April 15, 2015 • 41 mins
Andrée 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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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frown, I'm Tracy Wilson, and uh many of
the history makers of the world were people who are
considered a little bit mad by their contemporaries. You know,
(00:22):
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 and his expedition, it definitely falls into
that category, but the unmeant 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
(00:45):
to feature some high adventure, some really wild courageousness, and
just positivity in the face of what I think would
break most people. Uh So we're actually just gonna jump
right in and not really set it up a whole lot,
and we're actually gonna are sort of at the end
of the story, so that end who were starting as
a discovery. White Island, which is known as Kuiteo in Norwegian,
(01:10):
is an island in this spal Bard archipelago, and baal
Bard means cold coast, which makes sense because all these
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
and more of the island than normal was exposed. And
(01:33):
because so much of the ice on White Island had melted,
a Norwegian sloop called the Broad Vague, which was on
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 Horne and his team followed
these walruses that they had spotted on the island. But
(01:54):
while they were following these walruses, they found, much to
their surprise, something that they had absolutely not been looking or,
which was a diary. The book was pretty wet, it
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
(02:14):
the geologist Horn took this book back to Peter Eliason,
who was the captain of the Bratvag, he discovered that
two of the seelers that have been traveling with them
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
(02:37):
from there, they found a canvas boat, and this boat
had a hook, and the hook was stamped Andre's Polar Expedition.
It's actually pol period x e XP period eight. They
explored the area a little more and quickly found a
lot more stuff, including a headless body which was reduced
(02:58):
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 brack
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.
(03:19):
And so that man that they found they found others
as well. But his name was Solomon August Andre and
he was born in Grenna, Sweden in 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
(03:41):
attended Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology and studied engineering. In
eighteen 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 Wins
during this journey to the atlant Antic, he was inspired
to think about balloon travel. And when he reached Philadelphia,
(04:06):
he actually 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
(04:28):
crash that 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 the fourth of July celebration,
(04:49):
wound 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
(05:10):
and he 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 his competitors.
(05:31):
He 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 that there were meteorological and steophysical problems that could
(05:55):
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 Andrea's group went
to the Svalbard island of Spitzbergen, and one of the
(06:18):
experiments that was conducted there actually involved Andrea being confined
indoors for an entire month to see if his skin
color would change uh. And it did. It took on
this yellowish hue 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 vision having been altered and people just looked that way,
(06:39):
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
(07:00):
dane 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
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 thirty eight, So for sixteen years
(07:21):
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. He
was a tout of Italian family, but he was Norwegian.
I'm not sure how the Norwegian language shift would have
(07:43):
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 kind of annoyed by by Andrea's behavior during this
first outing. He called it quote disagreeably calm. According to
(08:05):
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 feelsome
fear going on. He found himself, for example, tightly gripping
the ropes on the balloon. He took only one more
(08:25):
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
is basically a fun set up for people to use money,
uh if they were gonna work on 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
(08:48):
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 fifty feet
that's four thousand, three forty three meters, So for contexts,
cabin pressure and modern airplanes is set to correspond to
(09:09):
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 aim for in terms of
keeping people comfortable and safe. And he described this during
(09:29):
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've talked about Mount Everest, which is twenty nine thousand feet.
Uh However, those most people that summit Everest are using
oxygen tanks to help them along. This is a case
(09:51):
where there was none such. They're also acclimating on the
way up, they're not just descending it an all that way.
I'm surprised he didn't get the bens. Yeah, he was
a resilient dude, so maybe he did. We just don't know.
So anyway, on another of his trips on his balloon,
which he named this Veia, he tested out the use
(10:12):
of drag ropes and a sale 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 in and his engineering background and his wind
study and his experiences in balloon ing had basically given
(10:35):
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 one had died, so UH most of them.
It was really serious business and being the first to
(10:55):
get to the North Pole was going to be a
significant point of pride for whatever country could claim it.
And so on February eight, when he was forty years old,
so this is only two years into his ballooning experience,
Andrea addressed the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and during
that speech he outlined his very ambitious plan to travel
(11:18):
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. I think I've seen it listed as
around thirty eight thousand, traveling by balloon and leaving from
(11:39):
Danes Island in this Baal Barn archipelago. He expected to
go north for about forty three hours to reach the pole.
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 of his plan involved crossing over the
pole and then continue knewing over that point to travel
(12:02):
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 learn that Andrea's outlook as
he described this whole plan was positive and enthusiastic, even
(12:23):
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 people he would encounter would
give him directions or help him back to civilization. He
(12:45):
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 taking to the air.
What may have really been the moment where Andre won
over the crowd was actually something of a job that
(13:06):
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, you may recognize that name,
had been the commanding officer of an expedition to the
Arctic Circle, in one that was the Lady Franklin Bay expedition,
(13:26):
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 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
(13:49):
this three man balloon plan, Andre said, I risked three
lives in what you call a fool hearty attempt, and
you risked how many a shipload? So as Andrea left
the stage, the entire hall cheered him, 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
(14:11):
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 brakes are a little close together,
but that's because I want to keep the whole expedition
all in one piece. So we'll 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
(14:33):
balloon which was made from layers and layers of varnished silk,
and this balloon was named the Eagle. The hydrogen balloon
was one feet thirty meters tall and to protect this
impressive uh 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
(14:55):
custom house actually had a felt lined interior so that
anything the un touched would not damage it and one
entire side of the house could be quickly 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. Andrea chose two other men to
complete his crew for this ambitious plan. These were Neil's
(15:17):
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 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
(15:40):
weeks in eight six, the eager Andrea and his companions
attempted to begin their journey, but they were just constantly
thwarted by in their efforts by unfavorable conditions and to
make matters worse, as Winter said on eck 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 already that was Mute Frankle. He
(16:02):
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 off in 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
(16:22):
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 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
(16:44):
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. 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
(17:07):
finally able to leave Danes Island on July eleven, And
I sort of loved this. But the 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.
(17:28):
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 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 were still struggling with
(17:49):
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 designed to help them steer we're now gone. Yes,
so they were drag ropes. Not a great idea. You
don't often see a balloon toodling around with a rope
(18:12):
dragging from it to the ground, and there are reasons
for that. Uh So what happened to the team next
was actually 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
(18:32):
their journey seemed to be really incredibly joyous. Andre marveled
at seeing the vast expanses of ice, which were dotted
by polar bears. And 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,
(18:53):
the basket dropped and it bounced repeatedly on the ice,
as often as eight times in thirty minutes. According to
their reck herds, 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
(19:15):
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? 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
(19:36):
coming generations? Is this ambition? And as that bumpy ride continued,
uh seasickness kind of 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
(19:59):
again dropped. The conditions turned even fog gear, and then
it suddenly rose high in the air as it warmed
up a little bit, 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 this situation for a
while and growing a little more frustrated, they finally decided
to land on the ice, and they did so at
(20:20):
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 eight hundred kilometers into their
ride for the next week. The three men plotted with
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
(20:42):
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 that were wrapped around their
shoulders like harnesses. These sledges weighed hundreds of pounds, so
this is really no small task, and sometimes the men
would all three pull one slip it and then go
back and do the same with the next one, and
(21:02):
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 was on Franz
Joseph Lend, 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 the small
Bard archipelago. After they had packed their sleds, the first
(21:24):
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 through the
ice blows 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,
(21:45):
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 and miserable.
But really, all their dire reas are so sort of
like positive, it's it's almost freaky. I wonder's one reason.
(22:06):
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 seeming the miserable circumstances.
Um So, several days into their trek towards Friends Joseph Land,
there were two major setbacks. First, Frankel started to experience
snow blindness. So this is known clinically as photocarrotitis, and
(22:31):
snowblindness 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 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
(22:53):
faster pace than they were making. So they have 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 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
(23:16):
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 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
(23:39):
does not sound nearly as disgusting as the bare blood pancakes.
To me, I was talking with friends about this last
night while I was working on it, and I was
describing blood pancakes to one of my friends, who is
also a big food eating goes, this sounds kind of French.
I'd try it, and it does. Then, when I thought
(24:00):
about some of the things my grandmother cooked, it does
sound pretty French. Um. So, despite their exhaustion and this
totally desperate situation, the 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
(24:21):
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 by problems. He twisted his knees,
he had digested distress. This is actually kind of ironic
because Frankel one of the reasons he was chosen was
(24:42):
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 Andrea's notebooks, he was the
one that they were kind of constantly having to figure
out when he needed opium dosages. And the first day
of September, the crew managed to travel by boat, which,
while grueling in its own right, was a really welcome
(25:04):
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 given to
him before they left Danes Island. This is a happy
surprise though, but unfortunately Strenberg 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,
(25:26):
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 than eighty miles or roughly nine kilometers southwest,
but again, because the ice that they're walking on is
(25:47):
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 a clue that he might be losing heart. On
September seventeenth, he wrote that an especially bad blister on
Frankel's foot had rendered him unable to pull his sledge anymore,
(26:10):
so he and Strondberg 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 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,
(26:32):
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 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 gonna be able to get
through at least half of the winter. So they knew
(26:54):
like they had rations for at least a little while,
they could keep trying to gather more and they might
be in okay shape. 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 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 eight, but just
(27:17):
four days later, the ice flow that they built it
on broke apart and water came rushing in that three
men had to hustle to get all their supplies together
and to get it up off the breaking 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.
(27:41):
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 complete misery and seemingly loss
of all hope. The men started construction on another snowhouse
two days later. They had spotted White Island earlier in
their journey, but they thought they'd be unable to land
(28:01):
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 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
(28:24):
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 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 and meet
(28:45):
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 n their supplies 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.
(29:06):
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 believed that this was
an expectation he had 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,
(29:27):
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 crew of the Norwegian sloop brat Vag
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
(29:48):
the common arguments against them. So the first is poisoning
from their food tents. There's a fingernail from a glove
that was tested and had high levels of lead in it,
but it's not to 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
(30:10):
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 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,
(30:31):
since once they found these bodies, they were pretty much
completely decomposed so that there wasn't any tissue to really test.
Then even if they were cremated, there's not much we
wouldn't know, and a lot of the nearby water that
would have been available to them would have been saltwater
that would not have hooked to them. Trickon nosis or
botuli is um is another popular theory from eating uncooked
(30:52):
polar bear or seal meat. Uh. None of the diaries
really describe anything that could be pointed to as evidence
of the simple him is associated with trickin nosis. However,
this was a new and 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 seal, so that's
(31:14):
one possibility. People have suggested that it might have been scurvy,
but three months really isn't long enough for scurvy to
kill someone. No, it can make you pretty sick in
that time, but probably 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
(31:38):
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 that they found Andre'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
(32:00):
also the idea that maybe since they had all this
opium around it was a deliberate opium over overdose, that
they had all seemed to 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
(32:21):
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 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.
(32:42):
There's 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 counter argument I have. Yeah, Well,
and you know, there's there are opiates involved. There's the
possibility that at some point they went you know, it
(33:02):
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 they died from cold and exhaustion.
I mean, at this point, they had been dragging these
multi hundred pounds fledges around for a while, they had
(33:23):
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 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
(33:43):
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 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 the little thing comes up that
(34:04):
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 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
(34:26):
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 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
(34:48):
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, finally they were really greeted his heroes. Remember
this was a big effort on uh Sweden's part. Like
there was a lot of fervor around it. There was
(35:09):
a lot of excitement that Sweden could be the country
that got to the North Pole first through 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 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
(35:29):
the procession to bring them home, and King Gustav the
Five 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 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. Their
(35:52):
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 stan nearby. There's
even a timed exposure shot of all three of the
men who are pulling one of the heavy sledges, and
you can actually see these photos at the Grinnam Museum
in Sweden and they also have them online. The museum
(36:14):
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.
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,
(36:36):
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
nothing else. Yeah, I'm so blown away, perpetually by just
how like upbeat they managed to stay through all of this.
(36:57):
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 story.
We've had a few requests for this. It pops up
in various places. Um, it's sort of a ceaseless fascination.
(37:22):
So uh. And it's one of those things that we
could go on forever and ever because a lot of
them the journals have been digitized and can be read
online and it's very very cool stuff. But I'm gonna
switch gears and read some listener mail about the Step
Pyramid of Joseph. And this is from our listener Christie,
and she says, without getting into too many details, because
(37:45):
I could write about my visit their NonStop until the
day I die. The first place we visited she's talking about,
a visit to Egypt in two thousand nine, was to
this step pyramid. I was astounded at its size. You
can look at pictures until the cows come home, but
actually being there is remarkable. We had free range of
the whole site and got to wander around, mostly unescorted.
The pyramid was shrouded and scaffolding, and when I asked
(38:06):
one of the guides about it, she said it was
not because of instability, even though it is, but because
they want to quote make it pretty like the Great
Pyramids so tourists will come. I found this amusing until
I realized I was that tourist. At the time, excavation
work was still being done in large deep pits, and
we eventually came upon a large group of local men
lifting a huge slab of stone. It was a false door.
(38:28):
I know you spoke of how only one door was
functional and the rest appeared to be for artistic use
only sorry um reading this in tiny print. However, according
to the guides, these doors were very important to the
afterlife and to confuse looters. The doorways that could not
be open could be quote opened by spirits passing on
to the next life, or to confuse bad spirits. The
(38:49):
door itself was huge, heavy, and the details carved into
it were breathtaking for being as old as it was,
and she attached some pictures of it. Also, one thing
most people don't know or don't acknowledge is the large
amount of stray dogs near the pyramids, and this one
in particular. Being part of an annimal animal rescue group
in the US, my heart was torn to pieces at
the amount of stray dogs at historical sites. They would
(39:11):
hang out in the shade hoping that tourists would feed them,
and they were friendly, but they were malnourished. The worst
part was the amount of puppies that were roaming around
or sitting in the shade of tour buses. I wanted
to smuggle them back with me so badly. The whole
trip in visiting this site will be something I will
never forget. I'm heartbroken now at the unrest in twenty
eleven that's left sites like these abandoned or worse completely destroyed. Um,
(39:33):
thank you so much for sharing this. This is only
an excerpt from her email, but it's I always love
getting someone's first hand account, especially when it's descriptions of
sort of what was going on in this historical area
that we don't always get from like news stories. So
that was good. Christie is not the only person that
I have heard from, both among my friends and our listeners,
who have talked about traveling to foreign countries and historic
(39:54):
sites and being sort of startled at the stray animals.
That's always a hard one. I don't I know an
easy fix for any of it, but that is the scoop.
If you would like to share with us your stories
of travel to historic sites or uh maybe you are
a balloonist and you want to talk about that, do that.
You can do so at History Podcast at how stof
works dot com. You can visit us at Facebook dot
(40:14):
com slash misst in history at misst in History, on
Twitter at miss in history dot tumbler dot com, and
on Interest dot com slash mist in History. I look
forward depending pictures of the balloon adventure. UH. You can
also visit our spreadshirt store at Misston History dot spreadshirt
dot com and get yourself some goodies. You would like
to research a little bit more about a topic related
to this episode, you can go to our parents site,
(40:36):
how stuff Works. Type in the words hot air balloon
in the search bar and you will get an article
called how hot air balloons Work. UH. If you would
like to visit us on the web, you can do
that at Misston History dot com. For show notes, a
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at Minston History dot com and Houston Parks dot com
(41:01):
for moralness and thousands of other topics. Does it has
to have workstaf cor
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frown, I'm Tracy Wilson, and uh many of
the history makers of the world were people who are
considered a little bit mad by their contemporaries. You know,
(00:22):
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 and his expedition, it definitely falls into
that category, but the unmeant 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
(00:45):
to feature some high adventure, some really wild courageousness, and
just positivity in the face of what I think would
break most people. Uh So we're actually just gonna jump
right in and not really set it up a whole lot,
and we're actually gonna are sort of at the end
of the story, so that end who were starting as
a discovery. White Island, which is known as Kuiteo in Norwegian,
(01:10):
is an island in this spal Bard archipelago, and baal
Bard means cold coast, which makes sense because all these
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
and more of the island than normal was exposed. And
(01:33):
because so much of the ice on White Island had melted,
a Norwegian sloop called the Broad Vague, which was on
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 Horne and his team followed
these walruses that they had spotted on the island. But
(01:54):
while they were following these walruses, they found, much to
their surprise, something that they had absolutely not been looking or,
which was a diary. The book was pretty wet, it
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
(02:14):
the geologist Horn took this book back to Peter Eliason,
who was the captain of the Bratvag, he discovered that
two of the seelers that have been traveling with them
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
(02:37):
from there, they found a canvas boat, and this boat
had a hook, and the hook was stamped Andre's Polar Expedition.
It's actually pol period x e XP period eight. They
explored the area a little more and quickly found a
lot more stuff, including a headless body which was reduced
(02:58):
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 brack
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.
(03:19):
And so that man that they found they found others
as well. But his name was Solomon August Andre and
he was born in Grenna, Sweden in 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
(03:41):
attended Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology and studied engineering. In
eighteen 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 Wins
during this journey to the atlant Antic, he was inspired
to think about balloon travel. And when he reached Philadelphia,
(04:06):
he actually 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
(04:28):
crash that 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 the fourth of July celebration,
(04:49):
wound 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
(05:10):
and he 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 his competitors.
(05:31):
He 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 that there were meteorological and steophysical problems that could
(05:55):
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 Andrea's group went
to the Svalbard island of Spitzbergen, and one of the
(06:18):
experiments that was conducted there actually involved Andrea being confined
indoors for an entire month to see if his skin
color would change uh. And it did. It took on
this yellowish hue 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 vision having been altered and people just looked that way,
(06:39):
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
(07:00):
dane 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
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 thirty eight, So for sixteen years
(07:21):
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. He
was a tout of Italian family, but he was Norwegian.
I'm not sure how the Norwegian language shift would have
(07:43):
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 kind of annoyed by by Andrea's behavior during this
first outing. He called it quote disagreeably calm. According to
(08:05):
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 feelsome
fear going on. He found himself, for example, tightly gripping
the ropes on the balloon. He took only one more
(08:25):
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
is basically a fun set up for people to use money,
uh if they were gonna work on 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
(08:48):
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 fifty feet
that's four thousand, three forty three meters, So for contexts,
cabin pressure and modern airplanes is set to correspond to
(09:09):
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 aim for in terms of
keeping people comfortable and safe. And he described this during
(09:29):
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've talked about Mount Everest, which is twenty nine thousand feet.
Uh However, those most people that summit Everest are using
oxygen tanks to help them along. This is a case
(09:51):
where there was none such. They're also acclimating on the
way up, they're not just descending it an all that way.
I'm surprised he didn't get the bens. Yeah, he was
a resilient dude, so maybe he did. We just don't know.
So anyway, on another of his trips on his balloon,
which he named this Veia, he tested out the use
(10:12):
of drag ropes and a sale 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 in and his engineering background and his wind
study and his experiences in balloon ing had basically given
(10:35):
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 one had died, so UH most of them.
It was really serious business and being the first to
(10:55):
get to the North Pole was going to be a
significant point of pride for whatever country could claim it.
And so on February eight, when he was forty years old,
so this is only two years into his ballooning experience,
Andrea addressed the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and during
that speech he outlined his very ambitious plan to travel
(11:18):
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. I think I've seen it listed as
around thirty eight thousand, traveling by balloon and leaving from
(11:39):
Danes Island in this Baal Barn archipelago. He expected to
go north for about forty three hours to reach the pole.
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 of his plan involved crossing over the
pole and then continue knewing over that point to travel
(12:02):
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 learn that Andrea's outlook as
he described this whole plan was positive and enthusiastic, even
(12:23):
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 people he would encounter would
give him directions or help him back to civilization. He
(12:45):
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 taking to the air.
What may have really been the moment where Andre won
over the crowd was actually something of a job that
(13:06):
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, you may recognize that name,
had been the commanding officer of an expedition to the
Arctic Circle, in one that was the Lady Franklin Bay expedition,
(13:26):
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 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
(13:49):
this three man balloon plan, Andre said, I risked three
lives in what you call a fool hearty attempt, and
you risked how many a shipload? So as Andrea left
the stage, the entire hall cheered him, 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
(14:11):
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 brakes are a little close together,
but that's because I want to keep the whole expedition
all in one piece. So we'll 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
(14:33):
balloon which was made from layers and layers of varnished silk,
and this balloon was named the Eagle. The hydrogen balloon
was one feet thirty meters tall and to protect this
impressive uh 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
(14:55):
custom house actually had a felt lined interior so that
anything the un touched would not damage it and one
entire side of the house could be quickly 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. Andrea chose two other men to
complete his crew for this ambitious plan. These were Neil's
(15:17):
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 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
(15:40):
weeks in eight six, the eager Andrea and his companions
attempted to begin their journey, but they were just constantly
thwarted by in their efforts by unfavorable conditions and to
make matters worse, as Winter said on eck 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 already that was Mute Frankle. He
(16:02):
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 off in 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
(16:22):
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 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
(16:44):
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. 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
(17:07):
finally able to leave Danes Island on July eleven, And
I sort of loved this. But the 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.
(17:28):
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 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 were still struggling with
(17:49):
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 designed to help them steer we're now gone. Yes,
so they were drag ropes. Not a great idea. You
don't often see a balloon toodling around with a rope
(18:12):
dragging from it to the ground, and there are reasons
for that. Uh So what happened to the team next
was actually 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
(18:32):
their journey seemed to be really incredibly joyous. Andre marveled
at seeing the vast expanses of ice, which were dotted
by polar bears. And 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,
(18:53):
the basket dropped and it bounced repeatedly on the ice,
as often as eight times in thirty minutes. According to
their reck herds, 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
(19:15):
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? 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
(19:36):
coming generations? Is this ambition? And as that bumpy ride continued,
uh seasickness kind of 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
(19:59):
again dropped. The conditions turned even fog gear, and then
it suddenly rose high in the air as it warmed
up a little bit, 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 this situation for a
while and growing a little more frustrated, they finally decided
to land on the ice, and they did so at
(20:20):
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 eight hundred kilometers into their
ride for the next week. The three men plotted with
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
(20:42):
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 that were wrapped around their
shoulders like harnesses. These sledges weighed hundreds of pounds, so
this is really no small task, and sometimes the men
would all three pull one slip it and then go
back and do the same with the next one, and
(21:02):
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 was on Franz
Joseph Lend, 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 the small
Bard archipelago. After they had packed their sleds, the first
(21:24):
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 through the
ice blows 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,
(21:45):
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 and miserable.
But really, all their dire reas are so sort of
like positive, it's it's almost freaky. I wonder's one reason.
(22:06):
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 seeming the miserable circumstances.
Um So, several days into their trek towards Friends Joseph Land,
there were two major setbacks. First, Frankel started to experience
snow blindness. So this is known clinically as photocarrotitis, and
(22:31):
snowblindness 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 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
(22:53):
faster pace than they were making. So they have 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 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
(23:16):
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 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
(23:39):
does not sound nearly as disgusting as the bare blood pancakes.
To me, I was talking with friends about this last
night while I was working on it, and I was
describing blood pancakes to one of my friends, who is
also a big food eating goes, this sounds kind of French.
I'd try it, and it does. Then, when I thought
(24:00):
about some of the things my grandmother cooked, it does
sound pretty French. Um. So, despite their exhaustion and this
totally desperate situation, the 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
(24:21):
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 by problems. He twisted his knees,
he had digested distress. This is actually kind of ironic
because Frankel one of the reasons he was chosen was
(24:42):
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 Andrea's notebooks, he was the
one that they were kind of constantly having to figure
out when he needed opium dosages. And the first day
of September, the crew managed to travel by boat, which,
while grueling in its own right, was a really welcome
(25:04):
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 given to
him before they left Danes Island. This is a happy
surprise though, but unfortunately Strenberg 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,
(25:26):
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 than eighty miles or roughly nine kilometers southwest,
but again, because the ice that they're walking on is
(25:47):
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 a clue that he might be losing heart. On
September seventeenth, he wrote that an especially bad blister on
Frankel's foot had rendered him unable to pull his sledge anymore,
(26:10):
so he and Strondberg 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 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,
(26:32):
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 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 gonna be able to get
through at least half of the winter. So they knew
(26:54):
like they had rations for at least a little while,
they could keep trying to gather more and they might
be in okay shape. 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 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 eight, but just
(27:17):
four days later, the ice flow that they built it
on broke apart and water came rushing in that three
men had to hustle to get all their supplies together
and to get it up off the breaking 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.
(27:41):
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 complete misery and seemingly loss
of all hope. The men started construction on another snowhouse
two days later. They had spotted White Island earlier in
their journey, but they thought they'd be unable to land
(28:01):
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 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
(28:24):
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 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 and meet
(28:45):
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 n their supplies 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.
(29:06):
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 believed that this was
an expectation he had 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,
(29:27):
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 crew of the Norwegian sloop brat Vag
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
(29:48):
the common arguments against them. So the first is poisoning
from their food tents. There's a fingernail from a glove
that was tested and had high levels of lead in it,
but it's not to 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
(30:10):
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 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,
(30:31):
since once they found these bodies, they were pretty much
completely decomposed so that there wasn't any tissue to really test.
Then even if they were cremated, there's not much we
wouldn't know, and a lot of the nearby water that
would have been available to them would have been saltwater
that would not have hooked to them. Trickon nosis or
botuli is um is another popular theory from eating uncooked
(30:52):
polar bear or seal meat. Uh. None of the diaries
really describe anything that could be pointed to as evidence
of the simple him is associated with trickin nosis. However,
this was a new and 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 seal, so that's
(31:14):
one possibility. People have suggested that it might have been scurvy,
but three months really isn't long enough for scurvy to
kill someone. No, it can make you pretty sick in
that time, but probably 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
(31:38):
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 that they found Andre'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
(32:00):
also the idea that maybe since they had all this
opium around it was a deliberate opium over overdose, that
they had all seemed to 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
(32:21):
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 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.
(32:42):
There's 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 counter argument I have. Yeah, Well,
and you know, there's there are opiates involved. There's the
possibility that at some point they went you know, it
(33:02):
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 they died from cold and exhaustion.
I mean, at this point, they had been dragging these
multi hundred pounds fledges around for a while, they had
(33:23):
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 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
(33:43):
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 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 the little thing comes up that
(34:04):
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 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
(34:26):
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 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
(34:48):
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, finally they were really greeted his heroes. Remember
this was a big effort on uh Sweden's part. Like
there was a lot of fervor around it. There was
(35:09):
a lot of excitement that Sweden could be the country
that got to the North Pole first through 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 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
(35:29):
the procession to bring them home, and King Gustav the
Five 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 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. Their
(35:52):
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 stan nearby. There's
even a timed exposure shot of all three of the
men who are pulling one of the heavy sledges, and
you can actually see these photos at the Grinnam Museum
in Sweden and they also have them online. The museum
(36:14):
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.
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,
(36:36):
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
nothing else. Yeah, I'm so blown away, perpetually by just
how like upbeat they managed to stay through all of this.
(36:57):
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 story.
We've had a few requests for this. It pops up
in various places. Um, it's sort of a ceaseless fascination.
(37:22):
So uh. And it's one of those things that we
could go on forever and ever because a lot of
them the journals have been digitized and can be read
online and it's very very cool stuff. But I'm gonna
switch gears and read some listener mail about the Step
Pyramid of Joseph. And this is from our listener Christie,
and she says, without getting into too many details, because
(37:45):
I could write about my visit their NonStop until the
day I die. The first place we visited she's talking about,
a visit to Egypt in two thousand nine, was to
this step pyramid. I was astounded at its size. You
can look at pictures until the cows come home, but
actually being there is remarkable. We had free range of
the whole site and got to wander around, mostly unescorted.
The pyramid was shrouded and scaffolding, and when I asked
(38:06):
one of the guides about it, she said it was
not because of instability, even though it is, but because
they want to quote make it pretty like the Great
Pyramids so tourists will come. I found this amusing until
I realized I was that tourist. At the time, excavation
work was still being done in large deep pits, and
we eventually came upon a large group of local men
lifting a huge slab of stone. It was a false door.
(38:28):
I know you spoke of how only one door was
functional and the rest appeared to be for artistic use
only sorry um reading this in tiny print. However, according
to the guides, these doors were very important to the
afterlife and to confuse looters. The doorways that could not
be open could be quote opened by spirits passing on
to the next life, or to confuse bad spirits. The
(38:49):
door itself was huge, heavy, and the details carved into
it were breathtaking for being as old as it was,
and she attached some pictures of it. Also, one thing
most people don't know or don't acknowledge is the large
amount of stray dogs near the pyramids, and this one
in particular. Being part of an annimal animal rescue group
in the US, my heart was torn to pieces at
the amount of stray dogs at historical sites. They would
(39:11):
hang out in the shade hoping that tourists would feed them,
and they were friendly, but they were malnourished. The worst
part was the amount of puppies that were roaming around
or sitting in the shade of tour buses. I wanted
to smuggle them back with me so badly. The whole
trip in visiting this site will be something I will
never forget. I'm heartbroken now at the unrest in twenty
eleven that's left sites like these abandoned or worse completely destroyed. Um,
(39:33):
thank you so much for sharing this. This is only
an excerpt from her email, but it's I always love
getting someone's first hand account, especially when it's descriptions of
sort of what was going on in this historical area
that we don't always get from like news stories. So
that was good. Christie is not the only person that
I have heard from, both among my friends and our listeners,
who have talked about traveling to foreign countries and historic
(39:54):
sites and being sort of startled at the stray animals.
That's always a hard one. I don't I know an
easy fix for any of it, but that is the scoop.
If you would like to share with us your stories
of travel to historic sites or uh maybe you are
a balloonist and you want to talk about that, do that.
You can do so at History Podcast at how stof
works dot com. You can visit us at Facebook dot
(40:14):
com slash misst in history at misst in History, on
Twitter at miss in history dot tumbler dot com, and
on Interest dot com slash mist in History. I look
forward depending pictures of the balloon adventure. UH. You can
also visit our spreadshirt store at Misston History dot spreadshirt
dot com and get yourself some goodies. You would like
to research a little bit more about a topic related
to this episode, you can go to our parents site,
(40:36):
how stuff Works. Type in the words hot air balloon
in the search bar and you will get an article
called how hot air balloons Work. UH. If you would
like to visit us on the web, you can do
that at Misston History dot com. For show notes, a
complete archive of all of our podcasts in the occasional
other extra goody and we hope you do. Visit us
at Minston History dot com and Houston Parks dot com
(41:01):
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