During Andrée's ill-fated polar expedition in 1897, crew member Nils Strindberg is said to have dropped a small tin on the island of Fuglesongen when the crew passed in their hydrogen balloon "Örnen". The tin contained a farewell letter to his fiancée Anna Charlier. Despite searches on Fuglesongen, the tin has never been found. New research shows that it may have been accidentally dropped on the wrong island.
It is an interdisciplinary research group with Björn Lantz from Chalmers University of Technology, physician and author Bea Uusma at Karolinska Institutet and meteorology professor Michael Tjernström at Stockholm University that presents the hypothesis with the help of new analyses and reinterpretations of data.
It was on 11 July 1897 when engineers Salomon August Andrée, Knut Frænkel and the young Nils Strindberg took off from Danskön in northwestern Svalbard with the hydrogen balloon Örnen. The innovative expedition went wrong right from the start. It was not until more than 30 years later that the remains of the crew were found.
Shortly after the balloon took off, Nils Strindberg is said to have dropped the small tin with the letter to his fiancée Anna Charlier as they passed over the island of Fuglesongen (formerly Vogelsang, “the Bird song”). Strindberg himself wrote in his diary: "My tin of farewell words to Anna was thrown on Vogelsang".
Despite at least one thorough search, the tin has never been recovered. Researchers now believe that Strindberg may have been mistaken about the location.
"We can show that the balloon definitely took a much more significant turn to the east than previously thought, just over half an hour after take-off," says Björn Lantz at Chalmers.
"The balloon probably passed not only over the island of Fuglesongen, but also over the island of Klovningen, which is located just east of Fuglesongen. We also show why this course of events was reasonable, purely meteorologically. Based on this, together with new analyses of Nils Strindberg's original notes from the balloon flight and the fact that the balloon passed the area over the mentioned islands embedded in a thick cloud – and therefore completely without visibility – we show that it is conceivable that the tin with Strindberg's last message to his fiancée may have been thrown at Klovningen instead of at Fuglesongen.”
The hypothesis means new opportunities to find the tin with an expanded search area. A targeted search on the island of Klovningen ("Cloven Cliff”) could be a promising next step in finally solving the mystery.
Björn Lantz, who has visited the region before, says that the islands are characterized by a barren and rocky environment that is typical of the Arctic. The landscape is dominated by steep cliffs and rocky beach strips. Apart from mosses and lichens, there is very little vegetation.
What is the probability of being able to find and then decipher the message from a place like this?
"It's mostly a question of how carefully you search," says Björn Lantz. “If the tin is still there – which we believe – and has not been destroyed by the ravages of time – which we do not believe – then it should be possible to find it, if sufficient resources are put in.”
"But of course it is not reasonable to spend very large resources on this. The message, if found, will likely hardly help solve any of the other remaining mysteries of the expedition. Strindberg’s original intention was to throw the tin with the message already on Amsterdam Island just minutes after the take-off, which he forgot according to his own statement, so likely he wrote it even before their departure.”
What would you like to find in the message?
"It would be interesting if there was something there that gave a hint of their goal. Some have discussed whether Andrée still had the goal of trying to reach the North Pole, or whether he might have decided to be content with ‘just’ flying the balloon a bit north and then land and return with sleds over the ice,” says Björn Lantz.
More about the new analyses
The researchers' conclusion is mainly based on three different types of analyses in conjunction:
- A picture drawn by a spectator at the take-off point on Danskön, showing the directions in which he could see the balloon at different times during the flight, along with other first-hand information from the spectators at the take-off.
- A revised analysis of Strindberg's notes from the balloon flight, which provides some new insights into the passage of the islands and also shows several errors in how the notes have previously been interpreted by other researchers.
- A meteorological analysis that verifies that it is entirely reasonable that the balloon made the pronounced turn eastwards over the islands.
More about the scientific publication
The scientific article "The lost message of Nils Strindberg: Re-examining an 1897 Andrée balloon expedition mystery" is written by Björn Lantz, Chalmers University of Technology, Bea Uusma, Karolinska Institutet, and Michael Tjernström, Stockholm University, and has been published in the polar research journal Polar Record, Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0032247424000196
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