Toward the end of July the Chicago Chronicle wrote, “Has Andrée crossed the north pole? Has he discovered an open polar sea? These are the questions that the scientific men in every country are discussing. But, aside from the scientific results, the success of the expedition, the most daring in modern times, is of interest to the world at large.”
In September, Baron Nordenskiöld, with whom Andrée had first discussed the trip, told a reporter that he was amused more than saddened by the reports of Andrée’s death that had begun to appear. “It is my belief that Andrée is at the present moment upon ice which has hitherto been untrodden by the foot of man,” he said, and that he expected Andrée to arrive home in the spring, from Siberia.
For months word of Andrée, pieced together from secondhand reports and conjectures, arrived intermittently. Late in November the captain of the Fiskeren, sailing near Spitsbergen, saw something large and reddish brown floating about a mile offshore, which he thought was a capsized boat, then later thought might be Andrée’s balloon, but he wasn’t able to examine it. A sealing captain named Johan Overli, whose ship was the Swan, said his crew heard a scream one night off Dead Man’s Island, near Spitsbergen. After a brief interval, they heard three more. Overli said the surf had been running too high for him to stop. The Swan retreated to a fjord to sit out a storm and was wrecked, and its crew were saved by the Maygin, a Norwegian boat. Passing the island again they heard three more screams, but the captain refused to investigate, saying they were birds. From Philadelphia came a report, first published in the Stockholm papers, “The bark Salmia, loaded with cryolite and on its way from Ivigtut, Greenland, has arrived in Philadelphia and brought the information that the natives of Ivigtut report, as of about three weeks later than Andrée’s departure, that they saw a balloon traveling at an elevation of about one thousand feet. They watched it for a while. It disappeared, moving in a northerly direction.”
In the fall of 1898 a ship captain reported that he had heard from the natives in Angmagssalik, on Greenland, that in late October or early November of 1897 they heard a gunshot one night from out on the ice. Since everyone in the village was accounted for, and since the shot had been heard by several people in several places, they decided that it must have been from Andrée’s party adrift on an ice floe.
The first of Andrée’s buoys to be found was found on the north coast of Iceland in May of 1899, nearly two years after Andrée had left. It had been jettisoned by Andrée on July 11 at 10:55 at night, after he had been gone about eight and a half hours. “We are drifting at an elevation of about 600 metres,” Andrée had written. “All well.” Another buoy was found in August of 1900, 1,142 days after Andrée had dropped it, by a woman collecting driftwood in Norway. She thought that it had come ashore recently. “Our journey has gone well so far,” Andrée wrote. “We are drifting at an elevation of about 250 meters, with a course which at first was N 10 E True. Four messenger pigeons were sent out at 5:40 P.M. Greenwich time. They flew westerly. We are now over the ice which is much broken up. The weather is beautiful. We are in the highest spirits.”
The polar buoy, the one they intended to drop when they passed over the pole, was found on King Charles Land, an island east of Spitsbergen, in September of 1899, with no message. The absence of a message led many people to presume that Andrée had died. The arguments against this included the possibility that he had dropped the buoy in the excitement of passing over the pole and had meant to drop another after it, with the readings of his position, and the second one had not yet been found. Or, from cold or fatigue, he might not have been thinking clearly. Or, for some reason, he might have had only enough strength to lift the buoy over the side and let go of it.