| The men who died to
reach the North Pole |
| A new book explores the tragic journey
of the first team to make it to the Arctic's highest point |
| BY PETER LEWIS, Barnes & Noble Review |
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| This article appears courtesy of
The Barnes
& Noble Review. |
|
 At the opening of the 20th century, the
North Pole lay unreached. Over 1,000 men had given the pole
their best shot, by ship and sledge, without success, while 751
of them died in the trying. Only one team had the audacity to
make the attempt in a balloon. They died, too.
Commanding the balloon was S. A. Andrée, a 33-year-old Swede.
Andrée was an engineer by training and a firm believer in
lighter-than-air travel. He had run the numbers. Leaving from
the Spitsbergen archipelago, he and his two compatriots would
float the 600 miles to the pole in 43 hours. A week later they
would make landfall in Asia or Alaska, or maybe even San
Francisco. Andrée packed a tuxedo just in case. You’ve got to
admire his moxie – even as you wince at the fate-tempting
presumption. The year was 1897.
Andrée is just the kind of eccentric traveler to whom Alec
Wilkinson takes a shine, someone who confronts the world on his
own terms because he can’t imagine doing it any other way.
Wilkinson tells Andrée’s story in “The Ice Balloon” with economy
and finish, light on its earthly feet while sharply
administering the piquant stab that attends so many accounts of
polar exploration. Time and place snap into focus: the North
Pole, a land of severe, sacred purity, a capricious territory
where romance, trial and mysticism merged, and the pole was at
its pitiless heart; the late-19th century, when selfless heroism
was still on the table and the mood still “receptive to the
enactment of myths.”
Though more is known about the Andrée misadventure than might be
expected, it doesn’t quite convey the full misery of Arctic
travel, so Wilkinson fills in the gaps with the aches and stings
of other expeditions, which make for fine, grim reading as
debacle trips over fiasco. There are Adolphus Greely’s 1881-1884
Ellesmere Island troubles — “Elison’s frostbitten fingers fell
off”; “To rest before leaving, Rice shared a sleeping bag with
Linn, who was dead.” And Fridtjof Nansen’s errant quest nine
years later: “Johansen grabbed the bear by the throat.” On the
plus side, there were more northern lights than you could shake
an ice ax at, and sunlight streaming “through icebergs as if
through a prism, turning them different colors.”
Andrée’s expedition left both journals and diaries, but their
formal doughtiness doesn’t give a peek into what had to be a
nightmare. The balloon was a disastrous conveyance, rising and
falling, bumping along the ground, and finally dumping the men
to hell-and-gone in the high Arctic. “Our position is not
specially good,” Andrée writes when he learns they must spend
winter on a crumbling ice floe. “Joking and smiling are not of
ordinary occurrence.”
Wilkinson makes the most of these scant means. He draws a
gatheringly bleak picture — accompanied, amazingly, by a few
existential photographs taken by the expeditionaries — to play
against Andrée’s stiff upper lip. But shortly after Andrée and
company found a tatty island on which to rest their weary bones,
the words stopped. They vanished into thin air, much as the men
had 33 years before their headless bodies were found — “bears
had disturbed the remains” — which was about 33 years more than
Andrée had expected to be gone. |
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