On foot, by sledge or by ship: many attempts had been made to reach the North Pole. The 19th century was slowly coming to an end, and still no North Pole expedition had ever been successful. So why not make an attempt with a balloon? At least that’s what the Swede Salomon August Andrée, born in 1854, chief engineer at the Swedish Patent Office and a passionate balloon pilot, thought.
Andrée had developed his own system that made a balloon steerable: he let long, heavy lines hang down from the basket, which drag on the ground and slow the balloon down to a low altitude: once the vehicle is slower than the wind, it can be steered with sails.
Andrée wanted to fly over the North Pole from the Danish island in Spitsbergen and land somewhere on the other side of the Arctic in Russia or Canada. Seemed obvious. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out at all.
After a cancelled attempt the previous year due to bad winds, the daring Swede took off on July 11, 1897 with his custom-made balloon “Örnen”, Swedish for eagle. The balloon had a diameter of 20.5 meters and was made of three layers of Chinese silk covered with a mesh of Italian hemp, which in turn was impregnated with Vaseline to protect it from water. Also on board, or rather in the basket: 27-year-old engineer Knut Frænkel and chemistry student Nils Strindberg as well as several carrier pigeons. Plus dropping buoys for messages, 767 kilograms of food and drink, sledges and kayaks for a possible return journey on foot.
But just a few minutes after the launch, the towing ropes drifting in the sea pulled the basket into the water, twisted and fell out of their mounts – ropes gone. However, the crew had already dropped 210 kilos of ballast sand to regain altitude, and now the balloon was so light that it rose to over 700 meters. This was never planned. The balloon floated away, no longer controllable – and was never seen again…
Now the interest of the international media also increased. Some newspapers speculated that the pioneers had been eaten by wild natives. Others suspected an attack by extraterrestrials. Balloon specialists knew that serious defects in Andrée’s design had led to the disaster. A full 33 years later, on August 5, 1930, crew members of the seal hunter “Bratvaag” discovered the bodies of Andrée, Frænkel and Strindberg near Kitvøya on Svalbard. In addition to the skeletons, diaries, meteorological reports and 200 photographs were also found, which were so well preserved that they could be developed in Sweden. Now the world finally knew what had happened, and very precisely at that.
The balloon was in the air for 10 hours and 29 minutes and was then driven over the ice by the wind for 41 hours while the basket dragged on the ground. At 82 degrees 56 minutes north latitude, the journey was complete – after only about a third of the planned distance to the North Pole. The three spent a week discussing which way they wanted to march home and finally set off in the approximate direction of Seven Island.
They had no shortage of food, as there were plenty of polar bears and seals. But the sledges were far too heavy and impractical, the clothing made of wool instead of furs was poor, and marching on the uneven ice was exhausting. The four carrier pigeons that Andrée had sent out never arrived home. The men made such slow progress that they decided to hibernate. At the beginning of October 1897, around three months after departure, Andrée wrote the last entries in his diary.
It is no longer possible to determine exactly what Andrée, Frænkel and Strindberg died of. The bodies were brought to Stockholm, cremated without an inquest and buried as national heroes in a common grave. The most likely assumption is that they simply collapsed from sheer exhaustion.
After all, authors are still dealing with this question to this day. In 1982, the grandiose failed venture was filmed under the name “The Flight of the Eagle”. There is a museum named after him in Andrée’s home town of Gränna, and an area in the north of Spitsbergen is called Andrée Land in his honor.
Author: Greta Paulsdottir
