CHAPTER XXVIII 



Andree's Fatal Flight Northward in a Balloon 



WE have dealt with many methods of seeking the Pole, b> 

 ship, by boat, by sledge, by floating in the ice; there is 

 still another to be considered, that of flying through the 

 air, one by which all the difficulties of ice ridges, ice drift, and 

 open water caused by splitting of the ice, can be avoided. But in 

 avoiding these there are other difficulties to be met, some of them 

 perhaps insuperable, and the first attempt to reach the Pole by an 

 air voyage could scarcely be expected to be more successful than the 

 first one by the water voyage. It is this first perhaps also the last 

 air voyage with which we are here concerned. The fact that the 

 air, if it could be traversed in safety for the necessary distance, 

 offered a field in which all the perils and delays of ice-navigation 

 could be avoided, and the great journey could be completed, if at 

 all, in days or weeks instead of years, and with a minimum of 

 suffering and hardship, was one very likely to appeal to adven- 

 turous spirits. 



To maintain the feasibility of such an excursion, however, was 

 one thing ; to attempt it was another. In the degree of development 

 of navigation of the air up to the end of the last century such an 

 enterprise did not commend itself to the judgment of the cautious. 

 Yet a Columbus is rarely wanting when a new continent is to be 

 discovered or a great feat of any kind to be performed, and the 

 Columbus in this instance was S. A. Andree, a Swedish engineer, 

 who set out in the summer of 1897 on a singular and daring enter- 

 prise, one which, despite its promise, was filled with perilous ele- 

 ments and threatened by all the terrors of the unknown. 



(39) 



