Going the Hard Way

[FIELD ETHOS]

Going the Hard Way | Field Ethos

By Caleb McClain Arctic exploration is a history seriously overlooked by those of us who equate adventure with…

fieldethos.com

By Caleb McClain

Arctic exploration is a history seriously overlooked by those of us who equate adventure with faraway tropical lands. And why wouldn’t it be? There were few people, no crazy animals they were hunting, and the land is barren ice sheets—it has all the makings of a boring story. The 1897 expedition of Salomon Andreé into the Arctic should be no different, but the posthumous publishing of his journals revealed a harrowing story of a man who was willing to give everything he had to fill in the giant void on the map that was the Arctic.

Salomon Andreé was not your average explorer. He had no military background and he was not a sailor. Instead, he was an engineer, patent office worker, and hot air balloon aficionado, which is not the kind of aficionado I would like to be remembered as. At some point, he became fixated on the quest to be the first man to the North Pole, despite having never seen Arctic conditions.

His plan was simple enough. He planned to fly a balloon as far as he could, then walk the rest of the way to Santa’s workshop. This idea was well-received by the political elites, and it was quickly funded by Alfred Nobel and the King of Sweden and Norway. The launch was set for 1896, but it never materialized, so the team packed up and went home after waiting a couple months for favorable winds.

Salomon Andreé — Arctic Explorer​

He went back the next year with two other inexperienced explorers, neither of whom had ever seen Arctic conditions, and the plan went about as poorly as expected. In liftoff, a gust of wind caused them to lose helium, which in turn caused them to lose altitude, so they were forced to throw as much ballast as they could over the edge to keep going. They had no ground tether, and they instantly rose into the clouds, blowing wherever the winds took them.

They lost altitude quickly, and they threw any extra weight overboard to increase their flight time. One journal entry read, “We have not had any sleep or been permitted any rest from the repeated slamming against the ice. We probably cannot stand it much longer.” After only two days in the air, they crashed into the ice for the final time.

The conditions were brutal. They had already thrown provisions overboard to lessen weight and increase their flight time, so they were short on many necessities, and what they had was not working. Their clothing was inadequate for the bracing cold, and their sleds did not move easily under heavy loads. They crawled on hands and knees across ice floes, pushing their sleds and themselves deeper into the unknown.

Going the Hard Way​

As food rations ran low, they hunted polar bears and seals. At one point, an entire sled fell into the icy ocean waters, and one of the men had to jump in after it. Based on the diary entries, many speculate that the men began hallucinating. Still, fueled only by morphine, opium, and half-cooked polar bear meat, they marched on.

After two months on the ice, they set a winter camp on a large ice flow, but the ice broke directly under their tents just a couple weeks later. After three days lost at sea, they landed on an island now called Kvitøya. The story ends there. The Swedish newspapers published speculative reports for years, but no one heard from them again. There was a brief hoax that one of their homing pigeons had returned a note, but it was quickly discredited.

In 1930, 33 years after the crew set out, Norwegian walrus hunters found the explorers’ corpses, photographs, and journals. The last entry in any of their diaries was only three days after landing on the island. Speculations remain as to what killed Andreé’s crew. Many cite some combination of exhaustion and trichinosis to be the killer, with others suggesting vitamin A poisoning from eating polar bear liver, botulism or lead poisoning from canned foods, and even polar bear attacks.

In the end, no one knows how those final grueling days were spent, but we know it was not pretty.