User:Bishonen/Icebox
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S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 was an effort by Sweden to challenge neighboring Norway in the late 19th-century race to the North Pole. S. A. Andrée, a Swedish patent bureau engineer and ballooning enthusiast, proposed using a hydrogen balloon in order to travel from Svalbard to either Russia or Canada, passing, with luck, straight over the North Pole on the way. Andrée's scheme demonstrated a faith in the power of technology and a disregard for the forces of nature which were extreme even for the period in which he lived. In the opinion of most modern students of the expedition, such attitudes on Andrée's part were major factors in the disastrous course of events and the deaths of Andrée and his two companions.[1]
Andrée failed to be discouraged by many early signs of the dangers and imponderables of his balloon scheme. He considered his trial flights with his own balloon the Svea in Sweden in the mid-1890s as proof that a balloon could be steered by means of his "drag rope" technique, even though he was unable to prevent the prevailing westerly winds from frequently and dangerously blowing the Svea out over the Baltic Sea, and sometimes into it. He engaged the meteorologist and experienced Arctic researcher Nils Gustaf Ekholm to be one of the team, but rejected his advice when Ekholm tested the balloon Örnen (the Eagle) and declared it dangerously leaky.
When Andrée took off from Svalbard with his companions Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel in July 1897, the balloon lost hydrogen and buoyancy even more quickly than Ekholm had feared and crashed after two days. The explorers were unhurt, but were faced with a gruelling march back to safety. Inadequately clothed, equipped, and prepared, and shocked by the difficulty of the terrain, they did not make it. In spite of heroic efforts they ended up on Kvitøya (=White or White's Island) in Svalbard as the Arctic winter closed in, and died there. For 33 years, until the remains were accidentally found in 1930, the fate of the Andrée expedition remained one of the unsolved riddles of the Arctic. Its solution created a media sensation and a great manifestation of national mourning in Sweden, where the dead men were seen as sacrificing themselves for the ideals of science and the honor of the motherland. More recently, with changing perceptions of the role of the polar areas and the value of indigenous Arctic cultures, Andrée's personal motives have been re-evaluated in less flattering terms. An early example is Per Olof Sundman's bestselling semi-documentary novel of 1967, The Flight of the Eagle, which portrays Andrée not as heroic but as a hostage to his own fundraising campaign, and as pushed by the sponsors and the media into cynically sacrificing the lives of his younger companions along with his own.