Nobile kept two rough books on the ice, one of messages received and one of messages sent, and when Lundborg took him off the floe on the night of 23 June 1928 he left his cap and his reindeer boots behind and took the two books. He said afterwards that they held “living and throbbing testimony of our anxieties on the pack, clear documentation of the tormented isolation in which we had been left.” What follows is drawn from them as he printed them in 1930, from the account the base ship’s captain gave him when he came aboard, and from what the Norwegian correspondent Odd Arnesen saw on the ship. The translations from Nobile’s Italian are mine.
What the tent sent
The reserve set that fell with the control cabin was a short-wave transmitter and receiver worked from batteries. Biagi had it working on the evening of 25 May, with an aerial raised on aluminium tubes from the wreck. From then on he sent every two hours, and ran into the tent after each transmission to listen. The message, in Italian and French and sometimes English, settled in the first days into this:
“S.O.S. Italia, Nobile. On the ice near Foyn Island, north-east Spitsbergen, latitude 80 degrees 37 minutes, longitude 26 degrees 50 minutes. Impossible to move, having no sledges and two injured. Airship lost in another place. Answer via Ido 32.”
“Ido” was the call sign of the naval station of San Paolo at Rome, which the camp could hear far more clearly than the base ship, and “32” was the wavelength in metres on which they asked for a reply. Nobile had Biagi send above all at eight in the evening by Greenwich time, when stations across Europe were listening on thirty-two metres for the time signal from the Eiffel Tower. When the companions asked him what positive ground he had for believing that someone would one day hear them, he wrote, “I found myself rather embarrassed to answer.”
What the tent heard
The set received far better than it transmitted. In the tent they heard the Città di Milano working through her press traffic and private telegrams. They heard the evening bulletin from San Paolo. And at the fifty-fifth minute, every two hours, they heard the ship’s message to them, which Nobile quoted back to her captain a month later:
“We believe you to be near the north coast of Svalbard, between the fifteenth and twentieth meridians east of Greenwich. Have confidence. We are organising help.”
The camp was east of the twenty-sixth meridian. “But you did not hear us,” Nobile told the captain; “you did not pay the attention you should have to our signals, and so we uselessly consumed the energy of our batteries to warn you that your inductions and your hypotheses were mistaken.” On the ice, as the batteries ran down and the ship went on sending, Biagi lost heart. Nobile’s note from the first days reads: “We noted with bitterness that on the Città di Milano they must evidently take us for dead, since they devoted most of their time to transmitting reports for newspapers and private telegrams.” He added, in Latin, the voice crying in the wilderness.
The evening of 29 May
Pedretti, the second operator, who had been left at Kings Bay to lighten the ship, was on watch in the wireless cabin on the evening of 29 May, with the chief operator Baccarani beside him. At five or seven minutes to the hour, Nobile wrote, Pedretti “could not remember exactly which”, he heard the word Italia, and a little later “Rispondete via Ido 32 K”: answer via Ido 32, go ahead. It was the beginning and the end of the message Biagi had been sending since the fall. Pedretti seized Baccarani’s arm. It’s the Italia calling.
“But no,” the other answered flatly. “It can’t be. It’ll be Mogadishu.” The station in Italian Somaliland was in the habit of working San Paolo every day. Nobody wired Mogadishu to ask whether she had been calling Rome at that moment. Pedretti marked on the dial of the receiver the figure at which the signal had come in, and nothing more was done. “Without the smallest hesitation,” Nobile wrote of this, “the hypothesis that it could be us was rejected: it seemed so absurd that it occurred to nobody to telegraph Mogadishu.”
The next evening Malmgren, Mariano and Zappi left the camp to walk to land.
The logic of the ship
When Nobile came aboard the Città di Milano on 24 June he asked her captain, Commander Giuseppe Romagna Manoja, why the ship had not heard the camp “in the first twelve days after the catastrophe, when for hours and hours we called you continuously, running the risk of exhausting our batteries”, while the Russians at Arkhangelsk, so much further away, had. He already knew part of the answer: the chief operator had told him that to hear the camp well it had been necessary to stop every electric motor on the ship, and the station had been “absorbed almost entirely by the interminable journalistic correspondence and the hundreds of telegrams that the two hundred people embarked on the Città di Milano sent to their families and friends.”
Romagna’s answer was about logic, and Nobile set it down as he heard it. “The last radio communication between us and the Italia was at 10.30 on 25 May. Then suddenly there was silence. We reasoned. Could this silence be explained by a breakdown of the transmitter? No: it was improbable, because there was a reserve station on board. So it could not be a matter of damage to the apparatus. And then how to explain that they had not managed even to transmit an S.O.S.? It was clear. The radio operator had found himself unable to do it. We thus reached the logical conclusion that Biagi was dead.”
Nobile asked how that could have happened. “We thought that Biagi had put his head out of the window, and that at that moment the little propeller of the radio, coming loose, had struck him fatally on the head.” Once that was taken as certain, Nobile wrote, “it was quite natural that nobody concerned himself seriously any more with our radio, and that most of the time of the ship’s station was given over to transmitting the numerous private telegrams and the lucubrations that the journalists were making about the fate that had befallen us.” The ship’s favourite theory was that the airship had hit a mountain, and seamen could not be expected to imagine a ship lost in three minutes: “has anyone ever heard of a steamer going to the bottom in three minutes?” The watch at the appointed hour was kept, Nobile wrote, “for a few minutes, but without any hope, as a pure formality.” Every time the subject came up in the following days, the captain repeated: “But, General, if logic is to serve for anything, we could not conclude otherwise.”
“And so, for twelve days running, nobody on the Città di Milano listened to our call for help, until the alarm was given by the Russian amateur Schmidt.”
3 to 8 June
On the evening of 3 June Nikolai Schmidt, a young amateur at Vokhma in the northern Dvina country, caught fragments of the call and reported them to Moscow. What he heard had the castaways near Franz Josef Land, because, as Nobile worked out later, the words “Foyn” and “circa” in the message had run together into something that sounded like “Francesco”. Moscow told Rome. On the evening of 4 June the Undersecretary of State for the Navy called on Nobile’s wife to tell her, and when she hesitated to believe it he explained that the ship might have missed the calls because of its heavy private traffic, “the day before there had been four hundred”, and that he had ordered that traffic stopped, the whole attention of the station turned to listening, and a second station set up ashore at Kings Bay. Arnesen, on the ship, heard the captain’s opinion of the amateurs: “In a case like this people hear and see much more than they would otherwise do, and amateurs hear more than anyone else. There may be something in it, but I admit I myself put no great faith in it. But of course we shall look into the matter.”
On the morning of 7 June the ship heard “S.O.S. … Francesco …”. On the ice they learned it that evening from the Italian journalists’ telegrams, which they could also hear, and Nobile changed the message to make the position plain: “S.O.S. Italia, Nobile, longitude twenty-eight east, about twenty miles from the north-east coast of Spitsbergen.” On 8 June Arnesen watched the operator on duty jump from his chair, and heard the second operator repeat, “Italia calling. Italia calling.” The ship asked, “Where are you?” and got back only “Francesco”, and told the camp to save its batteries and listen at five. That evening, at twenty-three minutes past seven Greenwich, she heard everything, and at five to ten the bulletin from San Paolo told the camp so:
“Italia. Ido. It is exactly 21.55. At 19.23 G.M.T. the Città di Milano heard you well and received your S.O.S. and the coordinates. The Città di Milano will call you at the fifteenth minute of every hour on 900 metres to ask you to verify the coordinates and, as a check, Biagi’s service number.”
They could not receive on 900 metres. Nobile answered by short wave the same night: “We confirm longitude twenty-eight east, latitude eighty and thirty north. Giuseppe Biagi 86891. We receive only on short wave. We are on the pack without sledges and with two injured. Airship lost in another place towards the east.” The ship took it down. “It was surprising,” Nobile wrote, “that the Città di Milano, which for thirteen days had never heard us, could now hear us so clearly.” On the next day, a Saturday, Arnesen recorded the moment at 10.37 when she logged “Italia calling 86891” and the position, and the captain told him he could not give out the position until he had telegraphed it to Mussolini.
What Nobile made of it
Nobile’s conclusion, set down for the captain and kept in the book, was not about the twelve days but about the three men who had walked. “Mariano, Zappi and Malmgren would not have left. Today we should not be in anguish over their fate, and the other companions would not have been deprived of the advice of an expert like Malmgren and the help of the other two. Yes, be convinced of it: the three would not have left, if they had not been persuaded that our appeals for help would never be heard. If you had concentrated all your efforts, all your attention on listening, you would certainly have picked up our signals before 30 May, even if only in fragments, and would have told us, and our hearts would then have opened to hope and they would not have insisted on leaving.”
And of the young man at Vokhma: “Nikolai Schmidt: a name to be remembered well, because it is to him first of all that we must be grateful if half the members of the expedition are alive today.”