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