The Ice Balloon

by Alec Wilkinson

  That morning a ship with three masts anchored about a mile offshore. As it swung on its line Strindberg wrote, “it showed itself in clear profile.” He and Andrée and Eckholm were taken toward it in a launch. “We used the binoculars until our eyes began to hurt,” Strindberg went on. They thought they knew who it was, “But we did not yet dare to believe it,” he wrote. “As we came to 500 meter’s distance the name began to appear and I was the first to confirm that it was Fram! It was like a dream. What a strange coincidence, what a peculiar twist of fate!”

  They waved their hats and gave four cheers. Andrée made no note of the occasion, but it is not unreasonable to assume that as he approached the ship he was uneasy. If it turned out that the Fram had reached the pole, his own voyage would be superfluous. On the other hand, if the Fram hadn’t made it, he might prove that three years of effort could be bettered in a week. At the gangway ladder, according to Strindberg, Lieutenant Hansen told them something that Andrée couldn’t have foreseen—“the sorrowful news regarding the fate of Nansen and Johansen”—that they had left the ship for the pole and not been heard from. (“Yet hope still remains,” Strindberg wrote.) From Captain Sverdrup, Andrée heard that the Fram had not traveled the course it had hoped to; it had zigged and zagged with the pack, heading mainly west, and never very far north, and been released above Spitsbergen. Nevertheless, Nansen might still return having reached the pole.

  The Fram left the following day, and a few days later, in Tromsø, met up with Nansen and Johansen, who had been traveling on Jackson’s boat. Meanwhile, Andrée wrote, “Today we sharpened the scissors, with which the balloon will be cut apart.”

  35

  On August 16, Andrée sent a telegram announcing that the expedition was returning, having not gotten a favorable wind. The next day at ten in the morning the balloon valves were opened, and by five it had been deflated. “Like a rag the proud airship sank to the floor,” Andrée wrote. The correspondent for Aftonbladet described the mood on the island as “quite depressed.” The hydrogen plant was dismantled, and its parts were stored by Pike’s cottage, and the walls of the balloon house were taken down and stored on the beach. Andrée thought that forty people could put the house back up in three or four days, compared with the thirty-five days it had taken to build it. More days could then be devoted to waiting for the wind.

  Nowhere does Andrée write that he was affected by Nansen’s return, but his feelings toward him were apparent when he concluded his speech in London in 1895 by saying, “Is it not more probable that the north pole will be reached by balloon than by sledges drawn by dogs, or by a vessel that travels like a boulder frozen into the ice?” The sentiment, however—provoked by nationalism—that Nansen had won by traveling farther north than anyone else, and Andrée been defeated, was circulating. The Norwegian novelist Alexander Kielland wrote that Nansen’s return “was a blessing for the entire country,” Sweden’s rival. “Even the Swedes had to contribute to the splendor with their 3 wind bags who returned home with the balloon between their legs.”

  Andrée’s plan had relied on ships and sledges having failed, but Nansen had shown that each could at least still come close. What was needed, some said, was not a balloon but an icebreaker. In addition Nansen’s intrepidness cast a shadow of hesitancy, even cowardice, over Andrée’s return. Furthermore, some people asked what Andrée, in a sprint, might learn that Nansen on a long tour hadn’t. One observer wrote of Andrée’s changed circumstances, “Instead of the original jubilant expectations, he is now surrounded by mistrust and indifference on many sides.”

  By the end of August, Andrée was back in the patent office. While the world had Nansen lead parades and gave him honors, Andrée sat at his desk. A reporter walking down the street in Stockholm with him in September was surprised at how few people noticed him. “It is strange to see how little known this man was amongst his own townspeople, there was not a hat that was lifted for his sake, nobody who passed turned around and whispered, ‘This was Andrée who walked here.’ ”

  36

  Over the winter Nansen and Andrée exchanged letters. Nansen felt that Andrée’s voyage was dangerous, and he hoped, perhaps from self-interest, that he wouldn’t try again. “I believe Macbeth’s golden words could be placed on your banner,” Nansen wrote. “ ‘I dare to do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.’ It is in drawing this boundary that true spiritual strength reveals itself.” Andrée wrote back, “Since I have proven that I am capable of returning, I am greatly tempted to do just the opposite.”

  Andrée’s backers were still eager to help him. Baron Oscar Dickson who had also supported Nordenskjiöld wrote, “Please bear in mind that those of us who have contributed to the expenses for this year, have a preferred right to subscribe to the next try.” Alfred Nobel offered to pay for another balloon, but Andrée said that he didn’t think that a better balloon could be designed or built. “The balloon is, with regard to its construction and fabrication, as far as I understand, as good as it could be made,” he wrote Nobel. To another friend he wrote that all care had been taken to prepare the balloon. “All that is humanly possible has been done when it comes to sealing,” he wrote, “the best-known method for the seams has been used, and the most renowned manufacturer employed, what is left?” Because the balloon had been heavier than he had expected, though, he had a band three feet tall added to its equator so that afterward the balloon was a hundred feet tall and sixty-seven and a half feet across at its widest point. The first version had been spherical, and the new one was slightly elliptical.

  Andrée had been home from Dane’s Island only a little longer than a month when his difficulties deepened. In a speech to the Society of Physics, Eckholm revised several of his predictions about the balloon and the trip. Friction from the drag ropes would cause the balloon to travel half as fast as Andrée had forecast, Eckholm said, meaning the trip would take twice as long. Andrée had allowed a margin of safety that was five times greater than the time he thought necessary—that is, for the six-day trip that he had assumed, he had designed a balloon that he believed could stay in the air for thirty days. Now that the trip, according to Eckholm, would take twelve days, the balloon had to remain aloft for sixty days, which almost everyone doubted it could. On Spitsbergen, according to measurements Eckholm had made, it lost gas at a rate that suggested seventeen days was more reasonable. Eckholm’s measurements had been difficult to interpret, however. The balloon seemed to lose gas erratically, which didn’t seem probable. Not until he was back in Sweden did he learn that Andrée had been having the balloon refilled.

  Eckholm also told his audience that his calculations had predicted a straight path for the balloon, but now he thought that it would travel “in many crooks,” which would double and perhaps triple the miles needed to reach land on the far side of the pole. Furthermore clouds would force the balloon to travel close to the ground and slowly, and sometimes even to stand still.

  Andrée had been content to arrive at the pole in the air and return over the ice if he had to, but Eckholm felt that such a trip was beyond even Nansen’s capabilities, and probably out of the reach of an engineer, a meteorologist, and a physicist who had no experience of traveling in the Arctic and hadn’t trained for it, either. He wanted the balloon somehow made able to travel faster or the envelope made less permeable, which was not simple, considering that in applying nine miles of thread, needles had passed through its surface something like eight million times.

  Andrée defended himself by saying that he thought that the balloon would not lose gas as quickly as Eckholm predicted, and that as time passed it would lose less. Moreover, once enough gas had been lost, one of the guide ropes could be discarded, with the result that the balloon would be lighter and go faster. Furthermore, even seventeen days was more than sufficient for their purposes. Strindberg added that the polar ice would cause less resistance to the ropes than snow, and that if a strong wind blew at the start they would cover more groun
d than forecast and so spend less time in the air.

  Eckholm didn’t merely give a speech, he also went to the Stockholm train station to meet the king’s train and tried to persuade him to withdraw his support. When the king, surprised to see him, asked where Andrée was, Eckholm disingenuously said that he had expected him to be present, and that he must have been delayed, meaning to imply that he was acting with Andrée’s approval. Eckholm also wrote to some of Andrée’s backers, hoping to convince them that Andrée’s flight was impossible.

  On September 19, Strindberg wrote his brother Sven, “Next year’s expedition is likely to involve a great change. Eckholm is probably not coming along! This is still being kept secret. This is the situation. Eckholm, upon return, has blamed Andrée for failing to keep his promises regarding the balloon’s permeability and poses preconditions for his participation, by which Andrée neither can nor wishes to abide as they show a mistrust of Andrée’s integrity. Moreover, he has behaved in a tactless manner in several ways, partly by waiting alone with tail wagging to receive the king as he returned from Norway, partly by secretly going against agreement and writing to the expedition’s patrons in an attempt to depict it as dangerous. Judging by appearances it seems as though he is suffering from pressures from his wife’s side and now wants to emerge from the situation with dignity intact. All of this is between us!”

  Scholars have speculated that Eckholm was trying to preserve his reputation. If Andrée discovered the pole without him, Eckholm would look like a turncoat and a coward. If the trip were abandoned for practical and technical reasons, though, he might appear to be a rational man of science who had the courage to put the well-being of others above his own ambitions and whose caution had saved lives.

  A few weeks later Andrée wrote Eckholm, “While it should be unnecessary to put forward a question that had already been asked and answered in the affirmative, I feel forced, due to circumstances that you know, to once again ask for your kind and definitive answer to my question, if you are willing to accompany next year’s balloon expedition.” Eckholm wasn’t. Andrée also suspected that Eckholm’s wife had influenced him. In 1895 Eckholm had married a woman named Agnes Boden, who was thirty years old and taught singing and piano.

  To a friend Andrée wrote that he didn’t think Eckholm’s leaving would matter. “I don’t think that this needs to give any reason for anxiety regarding the expedition, at least I do not have this feeling.”

  37

  At the end of October 1896 Andrée wrote to Alfred Nobel, “I have the sad duty to inform you that Strindberg has rushed ahead and got engaged.” He added that he hoped that Strindberg would not “follow Eckholm’s example.” He felt he could only wait, however, to learn “what face his fiancée, Miss Anna Charlier, will show.”

  As a teenager, visiting a family in the country, Strindberg had hidden with some friends behind bushes to spy on several girls who were swimming naked in a lake. When the boys jumped out, the girls ran away. One of the girls was Anna Charlier, whose father was the postmaster in a town nearby. Charlier played piano, and during the years afterward she and Strindberg sometimes played duets. In October, having returned from Spitsbergen, Strindberg was visiting friends in Johannesdal, outside Stockholm. He was staying on an estate belonging to the wife of a rich industrialist who had started a school for disadvantaged children. Charlier was a governess there. Strindberg was having a show of photographs from Spitsbergen. A large group of friends spent the day together then had dinner, and afterward there was music, and they danced. By the time the evening was over, Strindberg saw Charlier differently from the way he had before.

  Sixteen days later she was a guest at a dinner at his family’s house. Strindberg had decided that he would ask her to marry him, but being one of the hosts, he was so busy that he didn’t have the chance. She left behind a pair of galoshes, and the next morning, rather than have a servant return them, Strindberg took them to her. She wasn’t up, and he had to wait. They went to a café where they were constantly interrupted by people they knew. Charlier was returning that afternoon to Johannesdal on a boat. On the way to the harbor Strindberg was finally able to ask her.

  In the weeks after, Strindberg agonized over how far it was proper to let matters proceed. On one occasion she sat on his lap and her keys fell to the floor, and in reaching for them he was able to touch her leg. “We long for consummation,” he wrote, “and every time we meet it becomes more affectionate. What is the right thing to do? Hold back or give in? I must restrain myself. That is unconditionally the right thing to do.”

  Meanwhile, from one of the hundreds of young men who applied to replace Eckholm, Andrée received a letter, “I herewith apply for the position vacated by Dr. Eckholm as the third man on the polar expedition proposed by the Chief Engineer for the next year. I am 26 and a half years of age and have a healthy and strong physique. I have passed my matriculation and graduated from the Royal Technical High School’s Department of Highways and Hydro-engineering. Your obedient servant, Knut Hjalmar Ferdinand Fraenkel, civil engineer.”

  Fraenkel was tall and strong and loved being outdoors, and Andrée liked his straightforward manner. His father had worked in construction for the state railway, which meant that he was moved to wherever rails were being laid. Since lines were most often built through countryside, Fraenkel grew up playing in the woods and the fields, and, according to the portrait of him that appears in The Andrée Diaries, he developed “a physique which became uncommonly strong and hardy.” He is sometimes described as the expedition’s packhorse. He didn’t drink or smoke. “Excessive enjoyment is the death of pleasure,” is a remark he was fond of.

  In school, the report continues, “Knut Fraenkel was no bookworm.” His best subject was gymnastics. When he was a boy an “eye-affliction necessitated his studies being carried on with the greatest caution.” His second-favorite subject was history, and he liked reading about kings and royal exploits, especially those of Charles XII, the king of Sweden from 1697 to 1718, who fought a number of wars. When a friend came to visit Fraenkel in Stockholm and asked to see the town, Fraenkel took him to a park where there was a statue of Charles and had his friend take off his hat before it. Fraenkel had hoped to become an officer, but “an operation for a nervous complaint which he was obliged to undergo had compelled him to change his plans, and to enter the Royal Institute at Stockholm in order to study for his father’s profession.” He had gotten in the second time he applied. When he joined Andrée’s expedition he was hoping to find a place among the engineering corps of the “Road and Water Construction” department.

  Fraenkel had never been to the Arctic, and he hadn’t flown in a balloon, either. In April and May of 1897, he went to Paris as Strindberg had and made ten flights, meaning that altogether, by the time the expedition left, its three members had made twenty-seven flights. On one of Fraenkel’s flights the balloon fell so fast that when he and the others threw out sand they were using as ballast it hit them in the face. Fraenkel regarded the experience as fine sport.

  Either from genuine fondness or because Andrée felt a persistent obligation to put Strindberg’s family at ease, he spent a lot of time with them during the winter, which annoyed Gurli Linder, who felt overlooked. In a memoir she published in 1935, she addressed him directly, “That winter the Strindberg family had claimed even more of your presence than before. You did not have as much to do for the expedition at the time. You certainly noticed that it was a completely different circle than that to which you previously belonged. We spoke about this a few times the previous winter. ‘You understand that I must show them kindness for Nils’ sake. But they are not at all of the same sort as ours.’ The host”—meaning Oscar—“was a typical bourgeois Stockholmer from the trade association circle, jovial, well-meaning, slightly well-known and a poor writer of poetry. However, it was a moment in which you were relatively pleased, where you were the main highlight around which everything revolved, for which you were admired and fawned ov
er. In our circle you were just one among many equals, here you were the only one.”

  Among the regular company at the Strindbergs’ was a singer and actress named Ida Gawell, who performed under the name Delbostintan—she was from Delbos—and Linder felt envious of her. “Happy and witty as she was, it was probably she whose company you enjoyed most,” Linder wrote, “and this was gratefully used by the circle to bring you together as a couple.”

  Even so, before he left, she gave him a gold ring with two garnets and a turquoise stone.

  38

  Over the winter Alfred Nobel died, unsettling Andrée. Then, shortly before the three explorers left for Spitsbergen again, Strindberg’s father held a farewell dinner, which Andrée was unable to attend because his mother had died unexpectedly—“from paralysis of the heart,” Strindberg’s father wrote, meaning a heart attack—and he was attending her funeral. Strindberg’s father saw Andrée a week later, as the three were leaving, and wrote that he “was as calm as the summer sea.” Privately, though, Andrée grieved deeply. “Now all my personal interest in the expedition has gone,” he wrote. “To be sure, I am still interested in carrying out my idea; I have the same feeling of responsibility for my companions, but of the personal sense of joy there is not a trace. The only thread which bound me to the wish to live is cut off. No doubt all those who start on enterprises like mine, having somewhere a purely individual interest, a feeling of happiness at the thought of some one in whose arms they wish to rest after a completed task, where without reserve they can offer themselves, the essence of their battle, the noblest of their joy. In my case it was only to my mother that this individual interest was attached and you can therefore sense, perhaps, what I have lost.”