Three Men Tried to Fly a Hot Air Balloon to the North Pole. The Journey Went Horribly Wrong.

4 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:In 1897, two engineers and a photographer took off for a hot air balloon voyage to the North Pole, determined to be the first balloon team to make it to the planet’s northernmost point.The balloon crashed to the frozen ground much sooner than they anticipated, leaving them to find a way to survive in a frigid, perilous landscape.It appeared the men and their camp vanished, until hunters discovered their bodies in 1930, but unfortunately, their causes of death still remain inconclusive.Launching his hot air balloon from Danes Island on July 11, 1897, Salomon August Andrée waved from the clouds as he ascended higher and higher. He seemed to fear nothing. Andrée was an accomplished Swedish mechanical engineer, physicist, aeronaut, and explorer determined to make it to the North Pole, joined by engineer Knut Frænkel and photographer Nils Strindberg. The failure of a previous balloon expedition, during which he was forced to turn back, hardly daunted him. He and his companions were going to trek to the North Pole and return alive.Andrée was a dreamer but far from inexperienced. He had previously gone to Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago off the coast of Norway, to observe the flow of electrical currents in the air, and had published his findings from this and other research in several scientific journals. However, the polar expedition was a far greater risk, and his lofty ambitions soon came crashing down.He had flown a balloon before and this one, the Örnen (which translates to “eagle”) was his own design. However, it wasn’t long into the trio’s journey over the Arctic that the Örnen faced treacherous winds and rain that froze into ice. Andrée had devised a maneuver that involved sliding ropes across the ice to steer the airborne balloon, that ultimately failed. Throwing provisions overboard lightened the payload, but not for long. Soon, the balloon descended to the icy surface and the crew found themselves stranded in an expanse of stark white nothingness.Through his camera lens, Strindberg captured the balloon floundering on ice like a bloated whale carcass, as well as a scene with Frænkel and Andrée scrambling to gather all the equipment and supplies they could possibly carry, with their skeletal impromptu camp in the background. Frænkel was an athlete who had no issues pulling a heavy sledge. The three men consulted their charts and set off to find signs of civilization at Cape Flora on Franz Joseph Island, though it was nowhere in sight at around 200 miles away. They fought powerful winds and constantly shifting ice floes that kept taking them west when they were headed east. Snowblind, often soaked through, and suffering from diarrhea after eating half-cooked polar bear meat, they struggled to make it through the slush and melt pools of an Arctic summer. Reaching Cape Flora was far from a certainty.After the men spent months dragging sledges, hunting for food, treating a growing list of injuries, and sleeping huddled under reindeer skins in a single tent made of balloon silk, their expedition had not made much progress. Raging water smashed the makeshift shelter one night and carried off most of their provisions. Andrée had been keeping a diary this entire time. His handwriting on the pages gradually thinned out as summer turned to fall and the Arctic was no longer the Land of the Midnight Sun. As the days shortened, Andrée, Frænkel, and Strindberg (who wanted to believe he would see his fiancée Anna again), weakened. The final pages of Andrée’s journal, recovered from the campsite years later, were fragmented and heavily water-stained, smearing the words. He had finally been forced to accept an inevitable fate.“We think that we can well face death, having done what we have done,” Andrée wrote on one of its last pages. “Shall we be thought mad?”What ultimately happened to the expedition remained buried in the snow for 33 years. In August 1930, Norwegian walrus hunters on Kvitoya, another island in the Svalbard Archipelago, dug through the snow and exposed what was left of Andrée’s camp. The site also served as a grave for Frænkel and Andrée, whose remains had been mostly frozen under layers of ice and partly scattered in the snow by scavenging animals. Later, a recovery team found Strindberg’s skeleton, with leather boots still on, wedged into a rock crevice. What was especially haunting about Strindberg’s remains were slashes on the leg of his pants that were deep enough to rip through the long johns underneath. It is now thought that he may have lost his life in a polar bear attack, and the other men wasted away from illness and injury.Despite the hypotheses, the actual causes of death for Andrée, Frankel, and Strindberg have never been determined and are unlikely to be. Their bodies were cremated shortly after being unburied. When scientists examined some of the polar bear meat that had gone uneaten, they found evidence of parasitic worms. Undercooked meat may have been the cause of potentially deadly diarrhea. With diary entries referencing multiple polar bear attacks, it is entirely possible the claws of a hungry bear gave Strindberg a fatal blow, but whether illness, injury, or hypothermia claimed the lives of the three men will never be certain, remaining a mystery forever frozen in the ice.Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.