SYMHC Classics: S.A. Andrée and the 1897 North Pole Balloon Mission

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. This is the time of year when the North Pole is on a lot of folks minds. And to be very clear, this Saturday Classic is not a Christmas episode at all that it is about an attempt to get to the North Pole. It is in fact the polar expedition of s. A. Andre, which was made by Balloon in eighteen seventy nine. And this episode came out on April, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly fro and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson, and uh. Many of the history makers of the world were people who were considered a little bit mad by their contemporaries. You know, it's usually the people with great bravado that do something a little bit crazy and end up kind of changing the world or making some amazing discovery. Today's topic, which features a man and his expedition, it definitely falls into that category. But the unmet goal of the plan has left a lot of room for debate about how he's defined and how this mission is defined. This is going to feature some high adventure, some really wild courageousness and just positivity in the face of what I think would break most people. Uh So, we're actually just going to jump right in and not really set it up a whole lot, and we're actually going to start sort of at the end of the story, so that end whe we're starting as a discovery. White Island, which is known as Kfiteo in Norwegian, is an island in the small Bard Archipelago, and spall Bard means cold coast, which makes sense because all these islands sit in the Arctic Ocean. White Island is normally completely covered by ice except for two little points of rock, but in there was a really warm spring in summer, more of the island than normal was exposed, and because so much of the ice on White Island had melted, a Norwegian sloop called the brat Vague, which was on a combination scientific slash ceiling mission, was actually able to stop at White Island, and during the sloop's time there, a geologist named Dr Gunnar Horn and his team followed these walruses that they had spotted on the island. But while they were following these walruses, they found, much to their surprise, something that they had absolutely not been looking for. Which was a diary. The book was pretty wet, it had been sitting under the ice as the ice melted, and parts of it were stuck together on the opening page where the words the sledge journey. And so when the geologist Horn took this book back to Peter Eliason, who was the captain of the Bradwag, he discovered that two of the seilers that have been traveling with them had also made a discovery. While they were exploring White Island. They first found a metal lid like to a what had possibly been to a tin of food, and that kind of gave them pause. And then, uh, not far from there, they found a canvas boat, and this boat had a hook, and the hook was stamped Andre's Polar Expedition. It's actually p O L period x e XP period. They explored the area a little more and quickly found a lot more stuff, including a headless body which was reduced to little more than a skeleton. It's clothing was monogrammed with the letter A. And then they all kind of put the pieces together. While the men aboard the brat Bog had landed in White Island to study science and hunt seals, what they had actually found was the remains of a long lost ballooning expedition which had tried to make its way to the North Pole thirty years before, and so that man that they found they found others as well. But his name was Solomon August Andre and he was born in Grenna, Sweden eighteen fifty four. Just for very brief on him as a young man, when he was only sixteen, his father died. He became very very attached to his mother. They were already close, but that deepened when his dad passed away and he attended Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology and studied engineering. In eighteen seventy six, then twenty two year old Andre traveled by steamer to the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia. This is a journey that would turn out to be really momentous for Andre because while he was reading about winds during this journey to the Atlantic, he was inspired to think about balloon travel. And when he reached Philadelphia, he actually got a job at the Swedish pavilion at the expo as a janitor, and he took advantage of his location while he was there by visiting a Philadelphia resident by the name of John Wise and Wise was really famous for his work in ballooning, and because Wise had flown in all manner of weather conditions uh and he had walked away from virtually every possible type of ash that a balloon could have, Andre felt like this man kind of served as proof that ballooning was a perfectly safe mode of travel. The two became friendly, and Andrea requested the chance to accompany Wise in his balloon, which the experience balloonist agreed to do. But the planned day for their trip, which was a Fourth of July celebration, wound up having really high winds. The balloon collapsed before the trip could even start, and before they could reschedule their outing, Andre got sick and decided to go back to Sweden, and once he got home, he was still obsessed with this balloon idea, so he decided that he needed to raise funds to purchase his own balloon uh and he did this by setting up a machine shop, but that, unfortunately was not really a great money making plan. He ended up in a great deal of debt, and he really found the whole idea of running a retail business UH really unpleasant to him. He didn't like marketing. He didn't like the mode of marketing that was popular at the time, which was talking trash about the competitors. He found the whole thing distasteful. It just wasn't a good fit for him, so he closed up his shop and he still had never had a balloon ride. When he was twenty eight, Andre participated in the first International Polar Year as part of the Swedish delegation. Austrian explorer Carl wait Precked had inspired the International Polar Year, being certain that there were meteorological and geophysical problems that could only be solved by a cooperative effort that was aimed at gathering and studying information from the Earth's poles. So this was actually a huge event. Eleven different countries sent delegations to work on these coordinated expeditions that were part of this first International Polar Year, and Andre's group went to the Svalbard island of Spitzbergen, and one of the experiments that was conducted there actually involved Andre being confined indoors for an entire month to see if his skin color would change, and it did. It took on this yellowish huge that had been seen in other people after they had been through an Arctic winter. Prior to that, they weren't sure if that was something going on with their vision having been altered and people just looked that way, or if there was actually something happening in the skin that changed its its hue. Uh And then do in large part to Andrea's work in aero electricity, the Swedish delegation was really recognized for the impressive results of their work as part of this bigger cooperative effort. And after this expedition was over, though Andrea went to a fairly mundane job working for the Swedish Patent Office. He did, however, finally get to take a balloon ride, and that's what we will talk about after a brief word from a sponsor. So despite the fact that Andrea had been fascinated with balloons since he was only twenty two, he had not actually gotten to ride in one, and that didn't even happen until he was third the eight So for sixteen years he had kind of been pining for this experience and his eventual escort in this was what's the man who's called Norway's first balloon skipper and his name was Captain Francesco Chetti, which I know is an Italian name. He was of Italian family, but he was Norwegian. I'm not sure how the Norwegian language shift would have changed the pronunciation of his name, so we're going with the Italian version. Uh. Chetty was an interesting figure in his own right. He was also a mind reader and the starvation artist, where he would go without food for long times as these big sort of public stunts. Jenny was kind of annoyed by uh by Andrea's behavior during this first outing. He called it quote disagreeably calm. According to Andrea's own account, he was trying to be completely aware of his mental and physiological responses to the situation, noting that while he didn't consciously feel any fear, his body acted in ways that suggests that he did unconsciously feel some fear going on. He found himself, for example, tightly gripping the ropes on the balloon. He took only one more flight with Jetty before deciding that he ought to get a balloon for himself, and he was actually able to finance the purchase through a Swedish science fund. Uh. This was basically a fun set up for people to use money UH if they were going to work on science projects. Or things that would better the Swedish people as a whole. And so once he had his balloon, he took nine solo trips in it, and each time he was really scientific about carefully detailing his observations. Remember his education was engineering, so he was a really excellent NoteTaker. And on one trip he actually ascended to fourteen thousand, two hundred and fifty feet. That's four thousand, three forty three meters. So, for contexts, cabin pressure and modern airplanes is set to correspond to what humans would experience up to seven thousand feet or a little over that. Uh. So he was basically flying in this balloon without protection at twice the altitude that safety regulations say we should aim for in terms of keeping people comfortable and safe. And he described this during this journey a lightheadedness and a terrible headache and a faint quote a faint singing noise on the left side of my skull. So, for another comparison to a previous episode, we talked about Mount Everest, which is twenty nine thousand feet. Uh. However, those most people that Summit Everest are using oxygen tanks to help them along. This is a case where there was none such. They're also acclimating on the way up, They're not just descending in a balloon all that way. I'm surprised he didn't get the Benz. Yeah, he was a resilient dude, so maybe he did and we just don't know. So Anyway, on another of his trips on his balloon, which he named this Veia, he tested out the use of drag ropes and a sail to try to steer the vessel, and these would eventually become important as part of his eventual plan to explore the Arctic. And after his ninth trip, UH he sold his balloon to a museum. It was an outdoor museum where they would have space to put him and his engineering background and his wind study and his experiences in ballooning had basically given him a really big idea. At this point, a lot of explorers were totally focused on the North Pole. Numerous countries had launched missions to go north, and of the thousand men who had tried to get to the poll, seven and fifty one had died, so UH, most of them it was really serious business and being the first to get to the North Pole was going to be a significant point of pride for whatever country could claim it and so. On February, when he was forty years old, so this is only two years into his ballooning experience, Andrea addressed the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and during that speech he outlined his very ambitious plan to travel to the North Pole via balloon. And a few months after his talk at the Royal Swedish Academy, andre gave basically the same talk to the sixth International Geographical Congress in London in the hopes of getting UH funding in the form of a little less than forty thousand dollars worth of money. I think I've seen it listed as around thirty eight thousand, traveling by balloon and leaving from Danes Island in this Baal Barn archipelago. He expected to go north for about forty three hours to reach the poll. The balloon that he traveled in would be outfitted with the drag ropes and sale that we talked about before to try to enable steering and control of the balloon. The next part of his plan involved crossing over the pole and then continuing over that point two travels for several additional days, and his intention was that he would eventually land in Asia or perhaps Alaska, depending on how the wind moved him, and once he landed, he planned to travel over land on foot until he found civilization so he could arrange for travel back to Sweden. It may surprise you to learn that Andre's outlook as he described this whole plan was positive and enthusiastic, even when talking about the possible obstacles he might encounter once he got the balloon on the ground and tried to find his way home. He could use waterways to travel, he said, And he seemed really confident that even if he landed in a desert, he would surely find vegetation and shelter, and surely any people he would encounter would give him directions or help him back to civilization. He really was a positive thinker. I gotta give him props. He felt like this plan to reach the pole was going to succeed where others failed, and that was because he was going to circumvent all of those perils of traveling by sleder on foot by taking to the air. What may have really been the moment where Andre won over the crowd was actually something of a job that he made at One of the men who tried to contest this plan, American General Adolphus Greeley, made his opinion known that he thought this plan was foolish and had not been thought out. And Greeley, he may recognize that name, had been commanding officer of an expedition to the Arctic Circle in one that was the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, and it was intended to gather scientific information about the Arctic and to set a new record for the farthest point north that had been reached by explorers. And this expedition met with great tragedy. The crew ended up stranding in the Arctic for years, and all but Greeley and five other men died, so the majority of his crew did not survive that In response to Greeley's objections to this three man balloon plan, Andre said, I risk three lives and what you call a fool hearty attempt, and you risked how many a shipload? So as Andre left the stage, the entire hall cheered him, and in the end, most of the money that he needed for his polar balloon came from none other than Alfred Noble and Sweden's King Oscar the second, before we get to the exciting adventure of the expedition itself, let's have one more brief sponsor break. Yeah, the break. They're a little close together, but that's because I want to keep the whole expedition all in one piece. So we'll have a quick break and then we'll come right back to it. So once he had his funding secured, Andre commissioned a Parisian built balloon which was made from layers and layers of varnished silk, and this balloon was named the Eagle. The hydrogen balloon was on feet thirty meters tall, and to protect this impressive inflatable as it was ready for flight as they filled it with air and got everything ready, he also had a house built for it on Danes Island, which uh I believe was five stories tall. And this custom house actually had a felt lined interior so that anything the balloon touched would not damage it and one entire side of the house could be quickly removed when the balloon was ready to go, and the windows were made of gelatine like it was basically everything soft that won't hurt this balloon. Andre chose two other men to complete his crew for this ambitious plan. These were Nils Strendberg and Nils holm Strandberg, who was twenty three, taught physics as an assistant professor, and he was also the cousin of the famed playwright August Strenberg at home, was the oldest of the team, at age forty seven. He had led the Spitzberg and expedition that Andre had participated in, and he was an experienced meteorologist. And so for several weeks in eighteen ninety six, the eager Andrea and his companions attempted to begin their journey, but they were just constantly thwarted by in their efforts by unfavorable conditions and to make matters worse, as Winter said on et, Holme left the team. He didn't think this was such a good idea after all, and he bowed out. Fortunately, Andre already had an alternate at the ready that was Mute Frankel. He was an athletic civil engineer and was twenty seven years old. But his troubles were not over. Andre's mother died suddenly as they were preparing to set off in eight seven. While Andre seemed kind of placid to those around him, he was really deeply melancholy at the loss of his mother. He wrote in his journal quote, the only thread which bound me to the wish to live is cut off. Yeah. She was really his only like close relationship. He mentioned at one point when he was younger that he really just decided he was never going to have romantic interests because he knew he wanted to become, you know, an explorer and do great things once he had married this idea of ballooning, and he didn't ever want a woman to make the tearful, you know, request to him to please don't go and do this thing and him having to say, no, I'm doing it. So his mother was really it really was his one tether and so without that he was sort of starting off with a bit of heartbreak. And finally, after they had waited for the perfect conditions and the winter had passed, the team was finally able to leave Danes Island on July eleven. And I sort of of this, but the last words that Andrea was heard to utter by the onlookers were what's that as the balloon had struck something as it headed out on its expedition, Maybe unsurprisingly, giving the inauspiciousness of those words, almost immediately there were problems. The drag ropes were pulling the basket down into the water and they had to be cut. The three men aboard also quickly dumped about four and fifty pounds or two ms of sandbag ballast to try to lift their transport out of the icy ocean. As the vessel and its team, who were still struggling with these problems, vanished out of the sight of the onlookers. They were traveling north at about twenty miles an hour, which is about thirty two kilo an hour, and the ropes that were designed to help them steer we're now gone. Yea, so they were drag ropes. Not a great idea. You don't often see a balloon tootling around with a rope dragging from it to the ground, and there are reasons for that. Uh So what happened to the team next was actually put together from the journals which were found in h and While all of the men wrote records of this whole wacky adventure, Andrea not surprisingly was the most prolific writer of the group. The first night of their journey seemed to be really incredibly joyous. Andre marveled at seeing the vast expanses of ice, which were dotted by polar bears. In the morning after the first night, the team had breakfast and coffee, and they traveled through some hazy conditions that were just above freezing. And as the day stretched into the afternoon and that misty weather continued, the basket dropped and it bounced repeatedly on the ice, as often as eight times in thirty minutes. According to their records. They had lost enough hydrogen that they could not stay aloft. But despite this bumpy going, the team all stayed really upbeat. While taking a watch as his comrades rested, Andre wrote, it is not a little strange to be floating here above the polar sea, to be the first that have floated here in a balloon. How soon, I wonder Shaw we have successors. We think we can well face death having done what we have done. Isn't it all perhaps the expression of an extremely strong sense of individuality which cannot bear the thought of living and dying like a man in the ranks, forgotten by coming generations? Is this ambition? And as that bumpy ride continued, uh seasickness kind of hit Strindberg that he was really getting quite ill, so they dumped a great many of their sandbags so that they could get enough lift that they would stop thumping on the ice. But as the third morning of their trip came on, the basket once again dropped as the conditions turned even fog gear and then it suddenly rose high in the air as it warmed up a little bit, and the team released some gas so that they would drop down a little bit again, but they were just having trouble regulating their place in the air, and after fighting with the situation for a while and growing a little more frustrated, they finally decided to land on the ice, and they did so at around eight am, and at this point they had been traveling for sixty five hours and they were more than five hundred miles or about eight hundred kilometers into their ride for the next week, the three men plotted what their next move should be. They had, as part of their preparation, made plans for various possible events, and this included packing. Sledges are very heavy sleds for each of the men to pull, so the trio spent their planning time carefully selecting what they would load onto these sleds, which they pulled using ropes that were wrapped around their shoulders like harnesses. These sledges weighed hundreds of pounds, so this was really no small task, and sometimes the men would all three pull one sled and then go back and do the same with the next one, and then bring up the third. And they had also arranged to have depots set up in two places in the events that they needed them. The first was on Franz Joseph Lynn, which was part of a Russian archipelago, and the second, smaller depot that they had arranged was on the Seven Islands, and that's back part of this small Bard archipelago. After they had packed their sleds, the first men set out towards the Russian depot. The men managed to shoot several polar bears along the way and prep them to use as food. Picking their way through the ice flows was really treacherous and exhausting, but the men all seemed to bolster one another. They did fall into the water from time to time, though, and the average temperature stayed around thirty two degrees fahrenheit or zero celsius, although it did drop from time to time, so I would imagine being in wet clothes. I wouldn't even imagine. I would know for certain being in wet clothes in those conditions would be very treacherous, it would and miserable. But really, all their diaries are so sort of like positive, it's it's almost freaky. I wonder if it's one reason. I wonder if it's because hypothermia was affecting their their attitudes. Maybe we'll get we'll get to one reason why they might have been happy despite their seemingly miserable circumstances. Um So, several days into their trek towards friends Joseph Land, there were two major setbacks. First, Frankel started to experience snow blindness. So this is known clinically as photocarrotitis, and snow blindness basically occurs when the cornea of the eye becomes burned by ultra violet b rays. Uh. This happens a lot in cold areas with lots of ice and snow because it reflects off the snow up into your eyes even when your head is down. Second, they became aware that they had been walking east on the ice, but that same ice was actually drifting west at a much faster pace than they were making. So they had been struggling all that time with the sledges and working out all the pushing and pulling, and they really had made no headway whatsoever. So by August four they abandoned this plan to travel east to the Russian Archipelago, and instead they decided they would switch directions and head to the Seven Islands depot. To make matters worse, the temperature started to drop by several degrees, and fortunately they did have food supplies, including butter, bread, and biscuits, as well as water. They supplemented this with polar bear meat when they could, and they even tried eating the bear meat raw, as well as making blood pancakes out of bears blood mixed with oatmeal and fried. They also made algae soup, which does not sound nearly as disgusting as the bear blood and pancakes to me. I was talking with friends about this last night while I was working on it, and I was describing blood pancakes to one of my friends, who is also a big food evening goes that sounds kind of French. I'd try it, and it does. Then, when I thought about some of the things my grandmother cooked, it does sound pretty French um. So despite their exhaustion and this totally desperate situation, the tone of Andrey's journal entry still is almost oddly positive. And this could have been because in addition to their food rations, they had also brought quite a bit of opium with them. They used it as a pain reliever and also to treat diarrhea, and they also had morphine, and in some cases they were double dosing with the opium and the morphine. Frankel in particular seemed really plagued by problems. He twisted his knees, he had digestive distress. This is actually kind of uh ironic because Frankel one of the reasons he was chosen was because he was very athletic, and they kind of envisioned him being like the strong pack mule of the group. But he seemed to struggle the most with all of this travel, so according to Andre's notebooks, he was the one that they were kind of constantly having to figure out when he needed opium dosages. And the first days of September, the crew managed to travel by boat, which, while grueling in its own right, was a really welcome change from pulling these heavy sledges to celebrate Strindberg's birthday. On the fourth of September, Andre gave him letters from his family and his fiance which had been went to Hymn before they left Danes Island. This is a happy surprise, though, but unfortunately Stenberg later fell into the water and ruined all the rations that he was carrying. Yeah, it was kind of a day of ups and downs um. And then a few days after that, on September nine, they realized once again, since they had switched directions on August four, they had again been thwarted by the movement of the ice, so they had been trying to travel a little more than eighty miles or roughly nine kilometers southwest, but again, because the ice that they're walking on is also shifting, they had actually been drifting about the correct distance, but instead to the south southeast. This is also the day when Andre's diary kind of drops off. He stopped doing his regular entries, which seems like a little bit of a clue that he might be losing heart. On September seventeen, he wrote that an especially bad blister on Frankel's foot had rendered him unable to pull his sledge anymore, so he and Stronberg had been running back to get the third one and to play catch up with the others periodically as they all traveled. There had also been some snow which added extra weight to everything. They managed to kill and eat a seal, and then they realized that they were going to be trapped out there on the ice through the winter. Even with all this hardship. Uh he he wrote, quote, our humor is pretty good, although joking and smiling are not of ordinary occurrence. And on September nineteenth, there was actually a little bit of a ray of hope. Andrea managed to shoot three seals, and that meant that with those, once they were dressed for food and they're remaining food stores that they still had with them, they were going to be able to get through at least half of the winter. So they knew like they had rations for at least a little while, they could keep trying to gather more and they might be in okay shape. Like it looked like they might be able to do this. And they also started building a snow house on the ice that they were on to live in by forming snow into kind of like walls and structure and then pouring water over it to harden everything. Their ice hut was completed on September twenty eight, but just four days later, the ice blow that they built it on broke apart and water came rushing in. The three men had to hustle to get all their supplies together and to get it up off the breaking ice before everything drifted away. The end of the entry in Andrey's diary, and he had two diaries, and this was the end of the first one reads quote, no one had lost courage. With such comrades, one should be able to manage under, I may say, any circumstances. With that kind of positive attitude, even in the face of complete misery and seemingly loss of all hope, The men started construction on another snow house two days later. They had spotted White Island earlier in their journey, but they thought they'd be unable to land there because it looked like it was totally iced over. But October four, which was the same day they had started on their new house, they also saw a spot on White Island where they thought they might actually be able to move ashore. On October five, they did. They named their new camp Mina Andrea's Place after Andrea's mother because October five was her birthday, and so while it seems like things are looking up at this point in the story, Andrea's last entry is just three days later, on October eight. He describes their happiness at being off the ice and actually on land and in a tent, and he kind of sorting through what they're gonna need to do, including collecting some driftwood and whale bones so that they can get some fires going and meet some other needs. So we don't know for certain when or how the three adventurers died. When the White Island camp was discovered in ninety their supplies were still in the boat. There was a pile of driftwood that was gathered but unused. Nearby. There was an entry in Strandberg's notebook for October seventeenth which read home seven oh five am. But based on the fact that it was written in ink, which would have frozen and been unusable in the climate that the men were in, they believe that the this was an expectation he had of arriving home in Sweden on a train. Yeah, they think that entry was written before long before any of their kind of polar adventures happened. Um, As we said, the cause of death we don't know, and it remains one of history's mysteries and it will probably remain that way forever because the remains that were found by the crew of the Norwegian sloop Bradwag were actually cremated before they were buried, so additional testing of those bodies can never be done. We're gonna step through some of the most common theories and some of the common arguments against them. So the first is poisoning from their food tens. There's a fingernail from a glove that was tested and had high levels of lead in it, but it's not to believed to have been enough to have killed anyone. Uh. There is also a theory that one of the men had a psychotic episode and it resulted in a murder suicide. But since the men were rather shockingly upbeat throughout all of this horrible nous, most people think this seems unlikely, although there certainly have been cases throughout history of people that seem really happy and excited and then they have a psychotic break, so it's possible, but we're not sure. There's also the possibility of dehydration. Yeah, there's not a lot of way you can detract that since once they found these bodies, they were pretty much completely decomposed, so there wasn't any tissue to really test. Then, even if they were cremated, there's not much we wouldn't know, right, and a lot of the nearby water that would have been available to them would have been saltwater that would not have hoked to them. Trickin Nosis or botuli is um is another popular theory from eating uncooked polar bear or seal meat. Uh, none of the diaries really describe anything that could be pointed to as evidence of the symptoms associated with trichinosis. However, this was a new and exciting fact I learned while doing this research. Botuli is um is apparently really common in seal meat if it's not really thoroughly cooked, so it's possible. We know they were eating eel, so that's one possibility. People have suggested that it might have been scurvy, but three months really isn't long enough for scurvy to kill someone. Now, it can make you pretty sick in that time, but probably not to the point of fatality. Another theory that has been put forth is a polar bear attack. Uh, this one isn't really terribly likely. For one thing, Andre's gun was next to his body when they found it, so it seemed like he was actually like watching for danger, and it would have been unlikely. But also the bodies that they found Andrey's looked like it may have been disturbed, But most people believe that may have happened by a bear after he had already been deceased, because it just looked kind of shuffled about. It didn't look so much like an attack situation. There's also the idea that maybe since they had all this opium around, it was a deliberate opium over overdose, but they had all seemed to be in such reasonably good spirits that that seems maybe not as likely. Yeah, you would think that if they were coming to that conclusion, there would have been a diary entry about it. Another one that is is sometimes brought up is the possibility of vitamin A poisoning from polar bear liver. However, we know that the men knew of this danger they wrote about it, so it seems unlikely that they would have taken that risk. They could have asphyxiated because they were maybe using their cook stove inside the tent. Yeah, that's a possibility. Again, we don't know for sure that one. They're just it's kind of like maybe we don't have a lot of evidence one way or the other. Well, there's the reasonable people would probably think that's a bad idea. But that's the only counter argument I have. Yeah, well, and you know there is there are opiates involved. There's the possibility that at some point they went, you know, it would be great and it will keep the tent warm, let's bring it in. Uh. The last theory that we're going to mention almost seems in some ways like the most obvious, which is that they died from cold and exhaustion. I mean, at this point, they had been dragging these multi hundred pounds sledges around for a while. They had gotten wet in freezing water repeatedly. You know, they were struggling with other issues. They were dosing with opium and morphine, like their bodies were taking a lot of abuse. Yeah. Well, I keep thinking about two different video games during this episode, and one is like that this feels like a frozen wasteland version of Oregon trail Um and the other is one of my favorite things to play recently, which is a game called The Long Dark, which is basically about surviving in this frozen wilderness. Um. And one of the things that happens in the Long Dark is if you go to sleep and it turns out it's not warm enough to keep your body warm and survive, you die, and it it just a little thing comes up that just says you have faded into the Long Dark. And I think the most believable thing is that they thought they were warm enough to sleep through the night, but they were not. Yeah, which would make sense because uh, you know, we don't unlike something like the diatlov past incident where we see people like paradoxical and dressing and trying to dig through the snow. This seems like everything was pretty undisturbed. And if I'm understanding my research correctly, it seems like they all died probably around the same time, which is one of the reasons that like the opium theory gains a lot of UH fans. It's like, well, they all died around the same time, surely, uh, at least we think that based on how the bodies were positioned. For all we know, they died and were propped up by you know another of the men, and they certainly couldn't bury them in the ice, so we don't really know. But what we do know is that once those remains were discovered in n Uh and the men were returned to Sweden, finally they were really greeted as heroes. Remember this was a big effort on uh Sweden's part, like there was a lot of fervor around it. There was a lot of excitement that Sweden could be the country that got to the North Pole first, this amazing approach that no one else had ever tried. The king had backed them and then they vanished, So there was a lot of There were a lot of question marks that were finally getting some answers. And when they finally arrived Uh there in Sweden, two hundred ships had joined the procession to bring them home, and King Gustav the fifth met them at the pier. Among the items that were recovered from Camp Mina Andre's place where several cans of film. Some of the film was damaged or exposed, but there were ninety three frames that were intact and were later developed. Strondberg was the photographer. More often than not, he had dabbled in photography prior to the expedition. There are images of Andre and Frankel with a polar bear they had killed, and there's an image of the balloon lying on its side with Andre and Frankel standing nearby. There's even a timed exposure shot of all three of the men who are pulling one of the heavy sledges. And you can actually see these photos at the Grenham Museum in Sweden, and they also have them on line. The museum has scanned them all and put them online and will include that link in the show notes. Because of the three decades that this film spent out in the freezing cold, the images are not particularly perfect. They're flared and burned out. Some of them have ghostly images of the three men. The view of Andre in public opinion has really shifted throughout the years. Sometimes people label him as a madman, other times people paint him as the hero of Sweden, and sometimes they portraying it more as a fool who had dreams of fame and glory. But he and his companions were it would seem really courageous and tenacious if nothing else. Yeah, I'm so blown away perpetually by just how like upbeat they managed to stay through all of this because I know I would be a whiny complainer right about the moment that we lost the ropes at the beginning of the trip. But I also would not pop probably do a trip like this because I enjoy the comforts of home. Uh. Yeah, it's such a wild star. We've had a few requests for this. It pops up in various places. Um. It's sort of a ceaseless fascination. So uh and it's one of those things that we could go on forever and ever because a lot of the journals have been digitized and can be read online and it's very very cool stuff. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. 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