The Ice Balloon

I don't want to give it away, but the fact that we aren't all enjoying hot air balloon rides to visit Santa kind of hints at how S.A. Andree's 1897 attempt to fly over the North Pole went. If you are into the sort of literature that deals with stupid people behaving badly in cold places (or, behaving heroically in cold places) then Alec Wilkinson's book, The Ice Balloon, is for you. I happen to be someone whose heart quickens to a subtitle like S.A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration, and I couldn't wait to read about this Norwegian who planned down to the most bizarre minutiae how to take two companions and be the first to fly over the North Pole. It being 1897, a hot air balloon made perfect sense. What could go wrong?

He was such a thinker--and by this I mean just a bit obsessive--that Andree even thought through how to cook food mid-flight in a balloon filled with extremely flammable gas. To heat water and cook, Andree had a stove...that could be lowered from the basket until it hung about twenty five feet beneath it. It was lit from the basket through a tube. A mirror placed by the stove allowed someone in the basket to see if the flame had lit. Blowing down a second tube put it out. An engineering marvel? No doubt. Practical? Hmm, not sure how good the food was, but they didn't die of starvation.

And yes, I don't give much away by saying they don't make it. The mystery of what happened to this visionary--dour and possessed--took 30 years to discover, but Wilkinson leads us to it gradually, and thrillingly, by way of a few other expeditions north. Some more horrific than others, and none terribly successful (in this book). My favorite is the experience of an American named George Tyson who signs up on an expedition only to find himself the leader of a mad scramble to safety. The ship he's on gets stuck in the ice and it's thought to be leaking. In a panic, the crew starts throwing stuff overboard and Tyson finds himself on the ice with a bunch of unknown others trying to reorganize when suddenly the ship breaks free and sails off in the dark without them. By the time there is light, the sad little ice floe crew can see the ship merrily chugging around the bend of land.

Suddenly Tyson becomes the de facto commander of a surly crew of German-speakers, women and children belonging to the expeditions Eskimo hunters, and the only one without a gun. Their tale of escape from the predicament is so unbelievable that many actually didn't believe them. It makes for great reading.

George Tyson was no scholar and his story is compelling because it is so amazing. Andree, on the other hand, is a scholar and kept meticulous journals--albeit not as emotionally detailed as one might like. The notes on his remarkable journey provide great insight into his daring dream. This was a man determined to succeed in the name of science and to prove his vision that sledging to the poles was never going to work. It is auspicious that the final words he was heard to speak were, "What was that?" as his balloon struck something leaving its mooring. And still, he sailed off, apparently happy, into the crystalline air of the northern regions.