Even the Norwegians admit it: the first great scientific expedition to the North Pole was not made by their hero Nansen or by the American Perry, but by an indomitable Germanborn Triestian and his Adriatic crew. The English and the Austrians recognize his record; his name appears on the NASA website as one of the fathers of international scientific research. Vienna has commemorated him with posthumous awards, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences has published his letters. But Italy ignores him, and even Trieste, his adopted city, has not so much as a street named after him.
Bear with me for telling you all this. It helps me to explain to you where I come from. Those were the years when geographic fever was sweeping across the world and globes featured vast, still-unexplored white spaces. The North Pole was the biggest one of all, and Weyprecht, a lieutenant in his early thirties, full of scientific fervor, infected sponsors and institutions with his enthusiasm, raising all the money he needed. He had a steamship built capable of sailing in icy waters, sheathed it with iron, selected a twenty-three-man crew, and on June 13, 1872, set sail for the Pole with the added objective of finding the northwest passage to the Pacific. He happened upon an extraordinarily cold summer and was immediately trapped in the ice pack without any help from the Gulf Stream, which in normal conditions would have been able to open up a route for him through the icebergs for at least six hundred miles or so.
As a kid, I read a book about him, illustrated with old black-and-white drawings—dawn breaking on the ice pack and interminable nights illuminated by oil lamps. I remember a date, October 28. That was the day the sun disappeared to remain for months below the horizon line, and the pressure of the ice on the keel became so powerful that the ship was lifted out of the water to the sound of terrifying creaking and thumping. The darkness was so thick that, to overcome the men’s depression, the commander invented all kinds of menial tasks for them to carry out and held classes for the crew as though they were on a training ship. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, they all went out on deck with torches and sucked on pieces of frozen champagne, while a few polar bears tried to climb aboard.
The next summer they sighted new land, but the ice pack closed in on them again and the night of the second winter arrived. They had to wait another six months before they could explore the Ultima Thule, where they baptized a promontory with the name Cape Trieste, after the commander’s adopted Heimat.
In Trieste, Weyprecht had become familiar with the Venetian dialect used by the sailors, had strengthened his scientific training, and had learned to appreciate the sons of those windswept cliffs overlooking the sea. They say that when he informed his fellow Germans that he wanted to take on the Arctic with a Mediterranean crew, they smiled at him with contempt. But he didn’t let that discourage him and reminded himself that during Napoléon’s retreat from Russia, the units that suffered the lowest losses were those from the Illyrian provinces: Trieste, Istria, Dalmatia, and Montenegro. On the ships of the Austrian Navy, the sailors least subject to illness were again the sons of the Dalmatian coast, tempered by torrid summers and hard winters, descended from the men who had defended Vienna and Venice from the Ottoman Turks.
In Bremerhaven, the German port on the North Sea, it’s still possible to see today an obelisk in honor of the sailors from Trieste, Istria, and Dalmatia who defeated the Italian Navy off the coast of Lissa in 1866, under the command of the Austrian admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, for whom, after his death in 1871, Weyprecht’s polar steamship would be named. In Pola, now in Croatia but formerly part of Italy, I’ve seen a plaque, which, with not totally unfounded vainglory, exalts the “men of iron on ships of wood” who defeated the “men of wood on ships of iron.” The iron men were the Austro-Hungarian enemies of Italy, but when sailing their ships, they spoke Venetian, and every time their cannons hit the target, they yelled, “Viva San Marco,” in honor of Venice. “Demoghe drento! ” (Full speed ahead!) is what Tegetthoff is said to have shouted to his helmsman just before ramming the Italian flagship, crammed with sailors from Liguria, Tuscany, and Naples—the Adriatic against the Tyrrhenian. At the Battle of Lissa, Weyprecht also sank an Italian ship, and it is understandable why he ended up in the vast archipelago of our national amnesia.
Italians don’t know or prefer not to remember that the port of Trieste experienced its greatest flowering under Hapsburg rule. They don’t know that my city invented the propeller and the first battleship with rotating cannons or that the enterprise of building the Suez Canal did not begin in Paris but with a pool of bankers and insurers in Trieste. It’s unimaginable that they might remember reading somewhere that the first combat planes in history were designed in Gorizia, near Venice, and that the first torpedoes and the first experimental hovercraft were perfected in Pola. Under the dynasty of Savoy and the Fascist regime, Italy was Tyrrhenocentric, and because Austria was the heir of Venice, even the legend of the Serene Republic has been relegated to the lower echelons of our national consciousness—and with it, the story of the captains courageous of the North Pole.
Sleet. The weather is getting worse. The pilot of the motorboat that has brought me to Bokfjord gestures that we had better head back into port at Kirkenes. I ask him how the winters are in these parts. He replies that sometimes it snows nonstop for a month, and that’s when they start having problems with the polar bears, which don’t go into hibernation. But the worst time is the transitional season, when the weather changes constantly and crossing the frozen lake is no longer safe. The boat heads toward Kirkenes while a splinter of sunlight reveals a little church on the coast. The chapel of King Oscar II, it is in the village of Grense Jakobselv, the easternmost point of Western Europe, the Europe that you don’t need a visa to visit. Set apart from the village, just a few yards from the shoreline, the church stands almost exactly on the thirty-first meridian. Around it, tundra and birch trees of all colors: brown, copper, tea, reddish brown, straw yellow, dirty silver, pure white. There’s no monotony in their presence. Their leaves still haven’t sprouted; the season is late this year, but little flowers all around indicate that nature is just waiting for the smallest signal to explode.
On an afternoon of alternating sun and sleet, I go to the airport to meet Monika, my companion. She’ll be my escort all the way to the end of the journey.
She’s a photographer and a writer. Born in Warsaw, she speaks Russian, and on the frontiers of the East, the terrain of my journey, she knows her way around perfectly. She has an innate talent for making herself be accepted. She’s been accepted by the Berbers of the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco, by Belarusians, Bulgarians, Sudanese, Iranians, Afghans, and Bengalese. For years she has gone in search of the lost peoples between the Baltic and the Black seas—Lemkos, Hutzuls, Boykos, Gypsies of every origin, the Gagauzi of Moldavia, the Tartars of Belarus, Caucasian Albanians and Udins—and peoples of borderline religious faiths like the Dönmeh in Turkey, practitioners of a hybrid of Judaism and Islam; or the Rifa’i Sufi; or again the Old Believers, a collection of Russian Orthodox splinter groups who have refused any modernization of the original liturgy. Her dense and varied biography bespeaks a woman who has lived for eighty years rather than her forty-two. When I see her coming down the stairs from the plane, I realize her backpack has even less space for clothes than mine, because of the bulky telescopic lens and dozens of rolls of film she has to carry.