The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (30 page)

I think this is true, with qualifications. It takes nothing from Andrée’s courage or daring to observe that while planning his voyage he seemed susceptible to self-persuasion. Fog and shadows caused problems for balloons, but the Arctic was as big as Europe, he said, and just as Europe was not permanently fogbound, the Arctic was not either. Then clouds and fog forced his balloon to the ice. Once he landed he was a man with a desk job trying to cross a landscape as punishing and inhospitable as any in the world. Fraenkel and Strindberg had a little experience in wild places, but the three of them had drawn up no plans for a march and had not practiced for one either. They hauled 300-and 400-pound sledges, when British sledgers, the best in the world, recommended 200 as a maximum, and Nansen’s crewmember, having tried briefly to haul 250, said that a man might as well give up as make the attempt. And they managed it for nearly three months, wearing down all the while like watch-springs.

The assertion, not infrequently made, that Andrée lacked the courage to call the whole thing off is not, I think, accurate. There is no evidence that he cared how people regarded him. After returning from Spitsbergen in 1896 he made no remarks that suggested he felt compromised by what people thought of his courage, even though the papers compared him rudely to Nansen. Perhaps his force of will protected him from embarrassment—or the narrowness of his focus. He was a man who didn’t put aside his plans if other people didn’t agree with them.

I don’t think he left because he was afraid not to. I think he left because he could no longer imagine not leaving. I think the desire to see if the balloon could do all that he was convinced that it could, plus the urge to discover the pole and settle the mystery of what was actually there, overpowered him, like a temptation one finally submits to. I think he couldn’t have lived with himself if he had turned around, not because he would have questioned his nerve or his resolve or would have been self-conscious about facing people as Andrée-who-had-backed-down, but because, having had everything prepared and all obstacles dismantled, he wouldn’t have been able to live peacefully without having taken the chance, without having stepped off into the unknown. Quietly, and without intending to, even while his attention was elsewhere, he’d undergone a species of conversion. Whereas he had first approached the task as a scientist, a disengaged engineer, aloof from the romance of the pole, he had become as zealous and wild-eyed as any fanatic who went off toward the unfound places. He had, in his way, been overtaken. To turn back might be to lose the chance forever, given how difficult it might have been to raise money for a third attempt, and the lost chance at the big deed is what I think he couldn’t have borne. Certainly the expedition had collected its own momentum, but the part that I think pushed him forward was behind his eyes, not in front of them.

In the Andrée Museum in Gränna, where the relics of the expedition reside, there are three watches, one with a smashed dial, one stopped at 12:02, and one stopped at 7:31. In other cabinets are their clothes and many of their scientific instruments. Viewing stains on the side of the boat, one can imagine the gestures that might have caused them. There are cracks in the floorboards and the leather pieces, and knots that were tied by their hands.

There are photographs of the remains on tables in the examining room at the hospital. So little is left of one of them that he looks only like a collection of rags. Another has one leg. Both useless relics and the bodies of heroes, they lie in an unadorned room with a clawfoot tub in the background.

In another cabinet at the museum is a film can. On the side of the can is a notice from the manufacturer:

A Suggestion. To avoid the possibility of allowing the film to grow old on your hands, paste the attached gummed slip in the front of your Kodak or on your roll holder. At least put it where it can be seen occasionally and can be readily referred to.

—Eastman Kodak Company.

Caution. This film should be used before January 1st, 1898.

The bulk of the rolls had been exposed, but ninety-three frames, taken mostly by Strindberg, were developed although many are only faintly legible.

Strindberg had a better than typical eye for composition—he had won a photography contest once. These were scientific men on a mission, though, and they weren’t recording their moods or the scenery. Nevertheless there is a suggestion that Strindberg was taking note of a landscape that no one but they had ever seen, and the creatures that they encountered. Strindberg appears to have stopped taking photographs sometime before the end (there is no photograph of the icehouse, for example), suggesting that he could no longer bring himself to believe that he would live, or that the making of records of the trip became less important than the labor to survive.

One photograph shows Fraenkel and Andrée standing over a polar bear one of them had shot. The camera had a time exposure, so Strindberg was able to take a picture of the three of them trying to force a sledge through a gap in the ice. There is a photograph of a shot ivory gull with its wings spread and nailed to a plank, and of the fork that Andrée made from heavy wire for Fraenkel because the polar bear meat was often so tough that it bent the forks they had. The most desolate of the images was taken on July 14, when Strindberg walked about a hundred feet off on the ice and pointed the camera at the balloon, which was on its side, with the cab tipped over and Andrée and Fraenkel beside it. The black and white and the shades of gray within the photographs are weak and watery, and the figures insubstantial, leading everyone who sees them to think, They already look like ghosts.

After I got back from Sweden, I wondered what the Swedish Pavilion at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia had looked like, the one where Andrée had been the janitor. When I found a photograph of it I was astonished, because it was a building that I have passed nearly every day for almost twenty years. It was a tech-built house, the first, designed to replicate a Swedish country schoolhouse. After the fair it was taken down, and put up in Central Park, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near Seventy-ninth Street. For years it was a toolshed used by the park’s gardener, and then it was a bathroom until a Swedish American citizens’ organization objected. Since 1947 it has been a place where a puppet troupe gives performances and has its offices—it is called the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre.

From the outside the building probably looks more or less as it did in Philadelphia in 1876—dark-stained wood, with a certain amount of fancy scrollwork along the eaves. One of the two big rooms downstairs is the theater and, sitting there on a low bench, it is easy to imagine a tall, slender young man sweeping the floor, lost in thinking about the currents of the air and having no idea how he will die.