After three days the balloon came to its final stop on an ice floe 180 miles north of White Island, a tiny, desolate dot on the map northeast of Spitzbergen. They would have to walk, paddle and sledge their way back to civilization.
The Arctic bug had bitten Solomon August AndrŽe and he was determined to give it a good scratch: He would fly a hydrogen filled balloon to the North Pole. Dozens of surface explorers had died in the Arctic's fearsome climate by the time AndrŽe announced his seemingly bizarre plan in 1895, but he refused to be deterred by the thought of a little unpleasantness in the cold air.
A visit with veteran balloonist Professor John Wise of Philadelphia 19 years earlier had sown the seeds for this effort in 1897, and a series of experimental flights was enough to convince him it could be done. With the support of fellow Swedes like Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel prizes, and other leading scientists and the general public, he would get his chance.
It would not be the first time someone planned to take a balloon to the Pole, nor would it be the last.
George Washington De Long, a U.S. Navy lieutenant, first raised the possibility of using a manned balloon in the Arctic in 1876 and he found an eager listener and sponsor in James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, who saw a trip to the Pole as a fitting follow-up to the finding of David Livingstone in Africa by Herald reporter Henry Stanley in 1871.
But De Long was no idle dreamer. After extensive study and consultation with French and British balloonists, he realized that in order to have enough hot air for his trip to the Pole, he'd need to bring along an entire coal mine to supply the heat. Instead, he commanded a ship, the Jeannette, towards the Pole and wound up losing his own life and the lives of 10 others when the Jeannette got caught in the pack ice off northern Russia and broke up well short of her goal.
De Long's plan didn't seem that far-fetched at the time. It had been almost 100 years since the Frenchman Joseph Montgolfier tested his first hot air balloon at Avignon in 1782, and almost 40 years since British Navy sailors seeking the lost Franklin Expedition in the Arctic used one-pound balloons in hopes of communicating with the missing seamen. (The balloon experiment, along with the same sailors' efforts with kites, carrier pigeons and collars on trapped and released foxes, went for naught. All 129 in Franklin's party died in the worst disaster in the often perilous history of Arctic navigation.)
Now AndrŽe was trying his luck. A dozen years before Admiral Robert Peary became the first man to reach the North Pole by trekking across the endless ice hauling his supplies on sledges, AndrŽe and two crewmen lifted off Dane Island, Spitzbergen, Norway on July 11, 1897. Their balloon, the Ornen (Eagle), got off to inauspicious start. The guide-lines, which were to have kept the balloon near the Earth's surface during the flight, mysteriously fell off on takeoff and after rising sharply the Ornen plunged dangerously toward the sea.
AndrŽe and his crew, Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel, jettisoned important supplies overboard to lighten their load to obtain elevation, and for a while they succeeded. But the weather over the next couple of days was cold and foggy, often forcing the Ornen to bump along the surface of the Arctic ice at a couple of miles an hour.
After three days the balloon came to its final stop on an ice floe 180
miles north of White Island, a tiny, desolate dot on the map northeast of
Spitzbergen. They would have to walk, paddle and sledge their way back to
civilization.
They didn't make it. They reached White Island three months after leaving the downed Ornen and established a camp, but weren't heard from for another 30 years. That was when a whaling ship put into the island and a sailor accidentally stumbled on their camp and their skeletal remains. Surprisingly, diaries, logs and photographs of their misadventure were in excellent shape and were the basis of the book "The Complete Record of The Polar Flight, 1897," published in 1930.
Even though Peary made it to the pole in 1909, proponents of hot air balloons and airships still yearned to reach the elusive goal. During the 1920s in particular there was a good deal of activity towards that target, with varied results.
In 1925 for example, the American Robert Bartlett proposed that he command the U.S. Navy dirigible Shenandoah on a polar trip and the scheme initially received a positive response in naval circles. But the politicians had reservations, to which Bartlett, who had accompanied Peary to the pole in 1909 and served as captain of the Canadian Arctic Expedition in polar waters in 1913-14, responded: "Hell's bells, what are we going to do with the Shenandoah, put it on the mantelpiece?"
President Calvin Coolidge vetoed the plan, suggesting it was to risky a project.
Also in 1925, a young Canadian, Grettir Algarsson, announced that he was ready to fly a blimp over the pole, but his scheme never got off the ground.
More successful was the renowned Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the first man to sail through the Northwest Passage (in 1903) and the first man to reach the South Pole (in 1911). Amundsen commanded the Italian-made airship Norge from Spitzbergen, Norway, across the pole to Wainwright, Alaska, in 48 hours in May 1926.
"Now we are there," navigator Hj. Riiser-Larsen told the 16 men aboard the Norge as it hovered 600 feet above the pole's surface. The crew included Col. Umberto Nobile, the Italian who built the airship and piloted it on its historic flight, and Lincoln Ellsworth, the American who was a principal sponsor.
"The ice was much broken up at the pole and a mass of small ice-floes was observable. It was quite different from the other ice we had passed over," Amundsen recalled in his book "First Crossing of the Polar Sea." The crew dropped the flags of Norway, the United States and Italy from their craft and because the flags were fastened to aluminum shafts the shafts bit into the ice and remained upright on landing. The three flags fluttered in the breeze as the Norge continued its journey.
As a sad footnote to the Norge's flight, it should be noted that Nobile returned to the Pole two years later, but crashed while returning over the Arctic ice. Despite a major international rescue mission, eight of his crew died. And Roald Amundsen, who was participating in the rescue mission, died when his own plane went down in the ice.
The resulting controversy over these mishaps resulted in a cooling down of balloonists' Arctic fever, but it obviously didn't put it on ice forever. When Chicago balloonist/stockbroker Steve Fossett landed in a Saskatchewan wheat field this past February after being the first to pilot his vehicle solo across the Pacific Ocean, one of his first comments to reporters was that he still had two goals: flying to the North Pole and flying around the world.
Editor's note: In the last 15 years at least hot air balloon flights have been made at the North Pole. The first modern flight was made around 1980 by Sidney and Elenor Conn who with a team of ten people flew to the North Pole and free flew a Balloon Works balloon. In the late 1980's an English Greenpeace group took a hot air balloon to the North Pole to fly for publicity. Last year Bob Kinsinger flew his balloon from the Magnetic North Pole while on a sight-seeing cruise through Arctic waters.
