Three Swedes tried to reach the North Pole by hydrogen balloon in 1897. It crashed after 65 hours, and their fate stayed a mystery for the next 33 years.
Salomon August Andrée, an engineer at the Swedish patent office, pitched a balloon dash to the North Pole as a shortcut past decades of grinding sledge expeditions. He won backing from King Oscar II, dynamite magnate Alfred Nobel, and Baron Oscar Dickson, and the plan quickly became a matter of Swedish national pride.
The hydrogen balloon Örnen, meaning 'The Eagle,' was built in Paris. Andrée claimed he could steer it by trailing heavy drag ropes on the ice to slow the balloon below wind speed so that sails could angle its course. Skeptics warned the ropes would not work as imagined, and the balloon was never test-flown before the expedition.
A first attempt in 1896 never got off the ground: the wind at Danskøya, or Danes Island, in Svalbard blew from the wrong direction for the entire summer. Andrée came back in 1897 under heavy public and press pressure to finally launch, which some historians think pushed him to ignore obvious warning signs.
On 11 July 1897 the Eagle lifted off carrying Andrée, 23-year-old photographer Nils Strindberg, and 27-year-old engineer Knut Frænkel. Within minutes most of the drag ropes twisted off and were lost, and the balloon was already leaking hydrogen faster than expected. After roughly ten hours of true flight and two more days scraping along the ice, it came down for good on the pack ice on 14 July.
Stranded far from anywhere, the three men spent months hauling sledges and a small boat across drifting, breaking sea ice toward supply depots hundreds of miles away. The ice frequently drifted them backward faster than they could walk forward. They shot polar bears and seals for food and kept meticulous diaries the whole time.
By early October 1897 the men reached Kvitøya, or White Island, a tiny, ice-capped island in the far northeast of Svalbard. All three died there within days or weeks of landing. Strindberg died first and was entombed in a rock crevice by the other two. Back home, Sweden had no idea what had become of them.
In 1930 a Norwegian sealing ship, the Bratvaag, chanced upon the last camp on Kvitøya. The men's diaries and Strindberg's rolls of exposed film were recovered, and after 33 years in the Arctic the film was successfully developed into eerie photographs of the expedition's final weeks. The remains were carried back to Stockholm and met by enormous crowds and a state funeral.
Historians and scientists still argue about what actually killed the men, since they had food, fuel, and working equipment. Leading theories include trichinosis from undercooked polar bear meat, carbon monoxide poisoning from their stove inside a closed shelter, vitamin A poisoning from eating polar bear liver, botulism, scurvy, and plain hypothermia and exhaustion.