While on this trip, Andrée spent his free time reading a book on trade winds and also met with an American balloonist, John Wise.

From 1880 to 1882, Andrée was an assistant at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm; from 1882 into 1883, he participated in a Swedish scientific expedition to Spitsbergen, an island in Norway's Arctic Svalbard archipelago, led by Nils Ekholm, where he was responsible for the observations regarding air electricity.

Supported by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and funded by various donors (such as King Oscar II and Alfred Nobel), Andrée's polar exploration project was a subject of enormous interest, being seen as a brave and patriotic scheme.

However, this was not directed or manned flight as, upon lift-off, the gondola had already lost two of its three sliding ropes that were intended to drag on the ice below, thus functioning as a kind of rudder (this was observed by the ground crew).

Given these safety and technical issues, the balloon and its three passengers were forced back down onto the ice; surprisingly, the landing was conducted in a semi-controlled manner, allegedly, rather than crash-landing.

The expedition was well-equipped for traversing across snow or ice as the men had made sure to bring three sleds and a boat; they also had provisions, such as food and medicines, sufficient for three months.

The men flew eastward to try and reach Franz Josef Land, though after a week, they had redirected westward due to the currents, which moved the ice.

The three had to pull the sledges themselves, and despite good reserves of food (supplemented by hunting polar bear), the efforts against the moving, uneven ice wore them out.

Most modern writers agree that Nils Strindberg died within a week of arrival: he was buried among the rocks (though no marker was placed on his grave) whilst the bodies of the other two men were later found in the tent.

Diary notes and observations end just days after the trio had landed on Kvitøya; up until that point, entries had been maintained, even in difficult conditions, which seems to indicate a critical change occurring.

The group's ultimate cause of death may have had to do with their hunting of and consumption of undercooked polar bear, which are likely to have been carrying Trichinella (an internal parasitic worm which causes trichinosis);[citation needed] Trichinella were found in the remains of a polar bear at the spot examined by the Danish physician Ernst Tryde, as published in a book, The Dead on White Island (1952).

A plausible indication of this is that some of the provisions they brought ashore (obviously after a few days of scouting to the west) were unloaded and left near the water and not carried to a safer place near the camp.

In 1898, eleven months after Andrée's first sighting of White Island (which he called New Iceland), a Swedish polar expedition led by A. G. Nathorst passed offshore just 1 kilometre (0.6 mi) from the camp, but bad weather prevented their landing.

Starting in the 1960s, Andrée's status as a national hero was increasingly questioned and a cooler, more skeptical view began to prevail, in a way not unlike the changing assessment of Robert Falcon Scott's South polar journey.

A 2013 novel Expeditionen : min kärlekshistoria by Swedish writer Bea Uusma retells the story from the point of view of Strindberg's love for his fiancée, Anna Charlier.