Lost explorers were nothing new. In most cases, nobody had ever been where they were going, and nobody would go again sometimes for centuries afterward. Of the would-be settlers’ ships that accompanied Leif Ericsson to Greenland, over half were lost to oblivion en route. After Willem Barents and his men, the explorers of the Northeast Passage, had wintered over on Novaya Zemlya in 1596 before attempting a return to Amsterdam, they left behind the cabin they’d built: sailcloth roof, bunks, a bathtub, and a powder horn with notes in it. Everything was discovered perfectly intact by a Norwegian hunter no less than 274 years later. John Franklin’s two stout ships ships disappeared into the icy maw of the Northwest Passage in 1845, and haven’t been seen since. At last report, we still hadn’t found the body of Irvine on Mount Everest. Radios and satellite phones are new. Then, if you went out there, you got back on your own, or you didn’t.

The most nationalistic exploring furor took place at the end of the Victorian Age. The Norwegian Roald Amundsen got to the South Pole and through the Northwest Passage. The English under Scott reached the South Pole, too, but in second place, and died on the way home. The Americans Peary and Cook both claimed to have reached the North Pole. One claim is clearly spurious; the other most likely is, too.

The Swedes, another northern nation with international pretensions, were feeling left out of the wildly publicized attempts on the poles. To their rescue came Salomon August Andreé, an energetic young Swedish balloonist who proposed to reach the North Pole by hydrogen balloon. It was an age when enthusiasm still could trump science and common sense. When Andreé claimed that all high-latitude winds blew straight north and would therefore waft him and his men to their destination, nobody thought to wonder aloud which way all those converging winds would blow once they got there, or how the balloon might thus get back. The plan was to cross the pole to Alaska, assisted by a sail and steered by ropes dragging across the ice.

Andreé and two companions left Sweden at the end of May 1896 to international headlines. But the favorable winds failed to materialize at the launch site in Svalbard (Spitzbergen),, and the expedition, as deflated as its balloon, returned to Sweden in mid-August, at the start of the Arctic winter. Andreé endured public humiliation until spring, when once again he set out for Svalbard.

He must have known before the takeoff that the effort was doomed. Experts all over the world – even a respected professor at Kansas State University – found the idea intriguing, but the prospects of success nearly nil. The huge hydrogen balloon, manufactured to Andreé’s standards in Paris, leaked badly – about 35 cubic metres of gas a day. Even its manufacturer advised postponing the expedition until he could rebuild the bag. But Andreé, prodded by sponsors, newspapers, and a clamoring public, decided to go. He and his crew took off on July 11 of 1897.

We know now, from the recovered journals of Andreé and one of the crew, that the flight lasted only three days. Plagued by the unremitting leaks and the formation of ice on the balloon, they sank lower and lower until, their gondola dragging and bumping across the ice, Andreé ordered the rip valves opened. A few hours earlier he had sent out the third carrier pigeon with an all’s-well message. It was the only message ever received from him.

No sign of the expedition was found for 33 years. Then in August of 1930 a Norwegian sealing vessel on a mixed fishing and scientific voyage east of Svalbard landed on White Island, usually impossible because of a wide ring of sea ice. Some of the crewmen discovered the bodies and trekking equipment of the lost expedition. A couple of weeks later The New York Times headlined the story. One body had been carelessly buried; the other two were dressed in their furs. But Andreé had preserved his journal inside his anorak, carefully wrapped in straw and oilcloth.

They had had plenty to eat. Their clothing was intact. Their journals recorded frequent kills of polar bears and seals. But they also recorded puzzling physical symptoms: unremitting aches and foot pains, intestinal and stomach cramps, and diarrhea. The camp was roughly constructed; they clearly had been very weak. Except for the illness, they easily could have survived the winter and sledged across solid ice to shelter and assistance. What had happened?

For decades it’s been one of the many icy mysteries of the Arctic. The most popular theory is that all three died of trichinosis from eating half-cooked polar bear meat; carcasses found at the camp contained the parasites. Others think the speed of their decline and death was a symptom of botulism, sometimes, apparently, found in seals. The bodies of all three adventurers were cremated upon their return to Sweden, so it’s likely no one will ever know for sure. They fell far short of their goal – unlike Mallory and Irvine – but they came so very close to making it back! Andreé was lionized as a hero. It’s ironic that he probably had to die to achieve that distinction.