Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 was a failed Swedish attempt to reach the North Pole, resulting in the deaths of all three expedition members, S. A. Andrée, Knut Frænkel, and Nils Strindberg. Andrée proposed a voyage by hydrogen balloon from Svalbard to either Russia or Canada, which was to pass, with luck, straight over the North Pole on the way. The scheme was received with patriotic enthusiasm in Sweden, a northern nation that had fallen behind in the race for the North Pole.
Andrée ignored many early signs of the dangers associated with his balloon plan. Being able to steer the balloon to some extent was essential for a safe journey, but there was much evidence that the drag-rope steering technique he had invented was ineffective. Worse, the polar balloon Örnen (Eagle) was delivered directly to Svalbard from its manufacturer in Paris without being tested. When measurements showed it to be leaking more gas than expected, Andrée failed to acknowledge the risk.
After Andrée, Strindberg, and Frænkel lifted off from Svalbard in July 1897, the balloon lost hydrogen quickly and crashed on the pack ice after only two days. The explorers were unhurt but faced a grueling trek back south across the drifting icescape. Inadequately clothed, equipped, and prepared, and shocked by the difficulty of the terrain, they did not make it to safety. As the Arctic winter closed in on them in October, the group ended up exhausted on the deserted Kvitøya (White Island) in Svalbard and died there. For 33 years the fate of the expedition remained one of the unsolved mysteries of the Arctic. The chance discovery in 1930 of the expedition's last camp created a media sensation in Sweden, where the dead men had been mourned and idolized.
Andrée's motives and mindset have been the subject of extensive fictional and historical discussion, particularly inspired by his apparent foolhardiness. An early example is Per Olof Sundman's fictionalized bestseller novel of 1967, The Flight of the Eagle, which portrays Andrée as weak and cynical, at the mercy of his sponsors and the media. Modern writers have been generally critical of Andrée.
Background
Andrée's scheme
The second half of the 19th century has often been called the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. The inhospitable and dangerous Arctic and Antarctic regions appealed powerfully to the imagination of the age, not as lands with their own ecologies and cultures, but as challenges to be conquered by technological ingenuity and manly daring. Salomon August Andrée, an engineer at the patent office in Stockholm, shared these enthusiasms. A keen balloonist, Andrée proposed a plan for letting the wind propel a hydrogen balloon across the Arctic Sea to the Bering Strait, to fetch up in Alaska, Canada, or Russia, and passing near or even right over the North Pole on the way. It was also a period of governmental and popular enthusiasm for exploration, often at the service of imperial expansion.
In 1893, Andrée purchased his own balloon, the Svea, and subsequently made nine journeys with it, starting from either Stockholm or Gothenburg and traveling a combined distance of 1,500 kilometres (930 mi). In the prevailing westerly winds, the Svea flights had a strong tendency to carry him uncontrollably out to the Baltic Sea and drag his basket perilously along the surface of the water or slam it into one of the many rocky islets in the Stockholm archipelago. On one occasion, Andrée was blown clear across the Baltic to Finland. His longest trip was due east from Gothenburg, across the breadth of Sweden and out over the Baltic to Gotland. Even though Andrée saw a lighthouse and heard breakers off Öland, he remained convinced that he was traveling over land and seeing lakes.
During a couple of Svea flights, Andrée tested and tried out the drag-rope steering technique which he had developed and wanted to use on his projected North Pole expedition. 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 that 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 reported, and presumably believed, that with drag-rope steering he had succeeded in deviating about ten degrees either way from the wind direction.
This notion is rejected by modern balloonists; the Swedish Ballooning Association maintains that Andrée's belief that he had deviated from the wind was mistaken, being misled by inexpertise and a surfeit of enthusiasm in an environment of variable winds and poor visibility. Use of drag ropes—prone to snapping, falling off, or becoming entangled with each other or the ground, in addition to being ineffective—is not considered by any modern expert to be a useful steering technique.
The Arctic ambitions of Sweden were still unrealized in the late 19th century, while neighboring and politically subordinate Norway was a world power in Arctic exploration through such pioneers as Fridtjof Nansen. The Swedish political and scientific elite were eager to see Sweden take that lead among the Scandinavian countries which seemed her due, and Andrée, a persuasive speaker and fundraiser, found it easy to gain support for his ideas. At a lecture in 1895 for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Andrée thrilled the audience of geographers and meteorologists; a polar exploration balloon, he explained, would need to fulfill four conditions:
- It must have enough lifting power to carry three people and all their scientific equipment, advanced cameras for aerial photography, provisions for four months, and ballast, altogether about 3,000 kilograms (6,600 lb)
- It must retain the gas well enough to stay aloft for 30 days
- The hydrogen gas must be manufactured, and the balloon filled, at the Arctic launch site
- It must be at least somewhat steerable
Andrée gave a glowingly optimistic account of the ease with which these requirements could be met. 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. As for the hydrogen, filling the balloon at the launch site could easily be done with the help of mobile hydrogen manufacturing units; for the steering he referred to his own drag-rope experiments with Svea, stating that a deviation of 27 degrees from the wind direction could be routinely achieved.
Andrée assured the audience that Arctic summer weather was uniquely suitable for ballooning. 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 otherwise be a dangerous business. Neither would the balloon's buoyancy be adversely affected by the cold of the night. The drag-rope steering technique was particularly well adapted for a region where the ground, consisting of ice, was "low in friction and free of vegetation". He said that the minimal precipitation in the area posed no threat of weighing down the balloon. If some rain or snow did fall on the balloon, Andrée argued, "precipitation at above-zero temperatures will melt, and precipitation at below-zero temperatures will blow off, for the balloon will be traveling more slowly than the wind".
The audience was convinced by Andrée's arguments, so disconnected from the realities of the Arctic summer storms, fogs, high humidity, and the ever-present threat of ice formation on aircraft. The Royal Swedish Academy approved Andrée's expense calculation of 130,800 kronor in all, corresponding in today's money to just under US$1 million, of which the single largest sum, 36,000 kronor, was for the balloon. With this endorsement, there was a rush to support Andrée's project, headed by King Oscar II, who personally contributed 30,000 kronor, and Alfred Nobel, the dynamite magnate and founder of the Nobel Prize.
Andrée's proposed expedition also elicited considerable international interest, and the European and American newspaper-reading public was curious about a project that seemed as modern and scientific as the books of the contemporary author Jules Verne. The press fanned the interest with a wide range of predictions, from certain death for the explorers to a safe and comfortable "guidance" of the balloon (upgraded by the reporter to an "airship") to the North Pole in a manner planned by Parisian experts and Swedish scientists. "In these days, the construction and guidance of airships have been improved greatly", wrote the Providence, Rhode Island Journal, "and it is supposed, both by the Parisian experts and by the Swedish scientists who have been assisting M. Andree, that the question of a sustained flight, in this case, will be very satisfactorily answered by the character of the balloon, by its careful guidance and, providing it gets into a Polar current of air, by the elements themselves."
Faith in the experts and in science was common in the popular press, but with international attention came also for the first time informed criticism. Andrée being Sweden's first balloonist, no one had the requisite knowledge to second-guess him about buoyancy or drag-ropes; but both France and Germany had long ballooning traditions and several of their more experienced balloonists expressed skepticism about Andrée's methods and inventions.
However, just as with the Svea mishaps, all objections failed to dampen Andrée's optimism. Eagerly followed by national and international media, he began negotiations with the well-known aeronaut and balloon builder Henri Lachambre in Paris, the world capital of ballooning, and ordered a varnished three-layer silk balloon, 20.5 metres (67 ft) in diameter, from his workshop. The balloon, originally called Le Pôle Nord, was to be renamed Örnen (Eagle).
Special technical solutions had to be designed for the accommodations for three adults to be confined in a small balloon basket for up to 30 days. The sleeping berths for the crew were fitted at the floor of the basket, along with some of the stores and provisions. The highly flammable hydrogen meant that cooking could not be done in the basket itself. The solution was a modified primus stove—designed by a friend of Andrée's—that could be dangled eight metres (26 ft) below the crew and then lit from the basket, at a safe distance. An angled mirror attached to the specially designed stove allowed the crew to determine whether it was successfully lit or not.
First expedition
For his 1896 attempt to launch the balloon, Andrée had many eager volunteers to choose from. He picked Nils Gustaf Ekholm, an experienced Arctic meteorological researcher and formerly his boss during an 1882–1883 geophysical expedition to Spitsbergen, and Nils Strindberg, a brilliant student who was doing original research in physics and chemistry. The main scientific purpose of the expedition was to map the area by means of aerial photography, and Strindberg was both a devoted amateur photographer and a skilled constructor of advanced cameras.
This was a team with many useful scientific and technical skills, but lacking any particular physical prowess or training for survival under extreme conditions. All three men were indoor types, and only one, Strindberg, was young. Andrée expected a sedentary voyage in a balloon basket, and strength and survival skills were not considered to be important.
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 or snow sticking to the balloon to weigh it down.
In the attempt of 1896, the wind battered Andrée's optimism by blowing steadily from the north, straight at the balloon hangar at Danes Island, Svalbard, 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 Danes Island; but in the late 19th century, information on Arctic airflow and precipitation existed only as contested academic hypotheses. Even Ekholm, an Arctic climate researcher, had no objection to Andrée's theory of where the wind was likely to take them. The observational data simply did not exist.
On the other hand, Ekholm was skeptical of the balloon's ability to retain hydrogen, from his own measurements. His buoyancy checks in the summer of 1896, during the process of producing the hydrogen and pumping it into the balloon, convinced him that the balloon leaked too much gas to ever reach the Pole, let alone go on to Russia or Canada. The worst leakage came from the approximately eight million tiny stitching holes along the seams, which no amount of glued-on strips of silk or applications of special secret-formula varnish seemed to seal.
The balloon was losing 68 kilograms (150 lb) of lift force per day. Taking into account its heavy load, Ekholm estimated that it would be able to stay airborne for 17 days at most, not 30. When it was time to go home, he warned Andrée that he would not take part in the next attempt, scheduled for summer 1897, unless a stronger, better-sealed balloon was bought. Andrée resisted Ekholm's criticisms to the point of deception. On the boat back 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.