December 11, 2021 • 39 mins
This 2015 episode cover the expedition efforts of Andrée, who hoped to succeed in reaching the North Pole where others had failed by doing it by air. With a seemingly endless positivity, he and two other men hoped to earn bragging rights for Sweden by reaching the pole.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. This is the time of year when the
North Pole is on a lot of folks minds. And
to be very clear, this Saturday Classic is not a
Christmas episode at all that it is about an attempt
to get to the North Pole. It is in fact
the polar expedition of s. A. Andre, which was made
(00:22):
by Balloon in eighteen seventy nine. And this episode came
out on April, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello
(00:42):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly fro and I'm
Tracy Vie Wilson, and uh. Many of the history makers
of the world were people who were considered a little
bit mad by their contemporaries. You know, it's usually the
people with great bravado that do something a little bit
crazy and end up kind of changing the world or
making some amazing discovery. Today's topic, which features a man
(01:03):
and his expedition, it definitely falls into that category. But
the unmet goal of the plan has left a lot
of room for debate about how he's defined and how
this mission is defined. This is going to feature some
high adventure, some really wild courageousness and just positivity in
the face of what I think would break most people.
(01:25):
Uh So, we're actually just going to jump right in
and not really set it up a whole lot, and
we're actually going to start sort of at the end
of the story, so that end whe we're starting as
a discovery. White Island, which is known as Kfiteo in Norwegian,
is an island in the small Bard Archipelago, and spall
Bard means cold coast, which makes sense because all these
(01:48):
islands sit in the Arctic Ocean. White Island is normally
completely covered by ice except for two little points of rock,
but in there was a really warm spring in summer,
more of the island than normal was exposed, and because
so much of the ice on White Island had melted,
a Norwegian sloop called the brat Vague, which was on
(02:11):
a combination scientific slash ceiling mission, was actually able to
stop at White Island, and during the sloop's time there,
a geologist named Dr Gunnar Horn and his team followed
these walruses that they had spotted on the island. But
while they were following these walruses, they found, much to
their surprise, something that they had absolutely not been looking for.
Which was a diary. The book was pretty wet, it
(02:34):
had been sitting under the ice as the ice melted,
and parts of it were stuck together on the opening
page where the words the sledge journey. And so when
the geologist Horn took this book back to Peter Eliason,
who was the captain of the Bradwag, he discovered that
two of the seilers that have been traveling with them
(02:55):
had also made a discovery. While they were exploring White Island.
They first found a metal lid like to a what
had possibly been to a tin of food, and that
kind of gave them pause. And then, uh, not far
from there, they found a canvas boat, and this boat
had a hook, and the hook was stamped Andre's Polar Expedition.
(03:16):
It's actually p O L period x e XP period.
They explored the area a little more and quickly found
a lot more stuff, including a headless body which was
reduced to little more than a skeleton. It's clothing was
monogrammed with the letter A. And then they all kind
of put the pieces together. While the men aboard the
(03:37):
brat Bog had landed in White Island to study science
and hunt seals, what they had actually found was the
remains of a long lost ballooning expedition which had tried
to make its way to the North Pole thirty years before,
and so that man that they found they found others
as well. But his name was Solomon August Andre and
(03:58):
he was born in Grenna, Sweden eighteen fifty four. Just
for very brief on him as a young man, when
he was only sixteen, his father died. He became very
very attached to his mother. They were already close, but
that deepened when his dad passed away and he attended
Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology and studied engineering. In eighteen
(04:18):
seventy six, then twenty two year old Andre traveled by
steamer to the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia. This is
a journey that would turn out to be really momentous
for Andre because while he was reading about winds during
this journey to the Atlantic, he was inspired to think
about balloon travel. And when he reached Philadelphia, he actually
(04:38):
got a job at the Swedish pavilion at the expo
as a janitor, and he took advantage of his location
while he was there by visiting a Philadelphia resident by
the name of John Wise and Wise was really famous
for his work in ballooning, and because Wise had flown
in all manner of weather conditions uh and he had
walked away from virtually every possible type of ash that
(05:00):
a balloon could have, Andre felt like this man kind
of served as proof that ballooning was a perfectly safe
mode of travel. The two became friendly, and Andrea requested
the chance to accompany Wise in his balloon, which the
experience balloonist agreed to do. But the planned day for
their trip, which was a Fourth of July celebration, wound
(05:21):
up having really high winds. The balloon collapsed before the
trip could even start, and before they could reschedule their outing,
Andre got sick and decided to go back to Sweden,
and once he got home, he was still obsessed with
this balloon idea, so he decided that he needed to
raise funds to purchase his own balloon uh and he
(05:41):
did this by setting up a machine shop, but that,
unfortunately was not really a great money making plan. He
ended up in a great deal of debt, and he
really found the whole idea of running a retail business
UH really unpleasant to him. He didn't like marketing. He
didn't like the mode of marketing that was popular at
the time, which was talking trash about the competitors. He
(06:03):
found the whole thing distasteful. It just wasn't a good
fit for him, so he closed up his shop and
he still had never had a balloon ride. When he
was twenty eight, Andre participated in the first International Polar
Year as part of the Swedish delegation. Austrian explorer Carl
wait Precked had inspired the International Polar Year, being certain
(06:23):
that there were meteorological and geophysical problems that could only
be solved by a cooperative effort that was aimed at
gathering and studying information from the Earth's poles. So this
was actually a huge event. Eleven different countries sent delegations
to work on these coordinated expeditions that were part of
this first International Polar Year, and Andre's group went to
(06:46):
the Svalbard island of Spitzbergen, and one of the experiments
that was conducted there actually involved Andre being confined indoors
for an entire month to see if his skin color
would change, and it did. It took on this yellowish
huge that had been seen in other people after they
had been through an Arctic winter. Prior to that, they
weren't sure if that was something going on with their
(07:07):
vision having been altered and people just looked that way,
or if there was actually something happening in the skin
that changed its its hue. Uh And then do in
large part to Andrea's work in aero electricity, the Swedish
delegation was really recognized for the impressive results of their
work as part of this bigger cooperative effort. And after
this expedition was over, though Andrea went to a fairly
(07:31):
mundane job working for the Swedish Patent Office. He did, however,
finally get to take a balloon ride, and that's what
we will talk about after a brief word from a sponsor.
So despite the fact that Andrea had been fascinated with
(07:53):
balloons since he was only twenty two, he had not
actually gotten to ride in one, and that didn't even
happen until he was third the eight So for sixteen
years he had kind of been pining for this experience
and his eventual escort in this was what's the man
who's called Norway's first balloon skipper and his name was
Captain Francesco Chetti, which I know is an Italian name.
(08:15):
He was of Italian family, but he was Norwegian. I'm
not sure how the Norwegian language shift would have changed
the pronunciation of his name, so we're going with the
Italian version. Uh. Chetty was an interesting figure in his
own right. He was also a mind reader and the
starvation artist, where he would go without food for long
times as these big sort of public stunts. Jenny was
(08:37):
kind of annoyed by uh by Andrea's behavior during this
first outing. He called it quote disagreeably calm. According to
Andrea's own account, he was trying to be completely aware
of his mental and physiological responses to the situation, noting
that while he didn't consciously feel any fear, his body
acted in ways that suggests that he did unconsciously feel
(08:58):
some fear going on. He found himself, for example, tightly
gripping the ropes on the balloon. He took only one
more flight with Jetty before deciding that he ought to
get a balloon for himself, and he was actually able
to finance the purchase through a Swedish science fund. Uh.
This was basically a fun set up for people to
use money UH if they were going to work on
(09:19):
science projects. Or things that would better the Swedish people
as a whole. And so once he had his balloon,
he took nine solo trips in it, and each time
he was really scientific about carefully detailing his observations. Remember
his education was engineering, so he was a really excellent NoteTaker.
And on one trip he actually ascended to fourteen thousand,
two hundred and fifty feet. That's four thousand, three forty
(09:42):
three meters. So, for contexts, cabin pressure and modern airplanes
is set to correspond to what humans would experience up
to seven thousand feet or a little over that. Uh.
So he was basically flying in this balloon without protection
at twice the altitude that safety regulations say we should
(10:03):
aim for in terms of keeping people comfortable and safe.
And he described this during this journey a lightheadedness and
a terrible headache and a faint quote a faint singing
noise on the left side of my skull. So, for
another comparison to a previous episode, we talked about Mount Everest,
which is twenty nine thousand feet. Uh. However, those most
(10:26):
people that Summit Everest are using oxygen tanks to help
them along. This is a case where there was none such.
They're also acclimating on the way up, They're not just
descending in a balloon all that way. I'm surprised he
didn't get the Benz. Yeah, he was a resilient dude,
so maybe he did and we just don't know. So Anyway,
(10:47):
on another of his trips on his balloon, which he
named this Veia, he tested out the use of drag
ropes and a sail to try to steer the vessel,
and these would eventually become important as part of his
eventual plan to explore the Arctic. And after his ninth trip,
UH he sold his balloon to a museum. It was
an outdoor museum where they would have space to put
(11:07):
him and his engineering background and his wind study and
his experiences in ballooning had basically given him a really
big idea. At this point, a lot of explorers were
totally focused on the North Pole. Numerous countries had launched
missions to go north, and of the thousand men who
had tried to get to the poll, seven and fifty
(11:29):
one had died, so UH, most of them it was
really serious business and being the first to get to
the North Pole was going to be a significant point
of pride for whatever country could claim it and so.
On February, when he was forty years old, so this
is only two years into his ballooning experience, Andrea addressed
(11:51):
the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and during that speech
he outlined his very ambitious plan to travel to the
North Pole via balloon. And a few months after his
talk at the Royal Swedish Academy, andre gave basically the
same talk to the sixth International Geographical Congress in London
in the hopes of getting UH funding in the form
of a little less than forty thousand dollars worth of money.
(12:13):
I think I've seen it listed as around thirty eight thousand,
traveling by balloon and leaving from Danes Island in this
Baal Barn archipelago. He expected to go north for about
forty three hours to reach the poll. The balloon that
he traveled in would be outfitted with the drag ropes
and sale that we talked about before to try to
enable steering and control of the balloon. The next part
(12:35):
of his plan involved crossing over the pole and then
continuing over that point two travels for several additional days,
and his intention was that he would eventually land in
Asia or perhaps Alaska, depending on how the wind moved him,
and once he landed, he planned to travel over land
on foot until he found civilization so he could arrange
for travel back to Sweden. It may surprise you to
(12:58):
learn that Andre's outlook as he described this whole plan
was positive and enthusiastic, even when talking about the possible
obstacles he might encounter once he got the balloon on
the ground and tried to find his way home. He
could use waterways to travel, he said, And he seemed
really confident that even if he landed in a desert,
he would surely find vegetation and shelter, and surely any
(13:18):
people he would encounter would give him directions or help
him back to civilization. He really was a positive thinker.
I gotta give him props. He felt like this plan
to reach the pole was going to succeed where others failed,
and that was because he was going to circumvent all
of those perils of traveling by sleder on foot by
(13:39):
taking to the air. What may have really been the
moment where Andre won over the crowd was actually something
of a job that he made at One of the
men who tried to contest this plan, American General Adolphus Greeley,
made his opinion known that he thought this plan was
foolish and had not been thought out. And Greeley, he
may recognize that name, had been commanding officer of an
(14:01):
expedition to the Arctic Circle in one that was the
Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, and it was intended to gather
scientific information about the Arctic and to set a new
record for the farthest point north that had been reached
by explorers. And this expedition met with great tragedy. The
crew ended up stranding in the Arctic for years, and
(14:21):
all but Greeley and five other men died, so the
majority of his crew did not survive that In response
to Greeley's objections to this three man balloon plan, Andre said,
I risk three lives and what you call a fool
hearty attempt, and you risked how many a shipload? So
as Andre left the stage, the entire hall cheered him,
(14:44):
and in the end, most of the money that he
needed for his polar balloon came from none other than
Alfred Noble and Sweden's King Oscar the second, before we
get to the exciting adventure of the expedition itself, let's
have one more brief sponsor break. Yeah, the break. They're
a little close together, but that's because I want to
keep the whole expedition all in one piece. So we'll
(15:04):
have a quick break and then we'll come right back
to it. So once he had his funding secured, Andre
commissioned a Parisian built balloon which was made from layers
and layers of varnished silk, and this balloon was named
the Eagle. The hydrogen balloon was on feet thirty meters tall,
(15:29):
and to protect this impressive inflatable as it was ready
for flight as they filled it with air and got
everything ready, he also had a house built for it
on Danes Island, which uh I believe was five stories tall.
And this custom house actually had a felt lined interior
so that anything the balloon touched would not damage it
and one entire side of the house could be quickly
(15:50):
removed when the balloon was ready to go, and the
windows were made of gelatine like it was basically everything
soft that won't hurt this balloon. Andre chose two other
men to complete his crew for this ambitious plan. These
were Nils Strendberg and Nils holm Strandberg, who was twenty three,
taught physics as an assistant professor, and he was also
the cousin of the famed playwright August Strenberg at home,
(16:14):
was the oldest of the team, at age forty seven.
He had led the Spitzberg and expedition that Andre had
participated in, and he was an experienced meteorologist. And so
for several weeks in eighteen ninety six, the eager Andrea
and his companions attempted to begin their journey, but they
were just constantly thwarted by in their efforts by unfavorable
(16:35):
conditions and to make matters worse, as Winter said on et,
Holme left the team. He didn't think this was such
a good idea after all, and he bowed out. Fortunately,
Andre already had an alternate at the ready that was
Mute Frankel. He was an athletic civil engineer and was
twenty seven years old. But his troubles were not over.
Andre's mother died suddenly as they were preparing to set
(16:57):
off in eight seven. While Andre seemed kind of placid
to those around him, he was really deeply melancholy at
the loss of his mother. He wrote in his journal quote,
the only thread which bound me to the wish to
live is cut off. Yeah. She was really his only
like close relationship. He mentioned at one point when he
(17:18):
was younger that he really just decided he was never
going to have romantic interests because he knew he wanted
to become, you know, an explorer and do great things
once he had married this idea of ballooning, and he
didn't ever want a woman to make the tearful, you know,
request to him to please don't go and do this
thing and him having to say, no, I'm doing it.
(17:40):
So his mother was really it really was his one
tether and so without that he was sort of starting
off with a bit of heartbreak. And finally, after they
had waited for the perfect conditions and the winter had passed,
the team was finally able to leave Danes Island on
July eleven. And I sort of of this, but the
(18:01):
last words that Andrea was heard to utter by the
onlookers were what's that as the balloon had struck something
as it headed out on its expedition, Maybe unsurprisingly, giving
the inauspiciousness of those words, almost immediately there were problems.
The drag ropes were pulling the basket down into the
water and they had to be cut. The three men
(18:22):
aboard also quickly dumped about four and fifty pounds or
two ms of sandbag ballast to try to lift their
transport out of the icy ocean. As the vessel and
its team, who were still struggling with these problems, vanished
out of the sight of the onlookers. They were traveling
north at about twenty miles an hour, which is about
thirty two kilo an hour, and the ropes that were
(18:45):
designed to help them steer we're now gone. Yea, so
they were drag ropes. Not a great idea. You don't
often see a balloon tootling around with a rope dragging
from it to the ground, and there are reasons for that.
Uh So what happened to the team next was actually
(19:07):
put together from the journals which were found in h
and While all of the men wrote records of this
whole wacky adventure, Andrea not surprisingly was the most prolific
writer of the group. The first night of their journey
seemed to be really incredibly joyous. Andre marveled at seeing
the vast expanses of ice, which were dotted by polar bears.
(19:27):
In the morning after the first night, the team had
breakfast and coffee, and they traveled through some hazy conditions
that were just above freezing. And as the day stretched
into the afternoon and that misty weather continued, the basket
dropped and it bounced repeatedly on the ice, as often
as eight times in thirty minutes. According to their records.
(19:47):
They had lost enough hydrogen that they could not stay aloft.
But despite this bumpy going, the team all stayed really upbeat.
While taking a watch as his comrades rested, Andre wrote,
it is not a little strange to be floating here
above the polar sea, to be the first that have
floated here in a balloon. How soon, I wonder Shaw
(20:08):
we have successors. We think we can well face death
having done what we have done. Isn't it all perhaps
the expression of an extremely strong sense of individuality which
cannot bear the thought of living and dying like a
man in the ranks, forgotten by coming generations? Is this ambition?
And as that bumpy ride continued, uh seasickness kind of
(20:32):
hit Strindberg that he was really getting quite ill, so
they dumped a great many of their sandbags so that
they could get enough lift that they would stop thumping
on the ice. But as the third morning of their
trip came on, the basket once again dropped as the
conditions turned even fog gear and then it suddenly rose
high in the air as it warmed up a little bit,
(20:52):
and the team released some gas so that they would
drop down a little bit again, but they were just
having trouble regulating their place in the air, and after
fighting with the situation for a while and growing a
little more frustrated, they finally decided to land on the ice,
and they did so at around eight am, and at
this point they had been traveling for sixty five hours
and they were more than five hundred miles or about
(21:13):
eight hundred kilometers into their ride for the next week,
the three men plotted what their next move should be.
They had, as part of their preparation, made plans for
various possible events, and this included packing. Sledges are very
heavy sleds for each of the men to pull, so
the trio spent their planning time carefully selecting what they
would load onto these sleds, which they pulled using ropes
(21:36):
that were wrapped around their shoulders like harnesses. These sledges
weighed hundreds of pounds, so this was really no small task,
and sometimes the men would all three pull one sled
and then go back and do the same with the
next one, and then bring up the third. And they
had also arranged to have depots set up in two
places in the events that they needed them. The first
(21:58):
was on Franz Joseph Lynn, which was part of a
Russian archipelago, and the second, smaller depot that they had
arranged was on the Seven Islands, and that's back part
of this small Bard archipelago. After they had packed their sleds,
the first men set out towards the Russian depot. The
men managed to shoot several polar bears along the way
and prep them to use as food. Picking their way
(22:19):
through the ice flows was really treacherous and exhausting, but
the men all seemed to bolster one another. They did
fall into the water from time to time, though, and
the average temperature stayed around thirty two degrees fahrenheit or
zero celsius, although it did drop from time to time,
so I would imagine being in wet clothes. I wouldn't
even imagine. I would know for certain being in wet
clothes in those conditions would be very treacherous, it would
(22:44):
and miserable. But really, all their diaries are so sort
of like positive, it's it's almost freaky. I wonder if
it's one reason. I wonder if it's because hypothermia was
affecting their their attitudes. Maybe we'll get we'll get to
one reason why they might have been happy despite their
seemingly miserable circumstances. Um So, several days into their trek
(23:06):
towards friends Joseph Land, there were two major setbacks. First,
Frankel started to experience snow blindness. So this is known
clinically as photocarrotitis, and snow blindness basically occurs when the
cornea of the eye becomes burned by ultra violet b rays. Uh.
This happens a lot in cold areas with lots of
(23:28):
ice and snow because it reflects off the snow up
into your eyes even when your head is down. Second,
they became aware that they had been walking east on
the ice, but that same ice was actually drifting west
at a much faster pace than they were making. So
they had been struggling all that time with the sledges
and working out all the pushing and pulling, and they
really had made no headway whatsoever. So by August four
(23:51):
they abandoned this plan to travel east to the Russian Archipelago,
and instead they decided they would switch directions and head
to the Seven Islands depot. To make matters worse, the
temperature started to drop by several degrees, and fortunately they
did have food supplies, including butter, bread, and biscuits, as
well as water. They supplemented this with polar bear meat
(24:14):
when they could, and they even tried eating the bear
meat raw, as well as making blood pancakes out of
bears blood mixed with oatmeal and fried. They also made
algae soup, which does not sound nearly as disgusting as
the bear blood and pancakes to me. I was talking
with friends about this last night while I was working
(24:35):
on it, and I was describing blood pancakes to one
of my friends, who is also a big food evening
goes that sounds kind of French. I'd try it, and
it does. Then, when I thought about some of the
things my grandmother cooked, it does sound pretty French um.
So despite their exhaustion and this totally desperate situation, the
(24:55):
tone of Andrey's journal entry still is almost oddly positive.
And this could have been because in addition to their
food rations, they had also brought quite a bit of
opium with them. They used it as a pain reliever
and also to treat diarrhea, and they also had morphine,
and in some cases they were double dosing with the
opium and the morphine. Frankel in particular seemed really plagued
(25:19):
by problems. He twisted his knees, he had digestive distress.
This is actually kind of uh ironic because Frankel one
of the reasons he was chosen was because he was
very athletic, and they kind of envisioned him being like
the strong pack mule of the group. But he seemed
to struggle the most with all of this travel, so
according to Andre's notebooks, he was the one that they
were kind of constantly having to figure out when he
(25:41):
needed opium dosages. And the first days of September, the
crew managed to travel by boat, which, while grueling in
its own right, was a really welcome change from pulling
these heavy sledges to celebrate Strindberg's birthday. On the fourth
of September, Andre gave him letters from his family and
his fiance which had been went to Hymn before they
left Danes Island. This is a happy surprise, though, but
(26:05):
unfortunately Stenberg later fell into the water and ruined all
the rations that he was carrying. Yeah, it was kind
of a day of ups and downs um. And then
a few days after that, on September nine, they realized
once again, since they had switched directions on August four,
they had again been thwarted by the movement of the ice,
so they had been trying to travel a little more
(26:27):
than eighty miles or roughly nine kilometers southwest, but again,
because the ice that they're walking on is also shifting,
they had actually been drifting about the correct distance, but
instead to the south southeast. This is also the day
when Andre's diary kind of drops off. He stopped doing
his regular entries, which seems like a little bit of
(26:48):
a clue that he might be losing heart. On September seventeen,
he wrote that an especially bad blister on Frankel's foot
had rendered him unable to pull his sledge anymore, so
he and Stronberg had been running back to get the
third one and to play catch up with the others
periodically as they all traveled. There had also been some
snow which added extra weight to everything. They managed to
(27:08):
kill and eat a seal, and then they realized that
they were going to be trapped out there on the
ice through the winter. Even with all this hardship. Uh
he he wrote, quote, our humor is pretty good, although
joking and smiling are not of ordinary occurrence. And on
September nineteenth, there was actually a little bit of a
ray of hope. Andrea managed to shoot three seals, and
(27:31):
that meant that with those, once they were dressed for
food and they're remaining food stores that they still had
with them, they were going to be able to get
through at least half of the winter. So they knew
like they had rations for at least a little while,
they could keep trying to gather more and they might
be in okay shape. Like it looked like they might
be able to do this. And they also started building
a snow house on the ice that they were on
(27:52):
to live in by forming snow into kind of like
walls and structure and then pouring water over it to
harden everything. Their ice hut was completed on September twenty eight,
but just four days later, the ice blow that they
built it on broke apart and water came rushing in.
The three men had to hustle to get all their
supplies together and to get it up off the breaking
(28:14):
ice before everything drifted away. The end of the entry
in Andrey's diary, and he had two diaries, and this
was the end of the first one reads quote, no
one had lost courage. With such comrades, one should be
able to manage under, I may say, any circumstances. With
that kind of positive attitude, even in the face of
(28:35):
complete misery and seemingly loss of all hope, The men
started construction on another snow house two days later. They
had spotted White Island earlier in their journey, but they
thought they'd be unable to land there because it looked
like it was totally iced over. But October four, which
was the same day they had started on their new house,
they also saw a spot on White Island where they
(28:57):
thought they might actually be able to move ashore. On
October five, they did. They named their new camp Mina
Andrea's Place after Andrea's mother because October five was her birthday,
and so while it seems like things are looking up
at this point in the story, Andrea's last entry is
just three days later, on October eight. He describes their
(29:20):
happiness at being off the ice and actually on land
and in a tent, and he kind of sorting through
what they're gonna need to do, including collecting some driftwood
and whale bones so that they can get some fires
going and meet some other needs. So we don't know
for certain when or how the three adventurers died. When
the White Island camp was discovered in ninety their supplies
(29:41):
were still in the boat. There was a pile of
driftwood that was gathered but unused. Nearby. There was an
entry in Strandberg's notebook for October seventeenth which read home
seven oh five am. But based on the fact that
it was written in ink, which would have frozen and
been unusable in the climate that the men were in,
they believe that the this was an expectation he had
(30:02):
of arriving home in Sweden on a train. Yeah, they
think that entry was written before long before any of
their kind of polar adventures happened. Um, As we said,
the cause of death we don't know, and it remains
one of history's mysteries and it will probably remain that
way forever because the remains that were found by the
(30:23):
crew of the Norwegian sloop Bradwag were actually cremated before
they were buried, so additional testing of those bodies can
never be done. We're gonna step through some of the
most common theories and some of the common arguments against them.
So the first is poisoning from their food tens. There's
a fingernail from a glove that was tested and had
high levels of lead in it, but it's not to
(30:46):
believed to have been enough to have killed anyone. Uh.
There is also a theory that one of the men
had a psychotic episode and it resulted in a murder suicide.
But since the men were rather shockingly upbeat throughout all
of this horrible nous, most people think this seems unlikely,
although there certainly have been cases throughout history of people
that seem really happy and excited and then they have
(31:07):
a psychotic break, so it's possible, but we're not sure.
There's also the possibility of dehydration. Yeah, there's not a
lot of way you can detract that since once they
found these bodies, they were pretty much completely decomposed, so
there wasn't any tissue to really test. Then, even if
they were cremated, there's not much we wouldn't know, right,
and a lot of the nearby water that would have
(31:29):
been available to them would have been saltwater that would
not have hoked to them. Trickin Nosis or botuli is
um is another popular theory from eating uncooked polar bear
or seal meat. Uh, none of the diaries really describe
anything that could be pointed to as evidence of the
symptoms associated with trichinosis. However, this was a new and
(31:50):
exciting fact I learned while doing this research. Botuli is
um is apparently really common in seal meat if it's
not really thoroughly cooked, so it's possible. We know they
were eating eel, so that's one possibility. People have suggested
that it might have been scurvy, but three months really
isn't long enough for scurvy to kill someone. Now, it
can make you pretty sick in that time, but probably
(32:13):
not to the point of fatality. Another theory that has
been put forth is a polar bear attack. Uh, this
one isn't really terribly likely. For one thing, Andre's gun
was next to his body when they found it, so
it seemed like he was actually like watching for danger,
and it would have been unlikely. But also the bodies
(32:33):
that they found Andrey's looked like it may have been disturbed,
But most people believe that may have happened by a
bear after he had already been deceased, because it just
looked kind of shuffled about. It didn't look so much
like an attack situation. There's also the idea that maybe
since they had all this opium around, it was a
deliberate opium over overdose, but they had all seemed to
(32:54):
be in such reasonably good spirits that that seems maybe
not as likely. Yeah, you would think that if they
were coming to that conclusion, there would have been a
diary entry about it. Another one that is is sometimes
brought up is the possibility of vitamin A poisoning from
polar bear liver. However, we know that the men knew
of this danger they wrote about it, so it seems
(33:15):
unlikely that they would have taken that risk. They could
have asphyxiated because they were maybe using their cook stove
inside the tent. Yeah, that's a possibility. Again, we don't
know for sure that one. They're just it's kind of
like maybe we don't have a lot of evidence one
way or the other. Well, there's the reasonable people would
probably think that's a bad idea. But that's the only
(33:38):
counter argument I have. Yeah, well, and you know there
is there are opiates involved. There's the possibility that at
some point they went, you know, it would be great
and it will keep the tent warm, let's bring it in. Uh.
The last theory that we're going to mention almost seems
in some ways like the most obvious, which is that
(33:59):
they died from cold and exhaustion. I mean, at this point,
they had been dragging these multi hundred pounds sledges around
for a while. They had gotten wet in freezing water repeatedly.
You know, they were struggling with other issues. They were
dosing with opium and morphine, like their bodies were taking
(34:21):
a lot of abuse. Yeah. Well, I keep thinking about
two different video games during this episode, and one is
like that this feels like a frozen wasteland version of
Oregon trail Um and the other is one of my
favorite things to play recently, which is a game called
The Long Dark, which is basically about surviving in this
frozen wilderness. Um. And one of the things that happens
(34:42):
in the Long Dark is if you go to sleep
and it turns out it's not warm enough to keep
your body warm and survive, you die, and it it
just a little thing comes up that just says you
have faded into the Long Dark. And I think the
most believable thing is that they thought they were warm
enough to sleep through the night, but they were not. Yeah,
which would make sense because uh, you know, we don't
(35:03):
unlike something like the diatlov past incident where we see
people like paradoxical and dressing and trying to dig through
the snow. This seems like everything was pretty undisturbed. And
if I'm understanding my research correctly, it seems like they
all died probably around the same time, which is one
of the reasons that like the opium theory gains a
lot of UH fans. It's like, well, they all died
(35:24):
around the same time, surely, uh, at least we think
that based on how the bodies were positioned. For all
we know, they died and were propped up by you
know another of the men, and they certainly couldn't bury
them in the ice, so we don't really know. But
what we do know is that once those remains were
discovered in n Uh and the men were returned to Sweden,
(35:45):
finally they were really greeted as heroes. Remember this was
a big effort on uh Sweden's part, like there was
a lot of fervor around it. There was a lot
of excitement that Sweden could be the country that got
to the North Pole first, this amazing approach that no
one else had ever tried. The king had backed them
and then they vanished, So there was a lot of
(36:07):
There were a lot of question marks that were finally
getting some answers. And when they finally arrived Uh there
in Sweden, two hundred ships had joined the procession to
bring them home, and King Gustav the fifth met them
at the pier. Among the items that were recovered from
Camp Mina Andre's place where several cans of film. Some
of the film was damaged or exposed, but there were
(36:29):
ninety three frames that were intact and were later developed.
Strondberg was the photographer. More often than not, he had
dabbled in photography prior to the expedition. There are images
of Andre and Frankel with a polar bear they had killed,
and there's an image of the balloon lying on its
side with Andre and Frankel standing nearby. There's even a
timed exposure shot of all three of the men who
(36:50):
are pulling one of the heavy sledges. And you can
actually see these photos at the Grenham Museum in Sweden,
and they also have them on line. The museum has
scanned them all and put them online and will include
that link in the show notes. Because of the three
decades that this film spent out in the freezing cold,
the images are not particularly perfect. They're flared and burned out.
(37:13):
Some of them have ghostly images of the three men.
The view of Andre in public opinion has really shifted
throughout the years. Sometimes people label him as a madman,
other times people paint him as the hero of Sweden,
and sometimes they portraying it more as a fool who
had dreams of fame and glory. But he and his
companions were it would seem really courageous and tenacious if
(37:35):
nothing else. Yeah, I'm so blown away perpetually by just
how like upbeat they managed to stay through all of
this because I know I would be a whiny complainer
right about the moment that we lost the ropes at
the beginning of the trip. But I also would not
pop probably do a trip like this because I enjoy
the comforts of home. Uh. Yeah, it's such a wild star.
(38:00):
We've had a few requests for this. It pops up
in various places. Um. It's sort of a ceaseless fascination.
So uh and it's one of those things that we
could go on forever and ever because a lot of
the journals have been digitized and can be read online
and it's very very cool stuff. Thanks so much for
(38:26):
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook U r L or something similar over the
course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio
dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no
longer works, and you can find us all over social
(38:47):
media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to
our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart
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you missed in History class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(39:09):
listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. This is the time of year when the
North Pole is on a lot of folks minds. And
to be very clear, this Saturday Classic is not a
Christmas episode at all that it is about an attempt
to get to the North Pole. It is in fact
the polar expedition of s. A. Andre, which was made
(00:22):
by Balloon in eighteen seventy nine. And this episode came
out on April, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello
(00:42):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly fro and I'm
Tracy Vie Wilson, and uh. Many of the history makers
of the world were people who were considered a little
bit mad by their contemporaries. You know, it's usually the
people with great bravado that do something a little bit
crazy and end up kind of changing the world or
making some amazing discovery. Today's topic, which features a man
(01:03):
and his expedition, it definitely falls into that category. But
the unmet goal of the plan has left a lot
of room for debate about how he's defined and how
this mission is defined. This is going to feature some
high adventure, some really wild courageousness and just positivity in
the face of what I think would break most people.
(01:25):
Uh So, we're actually just going to jump right in
and not really set it up a whole lot, and
we're actually going to start sort of at the end
of the story, so that end whe we're starting as
a discovery. White Island, which is known as Kfiteo in Norwegian,
is an island in the small Bard Archipelago, and spall
Bard means cold coast, which makes sense because all these
(01:48):
islands sit in the Arctic Ocean. White Island is normally
completely covered by ice except for two little points of rock,
but in there was a really warm spring in summer,
more of the island than normal was exposed, and because
so much of the ice on White Island had melted,
a Norwegian sloop called the brat Vague, which was on
(02:11):
a combination scientific slash ceiling mission, was actually able to
stop at White Island, and during the sloop's time there,
a geologist named Dr Gunnar Horn and his team followed
these walruses that they had spotted on the island. But
while they were following these walruses, they found, much to
their surprise, something that they had absolutely not been looking for.
Which was a diary. The book was pretty wet, it
(02:34):
had been sitting under the ice as the ice melted,
and parts of it were stuck together on the opening
page where the words the sledge journey. And so when
the geologist Horn took this book back to Peter Eliason,
who was the captain of the Bradwag, he discovered that
two of the seilers that have been traveling with them
(02:55):
had also made a discovery. While they were exploring White Island.
They first found a metal lid like to a what
had possibly been to a tin of food, and that
kind of gave them pause. And then, uh, not far
from there, they found a canvas boat, and this boat
had a hook, and the hook was stamped Andre's Polar Expedition.
(03:16):
It's actually p O L period x e XP period.
They explored the area a little more and quickly found
a lot more stuff, including a headless body which was
reduced to little more than a skeleton. It's clothing was
monogrammed with the letter A. And then they all kind
of put the pieces together. While the men aboard the
(03:37):
brat Bog had landed in White Island to study science
and hunt seals, what they had actually found was the
remains of a long lost ballooning expedition which had tried
to make its way to the North Pole thirty years before,
and so that man that they found they found others
as well. But his name was Solomon August Andre and
(03:58):
he was born in Grenna, Sweden eighteen fifty four. Just
for very brief on him as a young man, when
he was only sixteen, his father died. He became very
very attached to his mother. They were already close, but
that deepened when his dad passed away and he attended
Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology and studied engineering. In eighteen
(04:18):
seventy six, then twenty two year old Andre traveled by
steamer to the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia. This is
a journey that would turn out to be really momentous
for Andre because while he was reading about winds during
this journey to the Atlantic, he was inspired to think
about balloon travel. And when he reached Philadelphia, he actually
(04:38):
got a job at the Swedish pavilion at the expo
as a janitor, and he took advantage of his location
while he was there by visiting a Philadelphia resident by
the name of John Wise and Wise was really famous
for his work in ballooning, and because Wise had flown
in all manner of weather conditions uh and he had
walked away from virtually every possible type of ash that
(05:00):
a balloon could have, Andre felt like this man kind
of served as proof that ballooning was a perfectly safe
mode of travel. The two became friendly, and Andrea requested
the chance to accompany Wise in his balloon, which the
experience balloonist agreed to do. But the planned day for
their trip, which was a Fourth of July celebration, wound
(05:21):
up having really high winds. The balloon collapsed before the
trip could even start, and before they could reschedule their outing,
Andre got sick and decided to go back to Sweden,
and once he got home, he was still obsessed with
this balloon idea, so he decided that he needed to
raise funds to purchase his own balloon uh and he
(05:41):
did this by setting up a machine shop, but that,
unfortunately was not really a great money making plan. He
ended up in a great deal of debt, and he
really found the whole idea of running a retail business
UH really unpleasant to him. He didn't like marketing. He
didn't like the mode of marketing that was popular at
the time, which was talking trash about the competitors. He
(06:03):
found the whole thing distasteful. It just wasn't a good
fit for him, so he closed up his shop and
he still had never had a balloon ride. When he
was twenty eight, Andre participated in the first International Polar
Year as part of the Swedish delegation. Austrian explorer Carl
wait Precked had inspired the International Polar Year, being certain
(06:23):
that there were meteorological and geophysical problems that could only
be solved by a cooperative effort that was aimed at
gathering and studying information from the Earth's poles. So this
was actually a huge event. Eleven different countries sent delegations
to work on these coordinated expeditions that were part of
this first International Polar Year, and Andre's group went to
(06:46):
the Svalbard island of Spitzbergen, and one of the experiments
that was conducted there actually involved Andre being confined indoors
for an entire month to see if his skin color
would change, and it did. It took on this yellowish
huge that had been seen in other people after they
had been through an Arctic winter. Prior to that, they
weren't sure if that was something going on with their
(07:07):
vision having been altered and people just looked that way,
or if there was actually something happening in the skin
that changed its its hue. Uh And then do in
large part to Andrea's work in aero electricity, the Swedish
delegation was really recognized for the impressive results of their
work as part of this bigger cooperative effort. And after
this expedition was over, though Andrea went to a fairly
(07:31):
mundane job working for the Swedish Patent Office. He did, however,
finally get to take a balloon ride, and that's what
we will talk about after a brief word from a sponsor.
So despite the fact that Andrea had been fascinated with
(07:53):
balloons since he was only twenty two, he had not
actually gotten to ride in one, and that didn't even
happen until he was third the eight So for sixteen
years he had kind of been pining for this experience
and his eventual escort in this was what's the man
who's called Norway's first balloon skipper and his name was
Captain Francesco Chetti, which I know is an Italian name.
(08:15):
He was of Italian family, but he was Norwegian. I'm
not sure how the Norwegian language shift would have changed
the pronunciation of his name, so we're going with the
Italian version. Uh. Chetty was an interesting figure in his
own right. He was also a mind reader and the
starvation artist, where he would go without food for long
times as these big sort of public stunts. Jenny was
(08:37):
kind of annoyed by uh by Andrea's behavior during this
first outing. He called it quote disagreeably calm. According to
Andrea's own account, he was trying to be completely aware
of his mental and physiological responses to the situation, noting
that while he didn't consciously feel any fear, his body
acted in ways that suggests that he did unconsciously feel
(08:58):
some fear going on. He found himself, for example, tightly
gripping the ropes on the balloon. He took only one
more flight with Jetty before deciding that he ought to
get a balloon for himself, and he was actually able
to finance the purchase through a Swedish science fund. Uh.
This was basically a fun set up for people to
use money UH if they were going to work on
(09:19):
science projects. Or things that would better the Swedish people
as a whole. And so once he had his balloon,
he took nine solo trips in it, and each time
he was really scientific about carefully detailing his observations. Remember
his education was engineering, so he was a really excellent NoteTaker.
And on one trip he actually ascended to fourteen thousand,
two hundred and fifty feet. That's four thousand, three forty
(09:42):
three meters. So, for contexts, cabin pressure and modern airplanes
is set to correspond to what humans would experience up
to seven thousand feet or a little over that. Uh.
So he was basically flying in this balloon without protection
at twice the altitude that safety regulations say we should
(10:03):
aim for in terms of keeping people comfortable and safe.
And he described this during this journey a lightheadedness and
a terrible headache and a faint quote a faint singing
noise on the left side of my skull. So, for
another comparison to a previous episode, we talked about Mount Everest,
which is twenty nine thousand feet. Uh. However, those most
(10:26):
people that Summit Everest are using oxygen tanks to help
them along. This is a case where there was none such.
They're also acclimating on the way up, They're not just
descending in a balloon all that way. I'm surprised he
didn't get the Benz. Yeah, he was a resilient dude,
so maybe he did and we just don't know. So Anyway,
(10:47):
on another of his trips on his balloon, which he
named this Veia, he tested out the use of drag
ropes and a sail to try to steer the vessel,
and these would eventually become important as part of his
eventual plan to explore the Arctic. And after his ninth trip,
UH he sold his balloon to a museum. It was
an outdoor museum where they would have space to put
(11:07):
him and his engineering background and his wind study and
his experiences in ballooning had basically given him a really
big idea. At this point, a lot of explorers were
totally focused on the North Pole. Numerous countries had launched
missions to go north, and of the thousand men who
had tried to get to the poll, seven and fifty
(11:29):
one had died, so UH, most of them it was
really serious business and being the first to get to
the North Pole was going to be a significant point
of pride for whatever country could claim it and so.
On February, when he was forty years old, so this
is only two years into his ballooning experience, Andrea addressed
(11:51):
the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and during that speech
he outlined his very ambitious plan to travel to the
North Pole via balloon. And a few months after his
talk at the Royal Swedish Academy, andre gave basically the
same talk to the sixth International Geographical Congress in London
in the hopes of getting UH funding in the form
of a little less than forty thousand dollars worth of money.
(12:13):
I think I've seen it listed as around thirty eight thousand,
traveling by balloon and leaving from Danes Island in this
Baal Barn archipelago. He expected to go north for about
forty three hours to reach the poll. The balloon that
he traveled in would be outfitted with the drag ropes
and sale that we talked about before to try to
enable steering and control of the balloon. The next part
(12:35):
of his plan involved crossing over the pole and then
continuing over that point two travels for several additional days,
and his intention was that he would eventually land in
Asia or perhaps Alaska, depending on how the wind moved him,
and once he landed, he planned to travel over land
on foot until he found civilization so he could arrange
for travel back to Sweden. It may surprise you to
(12:58):
learn that Andre's outlook as he described this whole plan
was positive and enthusiastic, even when talking about the possible
obstacles he might encounter once he got the balloon on
the ground and tried to find his way home. He
could use waterways to travel, he said, And he seemed
really confident that even if he landed in a desert,
he would surely find vegetation and shelter, and surely any
(13:18):
people he would encounter would give him directions or help
him back to civilization. He really was a positive thinker.
I gotta give him props. He felt like this plan
to reach the pole was going to succeed where others failed,
and that was because he was going to circumvent all
of those perils of traveling by sleder on foot by
(13:39):
taking to the air. What may have really been the
moment where Andre won over the crowd was actually something
of a job that he made at One of the
men who tried to contest this plan, American General Adolphus Greeley,
made his opinion known that he thought this plan was
foolish and had not been thought out. And Greeley, he
may recognize that name, had been commanding officer of an
(14:01):
expedition to the Arctic Circle in one that was the
Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, and it was intended to gather
scientific information about the Arctic and to set a new
record for the farthest point north that had been reached
by explorers. And this expedition met with great tragedy. The
crew ended up stranding in the Arctic for years, and
(14:21):
all but Greeley and five other men died, so the
majority of his crew did not survive that In response
to Greeley's objections to this three man balloon plan, Andre said,
I risk three lives and what you call a fool
hearty attempt, and you risked how many a shipload? So
as Andre left the stage, the entire hall cheered him,
(14:44):
and in the end, most of the money that he
needed for his polar balloon came from none other than
Alfred Noble and Sweden's King Oscar the second, before we
get to the exciting adventure of the expedition itself, let's
have one more brief sponsor break. Yeah, the break. They're
a little close together, but that's because I want to
keep the whole expedition all in one piece. So we'll
(15:04):
have a quick break and then we'll come right back
to it. So once he had his funding secured, Andre
commissioned a Parisian built balloon which was made from layers
and layers of varnished silk, and this balloon was named
the Eagle. The hydrogen balloon was on feet thirty meters tall,
(15:29):
and to protect this impressive inflatable as it was ready
for flight as they filled it with air and got
everything ready, he also had a house built for it
on Danes Island, which uh I believe was five stories tall.
And this custom house actually had a felt lined interior
so that anything the balloon touched would not damage it
and one entire side of the house could be quickly
(15:50):
removed when the balloon was ready to go, and the
windows were made of gelatine like it was basically everything
soft that won't hurt this balloon. Andre chose two other
men to complete his crew for this ambitious plan. These
were Nils Strendberg and Nils holm Strandberg, who was twenty three,
taught physics as an assistant professor, and he was also
the cousin of the famed playwright August Strenberg at home,
(16:14):
was the oldest of the team, at age forty seven.
He had led the Spitzberg and expedition that Andre had
participated in, and he was an experienced meteorologist. And so
for several weeks in eighteen ninety six, the eager Andrea
and his companions attempted to begin their journey, but they
were just constantly thwarted by in their efforts by unfavorable
(16:35):
conditions and to make matters worse, as Winter said on et,
Holme left the team. He didn't think this was such
a good idea after all, and he bowed out. Fortunately,
Andre already had an alternate at the ready that was
Mute Frankel. He was an athletic civil engineer and was
twenty seven years old. But his troubles were not over.
Andre's mother died suddenly as they were preparing to set
(16:57):
off in eight seven. While Andre seemed kind of placid
to those around him, he was really deeply melancholy at
the loss of his mother. He wrote in his journal quote,
the only thread which bound me to the wish to
live is cut off. Yeah. She was really his only
like close relationship. He mentioned at one point when he
(17:18):
was younger that he really just decided he was never
going to have romantic interests because he knew he wanted
to become, you know, an explorer and do great things
once he had married this idea of ballooning, and he
didn't ever want a woman to make the tearful, you know,
request to him to please don't go and do this
thing and him having to say, no, I'm doing it.
(17:40):
So his mother was really it really was his one
tether and so without that he was sort of starting
off with a bit of heartbreak. And finally, after they
had waited for the perfect conditions and the winter had passed,
the team was finally able to leave Danes Island on
July eleven. And I sort of of this, but the
(18:01):
last words that Andrea was heard to utter by the
onlookers were what's that as the balloon had struck something
as it headed out on its expedition, Maybe unsurprisingly, giving
the inauspiciousness of those words, almost immediately there were problems.
The drag ropes were pulling the basket down into the
water and they had to be cut. The three men
(18:22):
aboard also quickly dumped about four and fifty pounds or
two ms of sandbag ballast to try to lift their
transport out of the icy ocean. As the vessel and
its team, who were still struggling with these problems, vanished
out of the sight of the onlookers. They were traveling
north at about twenty miles an hour, which is about
thirty two kilo an hour, and the ropes that were
(18:45):
designed to help them steer we're now gone. Yea, so
they were drag ropes. Not a great idea. You don't
often see a balloon tootling around with a rope dragging
from it to the ground, and there are reasons for that.
Uh So what happened to the team next was actually
(19:07):
put together from the journals which were found in h
and While all of the men wrote records of this
whole wacky adventure, Andrea not surprisingly was the most prolific
writer of the group. The first night of their journey
seemed to be really incredibly joyous. Andre marveled at seeing
the vast expanses of ice, which were dotted by polar bears.
(19:27):
In the morning after the first night, the team had
breakfast and coffee, and they traveled through some hazy conditions
that were just above freezing. And as the day stretched
into the afternoon and that misty weather continued, the basket
dropped and it bounced repeatedly on the ice, as often
as eight times in thirty minutes. According to their records.
(19:47):
They had lost enough hydrogen that they could not stay aloft.
But despite this bumpy going, the team all stayed really upbeat.
While taking a watch as his comrades rested, Andre wrote,
it is not a little strange to be floating here
above the polar sea, to be the first that have
floated here in a balloon. How soon, I wonder Shaw
(20:08):
we have successors. We think we can well face death
having done what we have done. Isn't it all perhaps
the expression of an extremely strong sense of individuality which
cannot bear the thought of living and dying like a
man in the ranks, forgotten by coming generations? Is this ambition?
And as that bumpy ride continued, uh seasickness kind of
(20:32):
hit Strindberg that he was really getting quite ill, so
they dumped a great many of their sandbags so that
they could get enough lift that they would stop thumping
on the ice. But as the third morning of their
trip came on, the basket once again dropped as the
conditions turned even fog gear and then it suddenly rose
high in the air as it warmed up a little bit,
(20:52):
and the team released some gas so that they would
drop down a little bit again, but they were just
having trouble regulating their place in the air, and after
fighting with the situation for a while and growing a
little more frustrated, they finally decided to land on the ice,
and they did so at around eight am, and at
this point they had been traveling for sixty five hours
and they were more than five hundred miles or about
(21:13):
eight hundred kilometers into their ride for the next week,
the three men plotted what their next move should be.
They had, as part of their preparation, made plans for
various possible events, and this included packing. Sledges are very
heavy sleds for each of the men to pull, so
the trio spent their planning time carefully selecting what they
would load onto these sleds, which they pulled using ropes
(21:36):
that were wrapped around their shoulders like harnesses. These sledges
weighed hundreds of pounds, so this was really no small task,
and sometimes the men would all three pull one sled
and then go back and do the same with the
next one, and then bring up the third. And they
had also arranged to have depots set up in two
places in the events that they needed them. The first
(21:58):
was on Franz Joseph Lynn, which was part of a
Russian archipelago, and the second, smaller depot that they had
arranged was on the Seven Islands, and that's back part
of this small Bard archipelago. After they had packed their sleds,
the first men set out towards the Russian depot. The
men managed to shoot several polar bears along the way
and prep them to use as food. Picking their way
(22:19):
through the ice flows was really treacherous and exhausting, but
the men all seemed to bolster one another. They did
fall into the water from time to time, though, and
the average temperature stayed around thirty two degrees fahrenheit or
zero celsius, although it did drop from time to time,
so I would imagine being in wet clothes. I wouldn't
even imagine. I would know for certain being in wet
clothes in those conditions would be very treacherous, it would
(22:44):
and miserable. But really, all their diaries are so sort
of like positive, it's it's almost freaky. I wonder if
it's one reason. I wonder if it's because hypothermia was
affecting their their attitudes. Maybe we'll get we'll get to
one reason why they might have been happy despite their
seemingly miserable circumstances. Um So, several days into their trek
(23:06):
towards friends Joseph Land, there were two major setbacks. First,
Frankel started to experience snow blindness. So this is known
clinically as photocarrotitis, and snow blindness basically occurs when the
cornea of the eye becomes burned by ultra violet b rays. Uh.
This happens a lot in cold areas with lots of
(23:28):
ice and snow because it reflects off the snow up
into your eyes even when your head is down. Second,
they became aware that they had been walking east on
the ice, but that same ice was actually drifting west
at a much faster pace than they were making. So
they had been struggling all that time with the sledges
and working out all the pushing and pulling, and they
really had made no headway whatsoever. So by August four
(23:51):
they abandoned this plan to travel east to the Russian Archipelago,
and instead they decided they would switch directions and head
to the Seven Islands depot. To make matters worse, the
temperature started to drop by several degrees, and fortunately they
did have food supplies, including butter, bread, and biscuits, as
well as water. They supplemented this with polar bear meat
(24:14):
when they could, and they even tried eating the bear
meat raw, as well as making blood pancakes out of
bears blood mixed with oatmeal and fried. They also made
algae soup, which does not sound nearly as disgusting as
the bear blood and pancakes to me. I was talking
with friends about this last night while I was working
(24:35):
on it, and I was describing blood pancakes to one
of my friends, who is also a big food evening
goes that sounds kind of French. I'd try it, and
it does. Then, when I thought about some of the
things my grandmother cooked, it does sound pretty French um.
So despite their exhaustion and this totally desperate situation, the
(24:55):
tone of Andrey's journal entry still is almost oddly positive.
And this could have been because in addition to their
food rations, they had also brought quite a bit of
opium with them. They used it as a pain reliever
and also to treat diarrhea, and they also had morphine,
and in some cases they were double dosing with the
opium and the morphine. Frankel in particular seemed really plagued
(25:19):
by problems. He twisted his knees, he had digestive distress.
This is actually kind of uh ironic because Frankel one
of the reasons he was chosen was because he was
very athletic, and they kind of envisioned him being like
the strong pack mule of the group. But he seemed
to struggle the most with all of this travel, so
according to Andre's notebooks, he was the one that they
were kind of constantly having to figure out when he
(25:41):
needed opium dosages. And the first days of September, the
crew managed to travel by boat, which, while grueling in
its own right, was a really welcome change from pulling
these heavy sledges to celebrate Strindberg's birthday. On the fourth
of September, Andre gave him letters from his family and
his fiance which had been went to Hymn before they
left Danes Island. This is a happy surprise, though, but
(26:05):
unfortunately Stenberg later fell into the water and ruined all
the rations that he was carrying. Yeah, it was kind
of a day of ups and downs um. And then
a few days after that, on September nine, they realized
once again, since they had switched directions on August four,
they had again been thwarted by the movement of the ice,
so they had been trying to travel a little more
(26:27):
than eighty miles or roughly nine kilometers southwest, but again,
because the ice that they're walking on is also shifting,
they had actually been drifting about the correct distance, but
instead to the south southeast. This is also the day
when Andre's diary kind of drops off. He stopped doing
his regular entries, which seems like a little bit of
(26:48):
a clue that he might be losing heart. On September seventeen,
he wrote that an especially bad blister on Frankel's foot
had rendered him unable to pull his sledge anymore, so
he and Stronberg had been running back to get the
third one and to play catch up with the others
periodically as they all traveled. There had also been some
snow which added extra weight to everything. They managed to
(27:08):
kill and eat a seal, and then they realized that
they were going to be trapped out there on the
ice through the winter. Even with all this hardship. Uh
he he wrote, quote, our humor is pretty good, although
joking and smiling are not of ordinary occurrence. And on
September nineteenth, there was actually a little bit of a
ray of hope. Andrea managed to shoot three seals, and
(27:31):
that meant that with those, once they were dressed for
food and they're remaining food stores that they still had
with them, they were going to be able to get
through at least half of the winter. So they knew
like they had rations for at least a little while,
they could keep trying to gather more and they might
be in okay shape. Like it looked like they might
be able to do this. And they also started building
a snow house on the ice that they were on
(27:52):
to live in by forming snow into kind of like
walls and structure and then pouring water over it to
harden everything. Their ice hut was completed on September twenty eight,
but just four days later, the ice blow that they
built it on broke apart and water came rushing in.
The three men had to hustle to get all their
supplies together and to get it up off the breaking
(28:14):
ice before everything drifted away. The end of the entry
in Andrey's diary, and he had two diaries, and this
was the end of the first one reads quote, no
one had lost courage. With such comrades, one should be
able to manage under, I may say, any circumstances. With
that kind of positive attitude, even in the face of
(28:35):
complete misery and seemingly loss of all hope, The men
started construction on another snow house two days later. They
had spotted White Island earlier in their journey, but they
thought they'd be unable to land there because it looked
like it was totally iced over. But October four, which
was the same day they had started on their new house,
they also saw a spot on White Island where they
(28:57):
thought they might actually be able to move ashore. On
October five, they did. They named their new camp Mina
Andrea's Place after Andrea's mother because October five was her birthday,
and so while it seems like things are looking up
at this point in the story, Andrea's last entry is
just three days later, on October eight. He describes their
(29:20):
happiness at being off the ice and actually on land
and in a tent, and he kind of sorting through
what they're gonna need to do, including collecting some driftwood
and whale bones so that they can get some fires
going and meet some other needs. So we don't know
for certain when or how the three adventurers died. When
the White Island camp was discovered in ninety their supplies
(29:41):
were still in the boat. There was a pile of
driftwood that was gathered but unused. Nearby. There was an
entry in Strandberg's notebook for October seventeenth which read home
seven oh five am. But based on the fact that
it was written in ink, which would have frozen and
been unusable in the climate that the men were in,
they believe that the this was an expectation he had
(30:02):
of arriving home in Sweden on a train. Yeah, they
think that entry was written before long before any of
their kind of polar adventures happened. Um, As we said,
the cause of death we don't know, and it remains
one of history's mysteries and it will probably remain that
way forever because the remains that were found by the
(30:23):
crew of the Norwegian sloop Bradwag were actually cremated before
they were buried, so additional testing of those bodies can
never be done. We're gonna step through some of the
most common theories and some of the common arguments against them.
So the first is poisoning from their food tens. There's
a fingernail from a glove that was tested and had
high levels of lead in it, but it's not to
(30:46):
believed to have been enough to have killed anyone. Uh.
There is also a theory that one of the men
had a psychotic episode and it resulted in a murder suicide.
But since the men were rather shockingly upbeat throughout all
of this horrible nous, most people think this seems unlikely,
although there certainly have been cases throughout history of people
that seem really happy and excited and then they have
(31:07):
a psychotic break, so it's possible, but we're not sure.
There's also the possibility of dehydration. Yeah, there's not a
lot of way you can detract that since once they
found these bodies, they were pretty much completely decomposed, so
there wasn't any tissue to really test. Then, even if
they were cremated, there's not much we wouldn't know, right,
and a lot of the nearby water that would have
(31:29):
been available to them would have been saltwater that would
not have hoked to them. Trickin Nosis or botuli is
um is another popular theory from eating uncooked polar bear
or seal meat. Uh, none of the diaries really describe
anything that could be pointed to as evidence of the
symptoms associated with trichinosis. However, this was a new and
(31:50):
exciting fact I learned while doing this research. Botuli is
um is apparently really common in seal meat if it's
not really thoroughly cooked, so it's possible. We know they
were eating eel, so that's one possibility. People have suggested
that it might have been scurvy, but three months really
isn't long enough for scurvy to kill someone. Now, it
can make you pretty sick in that time, but probably
(32:13):
not to the point of fatality. Another theory that has
been put forth is a polar bear attack. Uh, this
one isn't really terribly likely. For one thing, Andre's gun
was next to his body when they found it, so
it seemed like he was actually like watching for danger,
and it would have been unlikely. But also the bodies
(32:33):
that they found Andrey's looked like it may have been disturbed,
But most people believe that may have happened by a
bear after he had already been deceased, because it just
looked kind of shuffled about. It didn't look so much
like an attack situation. There's also the idea that maybe
since they had all this opium around, it was a
deliberate opium over overdose, but they had all seemed to
(32:54):
be in such reasonably good spirits that that seems maybe
not as likely. Yeah, you would think that if they
were coming to that conclusion, there would have been a
diary entry about it. Another one that is is sometimes
brought up is the possibility of vitamin A poisoning from
polar bear liver. However, we know that the men knew
of this danger they wrote about it, so it seems
(33:15):
unlikely that they would have taken that risk. They could
have asphyxiated because they were maybe using their cook stove
inside the tent. Yeah, that's a possibility. Again, we don't
know for sure that one. They're just it's kind of
like maybe we don't have a lot of evidence one
way or the other. Well, there's the reasonable people would
probably think that's a bad idea. But that's the only
(33:38):
counter argument I have. Yeah, well, and you know there
is there are opiates involved. There's the possibility that at
some point they went, you know, it would be great
and it will keep the tent warm, let's bring it in. Uh.
The last theory that we're going to mention almost seems
in some ways like the most obvious, which is that
(33:59):
they died from cold and exhaustion. I mean, at this point,
they had been dragging these multi hundred pounds sledges around
for a while. They had gotten wet in freezing water repeatedly.
You know, they were struggling with other issues. They were
dosing with opium and morphine, like their bodies were taking
(34:21):
a lot of abuse. Yeah. Well, I keep thinking about
two different video games during this episode, and one is
like that this feels like a frozen wasteland version of
Oregon trail Um and the other is one of my
favorite things to play recently, which is a game called
The Long Dark, which is basically about surviving in this
frozen wilderness. Um. And one of the things that happens
(34:42):
in the Long Dark is if you go to sleep
and it turns out it's not warm enough to keep
your body warm and survive, you die, and it it
just a little thing comes up that just says you
have faded into the Long Dark. And I think the
most believable thing is that they thought they were warm
enough to sleep through the night, but they were not. Yeah,
which would make sense because uh, you know, we don't
(35:03):
unlike something like the diatlov past incident where we see
people like paradoxical and dressing and trying to dig through
the snow. This seems like everything was pretty undisturbed. And
if I'm understanding my research correctly, it seems like they
all died probably around the same time, which is one
of the reasons that like the opium theory gains a
lot of UH fans. It's like, well, they all died
(35:24):
around the same time, surely, uh, at least we think
that based on how the bodies were positioned. For all
we know, they died and were propped up by you
know another of the men, and they certainly couldn't bury
them in the ice, so we don't really know. But
what we do know is that once those remains were
discovered in n Uh and the men were returned to Sweden,
(35:45):
finally they were really greeted as heroes. Remember this was
a big effort on uh Sweden's part, like there was
a lot of fervor around it. There was a lot
of excitement that Sweden could be the country that got
to the North Pole first, this amazing approach that no
one else had ever tried. The king had backed them
and then they vanished, So there was a lot of
(36:07):
There were a lot of question marks that were finally
getting some answers. And when they finally arrived Uh there
in Sweden, two hundred ships had joined the procession to
bring them home, and King Gustav the fifth met them
at the pier. Among the items that were recovered from
Camp Mina Andre's place where several cans of film. Some
of the film was damaged or exposed, but there were
(36:29):
ninety three frames that were intact and were later developed.
Strondberg was the photographer. More often than not, he had
dabbled in photography prior to the expedition. There are images
of Andre and Frankel with a polar bear they had killed,
and there's an image of the balloon lying on its
side with Andre and Frankel standing nearby. There's even a
timed exposure shot of all three of the men who
(36:50):
are pulling one of the heavy sledges. And you can
actually see these photos at the Grenham Museum in Sweden,
and they also have them on line. The museum has
scanned them all and put them online and will include
that link in the show notes. Because of the three
decades that this film spent out in the freezing cold,
the images are not particularly perfect. They're flared and burned out.
(37:13):
Some of them have ghostly images of the three men.
The view of Andre in public opinion has really shifted
throughout the years. Sometimes people label him as a madman,
other times people paint him as the hero of Sweden,
and sometimes they portraying it more as a fool who
had dreams of fame and glory. But he and his
companions were it would seem really courageous and tenacious if
(37:35):
nothing else. Yeah, I'm so blown away perpetually by just
how like upbeat they managed to stay through all of
this because I know I would be a whiny complainer
right about the moment that we lost the ropes at
the beginning of the trip. But I also would not
pop probably do a trip like this because I enjoy
the comforts of home. Uh. Yeah, it's such a wild star.
(38:00):
We've had a few requests for this. It pops up
in various places. Um. It's sort of a ceaseless fascination.
So uh and it's one of those things that we
could go on forever and ever because a lot of
the journals have been digitized and can be read online
and it's very very cool stuff. Thanks so much for
(38:26):
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook U r L or something similar over the
course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio
dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no
longer works, and you can find us all over social
(38:47):
media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to
our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart
Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff
you missed in History class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(39:09):
listen to your favorite shows.
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