Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition

[1] The inhospitable and dangerous Arctic and Antarctic regions appealed powerfully to the imagination of the age, not as lands with their own ecologies and cultures, but as challenges to be conquered by technological ingenuity and manly daring.

A keen balloonist, Andrée proposed a plan for letting the wind propel a hydrogen balloon across the Arctic Sea to the Bering Strait, to fetch up in Alaska, Canada, or Russia, and passing near or even right over the North Pole on the way.

In the prevailing westerly winds, the Svea flights had a strong tendency to carry him uncontrollably out to the Baltic Sea and drag his basket perilously along the surface of the water or slam it into one of the many rocky islets in the Stockholm archipelago.

[5] The Swedish political and scientific elite were eager to see Sweden take that lead among the Scandinavian countries which seemed her due, and Andrée, a persuasive speaker and fundraiser, found it easy to gain support for his ideas.

[8] Andrée's proposed expedition also elicited considerable international interest, and the European and American newspaper-reading public was curious about a project that seemed as modern and scientific as the books of the contemporary author Jules Verne.

The press fanned the interest with a wide range of predictions, from certain death for the explorers[9] to a safe and comfortable "guidance" of the balloon (upgraded by the reporter to an "airship") to the North Pole in a manner planned by Parisian experts and Swedish scientists.

The main scientific purpose of the expedition was to map the area by means of aerial photography, and Strindberg was both a devoted amateur photographer and a skilled constructor of advanced cameras.

The worst leakage came from the approximately eight million tiny stitching holes along the seams, which no amount of glued-on strips of silk or applications of special secret-formula varnish seemed to seal.

Especially pointed was the contrast between Nansen's simultaneous return, covered in polar glory from his daring yet well-planned three year Arctic expedition on the ship Fram, and Andrée's failure even to launch his own much-hyped conveyance.

[21] On 11 July, in a steady wind from the south-west, the top of the plank hangar was dismantled, the three explorers climbed into the already heavy basket, and Andrée dictated one last-minute telegram to King Oscar and another to the newspaper Aftonbladet, holder of press rights to the expedition.

Before it was well clear of the launch site, Eagle had turned from a supposedly steerable craft into an ordinary hydrogen balloon with a few ropes hanging from it, at the mercy of the wind; its crew had no means to direct it to any particular goal and had too little ballast for stability.

[22][23] Lightened, the balloon rose to 700 metres (2,300 ft), an unplanned for height, where the lower air pressure made the hydrogen escape all the faster through the eight million stitching holes.

[27] From the moment the three were grounded on 14 July, Strindberg's highly specialized cartographic camera, which had been brought to map the region from the air, became instead a means of recording daily life in the icescape and the constant danger and drudgery of the trek.

Andrée's rigid sleds proved impractical for the difficult terrain, with channels separating the ice floes, high ridges, and partially iced-over melt ponds.

They wore the oilskins but the explorers reported always seeming to be damp or wet from the half-frozen pools of water on the ice and the typically foggy, humid Arctic summer air, and preoccupied with drying their clothes, mainly by wearing them.

The far-off North Pole was discounted as an option; the choice lay between two depots of food and ammunition laid down for their safety, one at Sjuøyane in Svalbard and one at Cape Flora in Franz Josef Land.

The terrain in that direction was mostly extremely difficult, sometimes necessitating a crawl on all fours, but there was occasional relief in the form of open water—the little boat was apparently a functional and safe conveyance—and smooth, flat ice floes.

Drifting rapidly due south towards Kvitøya, they hurriedly built a winter "home" on the floe against the increasing cold, with walls made of water-reinforced snow to Strindberg's design.

[41] Later scientific analysis revealed the contents of the final pages of Andrée's diary, with its last entry on October 8 reading: "It feels fine to be able to sleep here on fast land as a contrast with the drifting ice out upon the ocean where we constantly heard the cracking, grinding, and din.

Several medical practitioners and amateur historians have read the extensive diaries with a detective's eye, looking for clues in the diet, for telltale complaints of symptoms, and for suggestive details at the death site.

For instance, the explorers are known to have eaten mainly scanty amounts of canned and dry goods from the balloon stores, plus huge portions of half-cooked meat of polar bears and occasionally seals.

The best-known and most widely credited suggestion is that made by Ernst Tryde, a medical practitioner, in his book De döda på Vitön (The Dead on Kvitøya ) in 1952: that the men succumbed to trichinosis, which they had contracted from eating undercooked polar bear meat.

[48] Critics note that diarrhea, which Tryde cites as the main symptomatic evidence, hardly needs an explanation beyond the general poor diet and physical misery, but some more specific symptoms of trichinosis are missing.

Kjellström argues that Tryde never takes the nature of the explorers' daily life into account, and especially the crowning blow of the ice breaking up under their promisingly mobile home, forcing them to move onto a glacier island.

[56][57] In Uusma's award-winning[58] book about the expedition, partly based on her own new research (including analysis of a rarely seen autopsy report from 1930),[59] she puts forth the theory that Strindberg was attacked and killed by a polar bear, which possibly also injured Frænkel, who appears to have died shortly thereafter in the tent, wearing no mittens or shoes.

In addition, nearly emptied morphine bottles were found on the site, as well as Andree's diary neatly wrapped with a sweater, hay and balloon cloth, indicating that he perhaps wanted it to be preserved as a last measure in case someone would later find it.

The procession carrying their mortal remains from the ships into Stockholm on 5 October 1930, writes Swedish historian Sverker Sörlin, "must be one of the most solemn and grandiose manifestations of national mourning that has ever occurred in Sweden.

Sundman's interpretation of the personalities involved, the blind spots of the Swedish national culture, and the role of the press are reflected in the film adaptation, Flight of the Eagle (1982), based on his novel and directed by Jan Troell.

[64] Appreciation of Strindberg's role seems to be growing, both for the fortitude with which the untrained and unprepared student kept photographing, in what must have been a more or less permanent state of near-collapse from exhaustion and exposure, and for the artistic quality of the result.

In his article, "Recovering the visual history of the Andrée expedition" (2004), Tyrone Martinsson has lamented the traditional focus by previous researchers on the written records—the diaries—as primary sources of information; he renewed his claim for the historical significance of the photographs.