FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE - The Doomed Andre Expedition

 

I imagine myself standing in a topless hut on the rocky shores of Spitsbergen, half way between the fjords of Norway and the North Pole. It is Sunday, 11 July, 1897, and most of the hut is taken up by a huge inflated hydrogen balloon. 

In the basket suspended beneath that leaking gas bag is a jar headed Swedish engineer named Salomon Andree.

It was Andree (above) who had dreamed up a flight to the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon.  And he sold the idea to investors, from average patriotic Swedes to scientific geniuses like Afred Nobel. Now, as he reaches out to shake my hand, a puzzled look comes over Andree's face. Where, he must be wondering, did I come from? But there is no time for explanations. I grasp his hand and pull him close. I whisper in his ear a final warning, “Ekholm was right. And you are the biggest idiot within ten thousand miles.” Andree nods and smiles absently. After all, he doesn’t speak English. 

He shouts, “Strindberg! Fraenkel!” Instantly, obediently, the slender Nils Strindberg (above, centrer) and bullet shaped Knute Franknel leap into the basket, like two eager well trained sacrificial lambs. The ropes are cut, and the Ornen (the Eagle) rises into the cold clear air and floats away. The three men are never seen alive again. What idiots.

Nils Ekholm had joined Andree in Spitsbergen for his first attempt at floating a balloon to the North Pole in 1896, but the southerly winds Andree had confidently predicted never showed up. The delay gave Ekholm time to come to the disturbing revelation that the balloon named the Eagle ("Ornen" in Swedish)  was leaking like a kitchen sieve. It would never, he realized, stay inflated long enough to reach the Pole, let alone safety on to a farther shore like Alaska or Russia. When he expressed his reservations, Andree expressed disappointment with Ekholm’s lack of enthusiasm. After the flight was cancelled for the year Ekholm made alternative travel plans for the summer of 1897.

And that was how Knut Fraenkel earned a chance at immorality and trichinosis; lucky him.

If the leaking gas bag had been properly sealed,  the expedition would have have still been in trouble. In truth there was an almost endless list of mistakes and false assumptions that insured doom, and all of them lead straight back so Salomen Andree.

Andree had invented a clever and simple device for steering the balloon by dragging ropes along the ice or water (note the trailing lines, above).  Their weight would keep the balloon from rising too high, or being carried too fast into trouble. The only problem was, they didn't work.

Bryan Swope, from his web site "This Day in Aviation" explains that "Problems began immediately. As the guide ropes dragged through the water, they became heavier. (After takeoff) They pulled the balloon down to the surface and the gondola actually touched the water. The aeronauts frantically began dumping ballast. Three of the four ropes became entangled and were pulled loose. Örnen began to rise again, but having lost ballast and the weight of the three guide ropes, it climbed to about 1,600 feet (490 meters). The loss of hydrogen accelerated."

"The Eagle floated northward above a fog bank. It sank into the fog and sunlight shining on the envelope decreased. 

The balloon cooled and the gas inside began to contract. Buoyancy decreased and the balloon sank further into the fog...After the explorers passed over the Arctic ice pack, the gondola would alternately bounce across the broken ice, then rise again into the sky. At about 10:00 p.m., 12 July , the gondola settled on to the ice and remained there for the next thirteen hours"

At 10:55 a.m., Tuesday, 13 July, the Eagle became airborne once again..."Drizzle and fog caused ice to form on the envelope. The gondola dragged behind. After jettisoning hundreds of pounds of ballast and equipment, Örnen rose higher, but again settled toward the ice. The remaining guide rope was lost. Realizing that the end of the flight was inevitable, the crew opened to valves to release the hydrogen. "

The balloon settled to the ice for the last time, at 8:11 p.m., Wednesday, 14 July 1897. The crew climbed down from the gondola onto the ice floe. The total elapsed time of the journey was 65 hours, 35 minutes. In that time, Andrée, Frænkel and Strindberg had traveled 295 miles (475 kilometers) from their starting point..." .

Anticipating such a problem, Andree had designed three clever sleds that folded away for easy storage in the balloon. But they proved so rigid you could break your back trying to pull them across the pressure ridges in the ice.

The three intrepid explorers ended up dragging the boats across the endless ice ridges until they collapsed. 

Andree had also stocked the balloon with more than a ton of food, almost none of which could be easily transported by foot, should the balloon go down. 

Their tiny cook stoves often failed, filling their tiny tent with toxic fumes. 

Luckily they had also brought guns, assuming they would be able to feed themselves on seal and polar bear meat if they were forced down on the ice. But when prepared upon the inefficient stoves, they undercooked the meat, contracted trichinosis and died of dysentery; not the fate most 19th century explorer-romantics usually envisioned for them selves -  death by constant toilet.

After they disappeared into the sky on 11 July  1897, for  33 years the assumption was that the brave trio had made it to the Pole but crashed while floating to make landfall in Russia or Alaska, a thousand miles beyond rescue. Then in August of 1930 a Norwegian scientific ship stumbled on the remains of their last camp, not more than 200 miles from their starting point. 

The Norwegians found only what little the polar bears had left of the three bodies, but Andree and Franknel's journals and Strindberg's extraordinary photographs of the dead men remained. That was when the whole truth became known.

On July 14th, the Ornen had crashed onto the ice, after just 51 hours in the air. (Stridberg took extensive photos of the 'landing'.) The three men then spent a week unpacking and deciding what to do. Only then did they set out for home.

They left behind the champagne and beer, but struggled to carry the cans of condensed milk and sausages and cheese. A week’s trek across the ice taught them the lesson and they abandoned almost half of their burden in big pile, and kept going. They had worn no furs but rather heavy woolen clothing, covered at times by oilskins, that trapped the moisture underneath until they were swimming in their own sweat.

As they marched, each two steps they took to the south were countered by the floating ice pack which carried them one and a half steps toward the north and east.

They clambered over two story high pressure ridges, sometimes reduced to crawling on all fours. They struggled over broken ice alternating with water leads that forced them into and then out of their clumsy boat, soaking their woolen clothing again and again.

Slowly they came to the realization that, for all the effort,  they were not making much progress. By the middle September they decided they were going to have to winter on the ice. They built an elaborate snow hut and prepared to float southward on the ice, which they finally realized by watching the shores of White Island (now called Kvitoya Island) drift slowly past their camp, was carrying  them away from safety.

But in early October the pack ice cracked right down the middle of their new home, and they were forced to drag their gear onto the rocky shores of Kvitoya island, barely 200 miles to the northeast of their starting point. They used the last of their strength to build a final camp on the island.

 Shortly after they landed thin and graceful Strindberg died of an apparent heart attack. His comrades buried him under stones in a cleft in the rocks. 

Within a few days Franknel and Andree also died in their little hut. A hunk of frozen polar bear meat found near their stove thirty-three years later was infected with trichinosis spores.  And then the bears came in to claim their winnings.

They had survived for 11 weeks on the open ice, perhaps the most ill-prepared polar explorers in history. But they had transcended their own stupidity with courage and tenacity. In the end they were killed by a bad plan and bad planning. 

But as one writer has since noted, “Posterity has expressed surprise that they died on Kvitøya, surrounded by food…The surprise is rather that they found the strength to live so long".

I would put it slightly differently. I find it unimaginable that Saloman Andree would ever admit defeat, even as he was dying.

- 30 -

WHO'D A THUNK IT - Queen of Scots births an English King.

I’ll tell you the best Scottish joke in history; Mary Stewart (AKA Queen of Scots), and her husband, Lord Darnley (AKA Henry Stewart), produced a child who became the King of England. That may not seem like a great gag, but you have to remember that she was a fool and he was an idiot and Scotland in the 16th century was the Cleveland of Europe. That their kid becoming a King of England could only happen in an episode of the "Beverly Hillbillies", performed with a brog.

Mary was a big girl, close to six feet tall, which in the 16th century made her a freak of nature, sort of like a sunny day in Scotland. She was the granddaughter of Robert the Bruce, and Henry VIII of England wanted her as his daughter-in law. But instead, when the girl was all of 5 years old, her mother sent her off to France, where she married Francis, the future King of France instead. That poor boy died of an ear infection in 1560, a year after he was promoted to King, and a year later, on 19 August,  1561, the 18 year old widow Mary returned to Scotland, a place she hadn't seen in a decade.

Unlike Queen Elizabeth to her south, Mary bowed under the pressure that she should wed. But she turned down any of the young men chosen by her protestant advisors, and even a man put forward by Elizabeth of England. The slub she finally chose in 1565 was her own cousin, Henry Stewart, the Lord of Darnley.  Sir Walter Scott, a man who knew something about romance, described Darnley as “…remarkably tall and handsome…but unhappily destitute of sagacity, prudence…(and) extremely violent in his passions.”

Another observer sketched Darnley as “shallow, vain, weak, indolent, selfish, arrogant, vindictive and irremediably spoiled.” And those were his good features.  But, not to worry. He was just Mr. Queen, and she was in charge. 

So why did Mary marry this slub? Well, he was one of the few men in Scotland she could look up to, by a good two inches, they say. And you know what they say about a man with big hands and  feet.

In any case, Lord Darnley did fulfill his role as a royal sperm donor. Mary quickly became pregnant with a son. They named the boy James.

But I suspect that Mary chose Darnley mostly because Queen Elizabeth wanted her to marry Lord Bothwell. He was pure Scotsman,,Catholic, violent and vulgar. And smart.  And that was reason enough for Mary to choose Darnley.  Mary was always competing with Elizabeth, and she was always losing. And boy did she lose on this one. It is a bad idea to choose any mate just because they aren’t somebody else, even if they do have big feet.

That point was driven home for Mary a year later when, one Saturday night, a drunken Darnley and a few of his thugs broke into the Queen’s chambers and right in front of the Queen, who was 5 months pregnant, murdered one of her favorite’s, a little Italian poet named Rizzio, whom she kept around for entertainment.  Then Darnely acted as if he had smashed his sister's stereo.  When they were finished turning Rizzio into Italian sausage,  Darnley told Mary, “I beg your pardon.” Somehow that failed to convince Mary to ever sleep with him again. Which, it turns out, was a very wise decision. Not to sleep with him, I mean.

Disappointed with his experiment in playing court politics, Darnley returned to his primary occupation of providing employment for every prostitute in Edinburgh and Glasgow, male and female, This task provided him with many hours of diversion and amusement along with a vicious case of syphilis.

I am told people develop syphilitic ulcers on their genitals within three weeks of being infected, and about two months later it develops into the secondary form, with a red rash on their torso, arms and legs, including the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet, accompanied by fever, sore throat, general malaise, weight loss, hair loss and a headache.  Darnley suffered from all of those delightful symptoms, and ended up confined in bed in a small Glasgow room, and feeling very sorry for himself.

But when she heard about his condition, Mary did something rather curious; instead of gloating, she journeyed to Glasgow, and nursed Darnley until he was well enough to be brought back to Edinburgh. She even put him up in a little country house called Kirk O’Field right near her favorite church, where she visited his second floor room almost daily, washed his sores and read to him from the bible. Now why would she do that?

It was pretty clear by this time that she despised the schmuck, and she had not said a kind word about him since the Italian sausage-making incident. Either she was a saint or she had a plan. Well, you know what they say about the Scots- they feel badly when they feel good because they are certain they’re going to feel worse the very second they feel better. Maybe it's got something to do with the weather, but these people are pessimists supreme. And pessimism about Lord Darnley's health seemed called for.

In the middle of the night of Monday, 13 February,  1567, the little house next to the church blew sky high. Ba-Boom!. The little house was demolished. The rubble even caught fire. And while the neighbors were pouring water on the remains, what should they discover lying in the courtyard outside the little house, but the bodies of Lord Darnley and his servant.  He was dressed in his nightshirt, and was as D-E-A-D  as a doornail. Except he had no wounds from the explosion, just a bruise around his throat.  He had been strangled. Clearly he had been gotten out of the house prior to the explosion.

Interviews with the surviving servants revealed that Darnley had heard men moving about in the rooms below him, rooms normally used by Mary when she stayed over. Darnley had ordered the servants to open a window and lower him to the ground in a chair.  Unfortunately Darnley had landed right in among the assassins who, instead of waiting for the fuse to reach the kegs of gunpowder stacked in the ground floor rooms, strangled the syphilitic slub. And while the were finishing up, who should slowly descend into their midst, but Darnley's servant. Well, two for the price of one, I guess. They then disappeared into the night before the explosion. The only question left was who did it?

There was no shortage of suspects. There were Darnley’s allies in the murder of Rizzio. Killing Darnley prevented him from spreading their names around when he got drunk. And then there the man who had comforted Mary after the murder of Rizzio, Lord Bothwell. He was just as rich and power hungry as Darnley was, but smarter. Killing Darnley made Mary an available widow again. And then there was Mary, herself

Mary was supposed to have been staying with her husband that night.  Instead, luckily for her, at the last minute she had decided to attend a wedding. Of course, that might have been an alibi. And few would have blamed her, if she had wanted to choke the life out of Darnley, or even blow him up. After all, it was possible Darnley and his buddies had planned on killing Mary the night they  had murdered Rizzio. Or maybe Darnley had just wanted Mary to miscarry the child she was carrying. This slub was a big baby, and probably saw the child in Mary's belly as competition. Either way, you could sympathize with the lady, if she had wanted to kill her arrogant, unfaithful, diseased and idiot slub of a husband. But did she do it?

We will never know. Forty days after Darnley’s death, the new man in Mary’s life, Lord Bothwell, conducted a traditional Highland Scottish wedding. He kidnapped the Queen, dragged her off to Dunbar Castle and raped her. Mazal Tov!  Well, Bothwell had been Queen Elizabeth's choice for Mary. And now she had won. Sort of.

A month after this ‘wedding’ the Catholic nobles of Scotland rose up, arrested the Protestant Bothwell, and forced Mary to surrender her crown. They then started running Scotland for themselves, in the name of the infant James, of course.  Bothwell died years later, insane, and locked up in a Danish prison. Mary eventually escaped south of the border to England, where Elizabeth had her locked up in one castle after another for the next 19 years.  

Finally, in 1586 Mary got caught conspiring with some politically active Catholics to replace  Elizabeth on the throne of England. That's the thing about  Kings and Queens - they are always a  threat until they are dead. With politicians, you just vote them out of office. Anyway,  reluctantly the Virgin Queen signed Mary's death warrant, and the Queen of Scots was executed just 4 days later, on 7 February, 1587.

But even her death turned into a joke. First, it took three slices to kill her.  And when the executioner held her head up as proof of her death, it slipped out of his hands and bounced across the floor. It seems the lady wore a wig to her own beheading.  In any  case the whole thing was a joke since the lady had done nothing but lose her head since she had set foot in Scotland. 

But while the audience was still chuckling over this, Elizabeth died in March of 1603, without an heir.  And by prearrangement,  Mary's son, James VI of Scotland, product of the most mismatched coupling since Lott asked his family to pass the salt,  became James I, King of England. 

Who’d a thunk it?

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