Andrée’s Arctic Balloon Expedition — three men flew north into the ice and never came back

In July 1897 the Swedish engineer Salomon August Andrée tried to reach the North Pole by hydrogen balloon, lifting off from Danskøya (Danes Island) in Svalbard with two younger companions, the physicist and photographer Nils Strindberg and the engineer Knut Frænkel. All three died. The balloon, named Örnen (Eagle), stayed aloft for only about two and a half days before settling onto the pack ice on 14 July, roughly 300 miles short of the Pole. The men then walked and dragged sledges south across the drifting, breaking ice for nearly three months, reached the uninhabited island of Kvitøya in early October, and died there within days. Their fate was unknown for 33 years.

The expedition was a wager on a single unproven technology. Andrée had convinced the Swedish establishment — and the financier Alfred Nobel and King Oscar II among his backers — that a balloon equipped with sails and trailing drag-ropes could be steered across the polar basin in a few days, bypassing the years of man-hauling that had defeated every surface expedition. The drag-rope steering system did not work. It rested on a mistaken theory of how a balloon could be made to deviate from the wind, and during the launch much of the rope gear tore away, leaving the Eagle an ordinary balloon at the mercy of the wind almost from the start.

What happened afterward was reconstructed only because the men kept meticulous diaries and Strindberg kept photographing to the end. On 5 August 1930 the Norwegian sealing ship Bratvaag, hunting walrus off the long-ignored Kvitøya, stumbled on the last camp: a boat, bones, journals, and Strindberg’s exposed film, frozen and preserved for a third of a century. Some 93 of roughly 240 negatives were salvaged and developed in Stockholm. The recovered diaries and photographs make Andrée’s the rare doomed expedition that documented its own slow death almost to the final day, and the cause of that death — trichinosis from polar-bear meat, cold, exhaustion, or some combination — remains debated to this day.