The Vikings displaced the monks. Among their legends was the visiting of Iceland, which was called Snowland, around 864, by Rabna Floki, which translates as Floki of the Ravens. The mariner’s compass hadn’t been invented, and fog often shrouded the sun for days, so Floki took three ravens trained to fly toward land (some accounts say two ravens, some say four). When Floki released the first raven, it flew in the direction he had come, leading him to conclude that land was closer behind than ahead. Released farther on, the second raven circled the ship, then also flew toward home. The third one flew forward. Floki spent the winter on Snowland and didn’t like it, and is the one supposed to have named it Iceland. After Floki came Ingolf, who with others, in 874, was escaping the rule of the Norwegian king, Hårfager. Approaching the shore of Iceland, Ingolf threw a door over the side of his ship, a Norwegian custom. The gods were supposed to guide the door to a favorable landing, but it drifted out of Ingolf’s sight, and he landed on the southern shore of the island. The settlement he established was the island’s first permanent one.
The British spent three hundred years looking for the Northwest Passage, dying by degrees, sometimes in big numbers, and usually of scurvy, starvation, and cold. The Arctic scholar Jeannette Mirsky wrote that Arctic exploration from the beginning had been a “series of victorious defeats.” Sometimes sandhogs—the men who build tunnels for trains and aqueducts—describe a task as a man-a-mile job, because a man dies every mile. By victorious defeats, Mirsky meant that while one expedition after another turned back, and many lives were given up, mile after mile of the blankness on the northern map was effaced.
7
After Andrée’s speech in London, a lot of explorers and geographers and journalists, offended by the brevity of the voyage he proposed, classified it as a stunt. Arctic exploration was supposed to be a grueling and harrowing journey through the harshest terrain imaginable, conducted sometimes over an interval of years, and occasionally for so long that the explorer and his party were thought to have been lost and often were. The stories the explorers told when they returned were ennobling. The science they did—practically all of it observing and collecting, the categorizing came later—expanded their version of the world. They were naming things for the first time, the way the Greeks named the sky. Their findings provided material for subordinate careers, the ordering and identifying of the natural world based on the artifacts brought back by the people who had been to the far edge of the frontier. Andrée’s dash to the pole didn’t seem properly respectful. He wouldn’t have sufficient time to do science, it was said. His purposes weren’t serious, and what value would his accomplishment have? He’d merely own a record.
In interviews Andrée defended himself by saying that he would take plenty of measurements and that the photographs he would add to the map would be invaluable. And what disadvantage could be claimed for seeing a part of the earth that had never been seen before? What he didn’t often say is that he would have preferred to cross the Atlantic Ocean, which he regarded as more daunting, but the trip to the pole appealed more to the public imagination and was easier to raise money for. Unlike explorers of the earlier ages and even of his own, Andrée wasn’t looking to test himself in a remorseless environment. He didn’t see himself as a solitary figure measuring himself against the wilderness and the elements, or as someone trying to wrest from nature its secrets. Or even, as some did, a man in a headlong approach toward the seat of the holy. He was an engineer who wanted to prove the validity of an idea, and he had found a forum in which to enact it.
Andrée was born on October 18, 1854, in Gränna, a small town about three hundred miles southwest of Stockholm, on Lake Vättern. His mother, Wilhelmina, was called Mina, and his father, Claes, was the town’s apothecary. They had four other sons and two daughters, with whom they lived above Claes’s shop on the main street in the center of town (the building is still there). Mina’s father was a mathematics professor, and behind him were three generations of clergymen, some of whom were known for keeping records of the weather. As a child, Andrée was said to have a wide-ranging intelligence, a capacity for asking difficult questions, and to be stubborn. He was fond of games whose outcome depended on solving a problem. His mother noted that if he was treated unjustly by someone, “he spared no effort to pay him back,” but “by character and from principle he was magnanimous.”
As a boy Andrée built a raft from boards he found, and he and a friend sailed out onto Lake Vättern and had to be rescued when the wind rose. Another time, from a cliff above Gränna, he launched a balloon he had filled with gas, and the balloon landed on the roof of a barn and caught fire. Over the Christmas vacation of 1867, when he was thirteen, he told his father that he no longer cared to study dead languages and that he wanted to be an engineer. He is said to have pounded the table as he spoke.
Andrée’s attachment to his mother was profound and only deepened when he was sixteen and his father died. He left money for Andrée to attend the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where his favorite subject was physics and his closest friendship among the faculty was with his physics instructor, Robert Dahlander. During successive summers Andrée worked as a tinsmith, in a foundry, and in a machine shop, and for two years after he graduated he was a draftsman and a designer in a mechanical works in Stockholm. Through friends he got interested in phrenology, the practice of drawing conclusions about someone’s nature and tendencies from the topography of his skull, and while he worked at an engineering firm in Trollhaven, called Nydquist and Holms, he made a phrenological helmet out of brass. It was a half-sphere with screws ascending in rows an inch apart to the crown. It opened into two parts, connected by a hinge, and the screws screwed down to trace the skull’s bumps and depressions. Andrée didn’t so much believe in phrenology as he was interested in the conclusions phrenologists reached, which he thought sometimes were precisely apt.
In 1876, when Andrée was twenty-three, he went to America to see the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which had been organized to celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Officially it was the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, and on display were all the world’s most prominent new inventions. Absorbed by modernity, he was there when word arrived of Custer’s defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn.
8
Sailing to America, Andrée had had two acquaintances, his cabin mate, “a young German who was ducking military duty,” he wrote in a journal, “and a Swede who claimed to be a pork importer bound for Chicago, but who later proved to be a fugitive.” However, “the pseudo pork dealer, who was a good mixer, soon made other friends who were richer than we and with whom he became engaged in gambling. My German cabin mate and I preferred remaining quietly in our berths.”
The deserter had brought love letters that he liked to pore through. Andrée had only one book, Laws of the Winds, by C. F. E. Björling, which he would read lying on his bunk. One day, reading about the trade winds and struck by their regularity, an idea “ripened in my mind which decisively influenced my whole life,” he wrote. This was the thought “that balloons, even though not dirigible, could be used for long journeys. And not only from the Old to the New World, but also in the opposite direction and between the other continents.” The German happened to laugh and interrupt Andrée’s reverie, but he returned to it and “firmly resolved, when I landed in America, to get in touch with an aeronaut and find out what I could about such balloons as were then manufactured.”
In Philadelphia, Andrée went to the Swedish consul to ask for a pass to the fair. The consul said he couldn’t give him one, but he could hire him as the janitor at the Swedish Pavilion. He could live upstairs in the pavilion and go anywhere at the fair that he wanted.
Andrée would go to bed at nine and get up at five. One day he made a trip to a river where he picked roses and daisies to press and send home to one of his sisters. He had only one companion, he wrote her, Plato, “but the best is good enough.” It pleased him that work was honored in America and that the harder someone worked the better he was treated. At the fair he was impressed by the machines that printed hundreds of thousands of newspapers in hours, and the “screws to make pocket watches so