XVI
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CENTURY
No account of disappearances under curious and romantic circumstances, or of the enigmatic fates of forthfaring men in our times, would approach completeness without some narration of one of the boldest and maddest projects ever undertaken by human beings, in many ways the crowning adventure of the nineteenth century. Particularly now, when a circumnavigation of the earth by airplane has been accomplished, when the Atlantic has been bridged by a dirigible flight, and men have flown over the North Pole in plane and airship, the heroic and pathetic story of Doctor Andrée and his attempt to reach the top of the world by balloon is of fresh and abiding interest.
No one who was not alive in the late nineties of the last century and of age to read and be thrilled, can have any conception of the wonder and excitement this man and his voyage caused, of the cloud of doubt and mystery which hung about his still unexplained end, of the rumors and tales that came out of the North year after year, of the expeditions that started out to solve the riddle, of the whole decade of slowly abating preoccupation with the terrible romance of this singular man and his undiscoverable end.
In the summer of 1895, at the International Geographical Congress in London, Doctor Salomon August Andrée, a noted engineer, and chief examiner of the Royal Swedish Patent Office in Stockholm, let it be known that he was planning for a flight to the pole in a balloon, and that active preparations were under way. At first the public regarded the whole thing with an interested incredulity, though geographers, meteorologists, geodesists, and some students of aëronautics had been discussing the possibilities of such a voyage for much longer than a generation, and many had expressed the belief in its feasibility. Sivel and Silbermann, of the University of Paris, had declared as early as 1870 that this was the practical way of attaining the pole.
Even so, they had not by long anticipated Doctor Andrée. His first inquiries into the possibility of such a flight had been made in the course of a voyage to the United States in 1876 to visit the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia. On shipboard he had made numerous observations of the winds and air currents, which led him to the belief that there was a general suction or drift of air toward the pole from the direction of the northern coast of Europe and from the pole southward along the Siberian or Alaskan coasts.
With this belief in mind, Andrée had gone back to Sweden and begun a series of experiments in ballooning. He built various gas bags and made a considerable number of voyages in them, on several occasions with nearly fatal results. Mishaps, however, did not daunt him, and he became, in the course of the following twenty years, perhaps the best versed aëronaut on earth. He was not, of course, an ordinary balloonist, but a scientific experimenter, busy with an attempt to work out a serious, and to him a practical, problem. In the early nineties Andrée succeeded in making a flight of four hundred kilometers in a comparatively small balloon, and it was on the observations taken in the course of this voyage that he based mathematical calculations which formed his guide in the polar undertaking.
If, as I have said, the first public announcement of the Andrée project was received by the rank and file of men as an entertaining, but impossible, speculation, there was a rapid change of mind in the course of the following months. News came that Andrée had opened a subscription for funds, and that the hundred thousand dollars he believed necessary had been quickly provided by the enthusiastic members of the Swedish Academy of Science, by King Oscar from his private purse, and by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of nitroglycerin and provider of the prizes which bear his name. Evidently this fellow meant business.
In the late spring of 1896 Andrée and a party of scientists and workmen, including two friends who had decided to make the desperate essay with him, sailed from Gothenburg in the little steamerVirgofor Spitzbergen. They had on board a balloon made by Lachambre of Paris, the foremost designer of that day, with a gas capacity of more than six thousand cubic meters, the largest bag which had been constructed at that time. The gas container was of triple varnished silk, and there was a specially designed gondola, whose details are of surviving interest.
This compartment, in which three men hoped to live through such temperatures as might be expected in the air currents fanning the North Pole, was made of wicker, covered outside with a rubberized canvas and inside with oiled silk, these two substances being considered capable of making the big basket practically air and weather proof. The gondola was about six and one half feet long inside and about five feet wide. It contained a sleeping mattress for one, with provision for a second bed, though the plan was to keep two of the three men constantly on deck, while the third took two hours of sleep at a time. This basket was covered, to be sure, the top having a trapdoor or hatch, through which the voyagers could come up to the deck. Inside and outside the gondola, in various pockets and bags, were fixed the provisions and supplies, while the various nautical instruments, cameras, surveyors’ paraphernalia, and a patent cookstove hung among the ropes, or were fixed to the gondola by specially invented devices. Everything had been thought out in great detail, most of the apparatus had been designed for the occasion, and Andrée had enjoyed the benefit of advice from all the foremost flyers and scientific theorists in Europe. His was anything but a haphazard or ill-prepared expedition.
Toward the end of June, Andrée and his party landed on the obscure Danes Island in the Spitzbergen group, where he found a log cottage built some years before by Pike, the British bear and walrus hunter. Here a large octagonal building was thrown up to shelter the balloon from the fierce winds, while it was being inflated. Finally all was ready, the chemicals were put to work, and the great bag slowly filled with hydrogen. Everything was in shape for flying by the middle of July, but now various mishaps and delays came to foil the eager adventurer, the worst of all being the fact that the wind steadily refused to blow from the south, as Andrée had anticipated. He waited until the middle of August, and then returned somewhat crestfallen to Sweden, where he was received with that ready and heartbreaking ridicule which often greets a brave man set out upon some undertaking whose difficulties and perils the fickle and callous public little understands.
Andrée himself was nothing damped by his reverses, and even felt that he had learned something that would be of benefit. For one thing, he had the gas bag of his balloon enlarged to contain about two hundred thousand cubic feet, and made some changes in its coating, which was expected to prevent the seepage of the hydrogen, a problem which much more modern aircraft builders have had difficulty in meeting.
If the delay in Andrée’s sailing had lost him a little of the public’s confidence and alienated a few lay admirers, his prestige with scientific bodies had not suffered, and his popularity with the subscribers of his fund was undiminished. King Oscar again met the additional expenses with a subscription from his own funds, and Andrée was accordingly able to set out for the second essay in June of 1897. His goods and the reconstructed balloon were sent as far as Tromsoe by rail, and there loaded into theVirgoand taken to Danes Island, accompanied by a small group of friends and interested scientists.
Almost at the last moment came a desertion, a happening that is looked upon by all explorers and adventurers as something of most evil omen. Doctor Ekholm, who had made the first trip to Danes Island and intended to be one of the three making the flight, had married in the course of the delay, the lady of his choice being fully aware of his perilous project. When it came time for him to start north in 1897, however, she had a not unnatural change of heart, and finally forced her husband to quit the expedition. Another man stepped into the gap without a day’s delay, and so the party started north.
The enlarged bag was attached to the gondola and its fittings, and the process of inflation began anew in that strange eight-sided building on that barren arctic island. The bag was fully distended at the end of the first week in July, and Andrée impatiently waited for just the right currents of air before casting off.
In those last few days of waiting a good deal of foreboding advice was given the daring aëronauts by the group of admirers who had made the voyage to Danes Island with them. It is even said that one of the leading scientists with the expedition took Andrée aside, spent a night with him, and tried to convince the man that his theories and calculations were mistaken; that the air currents were inconstant, and could not be depended on to sweep the balloon across the pole and down on the other side of the earthly ball; that very low temperatures at the pole might readily cause the hydrogen to shrink and thus bring the balloon to earth; and that the whole region was full of such doubts and surprises as to forbid the adventure.
To all this Andrée is said to have answered simply that he had made his decision and must stand by it.
Indeed, the balloonist’s plan seems to have been most thoroughly matured in his own mind. In twenty years of aëronautics he had worked out his ideas and theories in the greatest detail. He had not been blind to the problem of steering his machine, once it was in the air, but the plan of air rudders, or a type of construction that might lend itself to guidance through the air, had evidently not struck him as feasible, and was not brought to any kind of success until several years later under Santos Dumont. Yet Andrée was prepared to steer his balloon after a fashion. His gondola was, as already said, oblong, with a front and back. The front was provided with two portholes fitted with heavy glass, through which the explorer hoped to make observations in the course of his flight. As a practical balloonist, he knew that, once his car was in the air, the great bag was almost certain to begin spinning and to travel through the air at various speeds, increasing the rate of its giddy rotations as its rate of travel grew greater. That being so, the idea of front portholes and a prow for the gondola seemed something of a vanity, but Andrée had his own ideas as to this.
The balloonist explorer did not intend to ascend to any great heights, or to subject himself to the rotating action which is one of the unpleasantnesses and perils of ballooning. He had fixed to the stern of his gondola three heavy ropes, each about one hundred yards long, which descended from his craft, like elongated flaxen pigtails. In the center of each hundred-yard length of rope was a thinner spot or safety escapement, by means of which the lower half of any one of the ropes could be let go. And near the gondola was a second catch for releasing all of the rope or ropes.
These singular contrivances constituted Andrée’s steering gear and antiwhirling apparatus. His intention was to fly at an elevation of somewhat less than one hundred yards, thus leaving the ends of his three ropes trailing out behind him on the ice, or in the water of any open sea he might cross. The tail of his craft was expected to keep his gondola pointed forward by means of its dragging effect. Realizing that one or all of the ropes might become entangled in some manner with objects on the ice surface, and that such a mishap might wreck the gondola, Andrée had provided the escapements to let go the lower half or all the ropes.
Just what the man expected to do, may be read from his own articles in the New York and European papers. He hoped to fly low over a great part of the arctic regions, make photographs and maps, study the land and water conformations, pick up whatever meteorological, geological, geographical, and other information that came his way, cross the pole, if he could, and find his way back on the other side of the earth to some point within reach of inhabited places. Andrée said that he might be carried the seven hundred-odd miles from Danes Island to the pole in anywhere from two days to two weeks, depending on the force and direction of the surface wind. He did not expect to consume more than three weeks to a month for the entire trip, but his ship carried condensed emergency provisions for three years.
While a widely known French balloonist, who had planned a rival expedition and then abandoned it, had intended to take along a team of dogs, Andrée’s balloon had not sufficient lifting power or accommodations for anything of this kind, and he was content to carry two light collapsible sleds on which he expected to carry the provisions for his homeward trek after the landing.
~~ DOCTOR ANDRÉE ~~
~~ DOCTOR ANDRÉE ~~
~~ DOCTOR ANDRÉE ~~
When a correspondent asked Andrée, just before he set out, what provisions he had made for a mishap, and just what he would do if his balloon were to come down in open water, the explorer showed his spirit in the tersest of responses: “Drown.”
Yet, for all his cold courage and dauntless determination, it is not quite certain in what spirit Andrée set forth. It has often been said that he was a stubborn, self-willed, and self-esteeming enthusiast, who had worked up a vast confidence in himself and an overweening passion for his project through his flying and experimenting. Others have pictured him as an infatuated scientific theorist, bound to prove himself right, or die in the attempt. And there is still the other possibility that the man was goaded into his terrifying attempt, in spite of his own late misgivings, by the ridicule of the public and the skepticism of some critics. He felt that he would be a laughingstock before the world and a discredit to his eminent backers if he failed to set out, it is said. But of this there is no evidence, and it remains a fact that Andrée’s conclusions were sufficiently plausible to engage the attention and credence of a considerable number of scientists, and his enthusiasm bright enough to attach two others to him in his great emprise.
In the middle of the afternoon of July 11, 1897, Andrée got into the gondola of his car, tested the ropes and other apparatus, and was quickly joined by his two assistants, Nils Strindberg and K. H. F. Frankel, the latter having been chosen to take the place of the defected Ekholm.
At a little before four o’clock the cables were cast off, after Andrée had sent his farewell message, “a greeting to friends and countrymen at home.” The great bag hesitated and careened a few moments. Then it shot up to a height of several hundred feet, turned slowly about, with its three ropes dragging first on the ice and then in the water of the sea, and set out majestically for the northwest, carried by a steady slow breeze.
The little group of men on the desolate arctic island stood late through the afternoon, with eyes straining into the distance, where the balloon hung, an ever-diminishing ball against the northern horizon. What doubts and terrors assailed that watching and speculating crowd, what burnings of the heart and moistenings of the eyes overcame its members, as they watched the intrepid trio put off upon their unprecedented adventure, the subsequent accounts reveal. But the imagination of the reader will need no promptings on this score. A little more than an hour the ship of the air remained in sight. Then, at last, it floated off into the mist, and the doubt from which it never emerged.
Doctor Andrée had devised two methods of sending back word of his situation and progress. For early communication he carried a coop of homing pigeons. In addition, he had provided himself with a series of specially designed buoys, lined with copper and coated with cork. They were hollow inside and so fashioned as to contain a written message and preserve it indefinitely from the sea water, like a manuscript in a bottle. To the top of each of these buoys was fixed a small staff, with a little metal Swedish flag. The plan was to release one of the small buoys, as each succeeding degree of latitude was crossed, thus marking out, by the longitude observations as well, the precise route taken by the balloon in its drift toward or away from the pole.
About a week after Andrée’s departure one of the carrier pigeons returned to Danes Island, with this message in the little cylinder attached to its legs:
“July 13, 10.30P. M.—82.20 north latitude; 15.5 east longitude. Good progress toward north. All goes well on board. This message is the third by carrier pigeon.“Andrée.”
“July 13, 10.30P. M.—82.20 north latitude; 15.5 east longitude. Good progress toward north. All goes well on board. This message is the third by carrier pigeon.
“Andrée.”
The earlier birds and any the balloonists may have released after the night of the thirteenth, about fifty-five hours out from Danes Island, must have been overcome by the distance and the excruciating cold. None except the one mentioned ever reached either Danes Island or any cotes in the civilized world.
All over the earth, men stirred by the vivid newspaper accounts of Andrée’s daring undertaking, waited with something like bated breath for further news of the adventuring three. It was not expected that the brave Swedes could reach civilization again, even with every turn of luck in their favor, in less than two months. Even six months or a year were elapsed periods not considered too long, for the chances were that the balloon would land in some far northern and difficult spot, out of which the three men would not be able to make their way before winter. That being so, they would be forced to camp and wait for spring. Then, very likely, they could find their way to some outpost and bring back the tidings of their monumental feat.
Meantime the world got to work on its preparations. The Czar, foreseeing the possibility that Andrée and his two companions might alight somewhere in upper Siberia, sent a communication by various agencies to the wild inhabitants of his farthest northern domains, explaining what a balloon was, who and what Andrée and his men were, and admonishing the natives to treat any such wayfarers with kindness and respect, aiding them in every way and sending them south as speedily as possible, the special guests of the imperial government and the great white father. In other northern countries similar precautions were taken, with the result that the news of Andrée and his expedition was circulated far up beyond the circle, among the Indians and adventurers of Alaska, the trappers and hunters of Labrador and interior Canada, the Greenland Eskimos, and scores of other tribes and peoples.
But the fall of 1897 passed without any further sign from Andrée, and 1898 died into its winter, with the pole voyagers still unreported. By this time there was a feeling of general uneasiness, but silvered among the optimistic with some shine of hope. It was strange that no further messages of any kind had been received. Another significant thing was that one of the copper-and-cork buoys had been picked up in the arctic current—empty. Still, it might have been dropped by accident, and it was yet possible that Andrée had reached a safe, if distant, anchorage somewhere, and he might turn up the following summer.
Alas, the open season of 1899 brought nothing except one or two more of the empty buoys, and the definite feeling of despair. Expeditions began to organize for the purpose of starting north in search of the balloonists, and Walter Wellman began talking of a pole flight in a dirigible balloon, but such projects were slow in getting under way, and the summer of 1900 came along with nothing accomplished.
On the thirty-first of August of this latter year, however, another, if not very satisfactory, bit of news was picked up. It was, once more, one of the buoys from the balloon. This time, to the delight of the finders, there was a message inclosed, which read, in translation:
“Buoy No. 4. The first to be thrown out. July 11, 10P. M., Greenwich mean time.“All well up to now. We are pursuing our course at an altitude of about two hundred and fifty meters. Direction at first northerly, ten degrees east; later northerly, forty-five degrees east. Four carrier pigeons were dispatched at 5.40P.M.They flew westward. We are now above the ice, which is very cut up in all directions. Weather splendid. In excellent spirits.“Andrée, Strindberg, Frankel.”“Above the clouds, 7.45 Greenwich mean time.”
“Buoy No. 4. The first to be thrown out. July 11, 10P. M., Greenwich mean time.
“All well up to now. We are pursuing our course at an altitude of about two hundred and fifty meters. Direction at first northerly, ten degrees east; later northerly, forty-five degrees east. Four carrier pigeons were dispatched at 5.40P.M.They flew westward. We are now above the ice, which is very cut up in all directions. Weather splendid. In excellent spirits.
“Andrée, Strindberg, Frankel.”
“Above the clouds, 7.45 Greenwich mean time.”
It will be noted at once that the body of this communication was written the night after the departure from Danes Island, and the postscript probably at seven forty-five o’clock the next morning, so that it must have been put overboard nearly thirty-nine hours before the single returning pigeon was released. No light of hope in such a communication.
The North was by this time resonant with rumors and fables. Almost every traveler who came down from the boreal regions brought some fancy or report, sometimes supporting the product of his or another’s imagination with scraps of what purported to be evidence. A prospector came down from the upper Alaskan gold claims with a bit of tarred and oiled cloth which had been given him by the chief of some remote Indian tribe. Was it not a part of the covering of the Andrée balloon? For a time there was a thrill of credulity. Then the thing turned out to be hide, instead of varnished silk, and so the tale came to an evil end.
In the spring of 1900 a report reached Berlin that Andrée and his party had been killed by Eskimos in upper Canada, when they descended from the clouds and started to shoot caribou. But why go into details? Month after month came other reports of all kinds, most of them of similar import. They came from all points, beginning at Kamtchatka and running around the world to the Alaskan side of Bering Strait, and they were all more or less fiction.
Finally, in the spring of 1902, came the masterpiece. A long dispatch from Winnipeg announced that C. C. Chipman, head commissioner of the Hudson’s Bay Company, had received from Fort Churchill, the northernmost outpost of the company, several letters from the local factor, Ashtond Alston, in which the sad fate of Doctor Andrée and his comrades was contained. The news had been received at Fort Churchill from wandering Eskimos. It was to the effect that a tribe of outlaw mushers, up beyond the Barren Islands, had seen a great ship descend from the sky and had followed it many miles till it settled on the ice. Three men had got out and displayed arms. The savage hunters, totally unacquainted with white men, and far less with balloons, believed the intentions of the trio to be hostile and attacked them, eventually killing all with their bows and arrows, though the white men were armed with repeating rifles and put up a good fight. There were many other confirmatory details in the report. The mushers were found with modern Swedish rifles and with cooking and other utensils salvaged from the wrecked balloon.
These reports led the late William Ziegler to write to the commissioner of the Hudson’s Bay Company for confirmation, with the result that the story was at once exploded in these words:
“There is no probability of there being any truth in the report regarding the supposed finding of Andrée’s balloon. The chief officer of the company on the west coast of Hudson’s Bay who himself interviewed the natives on the matter, has reported as his firm conviction that the natives who are said to have seen the balloon imposed upon the clerk at Churchill, to whom the story was given. The sketches of the balloon which the company has been careful to distribute throughout northern Canada naturally gave occasion for much talk among these isolated people, and it is not greatly to be wondered at that some such tale might be given out by natives peculiarly cunning and prone to practice upon the credulity of those not familiar with them, or easily imposed upon.”
But the imagination of the world was nothing daunted by such cold douches of fact, and more reports of Andrée’s death, of his survival in the igloos of detached tribes, of the finding of his camps, of his balloon, of parts of his equipment, of the skeletons of his party, and of many fancies came down from the northern sectors of the world, season after season. There was a great revival of these yarns in 1905, once more due to some imaginative Eskimo tale spinners, and in 1909, twelve years after Andrée’s flight, there was an even more belated group of rumors, all centering about the fact that one Father Turquotille, a Roman Catholic missionary residing at Reindeer Lake, and often making long treks farther into the arctic, had found a party of nomadic natives in possession of a revolver and some rope, which fact they explained to him by telling the story of the Andrée balloon, which was supposed to have landed somewhere in their territory. The good priest reported what he had been told to Bishop Pascal, of Prince Albert, and that worthy ecclesiastic transmitted the report to Ottawa, whence it was spread broadcast. But Father Turquotille, after having made a special journey to confirm the rumors, was obliged to discredit them. And so another end to gossip.
Thus it happens that there is to-day, more than thirty years after that heroic launching out from Danes Island, after the pole has long been attained, and all the regions of the Far North traversed back and forth by countless expeditions and hunting parties, no sure knowledge of Andrée’s fate. All that is absolute is that he never returned, and all that can be asserted as beyond reasonable doubt is that he and his companions perished somewhere in the North. The probabilities are more interesting, though they cannot be termed more than inductions from the scattered bits of fact.
The chief matters of evidence are the buoys, which were picked up from time to time between the spring of 1899 and the late summer of 1912, when the Norwegian steamerBeta, outward bound on September 1st, from Foreland Sound, Spitzbergen, put into Tromsoe on the fourteenth, with Andrée’s buoy No. 10, which had been picked up on the eighth in the open ocean. This buoy, like all the others, except the one already described, was empty and had its top unsecured. It rests with the others in the royal museum at Stockholm. When Andrée flew from Danes Island he took twelve of these buoys, eleven small ones, which he expected to drop as each succeeding degree of latitude was crossed, and one larger float, which was to be dropped in triumph at the North Pole. This biggest buoy was picked up in the closing months of 1899, and identified by experts at Stockholm, who had witnessed the preparation for the flight. In all, seven of these floats have been retrieved from the northern seas.
We know that Andrée dropped one buoy on the morning of July 12, 1897, less than sixteen hours from his base, and that he liberated a pigeon on the following night, after an elapsed time of about fifty-five hours. At that time he had attained 82.20 degrees northern latitude and 15.5 degrees eastern longitude. Since Danes Island lies above the seventy-ninth parallel, and in about 12 degrees of eastern longitude, the balloon had drifted about three degrees north and three east in fifty-five hours, a distance of roughly three hundred and fifty miles, as the crow flies. His net rate of progress toward the pole was thus no better than seven to eight miles an hour, and he was being carried northeast instead of northwest, as he had calculated. Evidently he was disillusioned as to the correctness of his theories before he was far from his starting point.
The recovered buoys offer mute testimony to what must have happened thereafter. When the big North Pole buoy was brought back to Sweden, the great explorer Nansen shook his head in dismay and said the emptiness of the receptacle was a sign portentous of disaster. Andrée would never have cast his largest and best buoy adrift, except in an emergency, or until he had reached the pole, in which case it would surely have contained a message. Nansen felt that the buoy had been thrown overboard as ballast, when the ship seemed about to settle into the sea. But even then, it would seem, Andrée would have scribbled some message and put it into the float, had there been time.
The fact that this main buoy and five others were picked up, with their tops unfastened and barren of the least scrap of writing, seems to argue that some sudden disaster overtook the balloon and its horrified passengers. Either it sprang a leak and dropped so rapidly toward the sea or an ice floe, that everything was thrown out in an attempt to arrest its fall, or there was an explosion, and the whole great air vessel, with all its human and mechanical freight, was dropped into the icy seas. In that case the unused buoys would have floated off and been found scattered about the northern ocean, while the explorer and his men must have met the fate he had so briefly described—“drowned.”
The fact that no buoy has ever been recovered bearing any message later than that carried by the solitary homing pigeon would seem also to indicate that death overcame the party soon after the night of July 13th, with the goal of the pole still far beyond the fogs and ice packs of the North.
In some such desolation and bleak disaster one of the most splendid and mad adventures of any time came to its dark and mysterious conclusion, leaving the world an enigma and a legend.