In the spring of 1900 a report reached Berlin that Andrée and his party had been killed by Eskimos in upper Canada, when they descended from the clouds and started to shoot caribou. But why go into details? Month after month came other reports of all kinds, most of them of similar import. They came from all points, beginning at Kamtchatka and running around the world to the Alaskan side of Bering Strait, and they were all more or less fiction.
Finally, in the spring of 1902, came the masterpiece. A long dispatch from Winnipeg announced that C. C. Chipman, head commissioner of the Hudson’s Bay Company, had received from Fort Churchill, the northernmost outpost of the company, several letters from the local factor, Ashtond Alston, in which the sad fate of Doctor Andrée and his comrades was contained. The news had been received at Fort Churchill from wandering Eskimos. It was to the effect that a tribe of outlaw mushers, up beyond the Barren Islands, had seen a great ship descend from the sky and had followed it many miles till it settled on the ice. Three men had got out and displayed arms. The savage hunters, totally unacquainted with white men, and far less with balloons, believed the intentions of the trio to be hostile and attacked them, eventually killing all with their bows and arrows, though the white men were armed with repeating rifles and put up a good fight. There were many other confirmatory details in the report. The mushers were found with modern Swedish rifles and with cooking and other utensils salvaged from the wrecked balloon.
These reports led the late William Ziegler to write to the commissioner of the Hudson’s Bay Company for confirmation, with the result that the story was at once exploded in these words:
“There is no probability of there being any truth in the report regarding the supposed finding of Andrée’s balloon. The chief officer of the company on the west coast of Hudson’s Bay who himself interviewed the natives on the matter, has reported as his firm conviction that the natives who are said to have seen the balloon imposed upon the clerk at Churchill, to whom the story was given. The sketches of the balloon which the company has been careful to distribute throughout northern Canada naturally gave occasion for much talk among these isolated people, and it is not greatly to be wondered at that some such tale might be given out by natives peculiarly cunning and prone to practice upon the credulity of those not familiar with them, or easily imposed upon.”
But the imagination of the world was nothing daunted by such cold douches of fact, and more reports of Andrée’s death, of his survival in the igloos of detached tribes, of the finding of his camps, of his balloon, of parts of his equipment, of the skeletons of his party, and of many fancies came down from the northern sectors of the world, season after season. There was a great revival of these yarns in 1905, once more due to some imaginative Eskimo tale spinners, and in 1909, twelve years after Andrée’s flight, there was an even more belated group of rumors, all centering about the fact that one Father Turquotille, a Roman Catholic missionary residing at Reindeer Lake, and often making long treks farther into the arctic, had found a party of nomadic natives in possession of a revolver and some rope, which fact they explained to him by telling the story of the Andrée balloon, which was supposed to have landed somewhere in their territory. The good priest reported what he had been told to Bishop Pascal, of Prince Albert, and that worthy ecclesiastic transmitted the report to Ottawa, whence it was spread broadcast. But Father Turquotille, after having made a special journey to confirm the rumors, was obliged to discredit them. And so another end to gossip.
Thus it happens that there is to-day, more than thirty years after that heroic launching out from Danes Island, after the pole has long been attained, and all the regions of the Far North traversed back and forth by countless expeditions and hunting parties, no sure knowledge of Andrée’s fate. All that is absolute is that he never returned, and all that can be asserted as beyond reasonable doubt is that he and his companions perished somewhere in the North. The probabilities are more interesting, though they cannot be termed more than inductions from the scattered bits of fact.
The chief matters of evidence are the buoys, which were picked up from time to time between the spring of 1899 and the late summer of 1912, when the Norwegian steamer Beta, outward bound on September 1st, from Foreland Sound, Spitzbergen, put into Tromsoe on the fourteenth, with Andrée’s buoy No. 10, which had been picked up on the eighth in the open ocean. This buoy, like all the others, except the one already described, was empty and had its top unsecured. It rests with the others in the royal museum at Stockholm. When Andrée flew from Danes Island he took twelve of these buoys, eleven small ones, which he expected to drop as each succeeding degree of latitude was crossed, and one larger float, which was to be dropped in triumph at the North Pole. This biggest buoy was picked up in the closing months of 1899, and identified by experts at Stockholm, who had witnessed the preparation for the flight. In all, seven of these floats have been retrieved from the northern seas.
We know that Andrée dropped one buoy on the morning of July 12, 1897, less than sixteen hours from his base, and that he liberated a pigeon on the following night, after an elapsed time of about fifty-five hours. At that time he had attained 82.20 degrees northern latitude and 15.5 degrees eastern longitude. Since Danes Island lies above the seventy-ninth parallel, and in about 12 degrees of eastern longitude, the balloon had drifted about three degrees north and three east in fifty-five hours, a distance of roughly three hundred and fifty miles, as the crow flies. His net rate of progress toward the pole was thus no better than seven to eight miles an hour, and he was being carried northeast instead of northwest, as he had calculated. Evidently he was disillusioned as to the correctness of his theories before he was far from his starting point.
The recovered buoys offer mute testimony to what must have happened thereafter. When the big North Pole buoy was brought back to Sweden, the great explorer Nansen shook his head in dismay and said the emptiness of the receptacle was a sign portentous of disaster. Andrée would never have cast his largest and best buoy adrift, except in an emergency, or until he had reached the pole, in which case it would surely have contained a message. Nansen felt that the buoy had been thrown overboard as ballast, when the ship seemed about to settle into the sea. But even then, it would seem, Andrée would have scribbled some message and put it into the float, had there been time.
The fact that this main buoy and five others were picked up, with their tops unfastened and barren of the least scrap of writing, seems to argue that some sudden disaster overtook the balloon and its horrified passengers. Either it sprang a leak and dropped so rapidly toward the sea or an ice floe, that everything was thrown out in an attempt to arrest its fall, or there was an explosion, and the whole great air vessel, with all its human and mechanical freight, was dropped into the icy seas. In that case the unused buoys would have floated off and been found scattered about the northern ocean, while the explorer and his men must have met the fate he had so briefly described—“drowned.”