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The ice balloon : one man's dramatic attempt to discover the North Pole by balloon

Wilkinson, Alec, 1952-2013

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Summary

In August 1930, a Norwegian sloop, sailing in the Arctic Ocean, stopped at a remote island called White Island. Landing, the sealers followed some walruses around a point of land. A few hours later, they returned with a book, together with a boathook stamped 'Andree's Pol. Exp 1896'. Not far from the boat was a body. It was leaning against a rock, with its legs extended, frozen. They carefully opened the jacket the corpse was wearing, and when they saw a large monogram 'A'. They knew who they were looking at: S. A. Andree, the Swede who, with two companions, ascended on July 11, 1897, in a hydrogen balloon to discover the North Pole, one of the last unmapped continents on earth. Andree had ascended on a blustery afternoon from Dane's Island, in the Spitzberg archipelago, six hundred miles from the Pole. It took an hour for the balloon, which was a hundred feet tall, to disappear from the view of the people who were watching from the shore; carpenters, technicians, members of the Swedish navy who had assisted in the weeks leading up to the launch. Two years of planning had led him to predict that he would arrive at the Pole in about forty three hours. Then he vanished, the first person to disappear into the air.