Al Polo Australe in Velocipede

By E. Salgari189527 chapters34 imagesItalian

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Contents

• Capitolo I. Il naufragio dell'Eira. (opens in a new tab)

  At the American Geographical Society's clubrooms in Baltimore, the Scottish shipowner Linderman and the American Wilkye argue over news that Sir Benjamin Leigh Smith's Arctic expedition aboard the Eira has been crushed by ice; when Linderman scoffs that no one could cross the polar wastes on foot fast enough, Wilkye proposes reaching the South Pole instead by velocipede, and the two rivals strike a wager, with Linderman charging two thousand dollars to carry the American party south aboard his ship.
• Capitolo II. Un uomo che va al polo per ingrassare. (opens in a new tab)

  Eight days later, Linderman's fast steam goletta the Stella Polare lies ready to sail from Fell's Point, Baltimore; the enormously fat salted-meat merchant Bisby talks his way aboard purely to fatten himself up on the voyage, comically boasting of having twice crossed Lake Ontario as his only nautical experience, before the ship prepares to weigh anchor with Wilkye's crated velocipedes and expedition stores loaded aboard.
• Capitolo III. A bordo della «Stella Polare». (opens in a new tab)

  The Stella Polare, a fast twenty-knot steam goletta capable of 500 miles a day, gets underway down Chesapeake Bay past Annapolis, Fort Monroe and Cape Henry into the Atlantic; Wilkye describes the ship's speed and the ocean's great depths to the seasick, wide-eyed Bisby as the party settles in for the voyage south.
• Capitolo IV. Dalle Bermude alle Falkland. (opens in a new tab)

  Sighting the Bermudas at a distance, Wilkye recounts their 1522 discovery by the Spanish navigator Bermudez and their coral-reef formation to the curious Bisby, and the crew observes shoals of flying fish (Exocoetus volitans) before a squall darkens the tropic of Cancro and drives the party below decks as the Atlantic turns rough.
• Capitolo V. Le coste della Patagonia. (opens in a new tab)

  The Stella Polare reaches the Falkland Islands, where Wilkye explains their Spanish and English settlement history and the guano trade at the Chincha Islands to Bisby, who gorges himself and boasts of having already gained weight, before the ship's whistle calls the party back aboard to continue toward Port William at the mouth of Berkeley Sound.
• Capitolo VI. I furori del Capo Horn. (opens in a new tab)

  On 17 November the Stella Polare presses through the strait of Magellan and rounds the dreaded Cape Horn, whose grim two-century reputation for wrecking ships Wilkye recounts to Bisby, including its 1616 discovery and naming by the Dutch navigator Cornelius Schouten, as the goletta fights through the notorious storms off the cape.
• Capitolo VII. Una balena speronata. (opens in a new tab)

  In heavy fog near Cape Horn the Stella Polare's steel prow accidentally rams and gravely wounds a sleeping whale; the maddened, bleeding sixteen-metre creature charges the ship in fury, and Captain Bak, refusing to flee, orders full steam ahead to ram it a second time head-on rather than risk being struck and sunk.
• Capitolo VIII. L'assalto dell'albatros. (opens in a new tab)

  Thrown overboard in the chaos of the whale attack, the corpulent Bisby finds himself alone and swimming in dense fog, relieved that the wounded whale has sunk but unable to find the ship; hearing braying cries overhead he is baffled until he realises the sounds come from giant albatrosses circling above him in the mist.
• Capitolo IX. I banchi di kelp. (opens in a new tab)

  With Bisby recovered, the Stella Polare races on toward the South Shetland Islands, but her propeller suddenly fouls in a vast floating kelp plantation near the polar continent; Wilkye identifies the obstruction and the crew sets sail to work the ship free while the propeller is cleared.
• Capitolo X. L'assalto dei ghiacci. (opens in a new tab)

  The expedition sights its first fleet of ten or twelve colossal Antarctic icebergs, some half a mile long and 200 metres high, and Wilkye explains to the astonished Bisby why the southern ice differs from Arctic ice and why he believes it proves the existence of a true Antarctic continent rather than scattered islands.
• Capitolo XI. Sull'Oceano Antartico. (opens in a new tab)

  Fleeing one iceberg, the Stella Polare rams and capsizes a second giant ice mountain, is violently thrown up by its submerged base and nearly crushed before falling back into the water; surrounded on every side by towering ice walls in the dark, Wilkye urges the paralysed Linderman that the crew must force a passage out before the ring of bergs closes and crushes the ship.
• Capitolo XII. Il continente Australe. (opens in a new tab)

  Having escaped the ice trap, the party breakfasts together while the Stella Polare skirts the South Shetland Islands, and the narrator catalogues the archipelago's barren, glacier-covered islands, their seabird colonies and the total absence of land mammals, before the ship turns southwest toward Cookburn Point at the mouth of the Hughes gulf.
• Capitolo XIII. La Terra di Palmer. (opens in a new tab)

  The crew kills an enormous elephant seal, whose natural history the narrator describes at length, while the Stella Polare passes Mount William and approaches Palmer Land; a tense private conversation between Wilkye and Linderman, now openly rivals, settles that the Stella Polare will land the American party at the Strait of Bismark and that both expeditions will rendezvous there again before the first freeze.
• Capitolo XIV. La separazione. (opens in a new tab)

  At the Strait of Bismark between the lands of Palmer and Graham, Captain Bak has the ship moor against an ice bank while Wilkye's six American sailors and the two cyclists Blunt and Peruschi are put ashore with the crated velocipede machine, timber, coal and stores, as the English and American parties formally part ways to make their separate attempts on the pole.
• Capitolo XV. La spedizione polare. (opens in a new tab)

  Wilkye spreads a chart of the Antarctic on the hut table to show his companions the routes of earlier explorers, frankly warns Blunt and Peruschi that the venture could cost them their lives, and receives their enthusiastic pledge of loyalty before the party climbs a coastal ridge to scout the flat, featureless snow plain that stretches away toward the interior.
• Capitolo XVI. La partenza pel Polo. (opens in a new tab)

  After a comic false alarm in which Bisby mistakes barking sea lions for lions and flees up the ice, the party hunts otarie (fur seals) for the farewell feast; Wilkye then unveils his eight-wheeled velocipede machine, a steam-and-petroleum-powered vehicle that melts snow for its boiler and can be broken down into three separate bicycles, and the three explorers depart the hut to a chorus of hurrahs, with Wilkye at the front, Blunt second and Peruschi last.
• Capitolo XVII. Il deserto di neve. (opens in a new tab)

  The velocipede machine proves its worth as it eats up the miles across the empty polar plain at fifteen miles an hour, though the explorers must dodge crevasse edges and shrinking magnetic-compass accuracy near the magnetic pole, reaching 84°40' south by nightfall after their first day's run from the coast.
• Capitolo XVIII. Lo sgelamento. (opens in a new tab)

  As the summer thaw sets in, Peruschi plunges through breaking ice into a hidden salt-water channel running beneath the surface; Wilkye and Blunt smash a hole in the ice with their rifle butts and haul him out half-frozen with a rope, then nurse him back from severe exposure beside the machine's warmth before the party finds an ice bridge across the channel and pushes on, reaching the foot of the newly named Monti Baltimora with fuel and food already much reduced.
• Capitolo XIX. L'ultima goccia di petrolio. (opens in a new tab)

  Crossing a mountain barrier and pressing south with dwindling fuel, the explorers drive the machine to its limit until, in mid-afternoon, its petroleum finally runs out entirely and the great velocipede grinds to a halt, its wheels frozen fast in a crevasse, the end of the road for Wilkye's mechanical marvel.
• Capitolo XX. I biciclettisti. (opens in a new tab)

  Stranded 350 miles from the pole and 1,100 from their hut, Wilkye dismantles the machine into three separate bicycles loaded with only the barest rations, tents and rifles; riding on, Peruschi is knocked from his bicycle and nearly mauled by a huge brown Antarctic bear-like creature before Wilkye and Blunt shoot it dead, and the trio camps to butcher and roast the animal for badly needed fresh meat.
• Capitolo XXI. Le pressioni dei campi di ghiaccio. (opens in a new tab)

  While Blunt stands night watch over his sleeping companions, the vast ice field beneath their camp suddenly begins to heave, crack and roar in a terrifying pressure event, throwing up ice pillars and opening and closing fissures for several minutes before falling still again, and Wilkye explains to his shaken companions that such pressures come from the expansive force of freezing water beneath the pack.
• Capitolo XXII. Il polo Antartico. (opens in a new tab)

  After a final desperate scramble over ice-bergs, Wilkye, Blunt and Peruschi reach open water at the pole itself; taking a sextant reading at noon, Wilkye declares they have triumphed where Weddell, Foster, Biscoe, Dumont d'Urville, Wilkes, Balleny and Ross all failed, plants the American flag, and formally claims the polar region in the name of the United States.
• Capitolo XXIII. Il ritorno alla costa. (opens in a new tab)

  With the six-month polar night only weeks away, Wilkye insists the party must not delay at their moment of triumph but push immediately back toward the coast, some 1,500 miles distant, before the ice closes and the bicycles become useless in deep snow.
• Capitolo XXIV. I primi freddi invernali. (opens in a new tab)

  The party crosses a newly frozen sea channel to reach the continent 1,600 miles from the Strait of Bismark, but blizzards, falling temperatures and near-exhausted rations force them on; when Peruschi collapses with advancing scurvy, Wilkye and Blunt dismantle one bicycle to build a makeshift litter from the other two so they can drag their stricken companion onward.
• Capitolo XXV. Le vittime del Polo. (opens in a new tab)

  Pushing through -30° cold with Peruschi gravely ill, the explorers kill a seal for badly needed fresh meat, then stumble on a wooden cross marking the freshly dug grave of Captain William Bak of the Stella Polare, dated 20 February, followed by further graves and wreckage that reveal the rival English ship has been crushed by an iceberg; hearing a distant gunshot, Wilkye and Blunt race to investigate and discover a survivors' camp.
• Capitolo XXVI. La catastrofe della «Stella Polare». (opens in a new tab)

  At the wrecked English camp, Wilkye and Blunt find a raving, skeletal Linderman, driven mad by the loss of his ship and the deaths of most of his crew, who at first refuses rescue and threatens his own starving sailors with an axe; the sailor Johnson recounts how the Stella Polare was crushed by an ice-berg on 6 December and the survivors decimated by scurvy and cold, and soon afterward, while marching the rescued party toward the coast, Wilkye and Blunt are astonished to stumble on Bisby himself, emaciated but alive, wandering the ice in his bison-skin coat.
• Capitolo XXVII. Il ritorno. (opens in a new tab)

  Splitting into two parties, with Wilkye's faster group racing ahead for help, the survivors reach the coast and are rescued by the American whaler Hudson under Captain Klemer, who sends relief back for the stragglers led by Peruschi and Linderman; the reunited expedition returns in triumph to Baltimore, where Wilkye is celebrated by the Geographical Society and awarded honours and a government pension for discovering the South Pole, while a final note reveals Linderman has been committed to an asylum, still consumed by rivalry, and Bisby has settled into a life of geographic-society dinners despite having been expelled from Chicago's Fat Men's Club for arriving too thin.