Read The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration Online

Authors: Alec Wilkinson

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Travel, #Adventure, #Biography, #History

The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration

BOOK: The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration
6.06Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Also by Alec Wilkinson
The Protest Singer (2009)
The Happiest Man in the World (2007)
Mr. Apology (2003)
My Mentor (2002)
A Violent Act (1993)
The Riverkeeper (1991)
Big Sugar (1989)
Moonshine (1985)
Midnights (1982)

This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Copyright © 2012 by Alec Wilkinson

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

A small portion of this book appeared, in significantly different form in
The New Yorker
.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Viking Penguin for permission to reprint an excerpt from
Andrée’s Story
by S. A. Andrée and Nils Strindberg and K. Fraenkel, translated by Edward Adams-Ray.
Copyright 1930 by Albert Bonniers Forlag & Hearst Enterprises Inc. Translation copyright © 1930 by Viking Press, Inc. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Images on
this page
,
this page
,
this page
,
this page
,
this page
,
this page
,
this page
,
this page
,
this page
,
this page
, and
this page
are Courtesy of the Grenna Museum, Sweden (
www.grennamuseum.se
) / The Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography. The map on
this page
is Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilkinson, Alec, [date]
The ice balloon : S. A. Andrée and the heroic age of arctic exploration / by Alec Wilkinson.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-95769-6
1. Andrée, Salomon August, 1854–1897. 2. Explorers—Sweden—Biography. 3. Balloon ascensions—Arctic regions. 4. Polar regions—Discovery and exploration. 5. Arctic regions—Discovery and exploration. I. Title.
G
7001897.
W
55 2011 910.911′3—dc23 2011025434

Cover photograph: The Andrée Expedition, July 14, 1897. Photo by Nils Strindberg.
Courtesy of the Grenna Museum, Sweden / The Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography

v3.1

For Sara Barrett
and
Sam Wilkinson

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Illustrations

A Note About the Author

1

In August of 1930, a Norwegian sloop, the
Bratvaag
, sailing in the Arctic Ocean, stopped at a remote island called White Island. The
Bratvaag
was partly on a scientific mission, led by a geologist named Dr. Gunnar Horn, and partly out sealing. On the second day, the sealers followed some walruses around a point of land. A few hours later, they returned with a book, which was sodden and heavy, and had its pages stuck together. The book was a diary, and on the first page someone had written in pencil, “The Sledge Journey, 1897.”

Horn rode to shore with the
Bratvaag
’s captain, who said that two sealers dressing walruses had grown thirsty and gone looking for water. By a stream, Horn wrote, they found “an aluminum lid, which they picked up with astonishment,” since White Island was so isolated that almost no one had ever been there. Continuing, they saw something dark protruding from a snowdrift—an edge of a canvas boat. The boat was filled with ice, but within it could be seen a number of books, two shotguns, some clothes and aluminum boxes, a brass boathook, and a surveyor’s tool called a theodolite. Several of the objects had been stamped with the phrase “Andrée’s Pol. Exp. 1896.” Near the boat was a body. It was leaning against a rock, with its legs extended, and it was frozen. On its feet were boots, partly covered by snow. Very little but bones remained of the torso and arms. The head was missing, and clothes were scattered around, leading Horn to conclude that bears had disturbed the remains.

He and the others carefully opened the jacket the corpse was wearing, and when they saw a large monogram A they knew whom they were looking at—S. A. Andrée, the Swede who, thirty-three years earlier, on July 11, 1897, had ascended with two companions in a hydrogen balloon to discover the North Pole.

Before the twentieth century, more than a thousand people tried to reach the pole, and according to an accounting made by an English journalist in the 1930s, at least 751 of them died. Only Andrée used a balloon. He had left on a blustery afternoon from Dane’s Island, in the Spitsbergen archipelago, six hundred miles from the pole. It took an hour for the balloon, which was a hundred feet tall, to disappear from the view of the people who were watching from the shore—carpenters, technicians, members of the Swedish navy who had assisted in the weeks leading up to the launch.

Two years of planning had led Andrée to predict that he would arrive at the pole in about forty-three hours. Having crossed it, he would land, maybe six days later, in Asia or Alaska, depending on the winds, and walk to civilization if he had to. Ideally, he said, and perhaps disingenuously, he would descend in San Francisco. To meet the dignitaries who would be waiting for him, he brought a tuxedo.

Every newspaper of substance in Europe and North America carried word of his leaving. The headline on the front page of the
New York Times
said, “Andrée Off for the Pole.” A British military officer called the voyage “The most original and remarkable attempt ever made in Arctic exploration.” For novelty and daring, the figure to whom he was most often compared was Columbus.

Then, having crossed the horizon, he vanished, the first person to disappear into the air.

It may be the strangest image in the annals of exploration—a dark gray orb in a white landscape. My wife found it in a slim English book from 1948 called
Ballooning
, by C. H. Gibbs-Smith, Companion Royal Aeronautical Society. The twenty-eight pages of text refer to prints, woodcuts, engravings, and photographs that range chronologically from “The First Public Balloon Ascent, Annonay, 1783,” to “World Altitude Record. 1935.” In between are “Death of Madame Blanchard, 1819” (fall from balloon); “An Alarming Experience in Gypson’s Balloon, 1847” (lightning); and “The ‘Zenith’ Tragedy, 1875” (crash). Plate 28 is the orb on its side, with two men contemplating it as if detectives sent to determine the circumstances.

All around the balloon is white from snow and ice, and the sky is white from fog, so there is no horizon, and only a fine line, which the balloon delineates, between the background and foreground. The photograph is not entirely in focus, which makes it appear to be more a print than a photograph, and so somehow obscurely unrealistic, or, on the other hand, realistic in an exaggerated way.

When my wife showed me the image, I assumed it was staged, a Victorian entertainment of some peculiar kind, a lark in an alien landscape, because a balloon couldn’t be where this one appeared to be any more than an airplane could be on the moon. And if it wasn’t a stunt, I could view it only with a sense of dread for the two men in it. Their craft is wrecked, the landscape is forbidding, and something about the static quality of their forms makes their situation seem utterly hopeless. The caption said, “Andrée’s balloon on the ice.” Who was Andrée, I wondered? How had he come to be standing beside this ruined contraption, and where was this forlorn place? What had he intended? And what happened to the men in the photograph? Had they made their way safely home? And if they hadn’t, how was it that this photograph existed?

BOOK: The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration
6.06Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Bama Boy by Sheri Cobb South
Sculpt-Paige_Michaels-Becca_Jameson by Becca Jameson and Paige Michaels
Thank You for Smoking by Christopher Buckley
Every Brilliant Eye by Loren D. Estleman
High Heels and Homicide by Kasey Michaels
Lori Austin by When Morning Comes