The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (29 page)

To determine where they were, they climbed the glacier, which was higher than it had appeared from the sea. In the afternoon they saw a bear coming in from the ice, but when it saw them it turned away. The birds plagued them, especially the gulls trying to steal their meat. “They fight, scream, and struggle,” Andrée wrote. “In their jealousy they no longer give the impression of innocent white doves, but of being outright beasts of prey.”

Despite the weather’s keeping them in the tent for nearly all of the eighth, they collected enough driftwood to lay the beams for their house. “It feels fine to sleep here on fast land as a contrast with the drifting ice out upon the ocean where we constantly heard the cracking, grinding, and din.”

Andrée concluded his last entry, “We shall have to gather driftwood and bones of whales”—for the house—“and will have to do some moving.”

The bones and the driftwood were collected; the house was never built.

Explorers kept diaries mainly to publish them. Even when they accepted that they weren’t going to return, they often wrote in the hope of the diaries’ being found and having their last thoughts known. Like the notes of some suicides, explorers’ diaries sometimes followed their subject to the moment he lost consciousness. Andrée’s last entry might have been only a prelude to a gap in his attentions. He might have felt that he needed to establish a shelter and that he would write when he had, the way Nansen interrupted his narrative. After all, there was little else to do but write while waiting for the winter to pass. Or something may have happened to weaken him or make him despair and give up.

When they died isn’t known, but they probably didn’t last much longer. The evidence of their provisions and belongings remaining in the boat suggests that they had never really established their camp. There was also the driftwood that had been gathered in a pile but not used. Strindberg’s diary has a final notation, for October 17, “Home 7:05 a.m.,” but it is made in ink, whereas all the other entries are in pencil. Ink freezes. A persuasive explanation offered by scholars is that Strindberg made the notation before they left, expecting to arrive home in Stockholm by train at 7:05 in the morning.

What killed them isn’t known either, or even if they died from the same cause. People thought lead poisoning from the metal cans might have done it. Or an accidental gunshot wound. A drowning after a fall through the ice while chasing a bear or looking for driftwood. Dehydration. A psychotic episode of murder. Suicide using opium. Scurvy, or trichinosis, or vitamin A poisoning from polar bear livers, which are rich in it, or maybe botulism. A polar bear attack, or asphyxiation caused by fumes from a cookstove in a tent that was covered with snow and therefore unventilated.

Murder and suicide are unlikely, since their spirits appeared to have held to the end. On none of their clothes were any bullet holes found, nor did the skulls have any. Andrée’s gun was beside him, and his back was against a wall, so it isn’t plausible that a polar bear crept up on him. Strindberg’s vest and shirt had tears on one shoulder, suggesting a polar bear attack, but the tears were more likely caused by the bear that separated his skull from his corpse. They knew about the danger of eating polar bear liver and avoided it. In the late 1990s, a fingernail was found in one of their mittens and tested for lead, and it turned out to have a lot of it, but not a sufficient amount to kill someone. Three months isn’t long enough to die from scurvy, and they would have recognized its symptoms, prominent among which are bleeding gums, sunken eyes, and severe fatigue. Also the fresh meat they ate should have been sufficient to protect them. Trichinosis, which is common in polar bears, is not likely, either, because the diaries mention none of the symptoms of a severe infection—muscle pain and fatigue especially. (The runs are a symptom of its onset, but theirs disappeared once they began eating bear fat.) Asphyxiation doesn’t seem probable, because Andrée had wrapped his first diary in sennegrass and placed it at his back, against the rock, a gesture that he would likely have been unable to make if he had lapsed abruptly into unconsciousness. Furthermore it is not entirely certain that Andrée and Fraenkel were both within the boundaries of the tent. Botulism is prevalent in Arctic seals and might have killed them if they hadn’t been able to cook their food properly, and there is a question of whether the bacteria responsible for it can prosper in such cold.

Perhaps they simply wore themselves out dragging three-and four-hundred-pound sledges on long days through the Arctic for nearly four months while often not having enough to eat. The sailors from the
Bratvaag
, seeing the woolen jerseys and cloth coats that the three men were wearing, decided that they had died of cold and exhaustion.

A peripheral mystery is the order of their deaths. It is generally assumed that Strindberg died first. His being the only one buried supports this notion, but Andrée felt responsible to Strindberg’s family for bringing him home safely. It may be that Fraenkel, to whom Andrée felt no special obligation, died first and that Andrée and Strindberg might have been planning to bury him when Strindberg died and Andrée had the strength only to bury him. Or Andrée might have died before having a chance to bury Fraenkel. Something about the shared nature of Andrée and Fraenkel’s deaths, however, their being found in similar postures of resignation, as if they had awaited their ends, and close to each other, suggests that the assumption that Strindberg died first is true.

Their ashes were buried in Stockholm on October 9, 1930. For years Gurli Linder had kept a flower in a vase by Andrée’s photograph. “Then you came to Stockholm,” she wrote. “The King himself was there to hold a speech of welcome. I attended with Greta and Signe”—her sisters—“It was strange. I did not actually feel anything. It was as if it was not you, as if it did not concern me. All that happened since became unreal and irrelevant.”

Andrée had kept Linder’s letters in a box. Atop them he placed a note, meant to be read when the box was opened. “Thanks my dear for all the happiness you have given,” he wrote. “Forgive me for all the pain you have got. Forget me, but not totally! Farewell! Farewell! Your truly devoted.”

Linder wrote, “I can still feel the pain I felt when you said, ‘You or the expedition—it must come first.’ ”

Who finally discovered the pole is disputed. Frederick Cook, an American, said he reached it on sledges, with two Inuits, in 1908, but he couldn’t prove it. Another American, named Robert Peary, said that he got there in 1909, but among his party, which included a black man from Maryland named Matthew Henson and four Inuit, he was the only one who could read navigational instruments. Also, as he closed on the pole, his sleds, according to his diary, went faster and faster, sometimes twice as fast as they had gone earlier in the approach. In addition Peary described traveling a straight path to the pole, whereas Henson said they had had to make detours around hummocks and leads. The first sighting of the pole no one quarrels with was made in 1926, when Roald Amundsen, who had been first to the South Pole, fifteen years earlier, flew over the North Pole in an airship, seeing it from exactly the vantage that would have been Andrée’s.

Oscar Strindberg died in 1905, not long after he had begun writing a book about Nils, in which he described him as his favorite son.

Nils Eckholm died in 1923. Early in the twentieth century he became known for expanding the ideas of Svante Arrhenius, Strindberg’s physics teacher, and predicting that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning coal would “undoubtedly cause a very obvious rise of the mean temperature of the earth.” Rather than be harmful, though, this circumstance would enable human beings to “regulate the future climate of the Earth,” Eckholm wrote, and prevent the arrival of the ice age that had been predicted by a respected Scottish scientist named James Croll.

Fridtjof Nansen died in May of 1930, a few months before Andrée was found on White Island. After his Arctic trip he became a statesman. Toward the end of his life he worked at the League of Nations, overseeing refugee rights, and in 1922 he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Adolphus Greely died in 1935. He retired from the army as a major general. There is a Greely Island in the Franz Josef Archipelago, which is now part of Russia, and a U.S. postage stamp, issued in 1986, which shows him with a full beard, more or less as he looked several days after he was rescued. So far as I can tell, no journalist sought him out to ask what he thought of Andrée’s being found. Enough years had passed that perhaps no one recalled his opposition to Andrée’s plan.

Anna Charlier died in 1949, having never reconciled herself to Strindberg’s disappearance and death. She had periods of illness and poor health and was in and out of hospitals and sanitariums. She once wrote of herself that she was “ill in body and soul.” Now and then she lived with Strindberg’s family. Oscar Strindberg wrote of her in 1900, “There are times when she is mourning, but she never torments anyone with her pain and despair.” Having watched her shaken by each episode of news about Andrée—by that time simply reports of a buoy being found, or a story emerging from the frontier—he wrote, “Her faith is cruel and hurts my heart … I cannot believe how brutal life sometimes can be.”

In 1901 Charlier lived in Switzerland, where she worked for a clockmaker, handling Swedish correspondence. Late in the year she went back to Stockholm and became godmother to Sven’s son, Ake. She continued to study piano and perform but had to stop frequently from illness. For a time she worked as a housekeeper.

After thirteen years Charlier married a saintly Englishman named Gilbert Hawtrey, who taught French at St. Paul’s School, in New Hampshire. At St. Paul’s she gave music classes, and on Saturday nights led a music club that met at her house. The students would discuss a different composer each week and sometimes play one of his works. Then they would have a meal characteristic of the country the composer was from. For Verdi they ate spaghetti, and for Wagner they had sauerkraut. A reminiscence in the school’s archives describes her as being “old and tottering but known in youth for her beauty. As a pianist, she had played in all the great concert halls of Europe.” In a window in the living room of the Hawtrey house was a stuffed pigeon with its wings spread.

On September 4, 1949, which would have been Strindberg’s seventy-seventh birthday, a few people gathered at his grave in Stockholm. Tore Strindberg held a small silver box, conveyed by Gilbert Hawtrey at his wife’s request.

“Anna could never forget her heart’s first love,” Tore said. “For her it stood as something sacred. And something broke within her during the latter years of her life—perhaps due to grief.

“When her worried life came to an end—and we remember with sadness the joyous dream of her youth, her musicality, in which her lively and warm intellect perhaps most clearly shone and through which a strong bond with Nils grew forth.”

The case was inscribed:

Ashes from near the heart of Anna Albertina Constancia Hawtrey

(nee Charlier)

to be placed near the grave of Nils Strindberg

to whom she was engaged in 1897

—and may the Great Conductor allow them both to share in the

Music of the Spheres.

“May peace be with her,” Tore said.

One winter I went with a friend to their grave, which occupies a hillside in a small park in Northern Cemetery. Pine trees enclose the grave on three sides. At the top of the hill is a monument, about twelve feet tall, designed by Tore. It is in the shape of a sail, set into layers of stone that approximate the prow of a ship cutting the water. Engraved on the sail is the route of their flight and the walk on the ice.

It has become fashionable in recent years, as attitudes have changed, to regard Andrée as willing to lead younger companions to their deaths if that was the price of fame and accomplishment. This theory is based on the belief, which isn’t easily supported, that Andrée knew that he couldn’t succeed and was too weak a figure to face the embarrassment, with all the world watching, of either calling off the expedition or sailing over the horizon and landing. Andrée was in early middle age, whereas Strindberg and Fraenkel were young. Fraenkel was not given to introspection—his journal entries were purely scientific—and he was chosen to be the packhorse. Strindberg’s nature was less hardy; he wept at leaving Stockholm and Charlier. Andrée was the resolute figure, and they must have trusted that he would see them through. Especially at this remove, he is an aloof, somewhat stern, even monumental figure. Someone who conducts a large degree of his life in his mind, someone not easily influenced or reasoned with. An enigma. He may have been a type more common to the nineteenth century, when fatal, visionary deeds were more frequently enacted on a grand scale, when such behavior was seated within a tradition of valor, commerce, and scientific inquiry. His purposes were deeply serious, and in none of his writing does the idea that he wanted to be famous for the sake of being famous ever appear, or that he regarded fame as something that would stabilize an insecure personality, or even that he had any vanity, other than the wish to have his example validated, to see balloons carry passengers and freight around the world and to places that couldn’t be reached by any other means.

Certainly there was a romantic element to his thinking, but if he was self-deluded or calculating, he agreed to suffer for it. The tone of his journals is of a man who believes that discipline and character can overcome formidable obstacles and that such efforts are what great accomplishments require.

An Andrée scholar named Urban Wrakberg defended Andrée in a paper called “Andrée’s Folly: Time for Reappraisal?” published by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in 1999. “The widespread notion that Andrée was an aspiring sensationalist and, intellectually, an isolated dreamer out of touch with the real polar science and technology of his period is distressingly close to the complete opposite of the reality,” Wrakberg wrote.