The Ice Balloon by Alec Wilkinson: review On July 11 1897, Swedish engineer and balloon nut Salomon Andrée set off from Spitsbergen in a specially modified balloon with two companions to fly over the geographic North Pole, 600 miles away. The plan was to reach the Pole in 43 hours, then land somewhere in Alaska or, better still, in San Francisco. Anticipating the crowds of dignitaries awaiting his arrival, Andrée packed a tux. A few weeks later, one of the expedition's homing pigeons fetched up on a fishing vessel, carrying a note of the balloon's position. An expedition buoy appeared near Iceland two years later, but in 1899 Andrée was officially declared "vanished." With temperatures below freezing and with no means of returning, there could be no great mystery about the team's fate, though the details remained sketchy until 1930, when three skeletons and a series of log books were found on an island east of Spitsbergen. Andrée's story is relatively unknown in the annals of Arctic exploration and, reading Alec Wilkinson's The Ice Balloon, it's not hard to see why. Though there's some engaging material here, Andrée was a minor player in the race to the North Pole. Wilkinson does his best with the usual explorer tropes: rugged hero, maverick lone wolf, but it's clear from the outset that Andrée was an Oedipal misanthrope, motivated less by the swash and buckle of Arctic exploration than by a technician's desire to perfect his balloon. Add to that the briefness of the journey - Andrée and his crew spent 65 hours aloft - and it's hard to see this as one of the truly epic voyages. Even after the men went down, the struggle, though grim, seemed free of the moral ambiguity which makes the doomed adventures of Scott et al so compelling. Wilkinson has a fondness for replicating the clichéd lyricism which infects much of contemporary Victorian exploration literature without questioning how much of that characterisation of the Arctic was itself a fiction designed to serve, among other things, Britain's imperial aims. Expression occasionally obscures fact. It is not true that, after being put out in a boat with his son by mutineers, the explorer Henry Hudson was "never heard of again." Inuit spoke years later of picking him up, dead, along with his living son who they tied up and left to die. Nor is it accurate to say that in the Arctic the "palette of dangers reduced to two: cold and starvation." Inuit weren't guaranteed friendly (see above), nor were polar bears. Add in scurvy, snow blindness, avalanches, lack of fresh water etc etc. And if it were the case that the Arctic offered "no riches that could be held in one's hand," then how to explain the centuries-old trades in narwhal tusks (which, as unicorn horns, fetched more than gold), gyrfalcons and animal pelts? Poetic licence has a perfect right to trump fact, but only in fiction. The Ice Balloon Alec Wilkinson Fourth Estate, £14.99, 239pp