Arctic Tragedy Revealed

It took 30 years to learn the fate of the first expedition to fly across the North Pole.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Aviation History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

By Kenneth P. Czech

Brisk southerly winds buffeted the heavy fabric skin of the hydrogen-filled balloon, straining the man-made bubble against its guide ropes.

Feverish activity surrounded the craft as its three aeronauts went through a final checklist of supplies: canvas boats, sleds, tents, rifles, 36 homing pigeons, 55 pounds of chocolate cake, scientific instrument….The varied cargo would be necessary, believed expedition leader Saloman Andrée, should the balloon be forced down while attempting to be the first to sail over the North Pole. Few people in 1897 had experience in polar travel.

“Don’t be uneasy if you receive no news from me for a year, and possibly not until the following year,” Andrée cried out as fellow Swedes Knut Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg completed final adjustments within the gondola. Swedish sailors and scientists, crowding the barren beach of Danes Island in the northwestern island- group Spitsbergen, waved and cut loose the guide ropes holding the craft earthbound. Andrée’s balloon, Ornen (Eagle), floated free, then drifted northward. It was the last time human eyes would see Andrée and his companions for more than 30 years.

Born at Grenna on Lake Vetter in south-central Sweden in 1854, young Saloman Andrée displayed an early interest in engineering and science. At age 17, he enrolled at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, capping his education with a trip to America’s Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. At the fair, he met veteran balloonist John Wise who, Andrée wrote, “taught me the ABCs of his art. He took me to his shop and showed me how balloons were cut out, sewed together and varnished.”

Returning to Sweden in the fall, Andrée became acquainted with the Arctic regions while on a meteorological expedition to Spitsbergen in 1882. While in France several years later, he studied the aerodynamics of ballooning with the early aeronaut Georges Besancon. It wasn’t until 1892, however, that Andrée finally went aloft, twice, with Norwegian balloonist Captain Francesco Cetti. “I felt no sense of dizziness, not even when I leaned over the railing at the highest point of our flight and looked right down into the deep,” Andrée later noted.

Saloman Andrée was hooked. He convinced a public trust fund in Stockholm to support him with a 5,000 kronor ($1,475 at an exchange rate of 3.39 kronor per U.S. dollar) donation to purchase his own balloon. Dubbed Svea, the 37,230-cubic-foot balloon was constructed in Paris by Gabriel Yon. In Svea, Andrée made nine flights including a crossing of the Baltic Sea. Aerial photographs were taken and a variety of scientific experiments conducted. On one flight, Svea drifted well out over open water. Andrée managed to guide the balloon over rocky islands on the Finnish coast and make a desperate landing. The Swede was rescued the following day by a fisherman whose wife thought Judgment Day had arrived when she saw the huge balloon.

In March 1894, Andrée met the well-known Swedish explorer Baron Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld who posed several considerations concerning aerial reconnaissance of the Antarctic. Andrée may well have pursued the concept a step further: “I may try to cross the North Pole in a balloon drifting with the wind,” he reportedly said.

The aeronaut plunged into the details of the polar expedition with enthusiasm. Nordenskjöld estimated the cost at 128,800 kronor ($38,000). He also lent his stamp of support when Andrée publicly submitted the idea to the Swedish Academy of Science on February 13, 1895. Among Andrée’s stated requirements were: a balloon capable of carrying a crew of three, complete with instruments and provisions for four months; the balloon should be impermeable enough to be kept afloat for 30 days; and the filling of the balloon with hydrogen had to take place as near to the North Pole as possible.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to