The Ice Balloon

7

After Andrée’s speech in London, a lot of explorers and geographers and journalists, offended by the brevity of the voyage he proposed, classified it as a stunt. Arctic exploration was supposed to be a grueling and harrowing journey through the harshest terrain imaginable, conducted sometimes over an interval of years, and occasionally for so long that the explorer and his party were thought to have been lost and often were. The stories the explorers told when they returned were ennobling. The science they did—practically all of it observing and collecting, the categorizing came later—expanded their version of the world. They were naming things for the first time, the way the Greeks named the sky. Their findings provided material for subordinate careers, the ordering and identifying of the natural world based on the artifacts brought back by the people who had been to the far edge of the frontier. Andrée’s dash to the pole didn’t seem properly respectful. He wouldn’t have sufficient time to do science, it was said. His purposes weren’t serious, and what value would his accomplishment have? He’d merely own a record.

In interviews Andrée defended himself by saying that he would take plenty of measurements and that the photographs he would add to the map would be invaluable. And what disadvantage could be claimed for seeing a part of the earth that had never been seen before? What he didn’t often say is that he would have preferred to cross the Atlantic Ocean, which he regarded as more daunting, but the trip to the pole appealed more to the public imagination and was easier to raise money for. Unlike explorers of the earlier ages and even of his own, Andrée wasn’t looking to test himself in a remorseless environment. He didn’t see himself as a solitary figure measuring himself against the wilderness and the elements, or as someone trying to wrest from nature its secrets. Or even, as some did, a man in a headlong approach toward the seat of the holy. He was an engineer who wanted to prove the validity of an idea, and he had found a forum in which to enact it.

Andrée was born on October 18, 1854, in Gränna, a small town about three hundred miles southwest of Stockholm, on Lake Vättern. His mother, Wilhelmina, was called Mina, and his father, Claes, was the town’s apothecary. They had four other sons and two daughters, with whom they lived above Claes’s shop on the main street in the center of town (the building is still there). Mina’s father was a mathematics professor, and behind him were three generations of clergymen, some of whom were known for keeping records of the weather. As a child, Andrée was said to have a wide-ranging intelligence, a capacity for asking difficult questions, and to be stubborn. He was fond of games whose outcome depended on solving a problem. His mother noted that if he was treated unjustly by someone, “he spared no effort to pay him back,” but “by character and from principle he was magnanimous.”

As a boy Andrée built a raft from boards he found, and he and a friend sailed out onto Lake Vättern and had to be rescued when the wind rose. Another time, from a cliff above Gränna, he launched a balloon he had filled with gas, and the balloon landed on the roof of a barn and caught fire. Over the Christmas vacation of 1867, when he was thirteen, he told his father that he no longer cared to study dead languages and that he wanted to be an engineer. He is said to have pounded the table as he spoke.

Andrée’s attachment to his mother was profound and only deepened when he was sixteen and his father died. He left money for Andrée to attend the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where his favorite subject was physics and his closest friendship among the faculty was with his physics instructor, Robert Dahlander. During successive summers Andrée worked as a tinsmith, in a foundry, and in a machine shop, and for two years after he graduated he was a draftsman and a designer in a mechanical works in Stockholm. Through friends he got interested in phrenology, the practice of drawing conclusions about someone’s nature and tendencies from the topography of his skull, and while he worked at an engineering firm in Trollhaven, called Nydquist and Holms, he made a phrenological helmet out of brass. It was a half-sphere with screws ascending in rows an inch apart to the crown. It opened into two parts, connected by a hinge, and the screws screwed down to trace the skull’s bumps and depressions. Andrée didn’t so much believe in phrenology as he was interested in the conclusions phrenologists reached, which he thought sometimes were precisely apt.

In 1876, when Andrée was twenty-three, he went to America to see the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which had been organized to celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Officially it was the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, and on display were all the world’s most prominent new inventions. Absorbed by modernity, he was there when word arrived of Custer’s defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

8

Sailing to America, Andrée had had two acquaintances, his cabin mate, “a young German who was ducking military duty,” he wrote in a journal, “and a Swede who claimed to be a pork importer bound for Chicago, but who later proved to be a fugitive.” However, “the pseudo pork dealer, who was a good mixer, soon made other friends who were richer than we and with whom he became engaged in gambling. My German cabin mate and I preferred remaining quietly in our berths.”

The deserter had brought love letters that he liked to pore through. Andrée had only one book, Laws of the Winds, by C. F. E. Björling, which he would read lying on his bunk. One day, reading about the trade winds and struck by their regularity, an idea “ripened in my mind which decisively influenced my whole life,” he wrote. This was the thought “that balloons, even though not dirigible, could be used for long journeys. And not only from the Old to the New World, but also in the opposite direction and between the other continents.” The German happened to laugh and interrupt Andrée’s reverie, but he returned to it and “firmly resolved, when I landed in America, to get in touch with an aeronaut and find out what I could about such balloons as were then manufactured.”

In Philadelphia, Andrée went to the Swedish consul to ask for a pass to the fair. The consul said he couldn’t give him one, but he could hire him as the janitor at the Swedish Pavilion. He could live upstairs in the pavilion and go anywhere at the fair that he wanted.

Andrée would go to bed at nine and get up at five. One day he made a trip to a river where he picked roses and daisies to press and send home to one of his sisters. He had only one companion, he wrote her, Plato, “but the best is good enough.” It pleased him that work was honored in America and that the harder someone worked the better he was treated. At the fair he was impressed by the machines that printed hundreds of thousands of newspapers in hours, and the “screws to make pocket watches so small and delicate that only with a microscope can you see that they are screws.” There was a steam engine “high as a three-story house,” and a cannon weighing “millions of pounds” that shattered a foot-thick steel plate “as easily as if it were glass.” In New York he had heard they were building “a suspension bridge over the city, which already cost eighty million crowns, but it is not ready yet for a long time” (the Brooklyn Bridge was finished in 1883).

Once in New York and once in Philadelphia, Andrée visited phrenologists. He presented himself as a tailor, and was told that he would make an excellent engineer. Also that his determination led people to regard him sometimes as stubborn. His contrary temperament made him “quick to avenge insults and repel attacks.” A love for independence and change led to behaviors that frequently contradicted his feelings. His thinking was unconstrained by conventions. He could be trusted with “positions that demand masculinity, honor and faith” and was a natural leader: “You win people over to your cause and get them to sympathize personally with whatever you undertake.” Nevertheless, from deep caution, he was “watchful and worried” and deliberate, and only reluctantly did he trust people. Judgment and prudence helped him control his fantasies, “however large.” As for his future, twenty years would “pass before you achieve the highest degree of your spiritual development.”

9

Historically the Arctic was congenial to opposites. For some of the ancients, it was both holy and infernal. The devil lived there in a house of fire, a supposition based on a reading of Isaiah 14, which says that Lucifer will “sit on the mount of assembly in the far north.” A northerly wind was believed to transmit evil. “The Victorine monk Garnerius says that the ‘malign spirit’ was called Aquilo, the north wind,” Jung wrote in Aion. “Its coldness meant the ‘frigidity of sinners.’” Jung also wrote that Adam Scotus, a theologian of the twelfth century, believed that “there was a frightful dragon’s head in the north from which all evil comes.” The smoke that came from the dragon’s nose and mouth “was the smoke which the prophet Ezekiel, in his vision of God, saw coming from the north,” Scotus wrote.

The anthology of myths and deities and peculiar people assembled about the Arctic by the ancients includes the Arabs in the ninth century who knew about the Arctic from an Arabian traveler named Ahmad ibn Fadhlan. The king of the Bulgarians told Fadhlan that a tribe named the Wisu lived three months north of his country. Their summer nights were not even one hour long. The thirteenth-century Persian geographer Zakariya al-Qazwini says that the Wisu were not allowed to visit the Bulgarians’ territory, because wherever they went the air turned cold, even in summer, which killed the Bulgarians’ crops. To trade with the Wisu, from whom they mainly got furs, the Bulgarians would go to the border in a cart that was drawn by a dog. It had to be a dog, and not a horse or an ox, because dogs could get a purchase on the ground with their claws—in Wisu there were no trees or dirt or rocks, only ice. The traders would leave their goods on the frontier. When they came back, they would find an item beside their own, and if they liked the trade they would take it. Otherwise they withdrew their item, so they never saw the Wisu or knew what they looked like.

The cold in the north made a fantastic impression on al-Qazwini. Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, in his book In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times, quotes his opinion that the northern winter was “an affliction, a punishment and a plague; during it the air becomes condensed and the ground petrified, it makes faces to fade, eyes to weep, noses to run and change color, it causes the skin to crack and kills many beasts. Its earth is like flashing bottles, its air like stinging wasps; its night rids the dog of his whimpering, the lion of his roar, the birds of their twittering and the water of its murmur, and the biting cold makes people long for the fires of Hell.” Hell is a complicated notion for people in cold climates. When the Presbyterians went to Alaska in the nineteenth century they told the Indians about the fires of hell that burned perpetually, and the Indians thought it sounded pretty good, so the missionaries had to change hell to a place where it was always cold.

An Arab writer named Shams ad-din Abû Abdallâh Muhammad ad-Dimashqi (1256–1327) described the Far North as a desert with no people in it. It had no animals, either, only great amounts of snow and darkness, and “around it the vault of heaven turns like a stone in a mill.”

The Greeks believed that a people named the Hyperboreans lived at the top of the world, beyond the Boreas, the harsh northern wind that issued from a cave. Their territory was a paradise that could not be reached. The Hyperboreans were peaceful and just, they lived in the woods instead of living in houses, they never had wars, and they grew to be a thousand without becoming ill. When a Hyperborean had become tired of life, he or she would put on garlands of flowers, walk to the edge of a particular cliff, and fall into the sea. They cherished Apollo, who could transport to Hyperborea mortals who had lived especially pious lives. To worship him they had a sphere-shaped temple, which hovered on wings. Three brothers who were twelve feet tall were the priests. Every nine years Apollo visited, possibly in a chariot drawn through the air by swans. He played a kind of lyre, called the kithara, and danced for months without resting. When the priests offered their sacrifice and played music, immense herds of swans flew down from the mountains and landed on the temple.

Other ancients thought that a miscellany of oddities and monsters lived in the North. A lost poem from the seventh century BC, called the Arimaspeia, was said to have been written by a figure, perhaps mythical, named Aristeas of Proconnesus. Aristeas said that he had traveled to the region of the northernmost people, called the Issedonians. The Issedonians told him that north of them lived the Arimaspians, who had long hair and one eye. North of them were Griffins, which looked like lions and had wings and beaks like eagles. The Griffins guarded the earth’s gold and often fought with the Arismaspians, who tried to steal it.

Elsewhere in the North were the Meropians, whose territory shared a border with a country called Anostos, which means “No Return.” Anostos had no dark or light, only a reddish fog. There were two streams—the Hedone, which was the stream of gladness, and the Lype, which was the stream of sorrow. Each stream had trees on its banks. If you ate the fruit from the trees by the stream of sorrow, you shed tears until you died. If you ate the fruit by the stream of gladness, your desires were slaked and you got younger, but you lived life backwards and died as an infant.

As for the Romans, Pliny in his Natural History described a territory in the north where the snow fell almost constantly and was like feathers. This region had no light, it produced nothing but frost, it was where the north wind lived, and it was cursed. The existence of the Hyperboreans should be accepted, “since so many authors tell us about them,” he wrote. Tacitus wrote that the sea in the North was still and sluggish and that the sun in rising from it made a sound that could be heard.

By the fourteenth century, sailors believed that seas in the North had whirlpools so big that traveling into them was like falling into an abyss. In them lived plenty of fantastic creatures. The unknown writer of a thirteenth-century book called The King’s Mirror, a scientific treatise in the form of a dialogue between a man and his son, said that “the waters of Greenland are infested with monsters.” The merman was “tall and of great size and rises straight out of the water.” It had a head and shoulders and eyes and a mouth, “but above the eyes and the eyebrows it looks more like a man with a peaked helmet on his head.” Its form “looked much like an icicle,” in that it narrowed toward its lower half, “but no one has ever seen how the lower end is shaped, whether it terminates in a fin like a fish or is pointed like a pole.” The mermaid rarely appeared except before violent storms and was ugly to look at, with a “large and terrifying face.”

Instead of whirlpools the author mentions “sea hedges,” which are three-sided, “higher than lofty mountains,” and box in the sea. “We have to speak cautiously about this matter, for of late we have met but very few who have escaped this peril and are able to give us tidings about it.”

Among the region’s other attributes were the ice fields on the ocean, which he said were sometimes “as flat as if they were frozen on the sea itself,” and icebergs, “which never mingle with other ice, but stand by themselves.”

To read these accounts is to feel that the world the explorers were to step into hadn’t yet been completely created.

10

Soon after Andrée got to Philadelphia, he “looked up the balloonist John Wise, an elderly man who had begun his career as a piano polisher,” he wrote. Actually Wise had started as a cabinet-maker and had then built pianos. At fourteen, from an article in a German-language newspaper, he got interested in balloons. In his twenties he built one from muslin and varnished it with linseed oil and birdlime, a sticky substance made from tree bark, that was used to trap birds. The mixture, Wise noted, was prone to combust spontaneously.

Wise was also an innovator. He was among the first aeronauts to use draglines as a means for a balloon to maintain a stable height. He also invented the rip panel, which allowed a balloon to deflate quickly and safely for landing. Beforehand a balloonist had to climb through the rigging to the top of the balloon, and with his knees grasp the valve that released the gas. From his weight, the balloon would often turn upside down, which, depending on how hard it hit the ground, might not be so good for the balloonist.

Wise had made roughly four hundred flights “and had had all manner of thrilling adventures,” Andrée wrote. “He had flown with them in sunshine, rain, snow, thunder showers and hurricanes. He had been stuck on chimneys, smoke stacks, lightning rods and church spires, and he had been dragged through rivers, lakes, and over garden plots and forests primeval. His balloons had whirled like tops, caught fire, exploded and fallen to the ground like stones. The old man himself, however, had always escaped unhurt and counted his experiences as proof of how safe the art of flying really was.

“In order to convince a few fellow citizens who had been inconsiderate enough to doubt his thesis, Mr. Wise once made an ascent in Philadelphia, and while in mid-air he deliberately exploded his balloon. Then using the remains of the bag as a parachute he landed right in the midst of the doubters. What effect this had on them I do not know, but the old man himself felt better.”

Wise believed that the wind blew predominantly from west to east, and with sufficient force and steadiness to transport a balloon carrying people and freight not only across America but also to Europe. Building a balloon to cross the Atlantic was, he wrote, “the dream of my lifetime.” The balloon he imagined had a basket shaped like a boat, in case he came down in the water. On the gunwales it had oars and hand-turned propellers. In 1859 Wise started the Trans Atlantic Balloon Corporation with two partners. The balloon they built they flew from Missouri to New York in twenty hours and forty minutes, a record. Two months later, the partners, flying from New York to Canada, crashed in the Canadian woods, and the balloon was destroyed.

In 1873, Wise raised money for a second transatlantic balloon from the Daily Graphic, a New York newspaper. This balloon was accompanied by two smaller ones that carried extra gas and could also support someone making repairs to the balloon itself. Wise thought that a crossing to Ireland would take sixty hours and be almost absurdly perilous. “The discovery of the North Pole, which had recently caused Captain Hall’s death,” he wrote, meaning Charles Hall, who died in 1871 trying to reach the pole, “not to mention the journey of the vessel Polaris”—Hall’s ship—“which has just disappeared and probably been lost, is nothing but a pleasure trip compared to this journey through airspace, win or lose.” Wise eventually decided that the balloon wasn’t substantial enough, and he withdrew. While being filled, the balloon tore and collapsed. A smaller version left for Europe and after three hours crashed in a storm near New Haven, Connecticut.

Wise took Andrée to his shop and showed him “how balloons were cut, sewed together and varnished.” When Andrée asked if he might go up in a balloon, Wise “acquiesced immediately, and a short time afterwards informed me that I might accompany his niece, who was to make an ascension a few days later. It was to take place at the city of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where the authorities had decided to celebrate the Day of Independence with a balloon ascension.”

The evening before, Andrée, Wise, and the niece rode west on a train, with the balloon. When they arrived in the morning Wise said that he needed to rest and gave Andrée the task of filling the balloon, “which I naturally accepted with alacrity.” The gas was drawn from a main in the city square, and by five the balloon was full. As Andrée and the niece, dressed as the goddess of liberty, were about to get into the basket, a high wind rose and “the bag collapsed like a rag.” The balloon had been torn, and there was not sufficient time to mend it and fill it again. “Thus ended my first attempt to get up into the air.”

A few weeks later Andrée heard of a balloon in Philadelphia that would be taking five passengers, and he reserved a place. The ticket, however, cost seventy-five dollars, and he had only fifty, which the owner wouldn’t accept. (“To be sure, I had more money,” he wrote, “but at the moment it had been lent to a fellow student, who just then was out in the country, painting picket fences at fifty cents a day and board, and thus was in no position to pay me back.”)

Not long after that Andrée fell sick with an intestinal complaint that he believed was caused by drinking ice water, but may have been from his living mostly on cake, candy, and ice cream, according to his journals. Having stayed five months in Philadelphia, he went back to Sweden.

Three years later, in May of 1879, Wise wrote a letter to the New York Times to say that someone should make a trip to the pole in a balloon. “In the polar summer there is an inflowing current of air that will carry a balloon into the polar basin, if it be kept near the earth, with balance ropes for compensation, to avoid the balloon’s rising up into the outflowing current,” he wrote.

“It is utterly futile to attempt an ingress by landcraft or watercraft with a handful of men,” he continued. “With a well-organized party of a thousand men, moved and stationed at intervals of five miles—say ten men at each station, it may be accomplished…. Aircraft is the most feasible—the least expensive, the fewest number of men required, and the shortest time necessary to make the ingress and egress. It is possible to solve the problem within a hundred hours from the time the aerostat is made available. If you deem my suggestions of any value, give the scheme a push, as I am more than convinced that it can be pushed to ultimate consummation through the upper highway.”