Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition

• Sea ice has some definitions.
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File:"Eagle".crashed.jpg

S. A. Andrée and Knut Frænkel with the crashed balloon on the ice, in one of the photos taken by the third expedition member, Nils Strindberg, and found on Kvitøya in 1930, 33 years after the disaster.

S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 was an effort by Sweden to challenge neighboring Norway in the late 19th-century race to the North Pole. S. A. Andrée, a Swedish patent bureau engineer and ballooning enthusiast, proposed using a hydrogen balloon in order to reach farther north, in greater comfort, than Norway's highly successful Fridtjof Nansen had done. Andrée's scheme demonstrated a faith in the power of technology and a disregard for the forces of nature which was typical of the period, but more extreme than most, and which killed the three-man expedition. A persuasive speaker to willing listeners, Andrée had little trouble convincing the Swedish political and scientific elite of the reliability of the balloon steering system which he had invented, and of the suitability of the Arctic climate for balloon travel.

Andrée failed to be discouraged by many early warning signs of the dangers and imponderables of his balloon scheme. He considered his practise ascents with his own balloon the Svea in the early 1890s as proof that he could steer the balloon by means of his "drag rope" technique, even though the prevailing westerly winds often blew him dangerously out over the Baltic Sea, where he by no means intended to go, and half drowned him. He engaged the meteorologist and experienced Arctic researcher Nils Gustaf Ekholm as one of the North Pole team, but refused to engage in public debate with him when Ekholm quit after testing the balloon and declaring the whole enterprise to be too dangerous.

When Andrée struck out north in the balloon Örnen (the Eagle) from the Svalbard archipelago with his companions Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel in July 1897, he was at least officially convinced that they would remain airborne for at least 30 days, and, after passing close by the North Pole, would end up in either Canada or Russia. In reality the balloon lost hydrogen even more quickly than Ekholm had feared and crashed after two days, leaving the explorers with a gruelling march, for which they were badly prepared, back to safety. They never made it, but ended up, as the Arctic winter was coming on in October, on Kvitøya (=White or White's Island) in Svalbard, not many kilometres from where the balloon had started, and died there. For 33 years, until the remains were accidentally found in 1930, the fate of the Andrée expedition was one of the unsolved riddles of the Arctic. Its solution created a media sensation and public mourning in Sweden, a reaction intensified by the diaries and photographs that were found with the bodies and that recorded the ordeal in detail. Andrée, Strindberg, and Frænkel were once again national heroes. More recently, with changing perceptions of the role of the polar areas and the value of indigenous Arctic cultures, Andrée's personal motives have also been re-evaluated in less flattering terms. An early example is Per Olof Sundman's bestselling semi-documentary novel of 1967, The Flight of the Eagle, which portrays Andrée as cynically ready to sacrifice the lives of his younger companions along with his own.

S. A. Andrée

S. A. Andrée.

The second half of the 19th century has often been called the heroic age of polar exploration. The inhospitable and dangerous Arctic and Antarctic regions spoke powerfully to the Victorian imagination, not as lands with their own ecology and (in the case of the Arctic) cultures, but as challenges to technological ingenuity and manly daring. At the end of the century, the northern European nation of Sweden had high Arctic ambitions, fuelled by the Finland-Swede A. E. Nordenskiöld's discovery of the Northeast passage in 1878—79, and especially by a spirit of patriotic competition with neighboring Norway. Norway was at this time politically subordinate to Sweden but a world power in Arctic exploration through the pioneering voyages of Fridtjof Nansen in 1893—96. Nansen, by letting his ship Fram freeze into the ice and drift with it, had reached farther north than anybody before him, but the Swede S. A. Andrée proposed reaching farther still, possibly even very close to the yet unconquered North Pole itself, by letting the wind propel a hydrogen balloon across the Arctic Sea, to fetch up in either Alaska, Canada, or Russia. The Swedish establishment and to some extent the whole nation were eager to see Sweden take that lead among the Scandinavian countries which seemed her due, and Andrée was a persuasive speaker and fundraiser. There was a rush to support him, headed by Swedish King Oscar II, who personally contributed 30,000 kronor, and Alfred Nobel, the dynamite magnate and founder of the Nobel Prize.

Fridtjof Nansen.

Salomon August Andrée (1857—1897), who as an adult invariably went by his initials S. A., was an engineer at the patent bureau in Stockholm, with an intense interest in technology and inventions, one of the founder members of the Swedish Inventors' Association in 1886. Ballooning was his passion. As a student, he had visited the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia and had gone 200 miles out of his way to be able to witness an advertised balloon ascent outside town, directed by famous veteran aeronaut John Wise (1808—1879). According to Andrée's letter home, Wise was delighted by the young Swede's interest and allowed him to help fill the balloon with gas. The balloon was however torn in two by a gust of wind just as Wise's niece, dressed as the Goddess of Liberty in honor of the centenary of the American Revolution, was about to step into the basket and ascend. Andrée reports this accident coolly, not apparently disturbed in his ballooning ambitions by such a demonstration of the dangers. This was to be a pattern in his later dealings with balloons. When he had bought his own balloon, the Svea, in 1893, he showed no signs of drawing any cautionary lessons from the many dangerous situations his Swedish journeys with her brought him into (see below), in a climate and a geography so much less intrinsically risky than that of the Arctic region for which he was practising.

Andrée had some experience of Arctic conditions, having been a junior member of a Swedish geophysical expedition to Spitsbergen in 1882—83. This was part of a coordinated international effort with fourteen national teams distributed over the whole region. The Swedish expedition was led by Nils Gustaf Ekholm, who would much later join Andrée's Arctic balloon team, only to leave it again before the expedition got off the ground.

At the time of his first launch attempt of 1896, Andrée was 39. He was unmarried and having an affair with a married woman, Gurli Lindström, who was prepared to brave scandal by leaving her husband and children to marry Andrée. He, however, argued that the polar expedition needed to be safely over first.

The balloon team

Nils Strindberg.

Knut Frænkel.

For his 1896 attempt to launch his balloon Örnen (the Eagle), Andrée had many eager volunteers from which to build his desired three-man team, always assumed to include himself. He picked an experienced Arctic meteorological researcher, Nils Gustaf Ekholm (1848—1923), formerly his boss at the Spitsbergen geophysical expedition, and Nils Strindberg (1872—1897), a photographer and constructor of specialized photographic equipment. This was a team with many useful scientific and technical skills, but lacking any notable physical prowess or training for survival under extreme conditions. All three were indoor types, and only one of them, Strindberg, was young. Andrée expected a sedentary voyage, and strength and survival skills were far down on his list. While the expedition waited at Danskøya in Svalbard in the summer of 1896 for southerly winds, which never came, Ekholm became convinced by his checks and measurements of the Eagle balloon that it was too leaky and the undertaking altogether too dangerous, and left the expedition.

After the ignominy of the 1896 cancellation, enthusiasm for joining the expedition for a second attempt in the summer of 1897 didn't run quite so high. There were still candidates, however, and Andrée picked out the 27-year-old engineer Knut Frænkel (1870—1897). The team that actually took off for the flight north in 1897 consisted of Andrée, Strindberg, and Frænkel.

Nils Strindberg was not yet 24 at the abortive 1896 attempt. His diary during the death trek of 1897 has the form of messages to his fiancee Anna Charlier, and provides a more emotional and personal window on events than the formal diaries. Strindberg was considered a brilliant student, doing original research in physics and chemistry, and especially interested in photography, from practical, aesthetic, and theoretical angles, having both constructed cameras and taken a lot of well-designed amateur photos, as well as gone into the theoretical principles of color photography in his research. He assisted Ekholm in his examination of the reliability of the balloon on Danskøya in 1896, and can be presumed to have been fully informed of the problems that made Eklund withdraw. Several friends and relatives attempted to persuade Strindberg to follow suit, especially after he became engaged, but he declared his faith in Andrée to be unbroken. Sven Lundström mentions the young man's decision as an example of the influence Andrée's "charisma" had on his companions.

Knut Frænkel was a civil engineer from the north of Sweden, an athlete and outdoorsman, fond of long mountain hikes. He was enrolled specifically to take over Ekholm's meteorological observations, and, without any of Ekholm's theoretical and scientific knowledge, nevertheless handled this task efficiently. His meteorological journal allows the movements of the three men during their last few months to be reconstructed with considerable exactness.

Preparations

Test trips with the Svea

The Svea.

This artist's impression shows Andrée trying to restrain an unrealistically small Svea in a high wind.

Andrée made nine journeys with his practice balloon the Svea in 1893—95, starting from Göteborg or Stockholm and travelling a combined distance of 1,500 kilometres. In the prevailing westerly winds, the flights had a strong tendency to carry him uncontrollably out to the Baltic Sea and drag his basket perilously through water and across the many archipelago islands. On one occasion he was blown clear across the Baltic to Finland. His longest trip was from Göteborg due east, across the breadth of Sweden and out over the Baltic to Gotland. Even though he actually saw a lighthouse and heard breakers off Öland, he remained convinced that he was travelling north-east over land, and merely seeing lakes. These voyages were extensively covered by the Stockholm daily newspapers (compare artist's impression, right, of Andrée being blown off an island, from the evening paper Aftonbladet), with a mixture of fascination and raillery. On the one hand, he was the first Swede to fly his own balloon; on the other, his mishaps were colorful.

Andrée made meteorological and other observations from the Svea and pioneered aerial photography in Sweden, but the primary purpose of these flights was to test and perfect the drag rope steering technique which he had invented. Drag ropes, which hang from the balloon basket and drag part of their length on the ground, are designed to counteract the tendency of lighter-than-air craft to travel at the same speed as the wind, a situation which makes steering by sails impossible. The friction of the ropes was intended to slow the balloon to the point where the sails would have an effect (beyond that of making the balloon rotate on its axis). Andrée's claim that, with the drag rope/sails steering, his Svea had essentially become a dirigible is dismissed by modern balloonists. On some of his voyages with the Svea, Andrée claimed to have experienced a travel direction diverging from the wind direction by up to 30°, an effect which the Swedish ballooning association ascribes entirely to wishful thinking, capricious winds, and the fact that much of the time on these flights, Andrée was inside cloud and had little idea where he was or which way he was moving. Persistently, too, drag ropes would snap, fall off, become entangled in one another, or get stuck on the ground, which could result in pulling the often low-flying balloon down into a dangerous bounce. No modern Andrée researcher has expressed any faith in drag ropes as a balloon steering technique.

A second function of the ropes, much relied on in planning the Arctic expedition, was that of stabilizing the balloon heightwise, through the principle that as the balloon approached the ground, the ropes would have a longer portion of their weight supported by the ground, thereby becoming less heavy, and the balloon would tend to rise; as soon as it did, the ropes would again weigh it down more strongly. The combined weight of the Eagle ropes, 850 kg, would, however, turn out to be too slight in relation to the payload to have much effect. Most of them in fact had to be jettisoned within minutes of takeoff. Look for where Lundström gives other reasons why the height stabilizing didn't work on the Eagle. Here it is.

Promotion and fundraising

It was easier than Andrée had apparently expected to get the endorsement of the official body the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his plans, and much easier to get the expenses of the projected polar expedition defrayed by wealthy sponsors. In 1895 he gave lectures at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, powerful and influential official centers of polar science, to argue the case for a balloon expedition to contribute to the mapping of the Arctic region by means of aerial photography, and to possibly be the first humans at the North Pole. The all-important balloon, Andrée told the learned audiences, needed to fulfill four specifications:

Swedish North Pole hype: this boardgame, inscribed "How may Andrée pass the North Pole in a southerly wind?" was offered for sale from March 1896.

1. It must have enough lifting power to carry three people and all their scientific, especially photographic, equipment, provisions for four months, and ballast, altogether about 3,000 kg.
2. It must be tightly-sealed enough to stay aloft for 30 days.
3. It must be at least somewhat steerable.
4. The hydrogen gas must be manufactured, and the balloon filled, at the Arctic launch site itself.

Andrée gave a glowingly optimistic account of the ease with which these requirements could be met. Even larger balloons had been constructed in France, he claimed, and more airtight, too. Some French balloons had remained hydrogen-filled for over a year without appreciable loss of buoyancy and without topping-up. For the steering, he referred to his own drag-rope experiments with the Svea, stating that a deviation of 27° could be routinely achieved. As for the hydrogen, filling the balloon at the launch site could easily be done with the help of mobile hydrogen manufacturing units.

The Arctic summer climate was exceptionally suitable for ballooning, according to Andrée. The midnight sun would enable observations round the clock, halving the voyage time required, and do away with all need for anchoring at night, which might be a dangerous business; nor, with constant daylight, would the balloon's buoyancy be adversely affected by the cold of night. The drag-rope steering technique was particularly well adapted for a region where the ground is "low in friction and free of vegetation". The minimal precipitation in the area posed no threat of weighing down the balloon; if, against expectation, some rain or snow fell, Andrée argued, "precipitation at above-zero temperatures will melt, and precipitation at below-zero temperatures will blow off, for the balloon will be travelling more slowly than the wind." The audiences were convinced by these arguments, so disconnected from the realities of the Arctic "summer" storms, fogs, high humidity, and ever-present threat of ice formation, that has sunk so many ships. The learned societies also approved Andrée's expense calculation of 130,800 kronor, of which the single largest sum, 36,000, was for purchasing the balloon itself. With that approval, the sponsors lined up with King Oscar II and Alfred Nobel at their head. The financing assured, Andrée ordered a varnished three-layer silk balloon from Henri Lachambre's workshop in Paris. It was to be 20.5 m in diameter and to be able to hold 4,800 cubic meters of hydrogen, and was christened Örnen, meaning the Eagle.

The 1896 fiasco

The three explorers are given a heroes' send-off as they start for Svalbard at Stockholm Central Station in the spring of 1896. From the newspaper Aftonbladet.

Modern writers all agree that Andrée's North Pole scheme was unrealistic. He relied on the winds blowing more or less in the direction he wanted to go, on being able to fine-tune his direction with the drag ropes, on the balloon being sealed tight enough to stay airborne for 30 days, and on no ice forming on the balloon to weigh it down. In the attempt of 1896, the real polar wind immediately refuted his optimism by blowing steadily from the north towards the balloon hangar at Danskøya until the expedition had to pack up, let the hydrogen out of the balloon, and go home. It is now known that northerly winds are to be expected at Danskøya, but in the late 19th century, information on Arctic airflow and precipitation existed only as contested academic hypotheses. Even Ekholm, the meteorologist and Arctic climate researcher, had no objection to Andrée's theory of where the wind was likely to take him. The observational data simply did not exist. On the other hand, Ekholm was critical of the balloon's ability to retain hydrogen, and for this he had a solid empirical basis which should have been alarming to Andrée. Ekholm's buoyancy measurements in the summer of 1896, during the process of producing the hydrogen and pumping it into the balloon, convinced him that the Eagle leaked too much to ever reach the pole, let alone go on to Russia or Canada. The worst leakage came from the multitude of tiny stitching holes along the seams, and no amount of glued-on strips of silk or applications of the special secret-formula varnish seemed to seal these holes. There were about 8 million of them. Taking into account its heavy load, Ekholm estimated that the Eagle would stay airborne for 17 days at most, not 30. He warned Andrée that he himself would not be on board at the next attempt, scheduled for summer 1897, unless a stronger, better-sealed balloon than the original Eagle was purchased.

Andrée resisted Ekholm's criticisms to the point of deception. On the boat home from Svalbard, Ekholm learned from the chief engineer of the hydrogen plant the explanation of some anomalies he had noticed in his measurements: Andrée had from time to time secretly ordered extra topping-up of the hydrogen in the balloon. Andrée's motives for such self-destructive behavior are not known. Several modern writers, following Sundman's Andrée portrait in the semi-documentary novel The Flight of the Eagle (1967), have speculated that Andrée had by this time become the prisoner of his own successful funding campaign. The sponsors and the media followed every delay and reported on every setback, and were clamoring for results. Andrée, Strindberg, and Ekholm had been seen off by cheering, jubilant crowds in Stockholm and Göteborg (see image from Aftonbladet, right) and now all the expectations were coming to nothing with the long wait for southerly winds at Danskøya. Especially pointed was the contrast between Nansen's simultaneous return, covered in polar glory, and Andrée's failure to even launch his own much-hyped conveyance. Andrée, theorizes Sundman, could not at this point face letting the press relay the message that he had, besides not knowing which way the wind would blow, also miscalculated in ordering the balloon, and would like another one. Alfred Nobel offered him a new balloon made to any specifications he wished, but Andrée declined, asserting that the one he had was perfect.

The 1897 disaster

The explorers minutes before takeoff.

The Eagle sailing north, photographed from the steamer Virgo.

Launch, flight, and landing

Returning to Danskøya in the summer of 1897, the expedition found that the balloon hangar built the year before had weathered the winter storms well. The winds were more favorable, too, and Andrée's leadership more absolute, now that the critical Ekholm, an authority in his field and older than Andrée, had been replaced by the 27-year-old enthusiast Knut Frænkel. On July 11, in a steady wind from the southwest, 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 tabloid Aftonbladet, holder of media rights to the expedition. The large support team cut away the last ropes and the balloon rose slowly. Moving out over the water, it was hit by a downdraft and dipped the basket into the water. The usefulness of engaging the trained gymnast Frænkel was immediately apparent, as the crew of the Virgo could see him climb agilely into the webbing to cut away some drag ropes that had become entangled. 530 kgs of rope were lost, while at the same time, 210 kgs of ballast sand was dumped overboard. 740 kgs of essential weight was thus lost in the first few minutes, and the Eagle, before it was well clear of the launch site, had turned from a putatively steerable craft into an ordinary hydrogen balloon with a few ropes hanging from it, at the mercy of the wind, with no ability to aim at any particular goal. Lightened, it rose to 700 meters, a quite unforeseen height in any of the calculations made, where the lower air pressure made the hydrogen escape all the faster through the 8 million little holes.

Please click for larger map.

The balloon had two means of communication, buoys and carrier pigeons. The buoys, steel cylinders encased in cork, were meant to be dropped from the balloon into the water or onto the ice, to be carried to civilisation by the currents. However, most buoys were sacrificed as ballast without any messages, and only two buoy messages have ever been found. One of them was dispatched by Andrée on July 11, a few hours after takeoff, and reads "Our journey goes well so far. We sail at an altitude of about 250 m, first N 10° east, but later N 45° east. [...] Weather delightful. Spirits high." The second had been dropped only an hour later and gave the height as 600 m. The pigeons, bred in northern Norway, had been supplied by Aftonbladet, and their message cylinders contained pre-printed instructions in Norwegian asking the finder to pass the messages on to the newspaper's address in Stockholm. Andrée released at least four pigeons, but only one was ever retrieved, by a Norwegian steamer where the pigeon had alighted and had been promptly shot. Its message is dated July 13 and gives the travel direction at that point as East by 10° South, adding briefly "all well on board". Lundström and others note that these messages fail to mention the accident at takeoff, or the increasingly desperate situation, as detailed in Andrée's main diary. The balloon was out of equilibrium, sailing much too high and thereby losing hydrogen at a faster rate than even Nils Ekholm had feared, then repeatedly threatening to crash on the ice. All the sand and some of the payload was thrown overboard to keep it airborne. Items jettisoned included buoys without messages, the single large "Pole buoy" among them. This buoy had been intended to be placed at the most northerly point the expedition reached.

Free flight lasted for 10 hours and 29 minutes and was followed by another 41 hours of bumpy ride with frequent ground contact before the inevitable final crash. The Eagle was thus on the move for 2 days and 3 1/2 hours altogether, during which time according to Andrée nobody got any sleep at all. The definite landing appears to have been gentle. Everybody was unhurt, including the carrier pigeons in their wicker cages, and all the equipment was undamaged, even the delicate optical instruments and Strindberg's two cameras.

On the ice

Crossing a ränna with the boat.

The first polar bear shot.

Nils Strindberg on snowshoes pulling his sled.

From the moment of touchdown, Strindberg's highly specialized cartographic camera, brought to map the region, became instead a means of recording daily life in the icescape through which the expedition moved with great difficulty, baffled by the reality of the polar pack ice with its canals, melt ponds, ridges, and movements. Strindberg's pictures of the other two men contemplating the fallen Eagle are famous; and throughout the toil and drudgery of their attempts to move themselves and their vital stores and equipment to one of the depots laid down for them, he kept setting up the 7-kg camera on its tripod and photographing the expedition itself, rather than the landscape. Andrée and Frænkel recorded events with equal care, Andrée in his "main diary", Frænkel in his meteorological journal. Strindberg's own "speed-written" or stenographic, diary was more personal, taking the form of messages to his fiancee, a journal in letters.

The explorers had great stores of food and equipment, but the latter was not of the best kind. Safety equipment such as guns, snowshoes, sleds, skis, a tent, a small boat (in the form of a bundle of sticks, to be assembled and covered with balloon silk) had been brought, but optimizing it had been the last thing on Andrée's mind. In a lecture to ?, he had stressed that he didn't really need it: [put in a quote when I find it]. Sven Lundström and others point to Andrée's technological hubris and lack of interest in learning from the practices of indigenous peoples. In this he contrasted with not only later but also earlier explorers, for instance Nansen, who had just turned up after 18 months on foot on the pack ice after leaving the Fram. The Andrée expedition's 77-day walk was made much more effortful by the sleds being poorly designed (by Andrée himself) for the terrain, and the clothes being woollen coats and trousers with oilskins to wear on top, not furs. The little caps that leave the ears bare, as worn in the streets of Stockholm, can be seen in the photos. A pervasive impression from Andrée's diary is that the explorers are never dry, and one of his main themes is the drying of clothes, mainly accomplished by wearing them. When they started the walk towards the archipelago Franz Josef Land, one of the first thing that happened was that Strindberg's sled overturned with its heavy load and slid into a melt pond, from which he had to retrieve the 200—300 kgs of now wet provisions and personal belongings at the expense of himself getting wet to the knees. This would turn out to be an everyday kind of occurrence, and the threat of much worse was everywhere, especially that of losing the provisions to one of the many fluctuating canals that had to be crossed, which would have meant death. Andrée writes about the sleds many times hanging by a hair over the abyss, but the worst never happens.

Before starting the march over this recalcritant terrain, the three men spent a week in a tent at the crash site, packing up and making decisions about what and how much to bring and, fatefully, where to go. The far-off North Pole was not mentioned as an option; the choice lay between the two depots of food and ammunition laid out for their safety, one at Cape Flora in Franz Joseph Land and one at Seven Islands in Svalbard (see map). The distances being about equal, they decided on the bigger depot at Cape Flora. Nils Strindberg took more pictures during this week than he would at any later point, including 12 frames that make up a 360° panorama of the crash site. That this series of frames is designed as a panorama was only noticed in the 2004 study by Tyrone Martinsson, who has created an animated web version of it.

Lost and found

Hic multa desiderata

It is believed, on the basis of the incoherent and badly damaged last pages of Andrée's diary, that the three men were all dead within a couple of days.

For the next 33 years the lost expedition was part of cultural lore. It was actively sought for a couple of years and remained the subject of myth and rumour, with newspaper reports of possible findings surfacing persistenly, not only in Sweden. Lundström points out that some of these reports take on the features of repetitive urban myths and reflect a prevailing disrespect for the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, who in the reports frequently appear as uncomprehending savages who kill the three men or show a deadly indifference to their plight.

Cause of deaths

What did the explorers die of? This is the only mystery of the Andrée expedition, and the only real area of disagreement and conflicting theories, since all other events are well documented in the diaries and photos. The remains were cremated on being returned to Sweden.

• Infobyte: botulism theory, http://ltarkiv.lakartidningen.se/2000/temp/pda20882.pdf Article in Swedish, abstract in English. Goes through previous theories as well. Good reference, if it were in English.
• Best-known theory: trichinosis, argued in Ernst Adam Tryde (1952). De döda på Vitön: Sanningen om Andrée. Stockholm. Referred in Lundström, pp. 114-15.

Records

The diaries and exposed films that were found with the remains of the explorers in 1930 form an extensive record of their last few months, and contributed to making the discovery of the lost expedition a media sensation in Sweden. Throughout the long lethal treck after the crash, even when dying, the exploreers kept a diary, and Nils Strindberg kept setting up his tripod and photographically recording the details of the ordeal. Five exposed rolls of film were found on Kvitøya one of them still in the camera. John Hertzberg at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm treated the five exposed rolls of film and managed to save 93 out of a theoretical maximum of 240 (each roll could hold up to 48 exposures). A selection of these photos were quickly published along with the complete diaries as Med Örnen mot Polen (British edition The Andrée diaries, 1931; American edition Andrée's Story, 1932), a book which credits the three explorers as its posthumous authors. Tyrone Martinsson has lamented the traditional focus by previous researchers on the written records — the diaries — as primary sources of information and the lack of care with which the original negatives were stored from 1944. Martinsson's article "Recovering the visual history of the Andrée expedition" (2004) makes renewed claims for the historical significance of the photos and of Nils Strindberg.

Legacy

When the daring, or foolhardy, expedition took flight in 1897 in a blaze of media coverage, it nourished Swedish patriotic pride and Swedish dreams of taking the scientific lead in the Arctic. The title of "Engineer" — "Ingenjör Andrée" — was generally and reverentially used in speaking of Andrée, and expressed high esteem for the late 19th-century ideal figure of the engineer as a representative of social improvement through technological progress. The three explorers were fêted when they departed, mourned by the nation when they disappeared, and sought by several expeditions in the early 20th century. When their remains and records were accidentally found in 1930, after the fate of the expedition had been shrouded in mystery for 33 years, the tragic story told by the diaries and photos had all the elements required for a media sensation. The three men were celebrated for the heroism of their doomed two-month struggle to reach populated areas and were seen as having selflessly perished for the ideals of science and progress. The home-bringing of their mortal remains to Stockholm on October 5, 1930, writes Swedish historian of ideas Sverker Sörlin, "must be one of the most solemn and grandiose manifestations of national mourning that has ever occurred in Sweden. One of the rare comparable events is the national mourning that followed the Estonia disaster in the Baltic Sea in September 1994".

Andrée's personal motives have later been re-evaluated, along with the role of the polar areas as the proving-ground of masculinity and patriotism. Per Olof Sundman's fictionalized bestseller novel of 1967, Ingenjör Andrée's Luftfärd (English title The Flight of the Eagle), portrays Andrée as weak and cynical, pushed by his sponsors and the media into undertaking what amounted to a suicide mission, despite many early warning signs, and thereby risking, or virtually sacrificing, not only his own life but those of two trusting young men. Sundman's interpretation of the personalities involved and of the role of the Swedish political and scientific establishment and the press in practically enforcing the takeoff carries over into the Oscar-nominated film by Jan Troell, Flight of the Eagle (1982), which is based on Sundman's novel. The verdict on Andrée varies in harshness in other modern writers, depending on whether he is seen as the manipulator or the victim of Swedish nationalist hype around the turn of the 20th century, but they all agree in condemning his unquestioning faith in technology and lack of respect for the forces of nature.

References

• Andrée, S. A., Nils Strindberg, and Knut Frænkel (1930). Med Örnen mot polen: Andrées polarexpedition år 1897. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1930. The London edition of the English translation, by Edward Adams-Ray, is The Andrée diaries being the diaries and records of S. A. Andrée, Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel written during their balloon expedition to the North Pole in 1897 and discovered on White Island in 1930, together with a complete record of the expedition and discovery; with 103 illustr. and 6 maps, plans and diagrams (1931); while the New York edition of the same translation is Andrée's Story: The Complete Record of His Polar Flight, 1897, Blue Ribbon Books, 1932.

• "Andrées färder", Svenska ballongfederationen. In Swedish. Accessed on March 5, 2006.

• Grenna Museum Andrée biography. In Swedish. Accessed on March 5, 2006.

• Kjellström, Rolf (1999). "Andrée-expeditionen och dess undergång: tolkning nu och då", in The Centennial of S.A. Andrée's North Pole Expedition: Proceedings of a Conference on S.A. Andrée and the Agenda for Social Science research of the Polar Regions, ed. Urban Wråkberg. Stockholm: Center for History of Science, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In Swedish.

• Lundström, Sven (1997). "Vår position är ej synnerligen god..." Andréexpeditionen i svart och vitt. Borås: Carlssons förlag. Lundström is the curator of the Andrée museum in Grenna, Sweden. In Swedish.

• Martinsson, Tyrone (2004). "Recovering the visual history of the Andrée expedition: A case study in photographic research". In Research Issues in Art Design and Media, ISSN 1474-2365, issue 6. Accessed 27 Feb 2006. This paper is based on Martinsson's doctoral dissertation from 2003. In English.

• "The Mystery of Andree", an extensive archive of American daily newspaper articles 1896—1899, from reports of the preparation and the launch to guesswork and rumours about the explorers' fate. Accessed on March 5, 2006.

• Sörlin, Sverker (1999). "The burial of an era: the home-coming of Andrée as a national event", in The Centennial of S.A. Andrée's North Pole Expedition: Proceedings of a Conference on S.A. Andrée and the Agenda for Social Science research of the Polar Regions, ed. Urban Wråkberg. Stockholm: Center for History of Science, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In English.

• Sundman, Per Olov (1967). Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd. Stockholm: Norstedt. Translated in 1970 by Mary Sandbach as The Flight of the Eagle, London: Secker and Warburg. The 1982 film Flight of the Eagle by Jan Troell is based on this novel.

• Swedish Inventors' Association, English version of homepage. Accessed on March 5, 2006.

External links

• A 360° polar panorama designed by Nils Strindberg. This panorama was not discovered until the separate frames that compose it were studied by Tyrone Martinsson, who created this web version. Accessed on March 5, 2006.
• Andrzej M. Kobos "Orłem" do bieguna, a Polish-only site with many high-quality photos from the expedition. Accessed on March 5, 2006.

Gallery

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  The Eagle in the hangar.

Category:Arctic exploration Category:Ballooning