Flight to the unknown - Telegraph In 1882 Andree went to Spitsbergen, in the Arctic, as a member of the Swedish delegation of the First International Polar Year, a project undertaken by 11 countries to study polar weather. Andree made observations concerning aero-electricity, and he did it with such resourcefulness, solving technical problems that defeated the other nations, that the Swedish results were considered the best. To determine whether the yellow-green tinge that appeared on someone's face at the end of the Arctic winter, when daylight finally arrived, was a result of the person's skin having changed colour or of his eyes having been affected by the light, Andree allowed himself to be shut indoors for a month. When he finally went out, it was clear that the pigmentation of his skin had changed. Agreeing to his confinement, he wrote, 'Dangerous? But what am I worth? In 1885 Andree went to work at the Swedish Patent Office; it was his last job. Andree didn't ride in a balloon until he was 38, in 1892. He went up with Captain Francesco Cetti, a Norwegian, who said that Andree aloft was 'disagreeably calm'. After two flights with Cetti, Andree decided that he needed his own balloon. With money from a fund created to further science and the public good, he bought one he called Svea, after the Swedish national emblem. He made nine trips in Svea, all of them alone. After his first flight, on July 15 1893, he wrote that three seemed the ideal number of people to take part in a balloon trip devoted to science - one person to manage the balloon, one to observe and one to record the observations. In 1895 he sold the Svea to an outdoor museum near Stockholm. In all, he had spent 40 hours aloft and travelled more than 900 miles. Andree was a pioneer, a futurist. He was the first to try a novel taste, and he wanted to prove that men could travel long distances in the air. He never wrote down what had moved him so profoundly as to hazard his life. His manner was terse and reserved - 'He was a typical Swede' is a remark often heard about him - and he was not given to confession. He was also different from the other men who went looking for the Pole - they were explorers, he was an engineer. He wanted to be regarded as a scientist, not as the performer of a stunt. In the summer of 1896 Andree was given a hero's send-off from Sweden. Called the Eagle, the balloon was built in Paris, from layers of varnished silk. His companions were Nils Ekholm, 47, a meteorologist, and Nils Strindberg, 23, an assistant professor of physics and a cousin of the writer August Strindberg. So that the balloon could be filled without interference from the wind, Andree had had a five-storey balloon house built on Danes Island, in the Svalbard Archipelago. The front wall of the house could quickly be pulled down when the balloon was ready to lift off. For three weeks Andree tried to leave, but he never got favourable winds. Having to return to Sweden and set about raising money again was a setback. That winter Ekholm resigned, saying that he doubted that the balloon could retain sufficient hydrogen to make the trip. He was replaced by Knut Fraenkel, 27, a civil engineer. Andree and his team arrived at Danes Island in May 1897. Strindberg wrote to his brother, 'With a fairly strong wind we will... reach the Pole, or a point near it, in from 30 to 60 hours. Once having reached the northernmost point, we don't care where the wind carries us... Even if we were obliged to leave the balloon and proceed over the ice, we shouldn't consider ourselves lost. We have sledges and provision for four months, guns and ammunition; hence are just as well equipped as other expeditions as far as that is concerned. On July 11, the wind blowing steady from the southwest, they left at 2.30 in the afternoon. According to one onlooker, Andree stood in the basket 'calm, cold, impassive. Not a trace of emotion is visible on his countenance; nothing but a firm resolution and indomitable will. The balloon rose slowly and somewhat erratically to about 300ft. It headed north-east, across the harbour, then very quickly descended and struck the water. Some of the watchers thought it was a gust coming off the water, more likely one of the guide ropes had caught on the shore. In any case by the time the balloon had recovered, they had suffered their first misfortune: the guide ropes remained on the ground. Without them, Andree was sailing a free balloon, not one he might steer. The balloon was travelling at about 20mph, according to a witness, who wrote, 'If it keeps up this initial speed, it will reach the Pole in less than two days.' They watched until it went over some hills and appeared to be lost. For one moment then, between two hills, we perceive a grey speck over the sea, very, very far away, and then finally it disappears. The discovery of the camp and the diaries in 1930 was reported throughout the world, and the diaries were published, with commentary, as Andree's Story. Several weeks after Horn and the Bratvaag had been to White Island, the Isbjörn, a ship hired by reporters, stopped there, and one of the reporters, Knut Stubbendorff, found a waterlogged notebook, which he dried in his cabin. 'I have seldom, if ever, experienced a more dramatic, a more touching succession of events,' Stubbendorff wrote, 'than when I began the preparation of the wet leaves, thin as silk, and watched how the writing or drawing, at first invisible, gradually became discernible as the material dried, giving me a whole, connected description written by the dead - a description which displayed unexpected and amazing details, and which allowed me to follow the journey of the balloon across the ice during the three short days from July 11 to 14 1897.' Each man had kept an account. Fraenkel's comprised terse meteorological observations. Strindberg had made astronomical observations, in addition to notes regarding the journey, and for a while he had also written letters in shorthand to his fiancée, Anna Charlier. Two diaries belonged to Andree, and are the most complete and the most descriptive. The first night was wonderful, he wrote, while Strindberg and Fraenkel slept. He was cold, but he didn't want to wake them. The snow on the ice a light, dirty yellow across great expanses. The fur of the polar bear has the same colour. Perhaps because he was looking down on the ice, its contours escaped him. It appeared to be flat, 'no signs of hummocks. A horse and sledge could drive over it if the surface is hard. Under clouds the balloon descended. At about seven o'clock it stopped and didn't move for 40 minutes; then it began heading west, instead of north, with the wind. They made breakfast at about nine, the coffee taking 18 minutes to boil. 'Pleasant feeling prevails,' Strindberg wrote. For most of the morning they travelled through mist. The temperature was just above freezing. Early in the afternoon, Strindberg noted, the balloon sank so low that twice it struck the ice. During the next few hours, the fog enclosed the men and the balloon struck the surface continually - '8 touches in 30m', 'bumpings every fifth minute', and 'paid visits to the surface and stamped it about every 50 metres' - nevertheless 'humour good', Andree wrote. The following evening the concussions against the ice made Strindberg seasick. They managed to make the balloon rise. Andree wrote that its progress was 'quite stately'. That night he noted that 'an immense polar bear swam about 30 metres right below us. He got out of the way of the guide-lines and went off at a jog-trot when he got up on to the ice. Early on the morning of the 14th, the fog thickened and the basket began to hit the ice hard again. At 6.30 the balloon rose 'to a great height', Andree wrote. They released some of the gas to lower themselves, then, a little after eight, they 'jumped out of the balloon... worn out and famished'. They had made the longest flight ever, having been aloft for 65 hours and 33 minutes, had travelled 517 miles, and were about 300 miles north of where they had started, some 300 miles south of the Pole. All around them were ice and ruins of ice; here and there were leads [fractures in the ice] and pools of water - from the air the leads had looked like deep open water but now they saw they were only shallow streams formed by melted ice. It took them a week to build their boat and choose what to pack in their sledges, one for each of them. Strindberg noted, as they started, that the sledges, which weighed between 300 and 450lb, were very hard to pull. Sometimes, with ropes over their shoulders as if in harness, all three pulled one sledge, then went back for another. At first they headed south-east, for a depot they had arranged to have left for them by the captain of a ship on Franz Josef Land, an archipelago in Russia. Along the way they shot several polar bears. At times they built bridges by bringing ice floes together, but the work was laborious. Sometimes they used axes to make tracks for the runners of their sledges. Sometimes the ice gave way and they fell into the water, and the sledges fell in, too. Is it easy to get across? Andree said they would ask one another. Yes, it is easy with difficulty! On a good day, they made three miles. On July 25, Anna Charlier's birthday, Strindberg wrote her a letter. We have just stopped for the day, after drudging and pulling the sledges for 10 hours. I am really rather tired but must first chat a little. First and foremost I must congratulate you, for this is your birthday. Oh, how I wish I could tell you now that I am in excellent health and that you need not fear for us at all. We are sure to come home by and by. A few days later Fraenkel began to suffer from snow blindness. On July 31, by taking astronomical readings with their instruments, they discovered that they had drifted west with the ice faster than they had walked east. 'This is not encouraging,' Andree wrote. Out on the ice one cannot at all notice that it is in movement. On August 4 they gave up walking east. 'We can surmount neither the current nor the ice,' Andree wrote. They decided to head south-west, towards a smaller depot on the Seven Islands. The temperature dropped. 'Each degree makes us creep deeper down into the sleeping sack,' Andree wrote. The cold froze some of the water in the leads, forcing them, at times, to crawl on hands and knees. When bear meat was scarce, meals sometimes consisted of only bread, butter, biscuits and water. Fraenkel got the runs, and Andree gave him opium for it. On August 17 Andree wrote, 'Our journey today has been terrible. We have not advanced 1,000 metres but with the greatest difficulty have dodged on from floe to floe. They set out fish hooks baited with bear meat but didn't catch anything. One evening, Andree suggested that they try the bear meat raw, which, if you salted it, tasted like oysters, he wrote. They made 'blood pancake' from bear's blood and oatmeal, fried in butter. Strindberg made soup from algae, which, Andree wrote, 'should be considered as a fairly important discovery for travellers in these tracts.' They had grown fatigued but were undaunted. Andree could still find beauty in where he found himself. Of the formations of ice on a peaceful clear night he wrote, 'Magnificent Venetian landscape with canals between lofty hummock edges on both sides, water-square with ice fountain and stairs down to the canals. Divine. Andree wrote on August 29 that he had started to feel the cold. Tonight was the first time I have thought of all the lovely things at home. On the 31st, 'The sun touched the horizon at midnight. The landscape on fire. The snow a sea of fire. In the evening Andree had the runs himself, and took both morphine and opium. On September 1 Andree wrote that 'we needed to be out of harness for a day'. September 4 was Strindberg's birthday. Andree woke him and gave him letters that Charlier and his family had written for the occasion, which pleased him immensely. They allowed themselves extra food for dinner - bear meat, goose-liver paste and cake with syrup. Later in the day, Strindberg and his sledge fell into a lead, soaking all the sugar and bread he was carrying. 'It was a pretty great misfortune for us,' Andree wrote. A few days later, a large blister on Fraenkel's foot became so painful that he could no longer pull his sledge, only help Andree and Strindberg push it. 'This tries our strength,' Andree wrote. 'Since I last wrote in my diary, much has changed, in truth,' Andree wrote 10 days later, on September 17. Snow had fallen, making sledging harder. Fraenkel's foot was no better and Strindberg and Andree were still pulling his sledge. Also, they were nearly out of meat. For two days a 'violent north-west wind' had pinned them down, and they had concluded that there was no hope of reaching the depot. Spending the winter on the ice had become unavoidable. 'Our position is not specially good,' Andree wrote. On the 19th, 'for the first time since July 11,' Andree wrote, they sighted land. He was sure it was White Island, and guessed it was about six miles away. Going ashore appeared to be impossible, since the 'entire island seems to be one single block of ice with a glacier border'. Two days later Andree shot two seals and the next day they shot a bear, which gave them food to last until April. Because of this, Andree wrote, 'they looked forward to the future with hopes considerably strengthened'. Mixing snow and fresh water to make walls and allowing them to freeze, Strindberg - 'the architect', as Andree described him - began building a house where they could spend the winter. On September 28 they moved in, and christened it Home. The evening of October 1 'was as divinely beautiful as one could wish,' Andree wrote. But at 5.30 in the morning, according to Andree, 'we heard a thunderous crash, and water streamed into the hut'. The ice floe they were living on had split into smaller floes. One wall of their house hung from the roof, with nothing below it but water. They saw their belongings drifting off and had to hurry to retrieve them. On October 2 Andre wrote, 'No one had lost courage; with such comrades one should be able to manage under, I may say, any circumstances.' Strindberg wrote tersely in his diary, 'Exciting situation.' On October 4 the three men began building another house. They also saw a lowland on the island where there was no ice. 'A refuge if we don't drift too far past,' Andree wrote. This afternoon five birds were seen flying towards the island. The next day they moved ashore, working partly in darkness beneath the northern lights. The following day happened to be Andree's mother's birthday, and he christened their camp Mina Andree's Place. Bad weather kept them in the tent all day on the 8th. It feels fine to be able to sleep here on fast land as a contrast with the drifting ice out upon the ocean where we constantly heard the cracking, grinding and din. He concluded his last entry, 'We shall have to gather driftwood and bones of whales and will have to do some moving.' When they died isn't known, but they probably didn't last much longer. The evidence of their provisions and belongings remaining in the boat suggests that they had never really established their camp. There was also the driftwood that had been gathered in a pile but not used. Strindberg's diary has a final notation, for October 17, 'Home 7.05am,' but it is made in ink, when all the other entries are in pencil. Ink freezes. A persuasive explanation offered by scholars is that Strindberg made the notation before they left, expecting to arrive home in Sweden by train at 7.05. What killed them isn't known, either. Poisoning from the metal cans has been suggested. Or an accidental gunshot wound; drowning after a fall through the ice while chasing a bear; dehydration; a psychotic episode of murder; suicide using opium; scurvy; trichinosis; vitamin A poisoning from eating polar bear liver; botulism; polar bear attack; and asphyxiation caused by breathing fumes from a cooking stove in a poorly ventilated tent. Murder and suicide are unlikely, since their spirits appear to have held up to the end. They knew about the danger of eating polar bear liver and avoided it. Andree's gun was beside him when he was found, so it isn't plausible that a polar bear crept up on him. In the late 1990s a fingernail found in one of their mittens was tested for lead and turned out to have a lot of it, but not enough to kill someone. Three months isn't long enough to die from scurvy. Trichinosis is not likely, because the diaries mention none of the symptoms of a severe infection. Asphyxiation doesn't seem likely, because Andree had wrapped his first diary in sedge grass (which the men used to insulate their boots) and placed it at his back, against the rock, as if wishing to be sure it was preserved, a gesture that he would be unable to make if he were lapsing abruptly into unconsciousness. Botulism is prevalent in Arctic seals, and might have killed them if they hadn't been able to cook their food properly. Perhaps they simply wore themselves out. The sailors from the Bratvaag, seeing the woollen jerseys and cloth coats that the three men were wearing, decided that they had died of cold and exhaustion. In recent years, as attitudes have changed, Andree has sometimes been regarded as a man who was willing to lead his younger companions to their deaths if that was the price of fame and accomplishment. This theory, expressed in a popular Swedish novel called Flight of the Eagle, by Per Olof Sundman, and in the 1982 film adaptation, starring Max von Sydow as Andree, is based on the belief, not easily supported, that Andree knew that he couldn't succeed and was too weak to face the embarrassment, with all the world watching, of either calling off the expedition or sailing over the horizon and landing. Andree was in early middle age, whereas Strindberg and Fraenkel were young. Fraenkel was not given to introspection - his journal entries are purely scientific - he was chosen to be the packhorse. Strindberg's nature was less hardy; he wept at leaving Stockholm and his fiancée. Andree was the resolute figure, and they must have trusted that he would see them through. Certainly, there was a romantic element to his thinking, but if he was self-deluded or calculating he agreed to suffer for it. The tone of his journals is that of a man who believes that discipline and character can overcome formidable obstacles, and that such efforts are what great accomplishments require. Among the remnants of the expedition in the Grenna Museum in Jönköping are the clothes the three men were wearing, many of their scientific instruments, and several film cans. Some of the film had been exposed, but 93 frames, taken mostly by Strindberg, were developed, although many are only faintly legible. Strindberg had a better than typical eye for composition; he had once won a photography contest. He appears to have stopped taking photographs some time before the end (there is a drawing of the ice house, for example, but no photograph), unless those photographs are among the film that was exposed. One photograph shows Fraenkel and Andree standing over a polar bear one of them had shot. The camera had a time exposure, so Strindberg was able to take a picture of the three of them trying to force a sledge through a gap in the ice. There is a photograph of an ivory gull nailed to a plank, and of a fork that Andree made from heavy wire for Fraenkel because the polar bear meat was often so tough that it bent the forks they had. The most desolate of the photographs was taken on July 14, when Strindberg walked about 100ft off on the ice and pointed the camera at the balloon, which was on its side, with the basket tipped over and Andree and Fraenkel beside it. The black, white and shades of grey in the photographs are weak and watery, and the figures insubstantial, leading everyone who sees them to think they already look like ghosts. Extracted from Ice Balloon (Fourth Estate, £14.99), available for £12.99 plus £1.35 p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1515; books.telegraph.co.uk). The paperback edition will be published on March 28