The Ice Balloon

In 1897, Swedish national S.A. Andrée and a crew of two attempted to fly from Spitsbergen to the North Pole and back via hydrogen balloon. Wilkinson (staff writer, The New Yorker; The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger) vividly describes this little-known Arctic expedition and provides details about late 19th-century ballooning. After being aloft for nearly 66 hours while traveling 517 miles, the balloon landed 300 miles short of the pole. Thus Andrée, Nils Strindberg, and Knut Fraenkel began the hard work of crossing the Arctic to find land. The book recounts contemporary expeditions by Adolphus Greely, FridtjofNansen, and Charles Francis Hall, which provide historical context and flesh out the conditions met by Andrée and his crew. Andrée's journal abruptly ends with his landing on White Island after nearly three months of sledging. No one knows exactly how or when the men died, a fact that lends greater mystery to this unusual Arctic expedition. Andrée's last camp and journals were not discovered until 1930.