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Spoken straight from the unconscious, which is wild and ungovernable and used to be called the soul.
4
Flying over the pole in a balloon appears to have occurred to Andrée on the evening of March 16, 1894, after a meeting of the Swedish Anthropological and Geographical Society in Stockholm, when the explorer A. E. Nordenskiöld asked Andrée to walk home with him. In 1878 Nordenskiöld, on the Vega, had finally discovered the Northeast Passage. He was interested to know what Andrée thought of using captive balloons—ones tethered to the ground, that is—to rise above the wall of ice surrounding Antarctica and see what lay beyond it. Andrée said, Why not rise above the ice and keep going?
A year later, on February 13, 1895, Andrée described his intentions in an address to the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. The following August, in London, at the Sixth International Geographical Congress, during a morning session devoted to polar exploration, he gave essentially the same speech, called “A Plan to Reach the North Pole by Balloon.” He followed General Greely, the American, whose subject was a history of Arctic expeditions, in which he delivered a sort of roll call of nations and names, prefaced by remarks depicting the Arctic as a place where “solitude and monotony, terrible in the weeks of constant polar sunlight,” nearly overthrew the mind “in the months of continuous Arctic darkness.” It was a territory “of silence awful at all times, but made yet more startling by astounding phenomena that appeal noiselessly to the eye; of darkness so continuous and intense” that a person was led to wonder “whether the world has been cast out of its orbit in the planetary universe into new conditions.”
S. A. Andrée
Courtesy of the Grenna Museum, Sweden (www.grennamuseum.se)/The Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography.
Because I would have chafed at such dramatized talk, however fervent or earned, I imagine Andrée as waiting impatiently to speak. He was thirty-nine, blond, tall, and well built, with wide shoulders and a strong jaw. A woman in the audience described him as “heroic-looking.” An acquaintance portrayed him in a letter as “a worthy descendant of the old Vikings.” When he felt something passionately, he wasn’t above rhetoric, and he liked the long run-up. In his Swedish accent, words such as “have” came out “haff.”
“The history of geographical discovery is at the same time a history of great peril and suffering,” he began. “While forcing their way through unknown regions across the vast deserts of Australia, Asia, Africa, the prairies of North America, or through the forests of South America and Central Africa, the explorers have encountered dangers, endured hardships, and been obliged to conquer difficulties, of which no clear idea can be formed by those who have never passed through similar experiences.”
In warm climates, however, “nearly every hindrance can be said to contain a means of success.” Natives often “bar the way of the explorer, but just as often, perhaps, they become his friends and helpers.” Lakes and rivers carried him places; plus he could drink from them and find in them things to eat. In the desert, despite the harsh sun, there could also be “a luxuriant vegetation that serves as a shelter,” not to mention people who have been where you are going and can tell you the best way to get there.
In the Arctic, “the cold only kills,” Andrée continued. There were “no oases in the icy desert, no vegetation, no fuel,” just “a field of ice that invites to a journey,” but this field, “covered with gigantic blocks,” had proved too daunting to cross. The current might lead a vessel forward, but only into waters filled with ice that crushed ships, and in the high reaches of the Arctic desert, no natives were around to help you. The sun lit one’s way in the summer, but it also rotted the ice so that your sledge balked and bogged down and with each step you might sink to your knees. Only by considerable toil could you advance, and then only farther into a landscape that had no comforts or shelter.
“If we further remember that the Arctic explorer can engage in active traveling during a brief season only,” Andrée said, “and that during the remainder of the year he is compelled to inactivity under the weakening influence of cold, together with darkness, while he has to resort to the nourishment that is usually unsuitable and often insufficient, and that is always haunted by the consciousness, that the results he can attain will almost inevitably be meagre in comparison with those which can be secured by explorers in other parts of the globe; then it must be admitted that Arctic research offers drawbacks which are materially greater than those encountered by geographical explorers in other places.”
Laying out his case, Andrée went on—perhaps incautiously—to malign the sledge, the only means for Arctic travel that had “hitherto been used or even been available for use.” Whether drawn by dogs or men, it had failed to carry anyone far enough, “although new efforts to make them a success have repeatedly been made. The fact remains that, in the attempts made for centuries to cross the polar ice, numerous lives and vessels have been lost and large sums of money wasted.”
No nation took greater pride in its sledging or its sledgers than Britain, and no nation had lost more of them. Perhaps Andrée was giving the same speech he had given in Sweden, where sledging was not so revered. Possibly he didn’t care what the British thought. Or maybe, as his friends sometimes said, he had a tin ear and didn’t understand the effect his remarks might have. It requires little of the imagination, however, to hear throats being cleared and feet shuffling.
Nevertheless, Andrée was now at the hinge of his speech. “It would seem,” he went on, “as if it were about time to look into the matter carefully, with a view to ascertaining whether there is no other means of transportation than the sledge available for a journey in the regions referred to. We need not pursue the investigation very far to discover such a means, one that appears to be created for the purpose in question. I refer to the balloon.”
The perfect and navigable balloon, “which is worshipped because nobody has ever produced one,” was not what was needed, he said. The version at hand would suffice—people weren’t aware of how suitable it was because, more than seeing its advantages, they were accustomed to noting its defects. “Such a balloon is capable of carrying an exploring-party to the pole and back again,” Andrée said. “It is possible, with such a balloon, to cross the Arctic plains.”
His purpose declared, he now needed to persuade, and he softened his tone. “To make a journey across the Arctic deserts, is not a purely scientific, but a technical problem.” The results of such a voyage were important for science, but the means must be devised by the engineer. A balloon to reach the pole needed to carry three people, he continued, all the instruments they required for scientific experiments, and their food. It should be able to remain aloft for thirty days (the record was fifteen), and, unlike all balloons thus far known, it had to be able to be steered. Last, it had to be inflated in the Arctic.
A larger balloon, with sufficient lift, had been built and displayed in 1878 in Paris at an exhibition, where it made fifteen hundred ascents, each time carrying thirty or forty people, Andrée said. Since then a number of balloons had had the carrying power that the Arctic balloon required. “It is evident that the problem involving the manufacture of a balloon that will satisfy requirement No. 1 has long since been solved by the arts,” he said.
Balloons had also been made that retained gas long enough to suggest that a thirty-day flight was achievable. The hydrogen could be manufactured at the launching place or brought in canisters aboard ships. To prevent the wind from interfering with the balloon while it was being filled, a shed could be built as a hangar. Finally, the difficulty in sailing a balloon to a specific destination was that conventional balloons could travel only where the wind blew. A balloonist might take to the air hoping to be carried by currents to where he wanted to land, but the currents could change on him. Andrée announced that he had designed a system using guide ropes and a sail that had allowed his balloon to travel at cross-purposes to the wind.
Next Andrée described the attributes of the balloon he needed. The basket should be “spacious and comfortable,” have floats attached, and be hung from the balloon in such a way that it could be disengaged quickly, possibly by pulling a single rope. “The occupants will thus be able to save themselves at sea, when a vessel heaves in sight, by descending to the surface, and, if a heavy wind is blowing, ridding themselves of the balloon.” (Such an escape was possible only if a ship was seen. When asked what he would do if his balloon came down in the water with no one around, he said, “Drown.”) The balloon should also carry “a sledge, a canvas boat, a tent, arms and ammunition, and provisions for four months, all with a view to making a rescue possible in case of a mishap.”
To build the balloon and equip the expedition would cost about thirty-eight thousand dollars. The balloon would travel approximately 250 meters above the ground—below the clouds, that is, and above the fogs. It should start as close to the pole as possible, and as early in July as a brisk and steady south wind arrived. A moderate wind would be better than a powerful one, since the ground would pass in a more regular way, and more of it could be added to the map. “The stay in the unknown regions should be of such long duration as circumstances will permit,” he said, “and if chances to visit the surface should occur, they must be improved,” meaning acted on.
Being almost finished, Andrée said that he couldn’t “help adding a few remarks which will tend to show that not only is it possible to cross the Arctics by balloon, but that these regions are particularly well suited for balloon voyages.” Obstacles for other expeditions would be advantages for a balloon trip, he said. Since the sun never set during the Arctic summer, he and his companions would be able to take photographs at all hours of territory that had never been viewed, and, since they could always see where they were going, they would not have to tie up at night, “and incur the risk of a heavy gale destroying the harnessed balloon.” In addition, the constant sun kept the temperature steady, which helped preserve hydrogen. “In the tropics, on the other hand—for instance, in Central Africa—a balloon would be strongly heated during the day, and considerably cooled at night, whereby great losses of gas and ballast would result.”
Furthermore, with the balloon traveling continuously, the trip would take half as long as otherwise. The “glossy” ground without trees to tangle the guide ropes meant that the basket would proceed at a constant altitude, making photographs and scientific measurements easier to manage than if the balloon were passing over a forest. Thunder and lightning, which were common at the equator, and which the balloon, with its ropes wet from rain, would be especially vulnerable to, were almost unknown in the Arctic. Finally, snow, which might collect and sink the balloon, hardly ever fell during the Arctic summer. Any that appeared when the temperature was warmer than freezing would melt, Andrée said, and if the temperature was lower the snow would blow away. What portion settled on the balloon would evaporate, “the evaporation in these regions being very considerable during the season in question.”
“The methods heretofore employed to cross the polar ice have not led to the desired result,” Andrée said in closing, “and there is no reason to suppose that future attempts of the same nature will be more successful.” Undoubtedly, more was to be learned from people who set out in ships and sledges, he conceded, but the knowledge would arrive in increments and only gradually, and a century might pass before the pole was reached. Moreover, the farther the sledges advanced, the more difficult the terrain was likely to be, and the slower their progress.
“With these facts before us, it is only natural to look for other means of accomplishing the difficult task, and every reasonable proposition with a view to solving the problem should be carefully considered,” he said. “The solution here proposed, to explore the Arctics by balloon, is not based on obscure theory, but on clear and indisputable facts, which appear to me quite convincing. They teach us—(1) That a balloon can be sent far into the Polar Regions; (2) that it can be kept afloat there a sufficiently long time for the purpose in question; (3) that such a balloon can carry the exploring party there and back; and (4) that many of the peculiarities of the Arctic Regions that have heretofore been a great hindrance in making Arctic exploration, prove to be factors in favour of an expedition by balloon.
“Besides, is it not more probable that the north pole will be reached by balloon than by sledges drawn by dogs, or by a vessel that travels like a boulder frozen into the ice? And can anybody on good grounds deny that it will be possible, by a single successful balloon journey, to acquire in a few days greater knowledge of the geographical aspect of the Arctic Regions than would otherwise be obtainable in centuries?”
5
Among the first in the audience to rise and respond was the president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Clements Markham, who had been to the Arctic to look for Franklin. Markham said that clouds might keep Andrée from seeing the ground, or even from knowing whether he was above “land, ice, or snow.” Furthermore, unless Andrée descended, he wouldn’t be able “to collect natural history specimens,” or to take celestial readings to find out where he was. Finally, if the balloon ran into a cliff or an iceberg and was wrecked, how would he get back?
A British explorer of Africa named A. Silva White said that experiments he had conducted with balloons in Scotland had led him to conclude that they couldn’t be steered and that Andrée’s attempt was “foolhardy, and not one to be seriously discussed at a meeting of this character.”
General Adolphus Greely, the American who had spoken before Andrée, added that Andrée’s balloon would lose too much gas to complete the trip. If Andrée had solved the problem of permeability, “which has engaged the attention of some of the acutest minds in France and Germany,” and to which “money in great sums has been applied,” Greely hoped he would share it before he left. Moreover, the southerly winds that might carry Andrée to the pole would converge there and strand him. “As geographers, looking at these things from a practical point of view, and having some knowledge of air and currents,” Greely said, “this Congress should not give the weight of their influence or their endorsement to this expedition.”
While Andrée listened, he made notes with a pencil. When he returned to the lectern, he said that the discussion seemed to have “wandered somewhat out of the region of the methods by which I propose to make my polar journey.” He was aware of how hard flying a free balloon was, he said, but his balloon would control its course by means of guide ropes and a sail. The suggestion that fog might appear in his path had no support. The polar region was about the size of Europe, and as in Europe, there would be fog in some places and not others. He described a trip in the Baltic in which he had controlled his course.
Then he pointed a finger at several explorers. “When something happened to your ships, how did you get back?” he asked. Greely, on his expedition a decade earlier, had lost eighteen of his twenty-five men. “I risk three lives in what you call a ‘foolhardy’ attempt, and you risked how many?” Andrée continued, “A shipload.”
He crumpled the paper he had written his notes on and left the stage, arriving at his seat “wiping his brow and taking deep breaths like an athlete,” a witness wrote. Meanwhile the audience “cheered until the great hall of the Colonial Institute rang.”
6
The first mariners to go toward the North had no idea what they were approaching. Homer described people in The Odyssey called the Men of Winter, who lived at the edge of the ocean and never saw the sun. What the Greeks knew of the Arctic they derived from observing that the stars went round a stationary point and that some stars could be seen every night whereas others were only occasional. The two classes were separated by a circular boundary that ran through Arktos, the Great Bear. From astronomical speculations they had deduced that north of the Arctic Circle there was sun at midnight during midsummer, and no sun at midwinter.
The first sailor to advance some ways north was a Greek named Pytheas, who probably lived in the third century BC, about the time of Aristotle and Alexander the Great. He sailed around Britain and six days north to a land he called Thule. What he wrote, which was apparently a geography more than a travel account, survives only in references by other writers, mainly Polybius, and those only brief. It is not possible to tell where Thule was for sure—some people think it was the Shetland Islands, some people think perhaps Iceland—but Pytheas, possibly having encountered ice and fog, wrote that in its vicinity the air, the earth, and the sea all blended, and it was no longer possible to navigate northward.
The next known journeys were made in the seventh and eighth centuries by Irish monks who were seeking a haven. At least some of the monks had followed the flocks of geese that flew over their monasteries. Proof of the monks’ visits appears in the form of place-names. Their legacy may be the impression of the Arctic as a sanctified territory, a refuge where a soul might withdraw to cleanse itself.
The Vikings displaced the monks. Among their legends was the visiting of Iceland, which was called Snowland, around 864, by Rabna Floki, which translates as Floki of the Ravens. The mariner’s compass hadn’t been invented, and fog often shrouded the sun for days, so Floki took three ravens trained to fly toward land (some accounts say two ravens, some say four). When Floki released the first raven, it flew in the direction he had come, leading him to conclude that land was closer behind than ahead. Released farther on, the second raven circled the ship, then also flew toward home. The third one flew forward. Floki spent the winter on Snowland and didn’t like it, and is the one supposed to have named it Iceland. After Floki came Ingolf, who with others, in 874, was escaping the rule of the Norwegian king, Hårfager. Approaching the shore of Iceland, Ingolf threw a door over the side of his ship, a Norwegian custom. The gods were supposed to guide the door to a favorable landing, but it drifted out of Ingolf’s sight, and he landed on the southern shore of the island. The settlement he established was the island’s first permanent one.
The British spent three hundred years looking for the Northwest Passage, dying by degrees, sometimes in big numbers, and usually of scurvy, starvation, and cold. The Arctic scholar Jeannette Mirsky wrote that Arctic exploration from the beginning had been a “series of victorious defeats.” Sometimes sandhogs—the men who build tunnels for trains and aqueducts—describe a task as a man-a-mile job, because a man dies every mile. By victorious defeats, Mirsky meant that while one expedition after another turned back, and many lives were given up, mile after mile of the blankness on the northern map was effaced.
7
After Andrée’s speech in London, a lot of explorers and geographers and journalists, offended by the brevity of the voyage he proposed, classified it as a stunt. Arctic exploration was supposed to be a grueling and harrowing journey through the harshest terrain imaginable, conducted sometimes over an interval of years, and occasionally for so long that the explorer and his party were thought to have been lost and often were. The stories the explorers told when they returned were ennobling. The science they did—practically all of it observing and collecting, the categorizing came later—expanded their version of the world. They were naming things for the first time, the way the Greeks named the sky. Their findings provided material for subordinate careers, the ordering and identifying of the natural world based on the artifacts brought back by the people who had been to the far edge of the frontier. Andrée’s dash to the pole didn’t seem properly respectful. He wouldn’t have sufficient time to do science, it was said. His purposes weren’t serious, and what value would his accomplishment have? He’d merely own a record.
In interviews Andrée defended himself by saying that he would take plenty of measurements and that the photographs he would add to the map would be invaluable. And what disadvantage could be claimed for seeing a part of the earth that had never been seen before? What he didn’t often say is that he would have preferred to cross the Atlantic Ocean, which he regarded as more daunting, but the trip to the pole appealed more to the public imagination and was easier to raise money for. Unlike explorers of the earlier ages and even of his own, Andrée wasn’t looking to test himself in a remorseless environment. He didn’t see himself as a solitary figure measuring himself against the wilderness and the elements, or as someone trying to wrest from nature its secrets. Or even, as some did, a man in a headlong approach toward the seat of the holy. He was an engineer who wanted to prove the validity of an idea, and he had found a forum in which to enact it.
Andrée was born on October 18, 1854, in Gränna, a small town about three hundred miles southwest of Stockholm, on Lake Vättern. His mother, Wilhelmina, was called Mina, and his father, Claes, was the town’s apothecary. They had four other sons and two daughters, with whom they lived above Claes’s shop on the main street in the center of town (the building is still there). Mina’s father was a mathematics professor, and behind him were three generations of clergymen, some of whom were known for keeping records of the weather. As a child, Andrée was said to have a wide-ranging intelligence, a capacity for asking difficult questions, and to be stubborn. He was fond of games whose outcome depended on solving a problem. His mother noted that if he was treated unjustly by someone, “he spared no effort to pay him back,” but “by character and from principle he was magnanimous.”
As a boy Andrée built a raft from boards he found, and he and a friend sailed out onto Lake Vättern and had to be rescued when the wind rose. Another time, from a cliff above Gränna, he launched a balloon he had filled with gas, and the balloon landed on the roof of a barn and caught fire. Over the Christmas vacation of 1867, when he was thirteen, he told his father that he no longer cared to study dead languages and that he wanted to be an engineer. He is said to have pounded the table as he spoke.
Andrée’s attachment to his mother was profound and only deepened when he was sixteen and his father died. He left money for Andrée to attend the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where his favorite subject was physics and his closest friendship among the faculty was with his physics instructor, Robert Dahlander. During successive summers Andrée worked as a tinsmith, in a foundry, and in a machine shop, and for two years after he graduated he was a draftsman and a designer in a mechanical works in Stockholm. Through friends he got interested in phrenology, the practice of drawing conclusions about someone’s nature and tendencies from the topography of his skull, and while he worked at an engineering firm in Trollhaven, called Nydquist and Holms, he made a phrenological helmet out of brass. It was a half-sphere with screws ascending in rows an inch apart to the crown. It opened into two parts, connected by a hinge, and the screws screwed down to trace the skull’s bumps and depressions. Andrée didn’t so much believe in phrenology as he was interested in the conclusions phrenologists reached, which he thought sometimes were precisely apt.
In 1876, when Andrée was twenty-three, he went to America to see the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which had been organized to celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Officially it was the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, and on display were all the world’s most prominent new inventions. Absorbed by modernity, he was there when word arrived of Custer’s defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn.
8
Sailing to America, Andrée had had two acquaintances, his cabin mate, “a young German who was ducking military duty,” he wrote in a journal, “and a Swede who claimed to be a pork importer bound for Chicago, but who later proved to be a fugitive.” However, “the pseudo pork dealer, who was a good mixer, soon made other friends who were richer than we and with whom he became engaged in gambling. My German cabin mate and I preferred remaining quietly in our berths.”
The deserter had brought love letters that he liked to pore through. Andrée had only one book, Laws of the Winds, by C. F. E. Björling, which he would read lying on his bunk. One day, reading about the trade winds and struck by their regularity, an idea “ripened in my mind which decisively influenced my whole life,” he wrote. This was the thought “that balloons, even though not dirigible, could be used for long journeys. And not only from the Old to the New World, but also in the opposite direction and between the other continents.” The German happened to laugh and interrupt Andrée’s reverie, but he returned to it and “firmly resolved, when I landed in America, to get in touch with an aeronaut and find out what I could about such balloons as were then manufactured.”
In Philadelphia, Andrée went to the Swedish consul to ask for a pass to the fair. The consul said he couldn’t give him one, but he could hire him as the janitor at the Swedish Pavilion. He could live upstairs in the pavilion and go anywhere at the fair that he wanted.
Andrée would go to bed at nine and get up at five. One day he made a trip to a river where he picked roses and daisies to press and send home to one of his sisters. He had only one companion, he wrote her, Plato, “but the best is good enough.” It pleased him that work was honored in America and that the harder someone worked the better he was treated. At the fair he was impressed by the machines that printed hundreds of thousands of newspapers in hours, and the “screws to make pocket watches so small and delicate that only with a microscope can you see that they are screws.” There was a steam engine “high as a three-story house,” and a cannon weighing “millions of pounds” that shattered a foot-thick steel plate “as easily as if it were glass.” In New York he had heard they were building “a suspension bridge over the city, which already cost eighty million crowns, but it is not ready yet for a long time” (the Brooklyn Bridge was finished in 1883).
Once in New York and once in Philadelphia, Andrée visited phrenologists. He presented himself as a tailor, and was told that he would make an excellent engineer. Also that his determination led people to regard him sometimes as stubborn. His contrary temperament made him “quick to avenge insults and repel attacks.” A love for independence and change led to behaviors that frequently contradicted his feelings. His thinking was unconstrained by conventions. He could be trusted with “positions that demand masculinity, honor and faith” and was a natural leader: “You win people over to your cause and get them to sympathize personally with whatever you undertake.” Nevertheless, from deep caution, he was “watchful and worried” and deliberate, and only reluctantly did he trust people. Judgment and prudence helped him control his fantasies, “however large.” As for his future, twenty years would “pass before you achieve the highest degree of your spiritual development.”
9
Historically the Arctic was congenial to opposites. For some of the ancients, it was both holy and infernal. The devil lived there in a house of fire, a supposition based on a reading of Isaiah 14, which says that Lucifer will “sit on the mount of assembly in the far north.” A northerly wind was believed to transmit evil. “The Victorine monk Garnerius says that the ‘malign spirit’ was called Aquilo, the north wind,” Jung wrote in Aion. “Its coldness meant the ‘frigidity of sinners.’” Jung also wrote that Adam Scotus, a theologian of the twelfth century, believed that “there was a frightful dragon’s head in the north from which all evil comes.” The smoke that came from the dragon’s nose and mouth “was the smoke which the prophet Ezekiel, in his vision of God, saw coming from the north,” Scotus wrote.
The anthology of myths and deities and peculiar people assembled about the Arctic by the ancients includes the Arabs in the ninth century who knew about the Arctic from an Arabian traveler named Ahmad ibn Fadhlan. The king of the Bulgarians told Fadhlan that a tribe named the Wisu lived three months north of his country. Their summer nights were not even one hour long. The thirteenth-century Persian geographer Zakariya al-Qazwini says that the Wisu were not allowed to visit the Bulgarians’ territory, because wherever they went the air turned cold, even in summer, which killed the Bulgarians’ crops. To trade with the Wisu, from whom they mainly got furs, the Bulgarians would go to the border in a cart that was drawn by a dog. It had to be a dog, and not a horse or an ox, because dogs could get a purchase on the ground with their claws—in Wisu there were no trees or dirt or rocks, only ice. The traders would leave their goods on the frontier. When they came back, they would find an item beside their own, and if they liked the trade they would take it. Otherwise they withdrew their item, so they never saw the Wisu or knew what they looked like.
The cold in the north made a fantastic impression on al-Qazwini. Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, in his book In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times, quotes his opinion that the northern winter was “an affliction, a punishment and a plague; during it the air becomes condensed and the ground petrified, it makes faces to fade, eyes to weep, noses to run and change color, it causes the skin to crack and kills many beasts. Its earth is like flashing bottles, its air like stinging wasps; its night rids the dog of his whimpering, the lion of his roar, the birds of their twittering and the water of its murmur, and the biting cold makes people long for the fires of Hell.” Hell is a complicated notion for people in cold climates. When the Presbyterians went to Alaska in the nineteenth century they told the Indians about the fires of hell that burned perpetually, and the Indians thought it sounded pretty good, so the missionaries had to change hell to a place where it was always cold.
An Arab writer named Shams ad-din Abû Abdallâh Muhammad ad-Dimashqi (1256–1327) described the Far North as a desert with no people in it. It had no animals, either, only great amounts of snow and darkness, and “around it the vault of heaven turns like a stone in a mill.”
The Greeks believed that a people named the Hyperboreans lived at the top of the world, beyond the Boreas, the harsh northern wind that issued from a cave. Their territory was a paradise that could not be reached. The Hyperboreans were peaceful and just, they lived in the woods instead of living in houses, they never had wars, and they grew to be a thousand without becoming ill. When a Hyperborean had become tired of life, he or she would put on garlands of flowers, walk to the edge of a particular cliff, and fall into the sea. They cherished Apollo, who could transport to Hyperborea mortals who had lived especially pious lives. To worship him they had a sphere-shaped temple, which hovered on wings. Three brothers who were twelve feet tall were the priests. Every nine years Apollo visited, possibly in a chariot drawn through the air by swans. He played a kind of lyre, called the kithara, and danced for months without resting. When the priests offered their sacrifice and played music, immense herds of swans flew down from the mountains and landed on the temple.
Other ancients thought that a miscellany of oddities and monsters lived in the North. A lost poem from the seventh century BC, called the Arimaspeia, was said to have been written by a figure, perhaps mythical, named Aristeas of Proconnesus. Aristeas said that he had traveled to the region of the northernmost people, called the Issedonians. The Issedonians told him that north of them lived the Arimaspians, who had long hair and one eye. North of them were Griffins, which looked like lions and had wings and beaks like eagles. The Griffins guarded the earth’s gold and often fought with the Arismaspians, who tried to steal it.
Elsewhere in the North were the Meropians, whose territory shared a border with a country called Anostos, which means “No Return.” Anostos had no dark or light, only a reddish fog. There were two streams—the Hedone, which was the stream of gladness, and the Lype, which was the stream of sorrow. Each stream had trees on its banks. If you ate the fruit from the trees by the stream of sorrow, you shed tears until you died. If you ate the fruit by the stream of gladness, your desires were slaked and you got younger, but you lived life backwards and died as an infant.
As for the Romans, Pliny in his Natural History described a territory in the north where the snow fell almost constantly and was like feathers. This region had no light, it produced nothing but frost, it was where the north wind lived, and it was cursed. The existence of the Hyperboreans should be accepted, “since so many authors tell us about them,” he wrote. Tacitus wrote that the sea in the North was still and sluggish and that the sun in rising from it made a sound that could be heard.
By the fourteenth century, sailors believed that seas in the North had whirlpools so big that traveling into them was like falling into an abyss. In them lived plenty of fantastic creatures. The unknown writer of a thirteenth-century book called The King’s Mirror, a scientific treatise in the form of a dialogue between a man and his son, said that “the waters of Greenland are infested with monsters.” The merman was “tall and of great size and rises straight out of the water.” It had a head and shoulders and eyes and a mouth, “but above the eyes and the eyebrows it looks more like a man with a peaked helmet on his head.” Its form “looked much like an icicle,” in that it narrowed toward its lower half, “but no one has ever seen how the lower end is shaped, whether it terminates in a fin like a fish or is pointed like a pole.” The mermaid rarely appeared except before violent storms and was ugly to look at, with a “large and terrifying face.”
Instead of whirlpools the author mentions “sea hedges,” which are three-sided, “higher than lofty mountains,” and box in the sea. “We have to speak cautiously about this matter, for of late we have met but very few who have escaped this peril and are able to give us tidings about it.”
Among the region’s other attributes were the ice fields on the ocean, which he said were sometimes “as flat as if they were frozen on the sea itself,” and icebergs, “which never mingle with other ice, but stand by themselves.”
To read these accounts is to feel that the world the explorers were to step into hadn’t yet been completely created.
10
Soon after Andrée got to Philadelphia, he “looked up the balloonist John Wise, an elderly man who had begun his career as a piano polisher,” he wrote. Actually Wise had started as a cabinet-maker and had then built pianos. At fourteen, from an article in a German-language newspaper, he got interested in balloons. In his twenties he built one from muslin and varnished it with linseed oil and birdlime, a sticky substance made from tree bark, that was used to trap birds. The mixture, Wise noted, was prone to combust spontaneously.
Wise was also an innovator. He was among the first aeronauts to use draglines as a means for a balloon to maintain a stable height. He also invented the rip panel, which allowed a balloon to deflate quickly and safely for landing. Beforehand a balloonist had to climb through the rigging to the top of the balloon, and with his knees grasp the valve that released the gas. From his weight, the balloon would often turn upside down, which, depending on how hard it hit the ground, might not be so good for the balloonist.
Wise had made roughly four hundred flights “and had had all manner of thrilling adventures,” Andrée wrote. “He had flown with them in sunshine, rain, snow, thunder showers and hurricanes. He had been stuck on chimneys, smoke stacks, lightning rods and church spires, and he had been dragged through rivers, lakes, and over garden plots and forests primeval. His balloons had whirled like tops, caught fire, exploded and fallen to the ground like stones. The old man himself, however, had always escaped unhurt and counted his experiences as proof of how safe the art of flying really was.
“In order to convince a few fellow citizens who had been inconsiderate enough to doubt his thesis, Mr. Wise once made an ascent in Philadelphia, and while in mid-air he deliberately exploded his balloon. Then using the remains of the bag as a parachute he landed right in the midst of the doubters. What effect this had on them I do not know, but the old man himself felt better.”
Wise believed that the wind blew predominantly from west to east, and with sufficient force and steadiness to transport a balloon carrying people and freight not only across America but also to Europe. Building a balloon to cross the Atlantic was, he wrote, “the dream of my lifetime.” The balloon he imagined had a basket shaped like a boat, in case he came down in the water. On the gunwales it had oars and hand-turned propellers. In 1859 Wise started the Trans Atlantic Balloon Corporation with two partners. The balloon they built they flew from Missouri to New York in twenty hours and forty minutes, a record. Two months later, the partners, flying from New York to Canada, crashed in the Canadian woods, and the balloon was destroyed.
In 1873, Wise raised money for a second transatlantic balloon from the Daily Graphic, a New York newspaper. This balloon was accompanied by two smaller ones that carried extra gas and could also support someone making repairs to the balloon itself. Wise thought that a crossing to Ireland would take sixty hours and be almost absurdly perilous. “The discovery of the North Pole, which had recently caused Captain Hall’s death,” he wrote, meaning Charles Hall, who died in 1871 trying to reach the pole, “not to mention the journey of the vessel Polaris”—Hall’s ship—“which has just disappeared and probably been lost, is nothing but a pleasure trip compared to this journey through airspace, win or lose.” Wise eventually decided that the balloon wasn’t substantial enough, and he withdrew. While being filled, the balloon tore and collapsed. A smaller version left for Europe and after three hours crashed in a storm near New Haven, Connecticut.
Wise took Andrée to his shop and showed him “how balloons were cut, sewed together and varnished.” When Andrée asked if he might go up in a balloon, Wise “acquiesced immediately, and a short time afterwards informed me that I might accompany his niece, who was to make an ascension a few days later. It was to take place at the city of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where the authorities had decided to celebrate the Day of Independence with a balloon ascension.”
The evening before, Andrée, Wise, and the niece rode west on a train, with the balloon. When they arrived in the morning Wise said that he needed to rest and gave Andrée the task of filling the balloon, “which I naturally accepted with alacrity.” The gas was drawn from a main in the city square, and by five the balloon was full. As Andrée and the niece, dressed as the goddess of liberty, were about to get into the basket, a high wind rose and “the bag collapsed like a rag.” The balloon had been torn, and there was not sufficient time to mend it and fill it again. “Thus ended my first attempt to get up into the air.”
A few weeks later Andrée heard of a balloon in Philadelphia that would be taking five passengers, and he reserved a place. The ticket, however, cost seventy-five dollars, and he had only fifty, which the owner wouldn’t accept. (“To be sure, I had more money,” he wrote, “but at the moment it had been lent to a fellow student, who just then was out in the country, painting picket fences at fifty cents a day and board, and thus was in no position to pay me back.”)
Not long after that Andrée fell sick with an intestinal complaint that he believed was caused by drinking ice water, but may have been from his living mostly on cake, candy, and ice cream, according to his journals. Having stayed five months in Philadelphia, he went back to Sweden.
Three years later, in May of 1879, Wise wrote a letter to the New York Times to say that someone should make a trip to the pole in a balloon. “In the polar summer there is an inflowing current of air that will carry a balloon into the polar basin, if it be kept near the earth, with balance ropes for compensation, to avoid the balloon’s rising up into the outflowing current,” he wrote.
“It is utterly futile to attempt an ingress by landcraft or watercraft with a handful of men,” he continued. “With a well-organized party of a thousand men, moved and stationed at intervals of five miles—say ten men at each station, it may be accomplished…. Aircraft is the most feasible—the least expensive, the fewest number of men required, and the shortest time necessary to make the ingress and egress. It is possible to solve the problem within a hundred hours from the time the aerostat is made available. If you deem my suggestions of any value, give the scheme a push, as I am more than convinced that it can be pushed to ultimate consummation through the upper highway.”
If Andrée ever saw the letter, he didn’t mention it in his writings.
He never saw Wise again either. In September, five months after Wise had written to the Times, Andrée “read in the papers that my old friend had gone off on a balloon trip, had been caught in a storm and had never since been heard of.” Wise was lost on September 29, in the Pathfinder, over Lake Michigan. “For his sake I like to believe that he landed unhurt and that he thereafter encountered obstacles which prevented him from coming home,” Andrée wrote.
11
Andrée exemplified a conceit that outlived him—the belief, then nascent, that science, in the form of technology, could subdue the last obstacles to possession of the world’s territories, if not also its mysteries. More or less as psychologists were beginning to regard the deeper orders of the mind, this view saw nature as a shadowy chamber of secrets, a vault, that could be illuminated by the new instruments of science. Its banal applications were typified by devices for the home and the factory—the gramophone, the vacuum cleaner, the arc welding machine—that made life easier, and its sinister ones were the innovations in weapons—the machine gun, the torpedo—and their influence on the tactics of war. For all its worldliness it was also an innocent notion, a response to Romanticism, which had influenced earlier ideas about the Arctic.
Andrée might also be said to have believed in a sort of new dismissiveness that held that anything modern was more desirable than a lived-in idea or artifact. The balloon was superior to the sledge and the ship. The encumbrances of the ocean and the land were absent from the air. The sledge and the ship had failed, the balloon and the air were all possibility. He was the first explorer to head toward the pole unaccompanied by Romantic references.
A hallmark of the Romantic tradition was the notion of the “sublime,” described by Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry, which was published in 1757. The sublime was characterized by an astonishment that drove from the mind all other feelings but terror and awe, Burke wrote. This stupefying dread was “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” The terror, which was encompassing and prevented reasoning or reflection, was provoked partly by an apprehension of the infinite, and also of the holy. The sublime aroused the deepest feelings the soul could embody, while simultaneously making someone aware that the object which inspired them was a component of a universe that was perhaps largely indifferent, if not unsympathetic, to his well-being both as an individual and a type. Man responded to the sublime because it was glorious—to feel the sublime was to scent the sacred—and because being fitted to feel powerfully, to be profoundly stirred, meant that something of the sublime reverberated within him, otherwise how could he recognize it.
The objects that inspired the sublime were “vast in their dimensions” and “solid, even massive,” Burke wrote. Mountains are what he had in mind, the type of towering, pointy, snow-covered peaks that northern Europeans never have to travel very far to stand beneath. When more became known of the immense and remorseless ground of the Arctic, however, with its darkness, its ship-crushing ice, and terrible cold—a place that was both sanctified and antagonistic—it lent itself even more handsomely to the case.
In one of the enduring Romantic novels, Frankenstein, a young Englishman named Walton is traveling to the Arctic, as a hobby scientist and discoverer—he hopes to find the Northwest Passage and “the secret of the magnet.” He is writing letters to his sister, Margaret, in London. In Russia he writes that a cold wind, which he imagines as coming from the Arctic, has stirred him. “Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid,” he says. “I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.” He pictures it as “a land surpassing in wonders and beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe,” as being “a part of the world never before visited” and “never before imprinted by the foot of man.”
The pole during this period was often personified. Vestiges of the romance surrounding it can be found in the introduction to Arctic Experiences, an account of an expedition made by the ship Polaris toward the pole, published in 1874. “The invisible Sphinx of the uttermost North still protects with jealous vigilance the arena of her ice-bound mystery,” it begins. “Her fingers still clutch with tenacious grasp the clue which leads to her coveted secret; ages have come and gone; generations of heroic men have striven and failed, wrestling with Hope on the one side and Death on the other; philosophers have hypothesized, sometimes truly, but often with misleading theories: she still clasps in solemn silence, the riddle in her icy palm—remaining a fascination and a hope, while persistently baffling the reason, the skill, and courage of man.
“Skirmishers have entered at the outer portals, and anon retreated, bearing back with them trophies of varying value. Whole divisions, as of a grand army, have approached her domains with all the paraphernalia of a regular siege, and the area of attack been proportionately widened; important breaches have been effected, the varied fortunes of war befalling the assailants; some falling back with but small gain; others, with appalling loss and death, have vainly sought escape and safety from her fatal toils. Nor has the citadel been won. ‘UNDISCOVERED’ is still written over the face of the geographical pole.”
12
By the time Andrée announced his plan to leave for the pole he was “altogether of Herculean frame,” one writer wrote. Another described him as “rather stout in appearance,” and as “one of the handsomer men in Sweden.” He was six feet tall, with a large nose, “which people in Sweden regard as an augury of success, and a piercing blue-grey eye,” which made him seem “cut out for command.” A German explorer, Dr. Georg Wegener, met Andrée in London in 1895 and wrote, “The Swedish researcher is a personality cut out of a wood with which world history forms its great men, at the same time daring and balanced, with this strange assurance about progress, with this belief based on the captivating ability to convince, which with all explorers has played the main role, and where the original type is the great, splendid fanatic Columbus.” A French geographer especially interested in glaciers, whose name was Charles Rabot, described Andrée as someone who “created sympathy at first sight. I was attracted towards him, at once I felt confidence in him; at our first meeting he gave me the impression of a strong personality.” Andrée and Rabot spent an afternoon looking for fossils while Andrée asked about the balloons that had carried the mail during the siege of Paris in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. “Everything that I could recollect of these ascensions interested him,” Rabot said. “That evening we parted as old friends.”
Much of what was written about how Andrée looked and what he was like was written after he had disappeared. He is recalled mostly in tributes, that is, and so he becomes reduced to abstractions and admirable qualities and blurs a little around the edges. He was said to have had few close friends, but among them he was regarded as sociable and devoted. He liked pranks and playing games with children. He had a talent for maxims and penetrating judgments: “Be careful of health, but not of life,” he said. Liberals tended to be tranquil because they believed that a moral force lay behind their positions and so were content to see them unfold, whereas conservatives, he wrote, were combative because they regarded themselves as always under attack.
He practiced a precautionary discipline he called self-hypnosis. Someone whose will was strong, he believed, was always liable to coming under its thrall, and “it is therefore essential to direct one’s will through daily training towards that which one, through judgment and experience, has found to be sensible and therefore beneficial.
“One masters oneself in the same way one masters others:” he wrote, “by cultivating a keen conception of how one should and should not act.” His “cold blooded calmness and realism,” wrote a friend, “were not based on a cold temperament, but on his incessant exercise of self-control.”
He had no ear for music or writing, or any eye for art. In the portrait of him published in The Andrée Diaries, the 1930 account of the voyage and the discovery of the remains, this indifference is described as amounting nearly to “a defect in his character.” Friends who persuaded him to go to the opera or an art exhibition “had every reason to repent of their success, for he always managed to spoil their own pleasure by his remarks and criticisms.” The writer doesn’t mention what those criticisms were, but they were apparently uninformed. When the novelist Selma Lagerlöf was given a prize, Andrée was invited to a dinner in her honor where he was asked if he had read her book, and he said, “No, but I have read Baron Münchhausen”—the German fabulist who had said that he had been to the moon—“and I suppose that it is all the same.” An oaf in cultured company is what he sounds like sometimes, but perhaps he was only trying to deflate manners he regarded as pretentious. As for nature, “he displayed a highly developed sense of beauty, and during his many balloon journeys he greatly enjoyed the magnificent scenery.”
He seemed to have a kind of intelligence that saw patterns in forms that other people found chaotic, and to be able to hold complicated structures and solutions in his head. He cared deeply about how things went together and how they worked and whether their design was efficient. According to The Andrée Diaries, once he decided on an end he did everything he could to attain it. Even so, “no one could weigh every consequence more ruthlessly, more critically than he. He never acted spontaneously, and there was wanting in him the spirit of fresh, impulsive action, but this was compensated for by the sense of security which is conveyed by the actions of an assured, discriminating man. He embodied, in every respect, the ancient phrase: ‘To speak once and stand by one’s word is better than to speak a hundred times.’”
Andrée appears to have been one of those people whose attitudes and habits of mind are literal and firmly formed, so that moving among disciplines is not a matter of broadening oneself by means of new terms so much as applying one’s customary judgments to new circumstances. Such a temperament seeks to encounter the familiar and to assess it or deplore its absence, rather than be influenced and possibly enlarged by what it doesn’t recognize. It is a commanding, not a humble, state of mind, restless rather than engaged, and capacious more than penetrating. An advantage of it is the capacity to interest oneself in a mulitiplicity of subjects and to arrive quickly at personally satisfying determinations. Andrée’s interests were wide-ranging. According to the portrait, he made notes for papers on the influence of new inventions on “every branch of human activity,” from “the general development of mankind” to “language, architecture, military science, the home, marriage, education, etc.” He wrote about scientific topics, in papers such as “Conductivity of Heat in Construction Material” and “Electricity of the Air and Terrestrial Magnetism.” He wrote about social phenomena in others such as “The Education of Girls,” and “Bad Times and Their Causes,” and about miscellaneous topics such as “The Importance of Inventions and Industry for the Development of Language,” and “Directives and Advice for Inventors.” He appeared to feel that nothing that interested him was beyond his ability to have an opinion about it.
13
Once Andrée was grown, the only woman for whom he felt a strong attachment was his mother. “Her rich natural endowments, in which good judgment and sharp intellect dominate such characteristics as are commonly called feminine in this day and time, her remarkable will power and capacity for work, as well as her ability to endure and suffer, remind us of the old Norse women,” he wrote in a notebook. “Despite her seventy-five years she does not seem old. Her face has few wrinkles. It seems to belong rather to a woman of sixty. The impression of power still unshaken is heightened by her voice which lacks the sentimental, pleading tone one so often finds in older women. Her voice harmonizes with her exterior: firm, strong, almost gruff, but with an undertone of kindliness.”
A monument, in other words, erected by a child and tended into adult life—which must have been fatiguing. When Andrée felt himself drawn to a woman, what he called the “‘heart leaves’ sprouting, I resolutely pull them up by the roots,” he wrote. The consequence was that he was “regarded as a man without romantic feelings. But I know that if I once let such a feeling live, it would become so strong that I dare not give in to it.” An acquaintance wrote in a letter that Andrée appeared to have remained a bachelor for the sake of his mother, and for a while they lived with each other. When Andrée was asked why he had never married, he said of any woman who would be his wife that he would not “risk having her ask me with tears in her eyes to abstain from my flights, and at that instant, my affection for her, no matter how strong, would be so dead that nothing could ever bring it back to life.”
Figures from history occasionally rise up from the page as if they had merely been waiting, sometimes impatiently, for someone to speak to them. Andrée comes to life a little resentfully, as if interrupted. Through his devotion to his mother he may have been restricted emotionally from mature relationships with women. It is also possible that he was indifferent to showing, or incapable of expressing, any true warmth to another person, except in the narcissistic fashion of a child. His great mechanical abilities and inclinations toward solitude suggest a temperament that does not effortlessly engage in conventional exchanges, one that might easily be confused or defeated or embittered, and might find objects and tasks more agreeable than people. Not all of us want the same things from life. The mainstream forces its preferences on the minority, partly to sustain those preferences, but that doesn’t necessarily lend them any substance. Nowhere in Andrée’s writings or in the descriptions of him is there an indication of any but a cold-blooded sort of introspection, a capacity for assessing the success or failure of objects and tactics. The territory of feelings seems not to have been hospitable to him.
The only relationship with a woman that Andrée was known to have conducted was an affair with a woman named Gurli Linder, who became in the early twentieth century an admired critic of children’s literature. (Linder wrote the portrait of Andrée in The Andrée Diaries.) The affair, which occupied the last few years before he left—Linder in her brief writings on the matter says 1894 was their best and most untroubled year—was conducted so openly that Linder’s husband, a professor, asked her to behave with more restraint lest she embarrass him among their friends.
