Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

Even so, they had not by long anticipated Doctor Andrée. His first inquiries into the possibility of such a flight had been made in the course of a voyage to the United States in 1876 to visit the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia. On shipboard he had made numerous observations of the winds and air currents, which led him to the belief that there was a general suction or drift of air toward the pole from the direction of the northern coast of Europe and from the pole southward along the Siberian or Alaskan coasts.

With this belief in mind, Andrée had gone back to Sweden and begun a series of experiments in ballooning. He built various gas bags and made a considerable number of voyages in them, on several occasions with nearly fatal results. Mishaps, however, did not daunt him, and he became, in the course of the following twenty years, perhaps the best versed aëronaut on earth. He was not, of course, an ordinary balloonist, but a scientific experimenter, busy with an attempt to work out a serious, and to him a practical, problem. In the early nineties Andrée succeeded in making a flight of four hundred kilometers in a comparatively small balloon, and it was on the observations taken in the course of this voyage that he based mathematical calculations which formed his guide in the polar undertaking.

If, as I have said, the first public announcement of the Andrée project was received by the rank and file of men as an entertaining, but impossible, speculation, there was a rapid change of mind in the course of the following months. News came that Andrée had opened a subscription for funds, and that the hundred thousand dollars he believed necessary had been quickly provided by the enthusiastic members of the Swedish Academy of Science, by King Oscar from his private purse, and by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of nitroglycerin and provider of the prizes which bear his name. Evidently this fellow meant business.

In the late spring of 1896 Andrée and a party of scientists and workmen, including two friends who had decided to make the desperate essay with him, sailed from Gothenburg in the little steamer Virgo for Spitzbergen. They had on board a balloon made by Lachambre of Paris, the foremost designer of that day, with a gas capacity of more than six thousand cubic meters, the largest bag which had been constructed at that time. The gas container was of triple varnished silk, and there was a specially designed gondola, whose details are of surviving interest.

This compartment, in which three men hoped to live through such temperatures as might be expected in the air currents fanning the North Pole, was made of wicker, covered outside with a rubberized canvas and inside with oiled silk, these two substances being considered capable of making the big basket practically air and weather proof. The gondola was about six and one half feet long inside and about five feet wide. It contained a sleeping mattress for one, with provision for a second bed, though the plan was to keep two of the three men constantly on deck, while the third took two hours of sleep at a time. This basket was covered, to be sure, the top having a trapdoor or hatch, through which the voyagers could come up to the deck. Inside and outside the gondola, in various pockets and bags, were fixed the provisions and supplies, while the various nautical instruments, cameras, surveyors’ paraphernalia, and a patent cookstove hung among the ropes, or were fixed to the gondola by specially invented devices. Everything had been thought out in great detail, most of the apparatus had been designed for the occasion, and Andrée had enjoyed the benefit of advice from all the foremost flyers and scientific theorists in Europe. His was anything but a haphazard or ill-prepared expedition.

Toward the end of June, Andrée and his party landed on the obscure Danes Island in the Spitzbergen group, where he found a log cottage built some years before by Pike, the British bear and walrus hunter. Here a large octagonal building was thrown up to shelter the balloon from the fierce winds, while it was being inflated. Finally all was ready, the chemicals were put to work, and the great bag slowly filled with hydrogen. Everything was in shape for flying by the middle of July, but now various mishaps and delays came to foil the eager adventurer, the worst of all being the fact that the wind steadily refused to blow from the south, as Andrée had anticipated. He waited until the middle of August, and then returned somewhat crestfallen to Sweden, where he was received with that ready and heartbreaking ridicule which often greets a brave man set out upon some undertaking whose difficulties and perils the fickle and callous public little understands.

Andrée himself was nothing damped by his reverses, and even felt that he had learned something that would be of benefit. For one thing, he had the gas bag of his balloon enlarged to contain about two hundred thousand cubic feet, and made some changes in its coating, which was expected to prevent the seepage of the hydrogen, a problem which much more modern aircraft builders have had difficulty in meeting.

If the delay in Andrée’s sailing had lost him a little of the public’s confidence and alienated a few lay admirers, his prestige with scientific bodies had not suffered, and his popularity with the subscribers of his fund was undiminished. King Oscar again met the additional expenses with a subscription from his own funds, and Andrée was accordingly able to set out for the second essay in June of 1897. His goods and the reconstructed balloon were sent as far as Tromsoe by rail, and there loaded into the Virgo and taken to Danes Island, accompanied by a small group of friends and interested scientists.

Almost at the last moment came a desertion, a happening that is looked upon by all explorers and adventurers as something of most evil omen. Doctor Ekholm, who had made the first trip to Danes Island and intended to be one of the three making the flight, had married in the course of the delay, the lady of his choice being fully aware of his perilous project. When it came time for him to start north in 1897, however, she had a not unnatural change of heart, and finally forced her husband to quit the expedition. Another man stepped into the gap without a day’s delay, and so the party started north.

The enlarged bag was attached to the gondola and its fittings, and the process of inflation began anew in that strange eight-sided building on that barren arctic island. The bag was fully distended at the end of the first week in July, and Andrée impatiently waited for just the right currents of air before casting off.