The entry says that the search for Wegener was a reading of the route, and gives the result. This piece gives the reading, in the words of the man who made it. Ernst Sorge’s account, “How we found Wegener”, was written for the press as “the first authentic account”, carried the Akademia agency’s world copyright, and appeared in the German papers on 19 August 1931, three months after the event; what follows is my translation from the Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten. It is the one part of the story in which the men of Eismitte speak at length in their own words, and it is a careful document, written by a schoolteacher of physics who knew that what he wrote would be read by the dead man’s family.
The day before
Sorge begins where the entry begins, with the departure. “On 1 November 1930 Wegener and the Greenlander Villumsen had set off westward again from the firn station ‘Eismitte’ with two sledges and 17 dogs. They were in excellent condition; only Rasmus had slight frostbite on the right hand from the journey in, from constantly holding the dog whip. The dogs, as a result of the cold (−54 degrees Celsius) and the headwind on the way in, were no longer as strong in the traces as usual. But Wegener hoped to get through to 200 kilometres with the two sledges, and then to reach Scheideck with one sledge and the best of the remaining dogs. Rasmus was then to drive the sledge; Wegener wanted to go on skis. For this he took, as he was used to from his Alpine ski tours, only one ski stick from ‘Eismitte’.” Then the provisions, box by box: 55 kilograms of food for two men for at least twenty days, two kilograms of naval biscuit and twenty bars of chocolate, eighty kilograms of pemmican for fifteen dogs for ten days, more in the depots along the way, and the dead dogs “if need be fed to the rest or serve as human food”. The route markers had been put in order on the way in. The clothing and the tent, a four-man tent, “were in very good condition and had been dried and checked at ‘Eismitte’. Rasmus had left his fur anorak behind at ‘Eismitte’, which he had seldom worn on the way in; whether by oversight or because he had a great deal of other warm clothing with him, we do not know.”
“In view of the whole situation and because of the tail wind to be expected on the way out, Wegener was very confident, indeed positively cheerful. We were even able to celebrate his 50th birthday on 1 November. He reckoned on daily marches averaging 20 kilometres. That all five of us could have wintered at ‘Eismitte’, if with severe stretching of the food, was hardly mentioned in the conversations, as if it were out of the question. Having made the connection with ‘Eismitte’ by his bold journey, he was impatient now to devote himself to directing the scientific work at the West Station. Dr Georgi, Dr Loewe and I stayed at ‘Eismitte’. The winter went by.”
7 May
“From the middle of April on we looked ever more often to the west, from where the first sledge journey must come. We reckoned on its arrival in the first half of May, which, apart from soft new snow, was quite excellently suited to travel by warm, mild, clear weather. On 7 May at midday two black dots appeared on the western horizon and came nearer very fast. One look through the telescope was enough: they were the propeller sledges! Soon we heard the hum of the propellers too. A few minutes later the sledges were already roaring round our firn castle and stopped after elegant curves. We had not expected such an unheard-of driving performance from the propeller sledges, and were therefore delighted in the highest degree. The doors opened. I recognised Kraus. We fell on each other’s necks and both asked at the same moment: ‘Is Wegener here?’ But no answer came. There was no longer any point in asking about anything else. Wegener was neither at Eismitte, nor at the West Station, nor on the sledge journey. Nobody spoke the terrible thing out loud that followed from this inexorably.”
That afternoon was given to the machines, the tents and “very serious talks”. In the night seven dog sledges came in with Weiken, Holzapfel and five Greenlanders, who had travelled 105 kilometres in the last three days “to help the station Eismitte. A regular race had developed between propeller sledges and dog sledges, and the machines had beaten the dogs by a few hours. Our thoughts came back again and again to the one thing: if Wegener had lived to see this! His bold ideas, the wintering in the centre of Greenland and the propeller sledge as a transport sledge on the inland ice, had been realised! We asked ourselves whether there was not still a possibility that Wegener and Rasmus were alive. Perhaps they had lost the route and reached the coast somewhere. But the West Station would surely have learned of that in the winter. In earnest nobody could hope any more. Nevertheless there had to be a search until we had proof of Wegener’s and Rasmus’s fate in our hands. On the other hand we wanted to carry on Wegener’s scientific programme.” The two meteorologists stayed at their stations, Georgi at Eismitte and Holzapfel back to the coast; Loewe, “because of his toes”, went back by propeller sledge as fast as possible; “I took over the search for Wegener and Rasmus. So Weiken, the five Greenlanders and I drove back with dog sledges and began the search as we went.”
Reading the route
“The emergency provisions at 300 kilometres from the coast had not been needed by Wegener. The box stood, however, at 285 kilometres instead of 300, so it had been carried 15 kilometres. At 255 kilometres Weiken and Holzapfel had already found Wegener’s sledge on their way in. From here, then, Wegener and Rasmus had travelled on westward with only one sledge, and so must have lost dogs faster than had been assumed. From 255 kilometres on Wegener must have gone on skis. At 200 kilometres there was no note of any kind in the ‘weather kitchen’. The emergency provisions (20 kilograms of pemmican) had, however, evidently been taken, for we found nothing left. At 189 kilometres stood Wegener’s skis, 3 metres apart, in the direction 80° (the prevailing wind direction), in the middle between them a piece of Wegener’s ski stick, broken, and besides a black box of dog pemmican. We felt: this meant something particular. Weiken had already dug here on his way in, but only to the depth of the stick, without noticing anything. Now we dug deeper and probed with a steel measuring tape. The probe soon struck something hard at a metre’s depth. The digging brought up reindeer hairs, bits of string and dirty snow, so that this spot must undoubtedly have been a tent site. Then a reindeer skin and a fur anorak came into view, laid over a sleeping-bag cover. We soon noticed that someone lay buried here, very carefully sewn into two sleeping-bag covers. Who, remained doubtful until we saw Wegener’s face: open eyes, a friendly expression, as always in life.”
The date of the finding, 12 May 1931, is not in the part of Sorge’s account that the Dresden paper printed; it comes from the expedition’s histories and is the date on every account since. The description is Sorge’s. “The colour of the face was somewhat paler than in life, the features calm, relaxed, without any sign of cramp. The nose carried at its root the scab of a frost wound and was slightly frostbitten at the tip, as happens very often in the polar region without ill effects. Wegener was fully dressed. The whole suit was in excellent condition from head to foot, in particular the kamiks thickly and softly padded and not iced. Therefore Wegener cannot have frozen to death. In his beard and head covering (as on the whole suit) there was no trace of rime, snow or ice. Wegener did not lie in the sleeping bag. By every sign Wegener died in the tent, but probably not in sleep, painlessly, perhaps of heart failure as a result of the great exertions of skiing. … We took from the pockets of his suit the whole contents, namely: a pipe cleaner, some loose matches, a bone ring from the fur anorak, a handkerchief, a wallet without written notes with 400 kroner in Greenland paper money, visiting cards and private letters to Wegener, a pocket watch on a chain. The watch had stopped at 11.57. Nothing further was found, in particular not Wegener’s pipe, compass, diaries, and no things of Rasmus’s.”
“The body was then sewn in again by the Greenlanders just as carefully as before and laid in the pit exactly as before. Out of firn blocks we built a small vault and covered it with a Nansen sledge laid lengthwise over it and further firn blocks. The skis we stuck back into their former holes and fastened a black flag to each ski. In the middle between the skis a wooden cross of two thin rods was set up. After finishing the work we left at once the place of this sad event.”
Villumsen
“On the further journey west tent sites of Rasmus were still found, namely at 171 kilometres, close north of the usual route, faint traces without objects; at 175 kilometres, in the hollow of the snow cairn, the remains of several meals and the axe that Wegener and Rasmus had taken with them from Eismitte; at 155 kilometres, as the last trace, a camp of several dogs. All later depots were untouched. Nor were any further traces of Rasmus found. The Greenlanders suppose, as do we, that Rasmus strayed from the marked route, and probably to the north, since in the prevailing south-east wind the dogs of themselves always bear to the right. Wegener’s diaries are still missing. Thus we had certainty about Wegener’s death, but the particular circumstances that led to it are still unknown.”
That is where the record stops. Villumsen had buried his companion in the way Sorge describes, which is the way a man is buried by someone who means him to be found, had kept the diaries, and had gone on west alone in the polar night with a sledge and a few dogs, past a depot at 175 kilometres where he ate, to a camp at 155 where the dogs lay down. He was never found, nor the sledge, nor the diaries. He was born at Upernavik Kujalleq on 17 November 1907, and if he was still alive on 17 November 1930 he turned twenty-three somewhere on the ice between 189 kilometres and the coast. A plaque at the school in his home settlement of Ukkusissat, put up in 1994 at Loewe’s suggestion, remembers him “in constant grateful remembrance”; the Alfred Wegener Institute named a building for him in 2023.
The cable and the guess
The first news to go round the world was shorter and less exact. A cable from Berlin dated 20 May, printed in Wellington on 21 May, said that the body “was found and wrapped in furs by reverential Esquimaux”, and that the rescue expedition had found “the last traces of Wegener ninety miles from Eismitte station”. The distance is wrong by about forty miles; the reverence is right. Peter Freuchen, the Danish explorer, had told Politiken a week earlier, when only the skis were known, that skis left standing showed a man who had chosen to leave them “at a time when he could no longer use them”, that at the 184th kilometre the firmer snow began where skis were useless, that there were crevasses there too, and that “it is probable that the famous explorer perished in such a crevasse”. The grave a metre down, with its sewn covers and its reindeer skin, answered him. Wegener’s widow asked that the body be left where it was, and it was; the firn has been closing over it, at the rate Sorge measured, ever since.
Sources
- Ernst Sorge, “Wie wir Wegener fanden. Erste authentische Darstellung der Forschertragödie im Grönland-Eis”, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 19 August 1931, p. 3; the same text ran in the Bochumer Anzeiger and the Velberter Zeitung on 22 August. All passages are my own translation, from the OCR of the Deutsches Zeitungsportal checked against the page image where the OCR is doubtful. Deutsches Zeitungsportal
- Johannes Georgi, telegram from Station Eismitte, 13 May 1931, as printed in the Badische Presse, 16 May 1931, p. 1, with Peter Freuchen’s comment from Politiken. My translation. Deutsches Zeitungsportal
- Evening Post, Wellington, 21 May 1931, “German Explorer: Body Found in Greenland”. Papers Past
- German Wikipedia, “Rasmus Villumsen”: his birth on 17 November 1907, the settlement of Ukkusissat, the plaque of 1994 and the building of 2023, citing the Upernavik Museum’s genealogy and the Uummannaq church book; and “Alfred Wegener”: Else Wegener’s wish that the body stay where it was found, and the date 12 May 1931. Villumsen, Wegener
- Ernst Sorge and Karl Weiken, “Die Auffindung Alfred Wegeners”, in Else Wegener and Fritz Loewe (eds.), Alfred Wegeners letzte Grönlandfahrt, Brockhaus, Leipzig, 1932: the fuller account, in copyright and not reached; nothing is quoted from it here.