The Ice Balloon

by Alec Wilkinson

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  In Tromsø a black pall was brought from the cathedral and laid over the box that held Andrée and, it turned out, Strindberg. Sealers from the Bratvaag—“a group of young men with weather-beaten faces, bare-headed,” the account in The Andrée Diaries says—carried the box to a hearse that was drawn by a horse. Along with relatives of Andrée and Strindberg, the crew walked beside it, leading a procession the mile to the hospital. Once the remains had been laid on tables in the sick ward, it was seen that Andrée and Strindberg were wearing the clothes they had left in. In Andrée’s pockets was a little black leather purse that had in it objects that had belonged to Strindberg. Among these was a gold heart with a photograph of Anna Charlier, and a lock of her hair. There were also two chronometers—one belonging to Strindberg, and one attached by a gold chain to a locket with photographs of Andrée’s mother and father, and to a gold ring with two garnets and a piece of turquoise. Around Andrée’s waist was a blue wool jersey. The doctors who opened it found some sennegrass and within the grass, a book with writing in pencil from cover to cover.

  After the doctors finished, Andrée and Strindberg were placed inside zinc coffins embedded in oak caskets, which had been brought from Sweden, and the caskets were draped with the Swedish flag. It happened to be Thursday, September 4, Strindberg’s birthday. Monday evening, at the cathedral, the coffins were arrayed side by side at an altar. “Tongues of fire from innumerable lights quivered around the altar, which was adorned with a wealth of flowers,” the report says. Andrée’s and Strindberg’s relations sat on each side of the nave. For the people who couldn’t fit in the cathedral, speakers were hung on the houses around it, “where multitudes stood listening with the greatest attention.” The sermon drew on the verse from Revelation that begins, “And the sea gave up the dead which were in it.”

  The preacher went on to observe, according to the report, that “many had said that it was a ‘madman’s journey’ to travel over the ice northwards in a balloon. It was possible that these men had been urged by some slight touch of human vanity, but innermost there lay an ideal craving to explore a world. They were the first who had endeavoured to penetrate the regions of the Arctic by the air. Others had succeeded them with better results, but if no one had ventured to take the first, dangerous step, these later results would never have been obtained. Sweden may be proud of having owned these men who had not quailed before their task.”

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  A number of journalists had gone looking for the Bratvaag. Some went to ports where they thought the ship might put in, and some chartered boats to find it at sea. Among these was the Isbjorn, an old, battered Norwegian sealer with its pilothouse aft. The reporters aboard, when they couldn’t find the Bratvaag, decided to go to White Island. By the time they arrived, in early September, more of the ice and snow had melted.

  On the first day a journalist named Kurt Stubbendorf found bones that turned out to belong to Andrée. Presumably when the Bratvaag had been there, they were under snow. The following day, Stubbendorf wrote, “an iron bar, which we were using against the side of the rock to reach what we took to be some thawed-out rags of reindeer skin, struck against something with an arresting sound.” He got down on hands and knees and pressed his face against the ice and saw “the head and upper body of a man lying on his left side, his left arm bent upwards, with the hand beneath the head.

  “The dead man was frozen fast to the ground, and I gained the impression that he had lain undisturbed, embedded in the ice deep below the surface, ever since death had touched him.”

  Freeing him from the ice, and pulling aside several layers of clothing they saw “K.F.” stitched on an undershirt.

  Fraenkel’s remains were taken to Tromsø, to join those of Andrée and Strindberg. On the fifteenth, the Svenskund, which had delivered the expedition to Dane’s Island in 1897, retrieved them and their artifacts and brought them to Sweden.

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  Early in the afternoon of October 5, 1930, escorted by five destroyers and five airplanes, the Svenskund reached Stockholm. As it approached the harbor, more and more boats fell in behind it until there were nearly two hundred in its wake. While the bells in all the churches tolled, the coffins were carried onto a pier built to receive them and laid in the rain at the feet of King Gustav V, who said, “In the name of the Swedish nation I here greet the dust of the polar explorers who, more than three decades ago, left their native land to find an answer to questions of unparalleled difficulty.”

  Each coffin was placed in an open car to ride to the cathedral. A funeral salute of ten guns was fired. Standing at the pulpit, the archbishop said, “Welcome home, Andrée! Welcome home, Strindberg! Welcome home, Fraenkel!”

  That evening a memorial was held in the City Hall. The secretary of the Swedish Academy, E. A. Karlfeldt, gave a talk, “Andrée and National Feeling.” The coffins remained in state for a few more days; then on October 9, Andrée, Strindberg, and Fraenkel were consigned to the flames.

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  The Isbjorn had been able to stay at White Island only three days before the concern over being caught among drifting ice led it to leave. The last thing the journalists found was a pair of snow-shoes. Among the artifacts recovered were some notebooks and a few tins of film. Stubbendorf began drying the notebooks in his cabin. “I have seldom, if ever, experienced a more dramatic, a more touching succession of events,” he wrote, “than when I began the preparation of the wet leaves, thin as silk, and watched how the writing or drawing, at first invisible, gradually became discernible as the material dried, giving me a whole, connected description written by the dead—a description which displayed unexpected and amazing details, and which allowed me to follow the journey of the balloon across the ice during the three short days from July 11 to 14, 1897.”

  Each man had kept an account. Fraenkel’s was composed of terse, meteorological observations. Strindberg had made astronomical observations and records of their meals, in addition, now and then, to notes regarding the journey, and for a while he had written letters to Anna Charlier in shorthand, presumably so the others couldn’t read them. The two diaries that belonged to Andrée are the most complete and the most descriptive.

  The first night was wonderful, Andrée wrote, while Strindberg and Fraenkel slept. He was cold, but he didn’t want to wake them. Earlier the three of them had drunk some ale then spliced some of the ballast lines to the guide ropes. After Andrée went to lie down, Strindberg and Fraenkel “converse in a whisper,” Strindberg wrote. “Everything is silent and quiet.” Clouds kept them from seeing the ice, so they couldn’t be sure what direction they were heading. When the clouds broke Strindberg determined it was north. “We are now traveling horizontally so beautifully that it is a pity that we are obliged to breathe as that makes the balloon lighter,” he wrote. For a time he made observations that Fraenkel wrote down.

  Andrée came back on watch at two in the morning on the twelfth, around the time that the balloon began drifting west. At five he heard an auk, which looks a little like a penguin but can fly, and saw a fulmar, which looks like a gull. “The snow on the ice a light, dirty yellow across great expanses,” he wrote. “The fur of the polar bear has the same colour.” Perhaps because he was looking down on the ice, its contours escaped him. It appeared to be flat, “no signs of hummocks. A horse and sledge could drive over it if the surface is hard.” He saw no land. “It is indeed a wonderful journey through the night.” The ingenuous tone of his remarks might be accounted for by the three of them being the first men to see the ice fields from the sky.

  At six they took a photograph of a seal, which may have been a walrus. They saw two of them, one of which “grew frightened,” Andrée wrote, “the other not.” Under clouds the balloon descended to fifty feet. Around seven it stopped and didn’t move for forty minutes, then it began heading west with the wind. They made breakfast at eight, the coffee taking eighteen minutes to boil. “Pleasant feeling prevails,” Strindberg wrote.

>   For most of the morning they traveled through mist. The temperature was just warmer than freezing. A little after eleven they released four pigeons. One tried to land in the balloon net, then circled the balloon and flew off. Two landed on the ice and disappeared in the fog. Early in the afternoon Strindberg noted, “Blood-red ice perhaps a relic of a bear’s meal.” Minutes later the balloon sank so low that twice it struck the ice. They threw out the heavy knives they had used to cut the ropes at the launch, a small iron anchor, and fifty-five pounds of sand. The balloon went forward at about five miles an hour, but it didn’t rise. They threw out the large buoy they had meant to jettison over the pole. It is difficult to know what the gesture meant. None of the three men was much like the self-revealing and declatory Nansen. Where he wrote set pieces about the sky, the way the ice looked and sounded and its geometry, and what he was thinking, Andrée and the others made brief remarks about bearings and temperatures. It is reasonable to assume that shedding the polar buoy signified an awareness that they weren’t going to reach the pole, let alone North America or Russia or Asia—that by the end of the first whole day they were already defeated in their intention, though not in their resolve. It is also possible, however, that the buoy was closest to hand in a crisis and went over when one of them reached for something and didn’t pause to consider what it was. Or that, regardless of their intentions, it weighed what they needed to lose and nothing else did. Or that, being essentially an ornament, it was more easily given up than food or medicine or tools or scientific instruments. Their notes are dutiful and pointed and don’t include judgments. No one wrote anything more than that it had been shed. Perhaps from familiarity, perhaps from superstition, Strindberg only called it the big buoy.

  The balloon not only didn’t rise, it underwent “continuous bumps against the ground,” Strindberg wrote. It traveled a little more than eight feet per second. Fog kept it close to the ice. If they shed enough weight to make it rise above the mists, the gas would warm in the sun and the balloon would rise higher, losing gas. Having lost gas, they would sink until they were back where they had been, but with less gas and fewer things to discard. During the next few hours the balloon struck the surface continually—“8 touches in 30m,” “bumpings every fifth minute,” and “paid visits to the surface and stamped it about every 50 metres”—nevertheless, “humour good,” Andrée wrote.

  That night one of the drag ropes caught beneath a block of ice and held fast. Alone on watch, Andrée wrote that having thrown out so much ballast during the day, he was content to stand still rather than ascend and find a current that might possibly take them to Greenland. Because of “the repeated bumpings” no one had slept, “and we probably could not have stood it any longer,” so he sent Strindberg and Fraenkel to rest at around eleven-thirty. He hoped to let them sleep until six or seven, if he could manage to stay awake.

  “It is not a little strange to be floating here above the Polar Sea,” he went on. “To be the first to have floated here in a balloon. How soon, I wonder, shall we have successors? Shall we be thought mad or will our example be followed? I cannot deny that all three of us are dominated by a feeling of pride. We think we can well face death having done what we have done. Isn’t it all, perhaps, the expression of an extremely strong sense of individuality which cannot bear the thought of living and dying like a man in the ranks, forgotten by coming generations? Is this ambition?”

  All night Andrée saw “not a living thing,” no “bird, seal, walrus, or bear.” The only sounds were “the rattling of the guide lines in the snow, the flapping of the sails,” and the whining of the wind as it worked through the basket. Strindberg got up around six. The fog thinned, and here and there were patches of blue sky. Strindberg wondered “if there will be a high-level flight.” He woke Fraenkel around nine-thirty. Around eleven, the balloon lurched forward and the cab struck the ice and they broke free, after thirteen hours. Strangely, if the rope had not held them, the wind that blew through the night would likely have carried them back to Spitsbergen.

  Around noon they had a meal: châteaubriand, the king’s special ale, chocolate with biscuits and raspberry syrup, and water. Strindberg said it was invigorating. Afterward he sat in the bearing ring, where the concussions were softer, and it was “confoundedly pleasant. One feels so safe there and so at home.” He made an inventory of his outfit. “Clothing in which I am dressed July 13, 1897 is: one Jaeger-wool jersey, wool hunting shirt, a pair of wool pants, a Blue ‘army suit,’ a wool-lined leather waistcoat, a pair of rather thin woolen stockings, one cap (woolen), a pair of fur-lined snowboots, a pair of woolen mittens.” Meanwhile Andrée tried to sleep in the basket, “but I expect he will not get any proper rest,” because it continued to strike the ground intermittently.

  Fog covered the sun again, and a light rain settled as hoarfrost on the ropes. On the ice they saw bear tracks. They sent off another four pigeons. One flew away, then returned and “circled a few times in the neighborhood of the balloon.” Among these was the bird that landed in the rigging of the Alkern and was shot.

  The balloon sank low enough that the basket was more or less being dragged over the ice. They threw out a medicine chest and a buoy, but rose only slightly. To Andrée the ice looked smooth enough to travel on, but he was concerned about crossing the leads. “No bird is seen or heard, and so I suppose there is no land near,” he wrote. Then he said, “I received a hard blow on the head,” but from what is illegible. The next entry suggested that he was pleased that the balloon had not lost much gas.

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  That evening the concussions against the ice made Strindberg seasick. They shed six small buoys, a winch, 165 pounds of sand, a barrel, and a few other things amounting to 440 pounds, and the balloon rose sufficiently that Andrée was able to set the sails. “They carry excellently and increase the speed. The balloon goes extremely beautifully. Altogether it is quite stately.”

  Meanwhile Strindberg sat in the bearing ring with Fraenkel and read Anna Charlier’s last letter again. “It was a really enjoyable moment,” he wrote.

  That night Andrée noted that “an immense polar bear” swam a hundred feet below them. “He got out of the way of the guide-lines and went off at a jog-trot when he got up on the ice.” Through the fog the horizon looked “bewilderingly like land. It has deceived me several times.” What ice he could see looked “easily traversed if there were no water on and between the floes.”

  Fraenkel went to bed around nine, then Andrée and Strindberg shot the sun—used a sextant, that is, to determine its position and fix their latitude. At ten-thirty the basket struck the ice hard several times. Around midnight the longest of the guidelines broke. They were enveloped in a deep and constant fog. “No land and no birds, seals or walruses,” Andrée wrote. One of the pigeons returned and flew around the balloon. “Perhaps it has done the same as Glaisher’s pigeon?”

  Andrée meant James Glaisher, an Englishman, from Wolverhampton, who had made the highest ascent in a balloon in 1862, when he rode to thirty-six thousand feet. At twenty thousand feet “I laid my arm upon the table possessed of all its vigour, and on being desirous of using it I found it powerless,” he wrote. “I tried to move the other arm and found it powerless also.” As he looked at the barometer “my head fell on my left shoulder.” He managed to raise it, but then it fell on his right shoulder. Glaisher had gone aloft with a partner named Coxwell, who was up in the ring, making an adjustment, and Glaisher tried to speak to him but “an intense black darkness came, the optic nerve finally losing power suddenly.” He came to hearing Coxwell say, “Do try—now do.” He rose as if from sleep and said, “I have been insensible,” and Coxwell said, “You have, and I, too, very nearly.” Coxwell’s hands had turned black, and Glaisher poured brandy over them, possibly to warm them.

  Glaisher had taken six pigeons aloft. One was set free at three miles and flew off; one was released at four and flew away but “taking a dip each time; a third was tossed out between four and f
ive miles and fell downward like a stone.” A fourth, thrown out on the descent at four miles, flew in a circle and landed on top of the balloon. The other two were brought to the ground. One was dead and the other, a carrier, “would not leave the hand when I attempted to throw it off.” Finally it left and flew to Wolverhampton and was “the only pigeon that has been heard of.”

  Andrée “adjusted the steering apparatus at its maximum southwards”—it was around two-thirty in the morning—and set a course to the north. About forty-five minutes later he cut the side sails loose. At six-twenty “the balloon rose to a great height,” but he opened the valves and immediately brought it back close to the ice.

  “Anchored on an ice-floe 7:30 a.m., July 14,” Strindberg wrote. The flight was all but done. About forty minutes later they jumped out of the basket, “worn out and famished,” according to Andrée.

  They had made the longest flight ever, having been aloft for sixty-five hours and thirty-three minutes, had traveled 517 miles, and were about 300 miles north of where they started, approximately 300 miles from the pole.

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  Andrée landed the balloon so expertly that none of the birds was injured and not even the most sensitive of their instruments was damaged. It lay on its side—the huge orb, flattened like a tire against the ice. The rigging and the ropes enclosing it made it appear as if it were a live thing that had been pursued and brought down. Andrée and Fraenkel stood looking at it, as if the first to arrive at the scene of a disaster or a remarkable anomaly, while Strindberg walked off on the ice and took photographs of it.