Sweden and Norway have experienced historical episodes of rivalry, such as the struggle to reach the polar regions in the second half of the 19th century. The 86 degrees and 14 minutes north latitude that the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen reached in 1893 aboard the ship Fram hammered the conscience of the Swedish engineer Salomon August Andrée, so he set out to beat that mark with a trip to the North Pole itself… in a balloon
Andrée, who at the age of 43 was already a renowned aeronaut in his country, was convinced that the floating ice and pack ice that surrounded the North Pole were impassable by boat, and that the key to reaching the crown of the planet was to do so in an aerostat. of hydrogen, which in the last decade of the 19th century was the only vehicle that could fly through the skies with some reliability.
He chose volunteers Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel, and each one was assigned a specific scientific mission. Strindberg was a 24-year-old, college intellectual, and talented photographer who took home a camera he built himself. Fraenkel, 27, was a civil engineer and an excellent athlete. His task on the expedition would be to write down all the meteorological observations.
The balloon, an artifact of more than 20 meters in diameter and about 4,500 cubic meters, was built in Paris. He was baptized as Örnen (“eagle” in Swedish) and transferred in 1896 to Danskøya, a small island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, in the Arctic Ocean. It was inflated with a hydrogen generator, waiting for the long-awaited south winds to blow.
In a journey of about 30 days of flight, the winds had to push the aerostat through the Arctic, allowing it to cross the ice pack and the North Pole to land somewhere in Siberia, Canada or Alaska. The first problem was the absence of those southerly winds, which led to the cancellation of the flight. The game would not take place until a year later.
Andrée was considered by many to be a puppet and his company to be a fantasy out of an adventure novel. The great French balloonist Gaston Tissandier, despite the fact that he agreed to technically supervise the manufacture of the balloon, was convinced that the expedition was doomed to failure.
The Frenchman had serious doubts about the impermeability of the aerostat and believed that the gas leaks would prevent it from staying in the air for more than three days. Impossible, then, that he could stay for thirty or more, as Andrée had foreseen.
But the Swede was not only an intrepid spirit with a thirst for glory, but also a skillful orator with the ability to persuade. To finance his trip, he managed to convince a good handful of influential personalities. Among them, he was offered patronage by the King of Sweden Óscar II and the magnate inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel.
Arrived on July 11, 1897, in the Danskøya hangar, the sailors cut the moorings and the Örnen undertook the journey… in a rather bumpy way. More than an eagle, the aerostat resembled a chicken trying to take flight. The balloon began to rotate around its vertical axis and at the same time began to descend sharply until the gondola collided with the surface of the water. The expedition members released a lot of ballast and Örnen finally came up.
On board they had all kinds of equipment and provisions to survive for three and a half months: a tent, three sleds, a collapsible boat, rifles and ammunition, cans of preserves, punch, beer bottles, champagne (to celebrate the arrival at the Pole Norte) and Porto… To communicate with the outside world, they had several homing pigeons, as well as twelve conical cork buoys (in which to deposit messages to be thrown overboard) and another larger one with the Swedish flag. They were to throw it as it passed over the North Pole.
The least known part of the Örnen’s story corresponds to the flight itself and the subsequent walk of the expedition members through the ice floes. Only two of the messages were located on buoys, while of the four or more pigeons they sent, only one was managed to catch a Norwegian steamer on which it had perched. With the information collected from them and the meteorological data and notes found in the crew’s diaries, it has been possible to partially reconstruct the events.
After losing most of the tow ropes, Örnen began to move at wind speed, leaving the Svalbard archipelago behind. The expedition members exuded optimism. The sun was hot, despite the fact that the thermometer indicated only one degree Celsius. Gas periodically escaped, hissing and hissing from the bottom valve of the casing; nothing exceptional.
They had some sandwiches and opened a bottle of beer that they passed from hand to hand. When they threw anything into the void, the balloon rose slightly. The same thing happened when they climbed the charging ring to satisfy their physiological needs.
Hours passed while Örnen flew at an altitude of about 600 meters. The crew members barely had room to move freely. Sleeping was also an ordeal: at the bottom of the gondola there was a tiny cabin in which two people could barely fit stretched out.
Soon they looked to the north for the first ice floes. The sun gradually faded as the Örnen began to slide aimlessly through thickening banks of fog that obscured all visibility. They always advanced surrounded by a blinding white light in a world without nights, in which summer is a single day of several months.
But the initial heat suddenly turned into a damp cold, a climate that was very different from the summer that Andrée had anticipated. Shortly before midnight on 11/12 July, Örnen entered a gigantic cloud bank and the temperature dropped sharply. Then the longer guideline began to slip on the ice, slowing the balloon.
The Örnen’s canvas absorbed a surprising amount of moisture, which also permeated the clothing of the expedition members. In addition, it endangered the buoyancy of the balloon, which was maintained with difficulty at about 100 meters, losing hydrogen and ascent force. The repeated threat of crashing into the ice led the crew to drop almost all of their ballast and some baggage, including the Swedish flag buoy.
The balloon was inevitably overloaded: moisture and ice could weigh, without exaggeration, close to a ton. The winds weren’t helping either, and the Örnen drifted as it pleased. Finally, after little more than three days of flight, the Swedes dropped anchor and prepared to land on the ice.
A week after landing, the expedition members began a tortuous march across the ice. In the imagination of the three Swedes, the 86 degrees north latitude reached by the Norwegian Nansen were already unattainable. At least they were able to enjoy a good rest in the first days on dry land.
They abandoned the unnecessary with the balloon and chartered the three sleds, each with loads that could exceed 200 kilograms. First they dragged them. Later, when the landscape was plagued with icebergs in all directions, they were forced to load the sleds in the boat and take advantage of the water channels, passing from one iceberg to another.
Particularly fragile areas stretched among the snow, thin layers of ice that cracked as you walked, which was equivalent to falling into the water and getting completely soaked. Every night – if you can talk about such a thing in the arctic summer – they took refuge in the tent and, with an oil stove, tried to dry the clothes. In the end they gave up and moved forward with their clothes always down.
Choosing the direction was a headache, since along the way the ice drifted in different directions. After loading the sledges, they chose to march towards the Seven Islands spread out in front of Spitzberg. The journey lasted for almost three months. They survived on the preserves they still kept and on the meat of the bears they hunted with their rifles. At the end of summer the nights appeared and an incipient darkness was imposing itself on the light.
To withstand the drop in temperatures they decided to forgo the tent and build an ice and snow shelter (the plan designed by Strindberg was found). It was twelve feet wide and nearly twenty feet long.
In the end, the iceberg on which they had camped broke, the water entered the shelter and a crack several meters wide was formed at the entrance. They had collided with Kvitøya, an island in the Svalbard archipelago. The island was not far, but it took them a long time to get the sledges to shore. A few days after arriving, Strindberg, exhausted, died. His companions managed to bury him among the rocks. But neither did they last much longer. His adventure had, three months after the departure, a tragic end.
Thirty-three years later, in 1930, a Norwegian vessel engaged in sealing and scientific exploration found the remains of Andrée and Strindberg along with their personal journals. Another ship, chartered by journalists, soon found Fraenkel’s body and Strindberg’s photographic film, kept in a metal box.
This text is part of an article published in number 472 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
