Against the Ice Read online

  Copyright © Ejnar Mikkelsen & Gyldendal, Copenhagen 1955. Published by agreement with Gyldendal Group Agency.

  Steerforth Press edition copyright © 2022

  Foreword copyright © 2022 by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

  First published in Danish as Farlig Tomandsfœrd in 1955 by Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag A/S, Copenhagen, Denmark

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The publisher wishes to thank the Danish Polar Center for their assistance. All photographs © Arctic Institut.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:

  Steerforth Press L.C., 31 Hanover Street, Lebanon, NH 03766

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mikkelsen, Ejnar, 1880–

  [Farlig Tomandsfærd. English]

  Two against the ice / Ejnar Mikkelsen; translated from the Danish by Maurice Michael.— Steerforth Press ed.

   p. cm.

  First published in Copenhagen : Gyldendal, 1955.

  ISBN 978-1-58642-335-3 (e-book)

  1. Mikkelsen, Ejnar, 1880—Journeys—Greenland. 2. Mikkelsen, Ejnar, 1880—Journeys—Arctic regions. 3. Greenland—Discovery and exploration—Danish. 4. Arctic regions—Discovery and exploration—Danish. 5. Alabama-expeditionen til Grønlands nordøstkyst (1909-1912) 1. Title.

  G743 .M63313 2003

  919.8’204 — dc21

  Ebook ISBN 9781586423353

  a_prh_6.0_138917747_c0_r0

  To my loyal and cheerful companion in

  North-east Greenland from 1909 to 1912

  IVER P. IVERSEN

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

  I The Start of a Greenland Expedition

  II East Greenland at Last

  III Sledging in Darkness and Storm

  IV Goodbye to Ship and Comrades

  V Alone between Heaven and Earth

  VI Still on the Inland Ice

  VII Last Days on the Inland Ice

  VIII On Land Again

  IX In Danmarks Fjord

  X Sledging in Slush

  XI Water and Hunger

  XII Things Get Worse

  XIII The Days Shorten

  XIV The Last Spurt

  XV Winter Again

  XVI Spring and Summer Hope

  XVII The Third Winter

  XVIII The Last Six Months

  XIX Hopes Fulfilled

  Postscript

  FOREWORD

  Queen Margrethe II of Denmark was working as the costume designer on an adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that was being directed by a good friend of mine, Peter Flinth. During filming, she suggested that the memoir Two Against the Ice by Ejnar Mikkelsen would make a great movie. As a good, proud subject, Peter then sent a copy of the book to me.

  It was 2011, and I was in Bolivia working on a fictional story about what would have happened if Butch Cassidy had lived out his days in the mountains there. Reading Two Against the Ice, I was struck by how reality often is stranger and more extreme than fiction. I have always been attracted to stories of explorers, tales of men and women who knowingly put themselves in harm’s way in the pursuit of adventure and discovery. Mikkelsen’s story grabbed hold of me and did not let go.

  At the turn of the previous century, Arctic explorers — alpha males born with incredible self-belief in their abilities to achieve the impossible — traveled to places where nature held no respect for human life. Risking their lives to go where no man had gone before, many of them perished.

  What set the story told in Two Against the Ice apart is that it featured two men who were the unlikeliest of companions. Ejnar Mikkelsen, an experienced explorer, ends up with a young mechanic, Iver Iversen, who only joined the expedition to Greenland that Mikkelsen was leading when its original mechanic turned out to be useless and a drunk. Iver had little if any ambition and zero experience in the Arctic.

  So, when Mikkelsen needed a volunteer to accompany him on an arduous journey, it was surprising that it was the rookie Iversen who stepped up and threw himself into what he believed would be a few months of adventure.

  These few months became three long years during which the two men battled the ice and deadly cold of the Arctic, managing to survive by virtue of companionship, friendship, and an unwavering trust in each other.

  Within this book there is a particular moment that made me want to adapt it into a movie. It’s a brief description of a postcard the two men find. The postcard depicts a group of young ladies in front of a building, and Ejnar and Iver choose imaginary girlfriends from among the members of the group. Ejnar picks only one and Iver picks three — after all, he was still young — and the ladies become very much real in their minds.

  For me the anecdote of this simple postcard symbolized human perseverance. With nothing to look forward to but their inevitable demise, their minds created a fictional space to nurture. This provided blessed relief from the bleakness of their reality and amazingly, against impossible odds, they survived.

  Ejnar and Iver suffered their one and only real falling-out when Iver shared a dream he had that included the girl Ejnar had chosen from the postcard to be his imagined beloved. Ejnar is consumed with anger and jealousy until finally they agree to give up their fictitious relationships and instead focus on their own very real companionship to see them through. The biggest threat they faced was breaking faith with each other while no more than a few feet apart, stranded in the far, far north in a tiny cabin on Shannon Island.

  Ejnar Mikkelsen is a great storyteller who spins the tale of his journey with Iver Iversen into an account of what it means to be human. At the core of our existence, the most valuable experiences we ever have are with our companions in life.

  We made the movie. My friend Peter directed, my writing partner and good friend Joe Derrick co-wrote the script. And a new friend, Baltasar Kormákur, co-produced. Friends and companions telling a story of friendship and companionship.

  The film is an adaptation of Mikkelsen’s remarkable book, and we have done all within our powers to do it justice. (The film is titled, simply, Against the Ice, and the publisher of the volume you are reading now chose to shorten the book’s title in recognition of our effort.) My hope is that the film will serve as a good companion to the book.

  If you watch the film on Netflix, I hope it will give you a sense of the preposterous beauty of Greenland, the unfathomable power of nature, and the fundamental human need for companionship. Enjoy.

  Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

  Copenhagen

  October 2021

  CHAPTER I

  The Start of a Greenland Expedition

  An expedition is given up — Mylius-Erichsen perishes in the wilds — Lord Northcliffe’s offer and its consequences — Gay departure — Ill-omens — We put in to Angmagssalik

  The lot of the out-of-work explorer is not a happy one. His head teems with plans for new travels, but, poor man, he usually lacks the essentials for putting them into effect; for he is broke, stony broke, and often worse than that. I, at least, seem always to have been left with a number of larger or smaller bills to meet at the end of my expeditions, without having any idea where the money was to come from.

  Of course there are fees to be earned for articles and lectures, and once in a while a cheque for a book about one’s latest expedition, but they make little difference to a large deficit. Also, you feel that having returned to a civilized country after several years in the wilds, you are entitled to a period of ease and freedom from care.

  Every civilized country has its kind people who feel sorry for the poor explorer with neither roots nor money, and hasten to tell him to be more sensible and to adopt a staid, quiet and profitable way of life instead of wasting his time running about the wilds. There was no need for those kind persons to tell me that; it had been all too obvious for a number of years. But what are you to do, when you have been born with eternal unrest in your body and are drawn to none but those parts of the world that sensible people regard as fit only for fools?

  I made an honest attempt to be sensible and do as other young men did, but I was unable to suppress the restlessness within me. I became touchy and impatient, impossible to live with. I longed to be off again, away from the fretting ties of civilization, far in the north where one could live life to the full and be oneself. Such was my situation in the early summer of 1908 after returning home from a two-year expedition to the seas north of Alaska, where I had sought an undiscovered land, whose existence and position had not only been worked out in theory, but which had been seen by a couple of ships’ crews and by Alaskan Eskimos. Or so they said.

  Unfortunately the theorists were wrong in their calculations, and it is a mistake uncritically to accept everything people insist they have seen, for the land was not where it had been calculated to be. The discovery that it was not land, but an island of ice was reserved for the foolish youth of the future, those who joyfully hazard their lives in high-flying aeroplanes and use the stars as mile posts across the endless vault of the heavens, from which the view is so vast that those enormous floating ice-islands were at last discovered. Now they drift slowly with the current across the polar seas carrying scientists and technicians with them.

  My outlook brightened one dark October da
y, when an old storm-whipped steamship chugged into Copenhagen and anchored in the roads. She was Mylius-Erichsen’s expedition ship Danmark come home with great results from a two-years expedition to the then remote and unknown land of North-east Greenland. But the flag at the flagstaff aft was flying at halfmast, and the news soon spread that the great results obtained had cost three lives, including that of Mylius-Erichsen himself.

  The experienced explorer knew, of course, that his life was not worth so very much once he had left civilization and been swallowed up in the wilds, for, unlike our young successors with their aeroplanes and wireless, we of the older generation had to manage entirely on our own, without the least possibility of obtaining outside help, if conditions proved worse than we had expected. We were aware of that, but it is nevertheless a blow when a flag at halfmast suddenly drags your thoughts from the struggles and events of everyday and compels them to fly far off to where friends and fellows have given their lives trying to wrest from the wilds some of their well-guarded secrets.

  I knew two of the men for whom that flag flew: Mylius-Erichsen, a dauntless idealist, dreamer and poet, and the faithful Greenlander Jørgen Brønlund; and my thoughts went back three or four years to the time when Mylius and I had had a lot to do with each other. He had been bent on Greenland, while my inclination was for Alaska, but we had talked a great deal about the expeditions we were planning, and for a time I was greatly tempted to let the unknown land north of Alaska remain unknown for a while longer and accept Mylius-Erichsen’s offer to become commander of the expedition ship Danmark. We never managed to agree, though, for Mylius had some curious ideas (or so I thought them) about all members of the expedition being equal. Skipper and mess-boy should have the same say in all decisions: the expedition’s motto was to be concord, and all that was done both on board ship and on land was to be agreed by everyone.

  It all sounded so beautiful, yet, though I too was regarded as an incurable idealist, I was also a sailor, and as a seaman with some experience of ships and people, I could not believe in the right of consultation for all and the principle of equality either in a ship or on long and arduous sledging journeys. Mylius, however, would not give in, and I stuck to my point of view; thus nothing came of our proposed collaboration, and we went our separate ways in the North that was so endless in those days.

  A month after Danmark’s return to Copenhagen, I was in London again trying my luck with the wealthy ones there. I was achieving very little, when one day I received a letter from Lord Northcliffe asking me to go and see him, as he wished to discuss with me a matter that ought to be of interest to me.

  The wishes of the owner of the Daily Mail were royal commands to men like myself, who always hoped for a fair wind, and naturally I went, wondering what a mighty newspaper proprietor could have to discuss with me. He began to speak of the three men who had lost their lives in Greenland, of their diaries and journals, none of which had been found except for fragments of Jørgen Brønlund’s, and of what these might contain; he spoke of English Polar explorers who had vanished and all that England had done to discover what had happened to them, and he ended by saying something to the effect that I would never get money for another expedition to look for the land in the Beaufort Sea, but that he had a suggestion to make to me: I was to fit out an expedition to North-east Greenland and try to find the dead men’s papers which must certainly contain interesting information. If I could find them he would publish them in the Daily Mail. He would pay the whole cost of the expedition. I had only to draw on him — and do my best.

  That was an offer for you! Fancy being able to equip an expedition without first having to ring at innumerable doorbells to obtain the necessary money — which in the end always proved too little. However, as a Dane I did not like the idea of an Englishman paying for the expedition and of his money acquiring the rights to what three Danes had given their lives to achieve. It seemed scarcely right or reasonable, and I blushed for Denmark that Lord Northcliffe had offered to do what Denmark should have done — if the task was otherwise practicable.

  After a sleepless night with all sorts of thoughts whirling in my head, I sent Lord Northcliffe a polite refusal, went back to Denmark and there announced cheerfully that I now knew what I wanted, that life had again acquired a purpose: that that summer I was going to Greenland to try and find Mylius-Erichsen’s papers.

  First I told my old friend and leader of my first expedition of what had transpired in London, and asked him to speak with the others on the Committee of the Danmark Expedition, of which he was a member, and see whether the Committee would give me its moral support where the public was concerned. It would certainly do me no harm to have some fine chaps to speak for me, for I was coming to be known as a pesterer.

  I then had a meeting with the Committee, and having received its promise of both moral and active support, I then began to consider where the money was to come from. Once more I began the trudge from one to the other of those who both could and, I felt, should help to pay what it would cost for Denmark to do her duty to her three sons who had vanished in North-east Greenland. The Government had given a considerable grant to the Danmark Expedition, and I was now promised that it would cover half the cost of mine. After that it was relatively easy to obtain what I needed, which was 50,000 Crowns in all, and at the end of March 1909 the Committee was able to issue a statement announcing that the expedition was financially assured.

  That was that, and I was glad that I had refused Lord Northcliffe’s offer. At the same time, however, it ended my friendship with Lieutenant Koch, my companion on a former expedition, who had been second-in-command of the Danmark Expedition. Before leaving Greenland, Koch had sledged north to Lamberts Land, where he had found Jørgen Brønlund’s body and in the dead man’s pocket-book Hoeg-Hagen’s sketch maps and Jørgen’s diary which ended with the memorable and proud words:

  Succumbed at 79 fjord after attempting return across the inland ice in November. I arrived here in fading moonlight and could go no further because of frost-bitten feet and the dark. The others’ bodies are to be found in the middle of the fjord in front of the glacier (about 12 miles). Hagen died 15 November Mylius about ten days later.

  After that Koch thought that all further search for the dead men’s bodies and any journals or notebooks they might have had, would be, and must remain, fruitless; also, that he, representing the remaining members of the Danmark Expedition, had done everything that could be done to elucidate the fate of their comrades.

  The Committee of the Danmark Expedition, which had undertaken to act as my guarantor, shared my opinion that more ought to be done, and so presumably did the authorities, for otherwise Parliament would scarcely have agreed to pay half the cost of sending an expedition to search for further traces of the vanished men.

  In Stavanger I found a suitable ship, Alabama. She was a Nordland yacht and roomy for a ship of her size, for she was only forty-five tons. She was cheap too, costing only 6000 Crowns, but the owner had stripped her of everything that was not nailed down.

  I brought her to Copenhagen, where she was overhauled from keel to truck and a motor installed, relatively a monster of a thing, though only 18 h.p. Then, scrubbed and gleaming with new paint and finery, she was moored at the Royal Greenland Company’s quay to take on equipment and provisions for sixteen months, but also so that we could show our fine ship to those who had made it possible to transform a Nordland yacht into as good an expedition ship, despite its size, as any that had sailed from Copenhagen with course set for the ice masses of East Greenland. People did not expect or require so much in those distant days.

  Our friends seemed surprised that the name Alabama, strange to Danish eyes and ideas, still figured on the ship’s quarter, now even carved on a mahogany name-board and the letters neatly gilded; but it is an old superstition of the sea that you should be very chary of changing a good ship’s name before a long and dangerous voyage, for grief and misfortune may result from denying a ship her past. So she was allowed to retain her old name, though we all realized that we could very easily have found one far better suited to her mission than that she already bore.