The Ice Balloon

by Alec Wilkinson

  Nils Eckholm died in 1923. Early in the twentieth century he became known for expanding the ideas of Svante Arrhenius, Strindberg’s physics teacher, and predicting that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning coal would “undoubtedly cause a very obvious rise of the mean temperature of the earth.” Rather than be harmful, though, this circumstance would enable human beings to “regulate the future climate of the Earth,” Eckholm wrote, and prevent the arrival of the ice age that had been predicted by a respected Scottish scientist named James Croll.

  Fridtjof Nansen died in May of 1930, a few months before Andrée was found on White Island. After his Arctic trip he became a statesman. Toward the end of his life he worked at the League of Nations, overseeing refugee rights, and in 1922 he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

  Adolphus Greely died in 1935. He retired from the army as a major general. There is a Greely Island in the Franz Josef Archipelago, which is now part of Russia, and a U.S. postage stamp, issued in 1986, which shows him with a full beard, more or less as he looked several days after he was rescued. So far as I can tell, no journalist sought him out to ask what he thought of Andrée’s being found. Enough years had passed that perhaps no one recalled his opposition to Andrée’s plan.

  Anna Charlier died in 1949, having never reconciled herself to Strindberg’s disappearance and death. She had periods of illness and poor health and was in and out of hospitals and sanitariums. She once wrote of herself that she was “ill in body and soul.” Now and then she lived with Strindberg’s family. Oscar Strindberg wrote of her in 1900, “There are times when she is mourning, but she never torments anyone with her pain and despair.” Having watched her shaken by each episode of news about Andrée—by that time simply reports of a buoy being found, or a story emerging from the frontier—he wrote, “Her faith is cruel and hurts my heart … I cannot believe how brutal life sometimes can be.”

  In 1901 Charlier lived in Switzerland, where she worked for a clockmaker, handling Swedish correspondence. Late in the year she went back to Stockholm and became godmother to Sven’s son, Ake. She continued to study piano and perform but had to stop frequently from illness. For a time she worked as a housekeeper.

  After thirteen years Charlier married a saintly Englishman named Gilbert Hawtrey, who taught French at St. Paul’s School, in New Hampshire. At St. Paul’s she gave music classes, and on Saturday nights led a music club that met at her house. The students would discuss a different composer each week and sometimes play one of his works. Then they would have a meal characteristic of the country the composer was from. For Verdi they ate spaghetti, and for Wagner they had sauerkraut. A reminiscence in the school’s archives describes her as being “old and tottering but known in youth for her beauty. As a pianist, she had played in all the great concert halls of Europe.” In a window in the living room of the Hawtrey house was a stuffed pigeon with its wings spread.

  On September 4, 1949, which would have been Strindberg’s seventy-seventh birthday, a few people gathered at his grave in Stockholm. Tore Strindberg held a small silver box, conveyed by Gilbert Hawtrey at his wife’s request.

  “Anna could never forget her heart’s first love,” Tore said. “For her it stood as something sacred. And something broke within her during the latter years of her life—perhaps due to grief.

  “When her worried life came to an end—and we remember with sadness the joyous dream of her youth, her musicality, in which her lively and warm intellect perhaps most clearly shone and through which a strong bond with Nils grew forth.”

  The case was inscribed:

  Ashes from near the heart of Anna Albertina Constancia Hawtrey

  (nee Charlier)

  to be placed near the grave of Nils Strindberg

  to whom she was engaged in 1897

  —and may the Great Conductor allow them both to share in the

  Music of the Spheres.

  “May peace be with her,” Tore said.

  71

  One winter I went with a friend to their grave, which occupies a hillside in a small park in Northern Cemetery. Pine trees enclose the grave on three sides. At the top of the hill is a monument, about twelve feet tall, designed by Tore. It is in the shape of a sail, set into layers of stone that approximate the prow of a ship cutting the water. Engraved on the sail is the route of their flight and the walk on the ice.

  It has become fashionable in recent years, as attitudes have changed, to regard Andrée as willing to lead younger companions to their deaths if that was the price of fame and accomplishment. This theory is based on the belief, which isn’t easily supported, that Andrée knew that he couldn’t succeed and was too weak a figure to face the embarrassment, with all the world watching, of either calling off the expedition or sailing over the horizon and landing. Andrée was in early middle age, whereas Strindberg and Fraenkel were young. Fraenkel was not given to introspection—his journal entries were purely scientific—and he was chosen to be the packhorse. Strindberg’s nature was less hardy; he wept at leaving Stockholm and Charlier. Andrée was the resolute figure, and they must have trusted that he would see them through. Especially at this remove, he is an aloof, somewhat stern, even monumental figure. Someone who conducts a large degree of his life in his mind, someone not easily influenced or reasoned with. An enigma. He may have been a type more common to the nineteenth century, when fatal, visionary deeds were more frequently enacted on a grand scale, when such behavior was seated within a tradition of valor, commerce, and scientific inquiry. His purposes were deeply serious, and in none of his writing does the idea that he wanted to be famous for the sake of being famous ever appear, or that he regarded fame as something that would stabilize an insecure personality, or even that he had any vanity, other than the wish to have his example validated, to see balloons carry passengers and freight around the world and to places that couldn’t be reached by any other means.

  Certainly there was a romantic element to his thinking, but if he was self-deluded or calculating, he agreed to suffer for it. The tone of his journals is of a man who believes that discipline and character can overcome formidable obstacles and that such efforts are what great accomplishments require.

  An Andrée scholar named Urban Wrakberg defended Andrée in a paper called “Andrée’s Folly: Time for Reappraisal?” published by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in 1999. “The widespread notion that Andrée was an aspiring sensationalist and, intellectually, an isolated dreamer out of touch with the real polar science and technology of his period is distressingly close to the complete opposite of the reality,” Wrakberg wrote.

  I think this is true, with qualifications. It takes nothing from Andrée’s courage or daring to observe that while planning his voyage he seemed susceptible to self-persuasion. Fog and shadows caused problems for balloons, but the Arctic was as big as Europe, he said, and just as Europe was not permanently fogbound, the Arctic was not either. Then clouds and fog forced his balloon to the ice. Once he landed he was a man with a desk job trying to cross a landscape as punishing and inhospitable as any in the world. Fraenkel and Strindberg had a little experience in wild places, but the three of them had drawn up no plans for a march and had not practiced for one either. They hauled 300- and 400-pound sledges, when British sledgers, the best in the world, recommended 200 as a maximum, and Nansen’s crewmember, having tried briefly to haul 250, said that a man might as well give up as make the attempt. And they managed it for nearly three months, wearing down all the while like watch-springs.

  The assertion, not infrequently made, that Andrée lacked the courage to call the whole thing off is not, I think, accurate. There is no evidence that he cared how people regarded him. After returning from Spitsbergen in 1896 he made no remarks that suggested he felt compromised by what people thought of his courage, even though the papers compared him rudely to Nansen. Perhaps his force of will protected him from embarrassment—or the narrowness of his focus. He was a man who didn’t put aside his plans if other people didn�
�t agree with them.

  I don’t think he left because he was afraid not to. I think he left because he could no longer imagine not leaving. I think the desire to see if the balloon could do all that he was convinced that it could, plus the urge to discover the pole and settle the mystery of what was actually there, overpowered him, like a temptation one finally submits to. I think he couldn’t have lived with himself if he had turned around, not because he would have questioned his nerve or his resolve or would have been self-conscious about facing people as Andrée-who-had-backed-down, but because, having had everything prepared and all obstacles dismantled, he wouldn’t have been able to live peacefully without having taken the chance, without having stepped off into the unknown. Quietly, and without intending to, even while his attention was elsewhere, he’d undergone a species of conversion. Whereas he had first approached the task as a scientist, a disengaged engineer, aloof from the romance of the pole, he had become as zealous and wild-eyed as any fanatic who went off toward the unfound places. He had, in his way, been overtaken. To turn back might be to lose the chance forever, given how difficult it might have been to raise money for a third attempt, and the lost chance at the big deed is what I think he couldn’t have borne. Certainly the expedition had collected its own momentum, but the part that I think pushed him forward was behind his eyes, not in front of them.

  In the Andrée Museum in Gränna, where the relics of the expedition reside, there are three watches, one with a smashed dial, one stopped at 12:02, and one stopped at 7:31. In other cabinets are their clothes and many of their scientific instruments. Viewing stains on the side of the boat, one can imagine the gestures that might have caused them. There are cracks in the floorboards and the leather pieces, and knots that were tied by their hands.

  There are photographs of the remains on tables in the examining room at the hospital. So little is left of one of them that he looks only like a collection of rags. Another has one leg. Both useless relics and the bodies of heroes, they lie in an unadorned room with a clawfoot tub in the background.

  In another cabinet at the museum is a film can. On the side of the can is a notice from the manufacturer:

  A Suggestion. To avoid the possibility of allowing the film to grow old on your hands, paste the attached gummed slip in the front of your Kodak or on your roll holder. At least put it where it can be seen occasionally and can be readily referred to.

  —Eastman Kodak Company.

  Caution. This film should be used before January 1st, 1898.

  The bulk of the rolls had been exposed, but ninety-three frames, taken mostly by Strindberg, were developed although many are only faintly legible.

  Strindberg had a better than typical eye for composition—he had won a photography contest once. These were scientific men on a mission, though, and they weren’t recording their moods or the scenery. Nevertheless there is a suggestion that Strindberg was taking note of a landscape that no one but they had ever seen, and the creatures that they encountered. Strindberg appears to have stopped taking photographs sometime before the end (there is no photograph of the icehouse, for example), suggesting that he could no longer bring himself to believe that he would live, or that the making of records of the trip became less important than the labor to survive.

  One photograph shows Fraenkel and Andrée standing over a polar bear one of them had shot. The camera had a time exposure, so Strindberg was able to take a picture of the three of them trying to force a sledge through a gap in the ice. There is a photograph of a shot ivory gull with its wings spread and nailed to a plank, and of the fork that Andrée made from heavy wire for Fraenkel because the polar bear meat was often so tough that it bent the forks they had. The most desolate of the images was taken on July 14, when Strindberg walked about a hundred feet off on the ice and pointed the camera at the balloon, which was on its side, with the cab tipped over and Andrée and Fraenkel beside it. The black and white and the shades of gray within the photographs are weak and watery, and the figures insubstantial, leading everyone who sees them to think, They already look like ghosts.

  72

  After I got back from Sweden, I wondered what the Swedish Pavilion at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia had looked like, the one where Andrée had been the janitor. When I found a photograph of it I was astonished, because it was a building that I have passed nearly every day for almost twenty years. It was a tech-built house, the first, designed to replicate a Swedish country schoolhouse. After the fair it was taken down, and put up in Central Park, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near Seventy-ninth Street. For years it was a toolshed used by the park’s gardener, and then it was a bathroom until a Swedish American citizens’ organization objected. Since 1947 it has been a place where a puppet troupe gives performances and has its offices—it is called the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre.

  From the outside the building probably looks more or less as it did in Philadelphia in 1876—dark-stained wood, with a certain amount of fancy scrollwork along the eaves. One of the two big rooms downstairs is the theater and, sitting there on a low bench, it is easy to imagine a tall, slender young man sweeping the floor, lost in thinking about the currents of the air and having no idea how he will die.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to Caroline Zancan, at Alfred A. Knopf; Andrew Wylie and Jacqueline Ko at the Wylie Agency; Hakan Jorikson, at the Gränna Museum; and Katherine Stirling, Lila Byock, and Ann Goldstein at The New Yorker.

  David Pearlman, who called himself Poppa Neutrino and was the subject of “The Happiest Man in the World,” used to say thank you in a way that was so understated and humble that it conveyed a depth of gratitude that I have never heard the remark carry otherwise. In that spirit, I would like to say thank you to Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency, Ann Close at Alfred A. Knopf, and David Remnick at The New Yorker for their advice and judgment.

  Rich Cohen, Charles McGrath, and Ian Frazier all helped me in one way or another make this book better. Willing Davidson helped me find Andrée’s grave. I had a species of guardian angel in the person of a young man from Montana named Grant Baldridge, who lives in Stockholm and found things for me in Swedish libraries and translated them. This book couldn’t have been written without his more than generous and intelligent help.

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