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.
In August 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton sailed from England aboard the Endurance to attempt the first crossing of the Antarctic continent, from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea by way of the South Pole. The expedition never set foot on the route. Yet of the 28 men aboard Endurance, not one died. The ship was beset in the Weddell Sea pack ice in January 1915, drifted helplessly for ten months, was crushed, and sank on 21 November 1915. The men then survived for almost a year on the ice and the sea — camping on drifting floes, sailing three open boats to Elephant Island, and watching as Shackleton and five others crossed 1,300 kilometres of the Southern Ocean in a 6.9-metre lifeboat to fetch help. It is the archetypal survival epic, and it is included here not as a disaster but as the rare counter-case: the doomed expedition whose people were not doomed.
The crossing itself was a total failure. The Endurance never reached the Antarctic mainland; the South Pole was never approached; the continent was not crossed until 1958, by a different expedition. By any measure of stated objective the expedition achieved nothing it set out to do. What it achieved instead was the preservation of every life under conditions that had killed comparable parties outright — the men of Greely, of the Jeannette, of Franklin. The difference was not luck alone. It was a sustained, deliberate refusal to let the party fracture, hoard, despair or split, enforced by a leader whose single surviving objective, once the ship was gone, was that everyone come home.
This account does not extend to the expedition’s other half. Shackleton’s plan required a second ship, Aurora, to lay supply depots from the Ross Sea side for a crossing party that never came; that Ross Sea party lost three men and is recorded under its own case file. On the Weddell Sea side — the Endurance and her 28 — the toll was zero, and the relevant question is how.
The Ross Sea party was the forgotten half of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914–17 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. While Shackleton attempted to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea, this second party, operating from the opposite Ross Sea coast under Captain Aeneas Mackintosh, was to lay a chain of supply depots southward across the Ross Ice Shelf to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, so that Shackleton’s crossing team would have food and fuel for the final stretch to McMurdo Sound. The depots were laid. The crossing never came: Shackleton’s ship Endurance was crushed in the Weddell Sea pack before his party ever set foot on the continent. Three men of the Ross Sea party died completing depots for a journey that no one would ever make. Of the men stranded on the Antarctic side, seven survived and three did not.
The party’s ordeal was compounded by the loss of its ship. On 7 May 1915 a gale tore the Aurora from her moorings off Cape Evans and drove her out to sea, locked in the pack, leaving ten men ashore with minimal supplies, clothing and equipment. Marooned, under-provisioned, and unaware that the crossing party would never come, those men nonetheless judged that lives depended on the depots being laid. They sledged south through two seasons, improvising clothing and gear, hauling loads in temperatures and conditions that broke their health, and completed the depot chain to Mount Hope at the foot of the Beardmore. The cost was severe: scurvy, frostbite, snow-blindness and exhaustion ground the men down on journeys lasting months.
Arnold Spencer-Smith, the expedition’s chaplain and photographer, collapsed with scurvy on the return from the farthest depots and died on the ice on 9 March 1916, carried on a sledge to the end. Two months later, on 8 May 1916, Mackintosh and Victor Hayward walked out from Hut Point toward Cape Evans across newly formed, unstable sea ice during a blizzard, against advice, and were never seen again — almost certainly drowned when the ice broke up. The survivors were rescued in January 1917 by the refitted Aurora, with Shackleton himself aboard. They learned that the depots they had nearly died to lay had been needed by no one. It remains one of polar history’s bleakest demonstrations of effort and sacrifice rendered futile by a failure half a continent away.