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 May 1596 the Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz set out on his third Arctic voyage, seeking a northeast passage over the top of Russia to the riches of Asia. The ship, captained by Jacob van Heemskerck with Barentsz as chief pilot, was trapped in the ice off the northeastern coast of Novaya Zemlya — Nova Zembla — in the late summer of 1596 and could not be freed. The party of 17 was forced to overwinter on the Arctic shore, building a timber lodge they called Het Behouden Huys, the Saved House, from the wreckage of their own ship. It was the first time Europeans are known to have survived a winter in the high Arctic. When the ice still held the ship the following June, the survivors abandoned it and set out south in two small open boats. Five men died, including Barentsz himself, who succumbed on 20 June 1597, days into the boat journey. Twelve survived to reach the Russian mainland and, eventually, Amsterdam.
The voyage failed at its object: there was no navigable northeast passage at that latitude, and the route to Asia was not found then or for centuries. What the expedition achieved instead was the demonstration — paid for with five lives and a winter of bears, cold and scurvy — that the polar night was survivable, and a meticulous written record of how. The carpenter Gerrit de Veer kept a journal that became one of the most famous accounts in the history of exploration, the first detailed European description of an Arctic overwintering, from the building of the house to the day Barentsz died.
The expedition is remembered chiefly through that record and through the Saved House itself, which stood frozen on the Novaya Zemlya coast for nearly three centuries until a Norwegian expedition rediscovered it in 1871, its contents — clocks, books, tools, the men’s possessions — preserved by the cold almost exactly as they had left them. Barentsz did not return, but his name endures on the sea he charted at the cost of his life, the Barents Sea.
On 25 May 1928 the Italian semi-rigid airship Italia, commanded by the engineer-general Umberto Nobile, crashed onto the Arctic pack ice roughly 120 kilometres northeast of Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago, while returning from the North Pole. Of the sixteen men aboard, ten were thrown onto the ice when the control gondola struck and shattered; one of them, the mechanic Vincenzo Pomella, was killed on impact. The other six were carried away inside the still-buoyant envelope, which rose, drifted off, and was never found. The survivors on the ice — several injured, including Nobile with a broken leg and arm — salvaged a radio, a tent and some food, and waited. The rescue that followed lasted seven weeks and cost more lives than the crash itself, including that of Roald Amundsen, the most accomplished polar explorer of the age, who disappeared while flying out to search for the men he had quarrelled with two years before.
The Italia was the climax of a brief, doomed enthusiasm for reaching the poles by airship. Nobile had already flown over the North Pole in 1926 aboard the Norge, an expedition led by Amundsen on which the two men had clashed bitterly over credit. The Italia was Nobile’s own command, an Italian state-backed bid to repeat and surpass that flight with scientific observations. It reached the Pole on 24 May 1928 but could not land in the wind, turned back, and was forced down by icing and a loss of control on the return leg — a triumph turned, in hours, into a survival ordeal on a drifting floe, watched by the world over the new medium of shortwave radio.
The death toll falls into two ledgers. The crash and its aftermath killed Pomella, the six men in the lost envelope, and Malmgren, who died on the ice during a desperate march for help. The rescue itself killed others: Amundsen and the five men of his French flying-boat crew vanished without trace, and further rescuers died in crashes. Eight of the original sixteen survived, lifted off by the Soviet icebreaker Krasin and by aircraft. The episode ended the age of polar airships, ruined Nobile’s reputation in Fascist Italy for two decades, and became a lasting study in how a rescue, badly coordinated and driven by competing nations and egos, can multiply a disaster rather than contain it.