The Ice Balloon

by Alec Wilkinson

“Farewell, heroic scientists!” he wrote. “Our most fervent prayers go with you. May God help you! Honour and glory to your names!”

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  Andrée had predicted the speed of the Arctic wind from the average of readings made by Greely’s party at Fort Conger, by the Americans at the other polar station in Point Barrow, his own readings from Spitsbergen, and ones from the Eiffel Tower.

  Eckholm, using what findings he had, along with “known laws of the movements of the atmosphere,” thought that conclusions could be drawn about what conditions were likely. He believed that several zones of high pressure encircled the pole, while over the pole itself was a zone of low pressure. Passing storms determined the force and direction of Arctic winds. How they operated could be inferred from areas where similar conditions existed.

  Eckholm was regarded as the most knowledgeable person in Sweden about Arctic weather. He had concluded that “wind conditions should be especially favourable for such an expedition.” To a friend in 1895 he wrote that, given what he regarded as the consistency of the Arctic weather, Andrée’s expedition was “no more dangerous than an ordinary long journey by steamship or railroad in civilized countries,” so long as “the participants are self-confident, intelligent and cold-blooded persons, who themselves can ensure that everything is in order.” When the rewards are much more substantial than the risks, “a clever person plays, but not otherwise.”

  When Andrée left, no one knew whether the pole was on land, lay within an open sea, or if there were islands around it, or islands with mountains, all of which would influence the weather and the wind. Andrée thought that if he was drawn close to the pole but not over it, he would try to hover close by and make a second approach. In all he might make several. He might also land the balloon to take scientific samples, he said.

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  A few days after the launch Svedenborg, the alternate, visited Oscar Strindberg and Anna Charlier in Stockholm. He told them that Strindberg’s last words had been, “Long live Sweden,” and he gave Charlier a sandbag that Strindberg had cut loose so the balloon could leave.

  Both Eckholm and Svedenborg said that Andrée had sufficient rope to repair the guidelines. If he hadn’t been able to fix them, however, he was traveling in a balloon whose altitude he wouldn’t have been able easily to control, which meant that he wouldn’t have been able to manage so efficiently the amount of hydrogen that was lost. The benefit, though, was that as he rose higher the winds would have blown harder.

  Four days after Andrée left, a pigeon landed in the rigging of the sealer Alkin, near Spitsbergen, folded its head under its wing, and fell asleep. The captain thought it was a ptarmigan, a bird he could eat, and crept close to it and shot it, but it fell in the water. A few hours later he met another sealer, whose captain said the bird might be related to the Andrée expedition and that there might be a reward for it. The captain of the Alken went back and found it. In a tube attached to one of its tailfeathers was a message, dated July 13, 12:30 p.m.: “Latitude 82°2′: longitude 15°5′ E. good speed to E., 10° south. All well on board. This is the third pigeon-post. Andrée.”

  According to the coordinates, Andrée had not yet passed the pole, as Machuron had predicted; he had traveled only 145 miles north and 45 miles east, and was heading east instead of north. The two other birds that Andrée mentioned were never found. In the summer the Arctic is full of falcons.

  Trying to account for the route that the balloon had taken, Eckholm said that it had likely ascended into a species of cyclone, that is, a whirling storm whose center would have been calm. Using accounts from sealing captains of the weather around Spitsbergen when Andrée had left, Eckholm had concluded that the center of the storm would have been northwest of the island, meaning that the balloon, having been carried north, then northwest, would have stayed at the center of the storm until it picked up a current heading east. That movement agreed with the one that Andrée had described in his message, and it would explain his remark that the balloon was making “good progress eastward.” Cyclones, however, require strong winds to form, and those blowing across Spitsbergen might not have been vigorous enough. Andrée might simply have caught winds blowing north and then east.

  Regardless of how the route was plotted, they had covered only 120 miles in two days. To reach Siberia or Alaska at that speed would take thirty-three days. Most likely they had landed. Against that possibility, an illustrated notice had been distributed among the captains of the revenue cutters and whalers visiting ports near where Andrée might descend.

  In the summer of 1897 a balloon (an object like that shown on the drawing) may be seen floating in the air. This balloon will convey a party of three Swedish scientists, who have been making explorations toward the north pole by these means. The Government of Sweden and Norway has requested that the explorers may receive all possible assistance. Natives should therefore be told that the balloon is not a dangerous thing, but merely a mode of conveyance in the air just as a ship is on the water.

  Natives should be told to approach the people on it without fear and to give them all the help in their power.

  If the balloon is seen only, the natives should be told to communicate the day and hour, the direction and time it was visible, and the direction of the wind.

  If the people arrive, having lost the balloon, the natives to be told to give them all possible assistance.

  It is requested that the traveler may be supplied with passport and all the official documents, the names being Solomon August Andrée, aged 43; Nils Strindberg, 45 [a mistake]; Knut Hjalmar Ferdinand Fraenkel, aged 27; or one of those replaced by Wilhelm Emanuel Svedenborg, aged 28.

  Fourteen days after the launch, on July 25, the New York Times reported that two pigeons with messages had turned up in Norway. One message said, “North Pole passed, fifteenth,” and the other said, “North Pole 142 W., 47 minutes, 62 degrees,” points suggesting that Andrée had reached Alaska. Eckholm said the birds didn’t appear to be Andrée’s but the paper wrote that the messages implied that “they are probably safe, and will make their way home by way of the Mackenzie River.”

  July 25 was Anna Charlier’s birthday, which she spent with the Strindbergs. In the morning they sailed to an island in the harbor and picked strawberries and, according to Oscar in a letter, “sat down, dreaming, with thoughts on the Pole.” In the afternoon they went to the offices of Aftonbladet, where Machuron gave Charlier photographs of the balloon’s leaving. They also talked with reporters who had watched the ascent. “There was not much news due to all the newspapers had printed,” Oscar wrote. They told him, though, that “the loss of a number of drag cables was generally seen as an advantage as this allowed for a start with speed,” he said. Finally the reporters gave Charlier Strindberg’s violin, some books, and some of his clothes. “You can imagine the impression it made to see all these things arranged,” Oscar wrote.

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  Toward the end of July the Chicago Chronicle wrote, “Has Andrée crossed the north pole? Has he discovered an open polar sea? These are the questions that the scientific men in every country are discussing. But, aside from the scientific results, the success of the expedition, the most daring in modern times, is of interest to the world at large.”

  In September, Baron Nordenskiöld, with whom Andrée had first discussed the trip, told a reporter that he was amused more than saddened by the reports of Andrée’s death that had begun to appear. “It is my belief that Andrée is at the present moment upon ice which has hitherto been untrodden by the foot of man,” he said, and that he expected Andrée to arrive home in the spring, from Siberia.

  For months word of Andrée, pieced together from secondhand reports and conjectures, arrived intermittently. Late in November the captain of the Fiskeren, sailing near Spitsbergen, saw something large and reddish brown floating about a mile offshore, which he thought was a capsized boat, then later thought might be Andrée’s balloon, but he wasn’t able to examine it. A sealing captain named
Johan Overli, whose ship was the Swan, said his crew heard a scream one night off Dead Man’s Island, near Spitsbergen. After a brief interval, they heard three more. Overli said the surf had been running too high for him to stop. The Swan retreated to a fjord to sit out a storm and was wrecked, and its crew were saved by the Maygin, a Norwegian boat. Passing the island again they heard three more screams, but the captain refused to investigate, saying they were birds. From Philadelphia came a report, first published in the Stockholm papers, “The bark Salmia, loaded with cryolite and on its way from Ivigtut, Greenland, has arrived in Philadelphia and brought the information that the natives of Ivigtut report, as of about three weeks later than Andrée’s departure, that they saw a balloon traveling at an elevation of about one thousand feet. They watched it for a while. It disappeared, moving in a northerly direction.”

  In the fall of 1898 a ship captain reported that he had heard from the natives in Angmagssalik, on Greenland, that in late October or early November of 1897 they heard a gunshot one night from out on the ice. Since everyone in the village was accounted for, and since the shot had been heard by several people in several places, they decided that it must have been from Andrée’s party adrift on an ice floe.

  The first of Andrée’s buoys to be found was found on the north coast of Iceland in May of 1899, nearly two years after Andrée had left. It had been jettisoned by Andrée on July 11 at 10:55 at night, after he had been gone about eight and a half hours. “We are drifting at an elevation of about 600 metres,” Andrée had written. “All well.” Another buoy was found in August of 1900, 1,142 days after Andrée had dropped it, by a woman collecting driftwood in Norway. She thought that it had come ashore recently. “Our journey has gone well so far,” Andrée wrote. “We are drifting at an elevation of about 250 meters, with a course which at first was N 10 E True. Four messenger pigeons were sent out at 5:40 P.M. Greenwich time. They flew westerly. We are now over the ice which is much broken up. The weather is beautiful. We are in the highest spirits.”

  The polar buoy, the one they intended to drop when they passed over the pole, was found on King Charles Land, an island east of Spitsbergen, in September of 1899, with no message. The absence of a message led many people to presume that Andrée had died. The arguments against this included the possibility that he had dropped the buoy in the excitement of passing over the pole and had meant to drop another after it, with the readings of his position, and the second one had not yet been found. Or, from cold or fatigue, he might not have been thinking clearly. Or, for some reason, he might have had only enough strength to lift the buoy over the side and let go of it.

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  Oscar Strindberg wrote in a letter, “And so one has to go on and hope for a year at least; and even after that don’t draw too unfavorable a conclusion, for they may have long distances to walk before they reach inhabited places.

  “At present I read Nansen’s book with great interest, and in my thoughts I place ‘the three’ in the same or similar situations. Since they have rifles and sufficient ammunition and the necessaries for a journey over the ice and a stay over the winter, I suppose they can do it, although with difficulties to overcome.

  “Andrée and Nils, whom I know best, are such characters that, if possible, they make the impossible possible; and they have surely intelligence enough to figure out the best way of getting out of their emergencies. Andrée’s ideas and Nils’s Anna are two mighty levers and self-protections, and the love of life will help along too.”

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  In 1898 word reached Sweden from Russia that Andrée had landed in Siberia, and a journalist named Jonas Stadling, who had been at the launching, went to see if it was true but didn’t learn anything conclusive.

  Writing in McClure’s Magazine, Walter Wellman said that there seemed to him to be three places where Andrée might have landed. Wellman was a newspaperman and explorer who tried in 1906 to fly an airship to the North Pole from the place on Dane’s Island where Andrée had left from. The engines of his airship failed, however. He thought Andrée might have traveled about five hundred miles east to Franz Josef Land, which he would have recognized in the white landscape “by the black cliffs at the edges of the fjords.” Landing there would have meant that he had given up on winds that would take him farther north. A depot had been left for him in a hut at Cape Flora, on the southeastern end, by Jackson, the man who had encountered Nansen. It included a rifle and four hundred rounds, twelve cans of tobacco, eight gallons of whiskey, salt, coal dust, cheese (damaged by frost, Jackson noted), cans of beef, cases of “rump-steak, veal, and tripe and onions,” chocolate, butter, tea, “four dozen fire-bricks,” and lime juice. (“He is on a most risky journey—the most so of any that has ever been attempted,” Jackson wrote later. “He exhibits great pluck, and I wish him every success in his brave venture.”) If Andrée hadn’t been able to reach the hut before winter, he could at least have built one as Nansen had and survived on what food he had and could shoot.

  Wellman thought Andrée might also have come down in the ocean east of Spitsbergen and drowned. Or he might have gone north and east, missed Franz Josef Land, and ended up on the ice. He would then have had perhaps 250 miles to travel across rotten and slushy ice, which would be exhausting.

  “In such case the explorers are probably lost,” Wellman wrote. “Upon the Polar pack no game can be had, except by the rarest good luck a stray bear comes that way.” Even if they had avoided the water, they might in a high wind have been “spilled out or severely injured.” Or, given Andrée’s having packed his food in the ropes instead of the cab, he and the others might have fallen out and had the balloon sail off without them. If Andrée had made shelter on Franz Josef Land, Wellman thought he would be found alive during the summer of 1899.

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  Andrée began to travel like a shade through the pages of the newspapers. A young Norwegian woman working for a family in Binghamton, New York, said that one night she had awakened to find a figure beside her bed. “At once I knew it as the astral body of Prof. Andrée,” she said in the Washington Post. Andrée had beckoned to her at her bedside, and she had gone with him over “seas and mountains until suddenly we were upon an open sea, free from ice, into which a point of land jutted. The figure pointed upward, and I saw the pole star was directly overhead.” They continued until they came to a tent where “around a fire I saw Andrée and his companions sleeping peacefully.”

  In January of 1898 the forms of Andrée, Strindberg, and Fraenkel were modeled as waxworks by Madame Tussaud’s museum in London. The newspaper in Boston that reported the casting wrote that it amounted to a prediction, since no lost figure cast in wax had ever turned up alive. In March the captain of the Danish steamer Inga said he had met the captain of an American ship who had gone ashore in Labrador and found a grave with a cross marked “Andrée.” He dug beneath the cross and found a body and a box with some papers. He took the cross with him and showed it to the Danish captain.

  The story in the New York Times on April 6, 1898, with the headline “Andrée Pigeon in Chicago,” that began, “An exhausted pigeon bearing a metal tag inscribed ‘No. 23,699, F. Andrée,’ was picked up at Forty-Second and Carroll Avenues this morning. A policeman noticed the bird acting strangely, and after some trouble he captured it,” was a hoax. So many pigeons had turned up around the world that the Louisville Courier ran the headline “A Plague of Pigeons.” The story included the sentence, “To the foreigner the impression is conveyed at certain times that the woods are full of pigeons.”

  By 1899 Franz Josef Land and the area east of Greenland had been searched. The searches were all based more or less on hunches. The area in which Andrée might have disappeared included two hundred thousand square miles—more than California and fewer than Texas, that is.

  Beneath the headline “Andrée Bones Found,” which appeared in the Los Angeles Times in February of 1899, ran a letter, first published in the Siberian Advertiser, and written by “a well-known sportsm
an named La Jalen.” The letter said, “I hasten to inform you that Andrée’s balloon has been found. I was running in snowshoes after elks in the primeval forest of the South Yenisee and came across traces of Andrée. It was 350 versts (234 miles) from Krasnolars, and 100 versts (67 miles) from the gold washings in Sanvinich, down in the pit of the river. The balloon and ropes were torn and three bodies lay at its side, one with a broken skull. Please prepare assistance so that the balloon and bodies can be brought to the washings at Sanvinich, which can only be done by means of snowshoes. I guarantee the truth of these facts, and shall soon be in Tomsk.”

  Both Nansen and Nordenskiöld said that they doubted the report. However, the New York Times wrote, “There is no reason whatever for distrusting the good faith of the story. There are no yellow journals in North Siberia, and few of any hue, and whatever interest there may have been among the few educated Russians in those parts about the fate of Andrée has long ago lapsed. It is not a rumor-breeding atmosphere.” They went on to say, “In any case, there can scarcely now be a doubt that Andrée and his companions have perished, and in any case their fate cannot affect the heroism of their exploit. To push out into space backed only by one’s own faith in one’s own theory, and to take a chance against overwhelming odds, is the very bravery, for which Columbus has been so honored for these four hundred years. That he found a continent and that poor Andrée has found only a grave makes no difference in the quality of the courage involved.”

  Nordenskiöld, however, remained confident. In his dining room in Stockholm he had a photograph of Andrée’s balloon ascending, and next to it a space where he planned to hang a photograph of Andrée’s return—“for I am firmly convinced that he will return,” he said.