page_title: Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition
section_title: On foot on the ice
hierarchical_section_title: Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition / Expedition of 1897 / On foot on the ice
caption_attribution_description: Map of Salomon August Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897.
context_page_description: Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 was an effort to reach the North Pole in which all three Swedish expedition members – S. A. Andrée, Knut Frænkel, and Nils Strindberg – perished. Andrée, the first Swedish balloonist, proposed a voyage by hydrogen balloon from Svalbard to either Russia or Canada, which was to pass, with luck, straight over the North Pole on the way. The scheme was received with patriotic enthusiasm in Sweden, a northern nation that had fallen behind in the race for the North Pole.
  Andrée ignored many early signs of the dangers associated with his balloon plan. Being able to steer the balloon to some extent was essential for a safe journey. But there was much evidence that the drag-rope steering technique he had invented was ineffective. Yet Andrée staked the fate of the expedition on drag ropes. Worse, the polar balloon Örnen was delivered directly to Svalbard from its manufacturer in Paris without being tested. When measurements showed it to be leaking more than expected, Andrée refused to acknowledge the alarming implications.
context_section_description: From the moment the three were grounded on 14 July, Strindberg's highly specialized cartographic camera, which had been brought to map the region from the air, became instead a means of recording daily life in the icescape and the constant danger and drudgery of the trek. Strindberg took about 200 photos with his seven-kilogram (15 lb) camera over the course of the three months they spent on the pack ice, one of the most famous being his picture of Andrée and Frænkel contemplating the fallen Eagle.
  Andrée and Frænkel also kept meticulous records of their experiences and geographical positions, Andrée in his "main diary," Frænkel in his meteorological journal. Strindberg's own stenographic diary was more personal in content, and included his general reflections on the expedition, as well as several messages to his fiancée Anna Charlier. All three manuscripts were eventually retrieved from the ice on Kvitøya in 1930.
  Eagle had been stocked with safety equipment such as guns, snowshoes, sleds, skis, a tent, a small boat (in the form of a bundle of bent sticks, to be assembled and covered with balloon silk), most of it stored not in the basket but in the storage space arranged above the balloon ring. These items had not been put together with great care, or with any acknowledgment of adopting indigenous peoples' techniques for dealing with the extreme environment. In this, Andrée contrasted not only with later but also with many earlier explorers.
  Lundström points to the agonizing extra efforts that became necessary for the team due to Andrée's mistaken design of the sleds, with a rigid construction that borrowed nothing from the long proven Inuit sleds, and were so impractical for the difficult terrain. Andrée called it "dreadful terrain", with channels separating the ice floes, high ridges, and partially iced-over melt ponds. The men's clothes included no furs but were woolen coats and trousers, plus oilskins. They wore the oilskins but the explorers reported always seeming to be damp or wet from the half-frozen pools of water on the ice and the typically foggy, humid Arctic summer air, and preoccupied with drying their clothes, mainly by wearing them. It would have meant certain death to lose the provisions lashed to one of the inconvenient sleds into one of the many channels that had to be laboriously crossed.
  Before starting the march across the "dreadful terrain," the three men spent a week in a tent at the crash site, packing up and making decisions about what and how much to bring and where to go. The far-off North Pole was not mentioned as an option; the choice lay between two depots of food and ammunition laid down for their safety, one at Sjuøyane in Svalbard and one at Cape Flora in Franz Josef Land. Inferring from their faulty maps that the distances to each were about equal, they decided to try for the bigger depot at Cape Flora. Strindberg took more pictures during this week than he would at any later point, including 12 frames that make up a 360-degree panorama of the crash site.
  The balloon had carried a lot of food, of a kind adapted more for a balloon voyage than for travels on foot. Andrée had reasoned that they might as well throw excess food overboard as sand if losing weight was necessary; and if it was not, the food would serve if wintering in the Arctic desert did, after all, become necessary. There was, therefore, less ballast and large amounts of heavy-type provisions, 767 kilograms (1,691 lb) altogether, including 200 litres (44 imp gal; 53 US gal) of water and some crates of champagne, port, beer, etc., donated by sponsors and manufacturers. There was also lemon juice, though not as much of this precaution against scurvy as other polar explorers usually thought necessary. Much of the food was in the form of cans of pemmican, meat, sausages, cheese, and condensed milk.
  By the time they crashed, they had thrown some of the provisions overboard. The three men took most of the rest with them on leaving the crash site, along with other necessities such as guns, tent, ammunition, and cooking utensils, 
caption: The path followed by the 1897 expedition: north by balloon from Danes Island, then south on foot to Kvitøya
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