At exactly 2.30pm on 11 July, 1897, a gigantic silk balloon could be
seen rising into the Arctic sky above Spitzbergen.
Inside the basket were three hardy adventurers, all Swedish, who were
taking part in an extraordinary voyage.
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| The doomed balloon |
Salomon Andrée was the instigator of the mission. Charismatic and
confident, he managed to persuade Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel to
accompany him on his historic balloon flight over the North Pole.
Andrée was confident of success. His balloon, the Eagle, used advanced hydrogen technology and he
had developed a complex steering system using drag ropes.
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| Salomon Andree |
A disastrous test flight suggested that Andrée’s confidence was
seriously misplaced. The much vaunted rope-steerage system had numerous
glitches and hydrogen was found to be seeping out of the balloon’s eight
million little stitching holes.
The expedition ought to have been abandoned before it even took off. But
Andrée overruled all objections and the launch was scheduled for the second
week of July.
The problems began within minutes of getting airborne. As the balloon
drifted across the sea to the north of Spitzbergen, it was weighed down by the
weight of the drag ropes - so much so that the balloon actually dipped into the
water.
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| Almost airborne |
Andree jettisoned 530 kilograms of ropes, along with 210 kilograms of
ballast. This lightened the balloon so much that it now rose too high: the
change in air pressure caused huge quantities of hydrogen to escape through the
little stitching holes.
Andrée remained optimistic, releasing a carrier pigeon with the message
‘All well on board.’
This was far from true. The first ten hours of troubled flight were
followed by 41 hours in which the balloon - soaked in a rainstorm - flew so low
that it kept bumping into the frozen sea.
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| Knut Fraenkel |
The Eagle
eventually crash-landed onto the sea-ice some fifty hours after taking off from
Spitzbergen. No one was hurt, but it was clear that the balloon would never fly
again. The men were stranded, many miles from anywhere and lost amidst an
Arctic wilderness.
They were well equipped with safety equipment, including guns, sleds,
skis, a tent and a small boat. Yet returning to the relatively safety of
Spitzbergen involved a gruelling march across shifting, melting ice.
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| Nils Strindberg |
The men spent a week at the crash site before setting out on their long
hike. They had a reasonable quantity of food - meat, sausages and pemmican -
but found it impossible to transport so much weight across the rucked-up ice.
Much of the food had to be abandoned: henceforth, they were to rely on hunting
for their survival.
They left their makeshift camp on 22 July and initially headed for Franz
Josef Land. But the ice soon became impassable so they headed instead towards
the Seven Islands, a seven-week march, where there was known to be a depot of
food.
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| Over the ice |
The terrain was so gruelling that they were reduced to advancing on all
fours. But they eventually reached a place where the sea-ice had melted
sufficiently for them to use their collapsible boat.
‘Paradise!’ wrote Andrée in his diary. ‘Large even ice floes with pools
of sweet drinking water and here and there a tender-fleshed young polar bear!’
Their passage soon became impassable once again, forcing them to change
direction. Aware that winter would soon be upon them, they built a hut upon an
ice floe. But the ice broke up beneath them and they were lucky to
struggle ashore onto desolate Kvitoya island.
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| Supper: polar bear |
‘Morale remains good’, reported Andrée. ‘With such comrades as these,
one ought to be able to manage under practically any circumstances whatsoever.’
It was the last coherent message he ever wrote. Within a few days, all
three men were dead.
Their fate was to become one of the great mysteries of Arctic
exploration.
What happened to them? They had shelter, food and ammunition and ought
to have been able to keep themselves alive. In the absence of any news, the
world’s media began to speculate as to what had happened.
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| Nils with sledge |
It was not until 1930 - fully 33 years after the men were lost - that
their remains were finally found. Far from answering questions, the discovery
of their bodies only deepened the mystery.
The most plausible theory is that the men died of trichinosis,
contracted after eating undercooked polar bear meat. They certainly had the
symptoms of the disease and larvae of the trichinella parasite were found in a
polar bear carcass at the site. But recent scientific evidence has thrown doubt
on this conjecture.
Other suggestions include vitamin A poisoning from eating polar bear
liver, lead poisoning from the food cans or carbon dioxide poisoning from their
primus stove.
Their diary entries reveal that by the time they struggled ashore they were living off scanty quantities
of canned goods from the balloon stores, along with portions of half-cooked
polar bear meat.
They were suffering from foot pains and debilitating diarrhoea and were
constantly cold and exhausted. Indeed they were so weary on their arrival at
Kvitøya Island that they left much of their valuable equipment down by the
water's edge.
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| Remains: 1930. |
Nils Strindberg, the youngest, was the first to die. His corpse was found wedged into a crack in the cliff. Analysis of his clothing suggests he was
killed by a polar bear.
The other two men seem to have weakened dramatically in the days that
followed Strindberg’s death. As the Arctic winter struck in earnest, they lost
the will to live.
It will never be known how many days they survived in their makeshift
Arctic shack. By the time they were eventually found, all that remained was
their diaries, a few spools of film (now developed) and a heap of bleached bones.
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