The Balloon That Flew Toward the North Pole and Vanished for 33 Years

On the afternoon of July 11, 1897, three Swedes climbed into a wicker basket under a varnished silk balloon on Danes Island, at the northwestern tip of Svalbard, and asked the ground crew to cut them loose. Their plan was to ride the wind across the Arctic Ocean, pass over or near the North Pole, and come down somewhere in Russia, Alaska or Canada a few weeks later. The balloon was called Örnen, the Eagle.

It flew for a little over two days. Then it came down on the pack ice, and the three men walked out of history. Nobody knew what had happened to them for 33 years, until Norwegian sealers landed on a remote island in 1930 and found a boat, a camp, the men’s bodies, their diaries, and canisters of exposed film that had sat frozen in the snow since 1897.

Sweden has long told S. A. Andrée’s story as heroism and, more recently, as hubris. It is also one of the strangest photography stories ever told: pictures of a disaster, taken by a man who died in it, developed by a stranger a third of a century later.

An engineer with a balloon

Salomon August Andrée was born in 1854 in Gränna, a small town in southern Sweden, trained as a mechanical engineer and worked at the patent office in Stockholm. He caught the ballooning bug early. At the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia he met the American balloonist John Wise, and in 1882 and 1883 he joined a Swedish scientific expedition to Spitsbergen.

In 1893 he bought his own balloon, the Svea, and made nine flights in it; the westerly winds kept carrying him out over the Baltic. He also tested his pet idea, drag-rope steering: long ropes dragging on the ground would slow the balloon below wind speed so that a sail could push it a little to one side. Andrée believed he could steer about ten degrees either way from the wind. The Swedish ballooning association now says he was mistaken.

In 1895 he laid out his North Pole plan to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The balloon would need to lift three men, four months of food and ballast, about 3,000 kilograms in all, and hold its hydrogen for 30 days. The academy backed his budget of 130,800 kronor, and King Oscar II and Alfred Nobel were among the donors.

Eight million stitching holes

Andrée ordered a three-layer silk balloon, 20.5 meters across, from Henri Lachambre’s workshop in Paris. It was shipped straight to Svalbard without a test flight. At Virgohamna, a bay on Danes Island once used by Dutch whalers, the expedition built a tall plank hangar to shelter it while it was filled with hydrogen made on site.

The first attempt, in the summer of 1896, never left the ground: the wind blew steadily from the north, and the team eventually let the gas out and went home. The meteorologist on that trip, Nils Gustaf Ekholm, came back with a bigger worry than the wind. His own measurements showed that the balloon was leaking badly, mostly through the roughly eight million stitching holes along its seams. He reckoned it was losing about 68 kilograms of lift a day and could stay up for 17 days at most, not 30.

Worse, Ekholm later learned that Andrée had secretly ordered the balloon topped up with extra gas, which explained some odd readings. He said he would not go again without a better balloon. Andrée replaced him with Knut Frænkel, a 27-year-old civil engineer and keen mountain hiker who took over the weather observations. The third man was Nils Strindberg, a 24-year-old physicist and gifted amateur photographer whose father’s cousin was the playwright August Strindberg.

Liftoff from Danes Island

They were back on Danes Island in the summer of 1897, and this time the wind came from the southwest. On July 11 the top of the hangar was taken down, Andrée sent last telegrams to King Oscar and to the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet, which held the press rights, and at 1:55 p.m. the ropes were cut.

Almost at once things went wrong. Dragging over the water, the heavy drag ropes pulled the balloon down until the basket dipped into the sea. The friction also unscrewed most of the ropes from their couplings. About 530 kilograms of rope fell away, and the crew threw out about 210 kilograms of sand to get clear of the water. Without its ropes the Eagle could not be steered at all, and, lightened, it climbed higher than planned, where the hydrogen escaped faster.

A few hours after takeoff Andrée dropped a message buoy, one of only two ever found. "Our journey goes well so far," he wrote, giving the altitude as about 250 meters. "Weather delightful. Spirits high."

Two days in the air

The balloon also carried homing pigeons supplied by Aftonbladet, according to one account 36 of them, none trained to find their way home from the polar sea. Andrée released at least four. One was found, after it landed on a Norwegian steamer and was shot. (Pigeons kept getting drafted into technology: in the 1940s the psychologist B. F. Skinner would try to train pigeons to steer bombs.) The Eagle’s surviving message, dated July 13 and sent from about 82 degrees north, reported a good journey eastward and said all was well on board. "This is the third pigeon-post," the 1931 English edition of the diaries renders the last line.

In fact all was not well, and Andrée’s private diary said so. The balloon was soaked by rain and fog, "dripping wet" in his words, and the men were throwing ballast and gear overboard to stay up. Free flight lasted 10 hours and 29 minutes. After that came about 41 hours of bumping and dragging along the ice before the Eagle settled for good on July 14. Nobody had slept. The landing itself seems to have been gentle: the men, the pigeons and even Strindberg’s cameras came through unhurt. They were on drifting pack ice at about 82 degrees north, roughly 480 kilometers from where they had started.

On foot across moving ice

Strindberg’s camera had been built to map the Arctic from the air. Designed with the Stockholm photo dealer Numa Peterson and his colleague August Westberg, it took 13 by 18 centimeter Eastman Kodak roll film and weighed about seven kilograms. Now it became a diary. One of his most famous pictures shows Andrée and Frænkel standing beside the collapsed balloon, and over the week the men spent at the crash site he shot twelve frames that fit together into a 360-degree panorama of the scene.

They had guns, a tent, sleds and a collapsible boat, but little of it was designed for the job. There were no furs, only wool and oilskins, and the men were wet almost all the time. Sleds loaded with more than 200 kilograms each broke, and after a week they cut the loads to about 130 kilograms. With the lighter loads, hunting mattered more than ever, and they shot seals, walruses and above all polar bears.

On July 22 they set off southeast toward a food depot at Cape Flora in Franz Josef Land. The ice was drifting the other way, so for all their hauling they were going backward. On August 4 they turned southwest toward another depot in the Sjuøyane, the Seven Islands north of Spitsbergen. For a while the going was easier. "Paradise!" Andrée wrote of one stretch: large even floes, pools of fresh water, and "a tender-fleshed young polar bear." Then the wind shifted and pushed them back again.

Pictures of a disaster, taken by a man who died in it, developed by a stranger a third of a century later.

By September 12 they gave up walking and settled on a large floe to let the ice carry them through the winter. Strindberg designed a snow hut with walls hardened by water. The floe drifted fast toward Kvitøya, White Island, an almost completely ice-capped island at the eastern edge of Svalbard. On October 2 it broke apart right under the hut.

White Island

It took them a couple of days to move their stores onto the island. Andrée wrote that morale was still good. Strindberg’s notes put the landing on October 5. On October 7 Strindberg wrote what appears to be the single word "Moving." Andrée’s last entry, dated October 8, is calm, almost cheerful: it felt good, he wrote, to sleep on solid land after the cracking and grinding of the drifting ice, and they would gather driftwood and whale bones when the weather allowed.

After that the diaries stop. Strindberg, the youngest, died first, and the others wedged his body into a cleft in the rocks. Andrée and Frænkel died soon after. They had spent 88 days on the ice and survived the crash, the trek and the floe, only to die within days of reaching land, apparently with food, rifles and warm clothes around them.

Thirty-three years of rumors

Back home the silence filled up with stories. Newspapers reported sightings of balloon silk and wreckage, psychics offered their own versions, and some reports wrongly blamed the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic. None of it was true.

The answer came by accident. In the summer of 1930 the Norwegian Bratvaag Expedition, led by Gunnar Horn, was hunting seals and studying glaciers around Svalbard. That year was unusually warm, and the belt of ice that normally kept ships away from Kvitøya had largely melted. On August 5 or 6 (accounts differ) some of the crew went ashore. Two sealers looking for fresh water, Olav Salen and Karl Tusvick, found a boat frozen under a snowdrift. Inside was a boathook engraved "Andrée’s Polar Expedition, 1896."

The crew found Andrée’s and Strindberg’s remains, identified by monograms on their clothes, and a journal. Weeks later, on September 5, a sloop chartered by journalists, the Isbjørn, reached the island and found even less ice. Its crew found Frænkel’s body and a tin box holding Strindberg’s film, logbook and maps.

Developing a frozen film

The film went to John Hertzberg, a scientist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where Strindberg had once worked. The rolls had spent 33 summers in waterlogged metal canisters on the shore of an Arctic island. Hertzberg recovered 93 of the roughly 240 frames.

The surviving pictures show the balloon lying on its side in the snow, the men hauling their sleds, a dead polar bear, a tent on the ice. Published in November 1930, they showed that Strindberg, wet and hungry, had kept working as a careful photographer to the end.

Ice is a good archivist. It kept Ötzi for more than five thousand years and buried a whole flight of wartime planes under Greenland’s ice cap. Here it saved the photographs of men who never came back, made by one of them.

The negatives were deposited with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1944, and then little was known about them until 1997, when they turned up in the academy’s attic and were later scanned by the photo historian Tyrone Martinsson. Today the Andrée collection is kept at the Grenna Museum in Gränna, Andrée’s hometown.

A funeral for a nation

The bodies reached Stockholm on October 5, 1930, 33 years to the month after the men had died. The Swedish historian Sverker Sörlin has called the procession that followed one of the most solemn and grandiose displays of national mourning Sweden has ever seen, and one account estimates that 100,000 people followed it through the city. The three men were cremated and buried together at Norra begravningsplatsen cemetery in Stockholm.

There was one more chapter. Strindberg had been engaged to Anna Charlier, and much of his shorthand diary took the form of messages to her. She later moved to England and married another man. When she died, she left a last wish: on September 4, 1949, the day Strindberg would have turned 77, the shared grave was opened and a silver box containing her heart was placed beside him.

How did they die?

Because the bodies were cremated in 1930 without a full examination, nobody knows for certain what killed the three men. The best-known theory came from the physician Ernst Tryde in 1952: trichinosis from undercooked polar bear meat, since larvae of the parasite Trichinella spiralis were found in bear remains at the camp. Critics note that Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen lived largely on polar bear meat in the same region for 15 months without harm.

Other suggestions include vitamin A poisoning, carbon monoxide from the stove, lead, scurvy, botulism, and simple cold, exhaustion and despair. The historian Rolf Kjellström favored that last combination. "Posterity has expressed surprise that they died on Kvitøya, surrounded by food," he wrote. "The surprise is rather that they found the strength to live so long."

The Swedish physician and author Bea Uusma, who works on medical history at the Karolinska Institute, has spent two decades on the puzzle. In her book The Expedition she argues that Strindberg was most likely killed by a polar bear, pointing to apparent tear marks in clothes recovered with his body. She suggests the bear may also have injured Frænkel, and that Andrée, left alone, may have taken morphine. That remains her interpretation, not a settled verdict.

Uusma also realized that the 1930 crews never excavated the camp, and that more than 200 bones may still lie on the island. In August 2024 she set out with Norwegian archaeologists, polar bear guards and two bone-detection dogs, carrying the first permit ever granted for a dig on Kvitøya. They never got ashore: there were too many polar bears, and the weather and waves turned against them. White Island kept its secret.

Why the Eagle still matters

Andrée was counting on helpful winds, drag ropes that did not work and a leaking balloon that stayed up for a month. Some writers argue that he ignored warnings because he could not face backing out in front of the sponsors and the press. Per Olof Sundman’s 1967 novel The Flight of the Eagle, filmed by Jan Troell in 1982 and nominated for an Academy Award, made that argument to a wide audience.

What the expedition left behind is harder to dismiss. Frænkel’s weather journal let researchers reconstruct the men’s route with remarkable precision. And Strindberg’s film, saved from the frost by a scientist in Stockholm, gives us something rare: a view through the eyes of a man who was there, still focusing his camera while the ice carried him the wrong way.

Further reading