Falling Upwards

by Richard Holmes

  Andrée was now alone on the deck of the stationary Eagle for several hours, until early in the morning of 13 July. It was a rare moment of solitary command, a historic pause: the heroic aeronaut aboard the greatest of the nineteenth-century free balloons. Using his Zeiss binoculars, he gazed around at the desolate, grey-yellow ice stretching to the horizon in every direction. The low fog and the utter solitude pressed down upon him: ‘Not a living thing has been seen all night, no bird, seal, walrus or bear.’45

  The balloon swayed slightly at the end of its trapped trail rope. At some point he sat down on the little wooden barrel they used as a seat, opened his journal on his knee, and made his longest and his only personal entry during the entire expedition.

  Is it 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, shall we have successors? Shall we be thought mad, or will our example be followed? I cannot deny but that all three of us are dominated by feelings of pride. We think we can well face death, having done what we have done. Is not the whole endeavour, 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? The rattling of the guide-lines in the snow, and the flapping of the sails, are the only sounds to be heard, except the creaking [of the wind] in the basket.46

  As Andrée clearly intended, this is a historic statement in the development of ballooning. It poses the question: are they at the beginning, or at the end, of a great tradition of aerial exploration?fn45 Yet the truly surprising feature of this entry is its philosophical resignation. There is no sense of planning ahead, of assessing their chances. Andrée, like his balloon, is stuck fast, psychologically immobilised.

  There is no attempt to consider options, or practical alternatives. It is almost as if the whole expedition is already over – ‘We think we can well face death, having done what we have done.’ For Andrée, after little more than thirty hours, death is now the most likely outcome. Yet clearly these were not the feelings of either Nils or Fraenkel, who had every reason to live, and to return to Sweden.

  By mid-morning on 13 July everyone had slept, and the situation had changed again. The capricious wind had come round through nearly 180 degrees, and was blowing eastwards once more. At 11 a.m. the trail rope, pulled in the reverse direction, suddenly broke free from the ice, knocking them all off their feet. They were now sailing back eastwards, on an almost reciprocal course. They resorted to a hot meal washed down with several bottles of ‘the King’s Special Ale’.47 Then Andrée released four pigeons bearing the same very brief message. He gave their latitude as 82 degrees 2 minutes North, and said they were making ‘good speed’ to the east. He added less than a dozen words: ‘All well on board. This is the third pigeon post. Andrée.’

  Ominously, there were no further details of their plans or prospects; no personal comments; and no signature from either Fraenkel or Strindberg. Probably Andrée simply did not want to admit the true position.48 But it was clear. At 5 p.m. that day they crossed back over exactly the same point at which they had been twenty-five hours earlier, at 4 p.m. on 12 July. The balloon had simply performed a huge west–east dog’s leg. They had covered a further two hundred miles over the ice, but got not a mile nearer the Pole.

  By this stage the technical state of the Eagle was critical. It was beginning to bump on the ice again, and it was now clear that the fog had frozen yet more moisture onto the balloon canopy and network cords, adding hundreds of pounds to her weight. The failure of the sun to emerge throughout 13 July meant that this process of icing-up was ever-accelerating. It was a situation, despite all his analysis of Arctic ‘data’, for which engineer Andrée had provided no ‘design solution’.

  As the afternoon of 13 July wore on, the bumpings made things increasingly difficult in the basket, and it became colder still. Andrée seemed lost in thought, Fraenkel let the cooker catch fire, and Nils started to feel ill: ‘I tried to lie down in the car at 7 o’clock but in consequence of the bumping I became seasick and spewed.’ He went up alone into the ring, pulled on ‘a pair of balloon-cloth trousers, and an Iceland jersey’, and read Anna’s last letter. ‘It was a really enjoyable moment.’49

  At 8 p.m. on 13 July, probably in response to Nils’s urgings to return to a ‘high-level journey’, Andrée ordered a major dump of ballast. They threw overboard six more marker buoys, the winch, the night-stool, and most of the remaining sacks of gravel. In total this amounted to 550 pounds, an enormous weight, which should have lifted them back well above the clouds. The Eagle stirred in response, rose to two hundred feet, and then stubbornly hung there, still shrouded in icy fog. By 10.30 p.m. it was down again, and striking violently against the ice.50

  The only possible remedy was now so extreme that it would be a complete aeronautical gamble. Unless they threw out some of the equipment in the upper storage cone – which consisted of the tinned food, the spare ammunition, the sledges, the tent, the collapsible boat and the cooking fuel, all of it vital for survival down on the ice – the Eagle would never rise again. It was exactly the dilemma defined by Dr Ekholm. Did Andrée really trust the balloon alone to get them ‘safely out of the Polar area’, and back home? Would they commit themselves completely and finally to the air, rather than to the earth? They must have discussed this dilemma throughout the ‘night’ of 13 July, although there is no record in either Andrée’s or Strindberg’s journals of what may have been said.fn46

  6

  Clearly Andrée concluded that it was too much of a gamble. At 6.20 the following morning, 14 July, he released further gas and started to bring the balloon down on what looked like a relatively smooth section of the ice floe. It was a fearful decision. They had been airborne for less than sixty-five hours, in a balloon designed to fly for thirty days. Now the Eagle would never be able to fly again. From this moment they were no longer aerial beings, but were committed to the ice, and to crawling painfully over one of the cruellest surfaces on the planet. It was not an easy landing, as the basket dragged for over an hour, banging, creaking and scouring up snow, until it finally turned over on its side. Nils recorded ‘heavy shocks’ until they came to a halt at 7.30 a.m.51 Led by Andrée all three scrambled out, and stood bleakly on the frozen, featureless plateau.

  It was a grim prospect. Their basket was no longer their snug home, their organised scientific laboratory, but a piece of wreckage, good simply for salvage. Their huge, proud balloon was a slack, half-deflated dome of tattered silk, crackling with frost and sitting brokenly on the ice, a mere piece of debris. Beyond, there was no sun and no clear horizon in any direction.

  It was true that they had travelled 517 miles over the ice, and had landed without injury, and with most of their equipment and instruments intact. That was a genuine achievement. But they were still over four hundred miles short of the Pole. They had not reached Nansen’s ‘farthest north’ point of 86 degrees, or the Fram’s at 84 degrees. They were not even quite at 83 degrees north, and barely beyond the point that Parry had reached in 1827. Moreover, they were 216 miles from the nearest land to the south, although they had four months left before the Arctic winter closed in on them. At first they all seemed stunned, and stood in silence, adjusting to their new world.52

  Nils Strindberg seems to have been the first to react. He pulled the Zeiss camera off the balloon ring, walked clear of the landing site, and took the most memorable sequence of photographs of the entire expedition. The first is taken relatively close, from immediately behind the basket, which lies on its side, snow scooped up around it where it has dragged. Andrée, wearing a flat woollen cap, is in the centre of the frame, gazing down at the tangle of ropes, his back turned and his head bowed. Behind him, in darker clothes, Fraenkel stands with his hands thrust into his pockets, his back also turned but appearing to gaze intently at Andrée. There is a box, possibly a binocular case, flung down in the snow behind h
im.

  The next photograph is taken from further back, and to the right. It shows the Eagle sitting upright and half inflated on the ice, a broken, bulbous shape, very black against the dead glare of the Arctic fog. The gondola is dragged out behind it in a tangle of cords and cables. The sail hangs inert, apparently without its boom. Several guide ropes are still attached, indicating that Andrée never tried to jettison them. A few bits of equipment have now been unloaded, and dumped without order in the snow.

  Andrée stands astride the storage section, as if beginning an assessment, and trying to reassert command. But Fraenkel still appears immobile on the ice, gazing at Andrée, stunned, as if he hasn’t yet gathered the force to move. It is the unseen Nils, the youngest, the photographic witness, who has reacted with the most speed and energy. The bleak, almost abstract image that he captures, so poignant in all its human implications, becomes the defining picture of the expedition. It also becomes a larger symbol: the end of the romantic era of ballooning.fn47

  The rest of their story belongs, as Dr Ekholm had feared and predicted, not to the air but to the ice. On 22 July, after eight days of preparation, they abandoned the Eagle’s gondola and the wreckage of the balloon, and began the long march south on the shifting ice floes. Andrée calculated that they had between two hundred and 250 miles to cover, depending on ice drift, and approximately 110 days of Arctic sunlight left in which to cover it. It was not impossible. If they headed south-west they might get back to the Seven Islands, off Spitsbergen; if south-east they might reach Franz Josef Land, where Nansen had overwintered. Both had supply dumps. Andrée initially chose Franz Josef Land, but would later change course and head for the Seven Islands. They cut up a section of the Eagle’s silken fabric to protect their tent, and perhaps also as a memento of their great and disastrous flight. Then they mounted everything they could carry on the three sledges and the small collapsible boat, and finally turned their backs on the elusive Pole. But the Pole had not turned its back on them.

  Initially they made good progress, of several miles a day. They hunted for food as they went, mostly shooting polar bear. A successful return seemed possible, provided they all kept well, the weather held, and there were no accidents on the perilous ice. Andrée’s diary concentrated on the immediate logistics of the expedition, and on keeping his team together, which he did admirably. Fraenkel maintained a daily meteorological journal, stolid and reliable, but without adding much comment. Only Nils Strindberg’s thoughts floated further afield and beyond the ice. For the first few weeks, he continued to write his tender letter to his fiancée Anna, promising his imminent return.

  Occasionally his reflections turned back to the balloon. He even thought optimistically of a future airborne expedition. After nearly a month he wrote:

  15th August. We made very good blood-pancake of bear fat and oatmeal fried in butter and eaten with butter … Proposals for alterations in the next polar-balloon expedition. The drag lines to be sheathed in metal. The car in the carrying ring. The gas to be somewhat heated by boiling water in the car and condensing the steam in a sheet-iron vessel in the balloon. The balloon to be of the same cloth [but] about 6,000 cubic metres [larger] in volume.53

  Nils’s running letter to Anna was incomplete and undated. But gallantly it maintains to the end the same light-hearted tone, as if describing some ordinary holiday jaunt. He gives details of their day, the weather and the things they talked about. He remains respectful and admiring of Andrée. He makes no mention at all of the slogging trek, the exhaustion, the growing terror, or the fact that he had recently slipped off an ice floe and nearly drowned, and been left behind with the sledges to recover, while Andrée and Fraenkel went on ahead to check their onward route.

  Instead he drifts into a dream of Anna sitting at home in Sweden, safe and sound. In fact, just like himself sitting on a sledge in the Arctic: ‘The weather is pretty bad; wet snow and fog; but we are in good humour. We have kept up a really pleasant conversation the whole day. Andrée has spoken about his life, how he entered the Patent Bureau etc. Fraenkel and Andrée have gone forward on a reconnoitring tour. I stayed with the sledges, and now I am sitting writing to you. Yes, now [I imagine] you are having an evening at home; and just like me, you have had a very jolly and pleasant day.’54

  But there was one fatal circumstance which only slowly became clear as Andrée studied Fraenkel’s irregular sextant sightings on the declining sun, on its rare appearances. They were covering their daily distance over the ice roughly as planned. Yet even as they walked away from the Pole, they were being drawn back towards it. The Arctic ice pack was itself drifting northwards almost as swiftly as they walked south. More than once after a succession of hard days’ marching (for example, between 31 July and 3 August), their sextant bearings showed that they had actually moved several miles north. It was almost as if the North Pole, like a jealous god out of the Norse legends, having glimpsed the Eagle trespassing on its horizon, was reluctant to let them escape from its icy grasp. They were moving from science and technology back into the world of myth and legend.

  This agonising process, like trying to walk up a downward escalator, held them in thrall for the next two months. In an attempt to compensate for it, between 4 August and 9 September they angled their direction of march south-westwards, towards Spitsbergen. After covering eighty-one miles in thirty-five days, they found that the ice had also changed direction. They had been carried back virtually the same distance south-eastwards towards Franz Josef Land.55 The net result was that they were headed almost exactly between their two possible landfalls, into the jaws of the open polar sea.

  By mid-September, two months after their landing on the ice, the weather was closing in and the sunlight failing. But at last the Pole seemed to have relinquished its vengeful grip. The pack ice was drifting due south again, and with growing speed. They determined to conserve the last of their energy and provisions, and allow themselves simply to drift with it. Like Nansen before them, they would attempt to overwinter, but this time on the ice. All three of them were physically much weakened by the brutal trekking, the crude diet of bear meat, and the relentless sledge-pulling over the increasingly broken and treacherous ice. They all had frequent diarrhoea, bouts of snow blindness, and open sores on their feet. The athletic Fraenkel could no longer pull his own sledge unaided.

  As Dr Ekholm had feared, they were all reaching the end of their tethers. Yet Andrée still thought their morale remained remarkably high: ‘Our humour is pretty good, although joking and smiling are not of ordinary occurrence. My young comrades hold out better than I had ventured to hope. The fact that during the last few days we have drifted towards the south at such a rate contributes essentially, I think, to keeping up their courage.’56

  In fact Fraenkel had completely stopped keeping his meteorological observations, while Nils Strindberg’s almanac now consisted almost entirely of lists of meals. A last fragment of his letter to Anna recorded: ‘Pull and drudge at the sledges, eat and sleep. The most delightful hour of the day is when one has gone to bed and allows one’s thoughts to fly back to better and happier times, but now their immediate goal is where we shall winter … It is a long time since I chatted with you …’57

  On 17 September something astonishing happened. They had their first sight of land since leaving Spitsbergen. It turned out to be tiny White Island, the most extreme north-easterly of the Spitsbergen archipelago, a mere seventeen miles long and dominated by an enormous six-hundred-foot glacier. They were still within the Arctic Circle, about 80 degrees north, and completely isolated in the polar sea. But the possibility of drifting south-westwards past White Island, and then all the way home, now became vivid. On the 18th they held a ‘banquet’ to celebrate. They ate seal steaks and ‘gateau aux raisin with raspberry syrup sauce’, drank a bottle of 1834 Antonio de Ferrara port given by the Swedish King, and sang the national anthem.58 They were not behaving like doomed men.

  In preparation for the last part of their
journey, they reconnoitred a large ice floe several hundred metres across, and began to construct a snow hut or igloo at its centre. This was designed with much ingenuity by Nils (‘our architect’), whose youthful sense of adventure had never faltered, and had become an essential dynamic in holding the team together.

  What Nils designed, with a touch of genius, was a sort of imaginary balloon-gondola on ice. He drew it in both plan and elevation.59 Of course it only had a single storey, and they crawled into it on hands and knees. But like Andrée’s original balloon basket, it contained various compartments, for storage, cooking and sleeping. Characteristically, Nils christened the latter, designed for warmth, ‘the baking oven’. Their new ‘snug home’ was scientifically equipped and appointed to last them, if necessary, through the winter until spring 1898. It had a vaulted roof, and even a chimney. It was as if the spirit of the Eagle would, after all, float them back to safety, but now in the form of an ice gondola floating on an ice floe.

  On 1 October, Andrée sat in the entrance to their new base and made an unusually lyrical note: ‘The evening was as divinely beautiful as one could wish. The water was alive with small animals, and a bevy of seven black-white guillemot youngsters was swimming there. A couple of seals too. The work with the snow-hut went on well, and we thought we would have the outside ready by the 2nd …’60

  But the polar spirit had not yet finished with them. As in Coleridge’s nightmare ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, written exactly one hundred years before in 1797, it continued to pursue them beneath the water. On the night of 2 October their ice floe suddenly started to break up. One crack passed directly beneath the side wall of their retreat, splitting it open and revealing a great chasm of icy black water below, which they only just prevented from devouring half their equipment. In the morning they repacked and prepared to take to their boat at a moment’s notice. They were all deeply shaken. Andrée made a solemn entry in his diary: ‘No one has lost courage. With such comrades one should be able to manage – I may say – under any circumstances.’61