The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (21 page)

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.

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 sportsman 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.

In October men sent to look for Andrée in Alaska were reported by the
Boston Globe
to have given up their search and staked twenty-five gold claims instead. That same month the
Manchester Guardian
printed parts of a letter forwarded to them by “Rear Admiral Campion, C.B.,” which he had received from his nephew, “Commander Alston, R.N., who is in charge of Fort Churchill, the most northern trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, where he had been about five years and talks Esquimaux.” In the spring an Eskimo named Stockley had told Alston that the summer before he and his brother had come across a party of white men shooting deer. Some Eskimos approaching them didn’t see the deer and thought the white men were shooting at them. Or, another paper wrote, perhaps they objected to the white men, who had arrived in a balloon, hunting on their ground. The
New York Tribune
writer said that the Eskimos, “who are adepts with bow and arrow, immediately discharged a flight of bone darts on their aerial visitors, killing all three.” From the balloon the Eskimos took rifles and ammunition and various utensils. In some versions Andrée had arrived in a large white house with ropes hanging from it. In another he had been riding in a bubble that fell from the heavens. When the Eskimos realized that they had killed human beings, they ran away and were unwilling to talk about it. Several of the people who reported hearing the story said that a characteristic of the Eskimos who told it were that they never lied and they never made anything up.

The natives were using the balloon and its ropes to pad their canoes and repair their tents. Since the account had been brought to Winnipeg by a Church of England clergyman, it was for a long time regarded as authentic.

In March of 1900 Nansen said that he had given up hope of seeing Andrée again. “All that can be looked for now,” he said, “is the recovery of his body.” Even so, in May, one of Andrée’s brothers said that he believed that Andrée had probably landed somewhere where it would take him two or three years to reach civilization. The balloon had been “as safe as a railway train,” he said. He added, however, that he would give up hope if Andrée hadn’t appeared by the end of the summer.

Under the headline “Andrée’s Will Made Public,” which appeared in the
Atlanta Constitution
in January of 1901, a reporter wrote that the will was accompanied by letters “from prominent scientists encouraging him in the dangerous enterprise,” along with one “warning him against it.” Andrée had written in pencil on it, “It is possible that he may be right but now it is too late. I have made all my preparations and cannot draw back.”

The will contained the sentences, “I write on the eve of a journey full of dangers such as history has yet never been able to show. My presentment tells me that this terrible journey will signify my death.”

What else? Two of Andrée’s sisters, interviewed in Gränna, said that they believed that Andrée went to look for the pole on a mission from God. “And the Lord has never forsaken one of his servants,” they said.

The claim that Andrée had been killed by Indians returned in 1910, brought by a missionary. In Chicago a man interviewed at length by a newspaper said that the poles of the earth were entrances to an interior world that was exactly like the outer world and that Andrée had gone over the lip of the boundary and was now at the center of the earth. The man was building a flying machine to rescue him.

Also in 1910 a reporter noted that if the balloon had fallen on the ice or into the water, relics of the sledge or the boat or something stamped with Andrée’s brand would have drifted into the path of a ship, as items from the
Jeannette
had.

In 1914 a report that Andrée’s balloon had been found in Siberia went round the world. The
Pittsburgh Post
ran a piece that said, “The other alternative is most interesting. He may be away and living in the beautiful region which is said to exist around the pole. If so, he must be in a tropical country, for scientists agree that there is an open Polar sea.”

Some people thought that after sending the third message, Andrée had been taken to Greenland by the wind and had come down and hadn’t had enough food to make it back. “Starvation would have been their one reward for their sacrifice to science,” one writer said. “The probability is that the aeronauts and the records of their achievement will remain fast in their ice sarcophagus for eternity.

“No memorial can be raised above the grave of Andrée and his comrades. And the spot where it should be raised will, perhaps, remain forever unknown.”

In a journal Oscar Strindberg wrote his brother a letter he never sent. “When I awake in the morning, and when I fall asleep at night—during walks, at meals, during work, at the theater, constantly I see the image of my beloved son and my fantasy depicts him in various ways; I see him struggling across the unbelievable expanses of ice, drawing his sledge, I see him huddled in a hole built of stone and ice in cold and darkness trying to hold onto the warmth of life, I see him struggling against hunger and hardship, and I see him stretched out and covered in snow, defeated, sleeping the eternal sleep, soiled, tattered and unshaven, but with a calm visage, as if he had fallen asleep knowing that he had done everything humanly possible to save his young life.”

The experience that Andrée might be having on the ice had been made plain to the American imagination through the case of George Tyson. Few people had as grievous an encounter with the ice fields as he and his party. Tyson was an assistant navigator on the
Polaris
expedition of 1871, which was led by Charles Hall, who was from Cincinnati. Hall had got money from Congress for a voyage to find the pole. This was his third Arctic voyage. Beforehand he had owned a printing business and published a small newspaper. He had also been a blacksmith, and he looked like one. He was about five foot nine inches tall and about two hundred pounds, “muscular rather than stout,” Tyson wrote. He had curly brown hair and a thick beard. “Life and vigor seemed inseparable from the thought of him.”

Hall liked to read anything he could find about the Arctic. “Everything relating to the arctic zone is deeply interesting to me,” he wrote in a journal—“I love the snows, the ices, the icebergs, the fauna, and the flora of the North!” In 1861, when he was thirty-nine, he went there, thinking he would find survivors of Franklin’s expedition. To prepare himself he spent a few nights in a tent in Ohio. His urge to go had been a calling, he said. In his journal he wrote, “I am on a mission of love.”

Hall was a species of rapturist. Having seen his first iceberg, which he described as “a mountain of alabaster resting calmly on the bosom of the dark blue sea,” he wrote, “I stood in the presence of God’s work. Its fashioning was that of the Great Architect! He who hath builded
such
monuments, and cast them forth upon the waters of the sea
is God
, and there can be none other!”

The
Polaris
was frozen into the ice off northern Greenland in September of 1871. In October, Hall and a companion left on a sledding trip north and came back in two weeks. Tyson met him as he approached the ship and thought that he looked “very well.” Hall, he said, seemed “to have enjoyed his journey amazingly. He said he was going again and that he wanted me to go with him.” Aboard the ship, Hall drank a cup of coffee, which he said tasted sweet, and almost immediately he fell sick. In his cabin that evening he told Tyson that he hoped he would be better in the morning.

Instead, Tyson wrote that “Captain Hall is certainly delirious. I don’t know what to make of what he says.” After several days Hall was out of bed, “but he don’t act like himself,” Tyson wrote. “He begins a thing and don’t finish it.” Hall lost feeling on his left side. When his hand was lifted, it fell, and he didn’t feel a needle that was stuck in it. The ship’s doctor said that he had had a stroke, but Hall told Tyson that he believed someone was trying to poison him.

On November 8 Hall died. Three days later, at eleven-thirty in the morning, he was buried about half a mile from the ship, in a grave that was “necessarily very shallow,” Tyson wrote. Despite the hour it was dark, and the stars were out. Tyson held a lantern so that the prayers could be read.

In 1968 Hall’s corpse was dug up, and it was determined that he had received large doses of arsenic during the last two weeks of his life. The symptoms of arsenic poisoning are consistent with the ones he suffered. In addition, arsenic tastes sweet. The supposition was that at least three prominent members of Hall’s crew—the doctor, the meteorologist, and the sailing master—thought they would die trying to reach the pole, and decided to kill Hall and turn back once the ice freed the ship.

Without Hall the ship’s discipline deteriorated. An attempt, which didn’t get far, was made to reach the pole. By the fall of 1872 the ship had turned south. In early October it began to leak. By the fifteenth, it was aground on an iceberg. During the night it rose and fell and leaned sideways. The chief engineer, named Schumann, announced that a new leak had sprung. The sailing master, named Budington, gave the order to “throw everything on the ice,” Tyson wrote. “Instantly everything was confusion, the men seizing everything indiscriminately and throwing it overboard.” While crates and bundles and instruments rained down on them, Tyson and several others stood on the ice trying to keep things from going into the water or landing beneath the ship and being crushed. Tyson went back onboard and discovered that the new leak was a false alarm. When the ship had turned to one side, the water it contained had rushed along with it, and the engineer had supposed a fresh leak. Tyson went back on the ice to try to retrieve the food and equipment.