Timeline issues in reverse
21 April 2018 02:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeMaybe the timeline can be worked backwards?
If M-day is the day when Christine and Raoul finally meet in the backstreets of some little port on the coast of Norway (forgetting the time issues with Erik's illness for the moment), then how much time do we need to allow for events before that?
Raoul travelling down from the whaling station: maybe one or two days (check current shipping schedules, assume steam power).
(Edit: six days allowed for route from Bergen to Vadsø)
He might not be able to leave straight away; d'Artois will need to write his dispatch/report, everyone will want to get cleaned up, and there may not be a ship leaving on a daily basis.
(Edit: it took Nansen five days to get from Vardø to Hammerfest but only five days (August 7th-12th) to get from Franz Josef Land to Vardø, steaming on board the Windward)
Christine crossing mountains, getting attacked by bear, rescued by Sami, delivered to town and lying ill in bed... hmm. I'm not sure I have any real idea. Google Maps says 58 hours by foot from Strömsund to Namsos (for example) -- that's probably absolute rubbish based on a load of inappropriate assumptions, but it's interestingly close to my initial intuitive guess of three days.
Quick reality check: that's over a stated start to end distance of 165 miles. There is no earthly way anyone hikes 55 miles a day, let alone over mountains. Even with bovine assistance, Christine will probably be lucky to do six in her condition. On the other hand, she isn't going door to door (we can hypothesise she is starting higher up in the foothills, and the Sami find her fairly high up on the other side) and she can't carry enough supplies for a long period and probably doesn't have enough strength to last that long in the open. Can we get away with saying she wanders in the mountains for seven days and manages 100 miles? An average of 14 miles a day sounds manageable, even if perhaps unrealistic in her case... Scott and his men were making about six miles a day in Antarctic conditions before they died, while suffering from starvation and man-hauling a sledge (albeit on the flat).
Say a week, then plus a night with the Sami and maybe a couple of days' travel into town, and a day or two of illness. Ten to twelve days from the night of her escape?
Now for Raoul.
It's still 700 miles south from Franz Josef Land to Vadsø. How far north did the whalers operate and where do the boats get picked up?
The habitat of the Common Rorqual is the temperate Northern seas... to the 70° north latitude
In August, 1880, Capt. Gray saw vast numbers of these [hump-backed] Whales about one hundred miles N.E. of Iceland and they were common in the Varanger Fjord. (As, apparently, were blue whales, with thirty or forty a year being caught there!)
Minke whales are found today as far north as Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya.
However, I doubt the whale-catchers wanted to tow their carcases any further back to shore than they had to. An expedition that went to Spitsbergen in 1890 took its own tryworks with it rather than using a Varanger shore station.
Sandberg's description is of catching a blue whale in sheltered water up a fjord. Dead blue whales were towed along the ship's side, tail first.
Whaling in the 1903-4 season involved towing the whales 200 miles down to Finnmark: this was evidently the extreme practical limit. "A considerable number of whales were lost on the way, and many arrived in poor condition."
Foyn's whaling station was situated 24 nautical miles inside the Varanger fjord and hence
he had a comparatively long trip to the catching grounds(!) So they were obviously hunting extremely close to home during the 1880s :-(
Unfortunately this part of the plot is left over from the old assumption that whaling ships went out for months-long voyages, as in the days of Moby Dick; in fact it sounds as if they're not likely to run into a whale hunt until they're almost within sight of land. (N.B. literal horizon distances from a small boat are actually very short: 3-10 miles for an object at water level!)
Is it even worth keeping the whaling connection? Should d'Artois and his men not simply get picked up by a random ordinary ship and taken back to the nearest part of Norway? (But then what 'ordinary' ships would be up in the Arctic far from shore? Maybe a scientific ship studying an eclipse? There was a partial eclipse up there on 27 May 1881 and on 27 March 1884...)
Shackleton covered 800 miles in small boats in a couple of weeks. If we assume that the boat voyage covers almost the whole distance, then allowing for extra travelling time from Vadsø, Raoul's expedition would have to set off before Christine's escape... unless of course she spends a lot of time lying delirious in bed, wandering in the mountains, or staying with the Sami...)
There's absolutely no reason why Raoul can't set off earlier, especially as we've already established that it probably takes Erik longer to establish a routine of supply runs than it does for Raoul to drift around the Arctic. But it doesn't really work with the idea of doing a timeline switch to cover Raoul's doings up to the point we've reached, returning to send Christine over the mountains, then switching back to Raoul -- not if he would have had to have left before Christine's escape.
If M-day is the day when Christine and Raoul finally meet in the backstreets of some little port on the coast of Norway (forgetting the time issues with Erik's illness for the moment), then how much time do we need to allow for events before that?
Raoul travelling down from the whaling station: maybe one or two days (check current shipping schedules, assume steam power).
(Edit: six days allowed for route from Bergen to Vadsø)
He might not be able to leave straight away; d'Artois will need to write his dispatch/report, everyone will want to get cleaned up, and there may not be a ship leaving on a daily basis.
(Edit: it took Nansen five days to get from Vardø to Hammerfest but only five days (August 7th-12th) to get from Franz Josef Land to Vardø, steaming on board the Windward)
Christine crossing mountains, getting attacked by bear, rescued by Sami, delivered to town and lying ill in bed... hmm. I'm not sure I have any real idea. Google Maps says 58 hours by foot from Strömsund to Namsos (for example) -- that's probably absolute rubbish based on a load of inappropriate assumptions, but it's interestingly close to my initial intuitive guess of three days.
Quick reality check: that's over a stated start to end distance of 165 miles. There is no earthly way anyone hikes 55 miles a day, let alone over mountains. Even with bovine assistance, Christine will probably be lucky to do six in her condition. On the other hand, she isn't going door to door (we can hypothesise she is starting higher up in the foothills, and the Sami find her fairly high up on the other side) and she can't carry enough supplies for a long period and probably doesn't have enough strength to last that long in the open. Can we get away with saying she wanders in the mountains for seven days and manages 100 miles? An average of 14 miles a day sounds manageable, even if perhaps unrealistic in her case... Scott and his men were making about six miles a day in Antarctic conditions before they died, while suffering from starvation and man-hauling a sledge (albeit on the flat).
Say a week, then plus a night with the Sami and maybe a couple of days' travel into town, and a day or two of illness. Ten to twelve days from the night of her escape?
Now for Raoul.
It's still 700 miles south from Franz Josef Land to Vadsø. How far north did the whalers operate and where do the boats get picked up?
The habitat of the Common Rorqual is the temperate Northern seas... to the 70° north latitude
In August, 1880, Capt. Gray saw vast numbers of these [hump-backed] Whales about one hundred miles N.E. of Iceland and they were common in the Varanger Fjord. (As, apparently, were blue whales, with thirty or forty a year being caught there!)
Minke whales are found today as far north as Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya.
However, I doubt the whale-catchers wanted to tow their carcases any further back to shore than they had to. An expedition that went to Spitsbergen in 1890 took its own tryworks with it rather than using a Varanger shore station.
Sandberg's description is of catching a blue whale in sheltered water up a fjord. Dead blue whales were towed along the ship's side, tail first.
Whaling in the 1903-4 season involved towing the whales 200 miles down to Finnmark: this was evidently the extreme practical limit. "A considerable number of whales were lost on the way, and many arrived in poor condition."
Foyn's whaling station was situated 24 nautical miles inside the Varanger fjord and hence
he had a comparatively long trip to the catching grounds(!) So they were obviously hunting extremely close to home during the 1880s :-(
Unfortunately this part of the plot is left over from the old assumption that whaling ships went out for months-long voyages, as in the days of Moby Dick; in fact it sounds as if they're not likely to run into a whale hunt until they're almost within sight of land. (N.B. literal horizon distances from a small boat are actually very short: 3-10 miles for an object at water level!)
Is it even worth keeping the whaling connection? Should d'Artois and his men not simply get picked up by a random ordinary ship and taken back to the nearest part of Norway? (But then what 'ordinary' ships would be up in the Arctic far from shore? Maybe a scientific ship studying an eclipse? There was a partial eclipse up there on 27 May 1881 and on 27 March 1884...)
Shackleton covered 800 miles in small boats in a couple of weeks. If we assume that the boat voyage covers almost the whole distance, then allowing for extra travelling time from Vadsø, Raoul's expedition would have to set off before Christine's escape... unless of course she spends a lot of time lying delirious in bed, wandering in the mountains, or staying with the Sami...)
There's absolutely no reason why Raoul can't set off earlier, especially as we've already established that it probably takes Erik longer to establish a routine of supply runs than it does for Raoul to drift around the Arctic. But it doesn't really work with the idea of doing a timeline switch to cover Raoul's doings up to the point we've reached, returning to send Christine over the mountains, then switching back to Raoul -- not if he would have had to have left before Christine's escape.
