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Originally published Monday, February 13, 2012 at 5:00 AM
Book review
'The Ice Balloon': floating toward oblivion in the far North
Alec Wilkinson's "The Ice Balloon" tells the story of a quixotic late 19th-century quest to reach the North Pole — by balloon.
Special to The Seattle Times
'The Ice Balloon: S.A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration'
by Alec Wilkinson
Knopf, 239 pp., $25.95
Reaching the North Pole long tantalized adventurers. During the last half of the 19th century, more than 1,000 people attempted to reach the fabled spot. Among the seekers were scientists, criminals, glory hounds, and the religiously inspired. At least 750 of them died, freezing to death, starving, drowning, and eating each other. Only three of them "disappeared into the air," writes Alec Wilkinson in his latest book, "The Ice Balloon: S.A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration."
Unlike all previous Arctic explorers, Andrée and his two companions, Knut Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg, attempted to reach the North Pole via a hydrogen-filled balloon. They took off from Dane's Island, a dab of land off Spitsbergen, about 700 miles south of the pole on July 11, 1897. They hoped to reach their goal in three days. Six days later they planned to land in Alaska or Asia. They never did.
Their fate was unknown for 33 years, until Norwegian scientists stopped at White Island, a remote spot about 260 miles east of Dane's Island. They found a boat, books, shotguns, three bodies, one missing its head, and the expedition dairies. The scientists' discovery attracted worldwide attention.
From what started as an article in The New Yorker, Wilkinson has fleshed out Andrée's expedition into a generally gripping account of what has been called the heroic age of Arctic exploration. His writing is most compelling when he describes the epic travails of Andrée and others who fared only slightly better, meaning some of them survived truly appalling conditions. When you consider what these people went through, it is hard not to admire their resilience, optimism and determination, but also to question their sanity. That is what makes such stories as Andrée's so compelling.
