve the riddle, of the whole decade
of slowly abating preoccupation with the terrible romance of this
singular man and his undiscoverable end.
In the summer of 1895, at the International Geographical Congress in
London, Doctor Salomon August Andrée, a noted engineer, and chief
examiner of the Royal Swedish Patent Office in Stockholm, let it be
known that he was planning for a flight to the pole in a balloon, and
that active preparations were under way. At first the public regarded
the whole thing with an interested incredulity, though geographers,
meteorologists, geodesists, and some students of aëronautics had been
discussing the possibilities of such a voyage for much longer than a
generation, and many had expressed the belief in its feasibility. Sivel
and Silbermann, of the University of Paris, had declared as early as
1870 that this was the practical way of attaining the pole.
Even so, they had not by long anticipated Doctor Andrée. His first
inquiries into the possibility of such a flight had been made in the
course of a voyage to the United States in 1876 to visit the Centennial
Exposition at Philadelphia. On shipboard he had made numerous
observations of the winds and air currents, which led him to the belief
that there was a general suction or drift of air toward the pole
from the direction of the northern coast of Europe and from the pole
southward along the Siberian or Alaskan coasts.
With this belief in mind, Andrée had gone back to Sweden and begun a
series of experiments in ballooning. He built various gas bags and
made a considerable number of voyages in them, on several occasions
with nearly fatal results. Mishaps, however, did not daunt him, and
he became, in the course of the following twenty years, perhaps the
best versed aëronaut on earth. He was not, of course, an ordinary
balloonist, but a scientific experimenter, busy with an attempt to work
out a serious, and to him a practical, problem. In the early nineties
Andrée succeeded in making a flight of four hundred kilometers in a
comparatively small balloon, and it was on the observations taken in
the course of this voyage that he based mathematical calculations which
formed his guide in the polar undertaking.
If, as I have said, the first public announcement of the Andrée
project was received by the rank and file of men as an entertaining,
but impossible, speculation, there was a rapid change of mind in the
course of the following months. News came that Andrée had opened a
subscription for funds, and that the hundred thousand dollars he
believed necessary had been quickly provided by the enthusiastic
members of the Swedish Academy of Science, by King Oscar from his
private purse, and by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of nitroglycerin and
provider of the prizes which bear his name. Evidently this fellow meant
business.
In the late spring of 1896 Andrée and a party of scientists and
workmen, including two friends who had decided to make the desperate
essay with him, sailed from Gothenburg in the little steamer _Virgo_
for Spitzbergen. They had on board a balloon made by Lachambre of
Paris, the foremost designer of that day, with a gas capacity of
more than six thousand cubic meters, the largest bag which had been
constructed at that time. The gas container was of triple varnished
silk, and there was a specially designed gondola, whose details are of
surviving interest.
This compartment, in which three men hoped to live through such
temperatures as might be expected in the air currents fanning the North
Pole, was made of wicker, covered outside with a rubberized canvas and
inside with oiled silk, these two substances being considered capable
of making the big basket practically air and weather proof. The gondola
was about six and one half feet long inside and about five feet wide.
It contained a sleeping mattress for one, with provision for a second
bed, though the plan was to keep two of the three men constantly on
deck, while the third took two hours of sleep at a time. This basket
was covered, to be sure, the top having a trapdoor or hatch, through
which the voyagers could come up to the deck. Inside and outside the
gondola, in various pockets and bags, were fixed the provisions and
supplies, while the various nautical instruments, cameras, surveyors’
paraphernalia, and a patent cookstove hung among the ropes, or were
fixed to the gondola by specially invented devices. Everything had been
thought out in great detail, most of the apparatus had been designed
for the occasion, and Andrée had enjoyed the benefit of advice from
all the foremost flyers and scientific theorists in Europe. His was
anything but a haphazard or ill-prepared expedition.
Toward the end of June, Andrée and his party landed on the obscure
Danes Island in the Spitzbergen group, where he found a log cottage
built some years before by Pike, the British bear and walrus hunter.
Here a large octagonal building was thrown up to shelter the balloon
from the fierce winds, while it was being inflated. Finally all was
ready, the chemicals were put to work, and the great bag slowly filled
with hydrogen. Everything was in shape for flying by the middle of
July, but now various mishaps and delays came to foil the eager
adventurer, the worst of all being the fact that the wind steadily
refused to blow from the south, as Andrée had anticipated. He waited
until the middle of August, and then returned somewhat crestfallen
to Sweden, where he was received with that ready and heartbreaking
ridicule which often greets a brave man set out upon some undertaking
whose difficulties and perils the fickle and callous public little
understands.
Andrée himself was nothing damped by his reverses, and even felt that
he had learned something that would be of benefit. For one thing, he
had the gas bag of his balloon enlarged to contain about two hundred
thousand cubic feet, and made some changes in its coating, which was
expected to prevent the seepage of the hydrogen, a problem which much
more modern aircraft builders have had difficulty in meeting.
If the delay in Andrée’s sailing had lost him a little of the
public’s confidence and alienated a few lay admirers, his prestige
with scientific bodies had not suffered, and his popularity with the
subscribers of his fund was undiminished. King Oscar again met the
additional expenses with a subscription from his own funds, and Andrée
was accordingly able to set out for the second essay in June of 1897.
His goods and the reconstructed balloon were sent as far as Tromsoe
by rail, and there loaded into the _Virgo_ and taken to Danes Island,
accompanied by a small group of friends and interested scientists.
Almost at the last moment came a desertion, a happening that is looked
upon by all explorers and adventurers as something of most evil omen.
Doctor Ekholm, who had made the first trip to Danes Island and intended
to be one of the three making the flight, had married in the course
of the delay, the lady of his choice being fully aware of his perilous
project. When it came time for him to start north in 1897, however, she
had a not unnatural change of heart, and finally forced her husband to
quit the expedition. Another man stepped into the gap without a day’s
delay, and so the party started north.
The enlarged bag was attached to the gondola and its fittings, and the
process of inflation began anew in that strange eight-sided building
on that barren arctic island. The bag was fully distended at the end
of the first week in July, and Andrée impatiently waited for just the
right currents of air before casting off.
In those last few days of waiting a good deal of foreboding advice
was given the daring aëronauts by the group of admirers who had made
the voyage to Danes Island with them. It is even said that one of the
leading scientists with the expedition took Andrée aside, spent a
night with him, and tried to convince the man that his theories and
calculations were mistaken; that the air currents were inconstant, and
could not be depended on to sweep the balloon across the pole and down
on the other side of the earthly ball; that very low temperatures at
the pole might readily cause the hydrogen to shrink and thus bring the
balloon to earth; and that the whole region was full of such doubts and
surprises as to forbid the adventure.
To all this Andrée is said to have answered simply that he had made his
decision and must stand by it.
Indeed, the balloonist’s plan seems to have been most thoroughly
matured in his own mind. In twenty years of aëronautics he had worked
out his ideas and theories in the greatest detail. He had not been
blind to the problem of steering his machine, once it was in the air,
but the plan of air rudders, or a type of construction that might lend
itself to guidance through the air, had evidently not struck him as
feasible, and was not brought to any kind of success until several
years later under Santos Dumont. Yet Andrée was prepared to steer his
balloon after a fashion. His gondola was, as already said, oblong, with
a front and back. The front was provided with two portholes fitted with
heavy glass, through which the explorer hoped to make observations in
the course of his flight. As a practical balloonist, he knew that,
once his car was in the air, the great bag was almost certain to begin
spinning and to travel through the air at various speeds, increasing
the rate of its giddy rotations as its rate of travel grew greater.
That being so, the idea of front portholes and a prow for the gondola
seemed something of a vanity, but Andrée had his own ideas as to this.
The balloonist explorer did not intend to ascend to any great heights,
or to subject himself to the rotating action which is one of the
unpleasantnesses and perils of ballooning. He had fixed to the stern
of his gondola three heavy ropes, each about one hundred yards long,
which descended from his craft, like elongated flaxen pigtails. In the
center of each hundred-yard length of rope was a thinner spot or safety
escapement, by means of which the lower half of any one of the ropes
could be let go. And near the gondola was a second catch for releasing
all of the rope or ropes.
These singular contrivances constituted Andrée’s steering gear and
antiwhirling apparatus. His intention was to fly at an elevation of
somewhat less than one hundred yards, thus leaving the ends of his
three ropes trailing out behind him on the ice, or in the water of any
open sea he might cross. The tail of his craft was expected to keep
his gondola pointed forward by means of its dragging effect. Realizing
that one or all of the ropes might become entangled in some manner with
objects on the ice surface, and that such a mishap might wreck the
gondola, Andrée had provided the escapements to let go the lower half
or all the ropes.
Just what the man expected to do, may be read from his own articles
in the New York and European papers. He hoped to fly low over a great
part of the arctic regions, make photographs and maps, study the land
and water conformations, pick up whatever meteorological, geological,
geographical, and other information that came his way, cross the pole,
if he could, and find his way back on the other side of the earth
to some point within reach of inhabited places. Andrée said that he
might be carried the seven hundred-odd miles from Danes Island to the
pole in anywhere from two days to two weeks, depending on the force
and direction of the surface wind. He did not expect to consume more
than three weeks to a month for the entire trip, but his ship carried
condensed emergency provisions for three years.
While a widely known French balloonist, who had planned a rival
expedition and then abandoned it, had intended to take along a
team of dogs, Andrée’s balloon had not sufficient lifting power or
accommodations for anything of this kind, and he was content to carry
two light collapsible sleds on which he expected to carry the
provisions for his homeward trek after the landing.
[Illustration: ~~ DOCTOR ANDRÉE ~~]
When a correspondent asked Andrée, just before he set out, what
provisions he had made for a mishap, and just what he would do if his
balloon were to come down in open water, the explorer showed his spirit
in the tersest of responses: “Drown.”
Yet, for all his cold courage and dauntless determination, it is not
quite certain in what spirit Andrée set forth. It has often been said
that he was a stubborn, self-willed, and self-esteeming enthusiast,
who had worked up a vast confidence in himself and an overweening
passion for his project through his flying and experimenting. Others
have pictured him as an infatuated scientific theorist, bound to prove
himself right, or die in the attempt. And there is still the other
possibility that the man was goaded into his terrifying attempt, in
spite of his own late misgivings, by the ridicule of the public and the
skepticism of some critics. He felt that he would be a laughingstock
before the world and a discredit to his eminent backers if he failed to
set out, it is said. But of this there is no evidence, and it remains
a fact that Andrée’s conclusions were sufficiently plausible to engage
the attention and credence of a considerable number of scientists, and
his enthusiasm bright enough to attach two others to him in his great
emprise.
In the middle of the afternoon of July 11, 1897, Andrée got into
the gondola of his car, tested the ropes and other apparatus, and
was quickly joined by his two assistants, Nils Strindberg and K. H.
F. Frankel, the latter having been chosen to take the place of the
defected Ekholm.
At a little before four o’clock the cables were cast off, after Andrée
had sent his farewell message, “a greeting to friends and countrymen at
home.” The great bag hesitated and careened a few moments. Then it shot
up to a height of several hundred feet, turned slowly about, with its
three ropes dragging first on the ice and then in the water of the sea,
and set out majestically for the northwest, carried by a steady slow
breeze.
The little group of men on the desolate arctic island stood late
through the afternoon, with eyes straining into the distance, where the
balloon hung, an ever-diminishing ball against the northern horizon.
What doubts and terrors assailed that watching and speculating crowd,
what burnings of the heart and moistenings of the eyes overcame
its members, as they watched the intrepid trio put off upon their
unprecedented adventure, the subsequent accounts reveal. But the
imagination of the reader will need no promptings on this score. A
little more than an hour the ship of the air remained in sight. Then,
at last, it floated off into the mist, and the doubt from which it
never emerged.
Doctor Andrée had devised two methods of sending back word of his
situation and progress. For early communication he carried a coop of
homing pigeons. In addition, he had provided himself with a series of
specially designed buoys, lined with copper and coated with cork. They
were hollow inside and so fashioned as to contain a written message and
preserve it indefinitely from the sea water, like a manuscript in a
bottle. To the top of each of these buoys was fixed a small staff, with
a little metal Swedish flag. The plan was to release one of the small
buoys, as each succeeding degree of latitude was crossed, thus marking
out, by the longitude observations as well, the precise route taken by
the balloon in its drift toward or away from the pole.
About a week after Andrée’s departure one of the carrier pigeons
returned to Danes Island, with this message in the little cylinder
attached to its legs:
“July 13, 10.30 P. M.--82.20 north latitude; 15.5 east longitude. Good
progress toward north. All goes well on board. This message is the
third by carrier pigeon.
“ANDRÉE.”
The earlier birds and any the balloonists may have released after the
night of the thirteenth, about fifty-five hours out from Danes Island,
must have been overcome by the distance and the excruciating cold. None
except the one mentioned ever reached either Danes Island or any cotes
in the civilized world.
All over the earth, men stirred by the vivid newspaper accounts of
Andrée’s daring undertaking, waited with something like bated breath
for further news of the adventuring three. It was not expected that the
brave Swedes could reach civilization again, even with every turn of
luck in their favor, in less than two months. Even six months or a year
were elapsed periods not considered too long, for the chances were that
the balloon would land in some far northern and difficult spot, out of
which the three men would not be able to make their way before winter.
That being so, they would be forced to camp and wait for spring. Then,
very likely, they could find their way to some outpost and bring back
the tidings of their monumental feat.
Meantime the world got to work on its preparations. The Czar,
foreseeing the possibility that Andrée and his two companions might
alight somewhere in upper Siberia, sent a communication by various
agencies to the wild inhabitants of his farthest northern domains,
explaining what a balloon was, who and what Andrée and his men were,
and admonishing the natives to treat any such wayfarers with kindness
and respect, aiding them in every way and sending them south as
speedily as possible, the special guests of the imperial government
and the great white father. In other northern countries similar
precautions were taken, with the result that the news of Andrée and his
expedition was circulated far up beyond the circle, among the Indians
and adventurers of Alaska, the trappers and hunters of Labrador and
interior Canada, the Greenland Eskimos, and scores of other tribes and
peoples.
But the fall of 1897 passed without any further sign from Andrée, and
1898 died into its winter, with the pole voyagers still unreported. By
this time there was a feeling of general uneasiness, but silvered among
the optimistic with some shine of hope. It was strange that no further
messages of any kind had been received. Another significant thing was
that one of the copper-and-cork buoys had been picked up in the arctic
current--empty. Still, it might have been dropped by accident, and it
was yet possible that Andrée had reached a safe, if distant, anchorage
somewhere, and he might turn up the following summer.
Alas, the open season of 1899 brought nothing except one or two more
of the empty buoys, and the definite feeling of despair. Expeditions
began to organize for the purpose of starting north in search of the
balloonists, and Walter Wellman began talking of a pole flight in a
dirigible balloon, but such projects were slow in getting under way,
and the summer of 1900 came along with nothing accomplished.
On the thirty-first of August of this latter year, however, another, if
not very satisfactory, bit of news was picked up. It was, once more,
one of the buoys from the balloon. This time, to the delight of the
finders, there was a message inclosed, which read, in translation: