Andrée began to travel like a shade through the pages of the newspapers. A young Norwegian woman working for a family in Binghamton, New York, said that one night she had awakened to find a figure beside her bed. “At once I knew it as the astral body of Prof. Andrée,” she said in the Washington Post. Andrée had beckoned to her at her bedside, and she had gone with him over “seas and mountains until suddenly we were upon an open sea, free from ice, into which a point of land jutted. The figure pointed upward, and I saw the pole star was directly overhead.” They continued until they came to a tent where “around a fire I saw Andrée and his companions sleeping peacefully.”
In January of 1898 the forms of Andrée, Strindberg, and Fraenkel were modeled as waxworks by Madame Tussaud’s museum in London. The newspaper in Boston that reported the casting wrote that it amounted to a prediction, since no lost figure cast in wax had ever turned up alive. In March the captain of the Danish steamer Inga said he had met the captain of an American ship who had gone ashore in Labrador and found a grave with a cross marked “Andrée.” He dug beneath the cross and found a body and a box with some papers. He took the cross with him and showed it to the Danish captain.
The story in the New York Times on April 6, 1898, with the headline “Andrée Pigeon in Chicago,” that began, “An exhausted pigeon bearing a metal tag inscribed ‘No. 23,699, F. Andrée,’ was picked up at Forty-Second and Carroll Avenues this morning. A policeman noticed the bird acting strangely, and after some trouble he captured it,” was a hoax. So many pigeons had turned up around the world that the Louisville Courier ran the headline “A Plague of Pigeons.” The story included the sentence, “To the foreigner the impression is conveyed at certain times that the woods are full of pigeons.”
By 1899 Franz Josef Land and the area east of Greenland had been searched. The searches were all based more or less on hunches. The area in which Andrée might have disappeared included two hundred thousand square miles—more than California and fewer than Texas, that is.
Beneath the headline “Andrée Bones Found,” which appeared in the Los Angeles Times in February of 1899, ran a letter, first published in the Siberian Advertiser, and written by “a well-known sportsman named La Jalen.” The letter said, “I hasten to inform you that Andrée’s balloon has been found. I was running in snowshoes after elks in the primeval forest of the South Yenisee and came across traces of Andrée. It was 350 versts (234 miles) from Krasnolars, and 100 versts (67 miles) from the gold washings in Sanvinich, down in the pit of the river. The balloon and ropes were torn and three bodies lay at its side, one with a broken skull. Please prepare assistance so that the balloon and bodies can be brought to the washings at Sanvinich, which can only be done by means of snowshoes. I guarantee the truth of these facts, and shall soon be in Tomsk.”
Both Nansen and Nordenskiöld said that they doubted the report. However, the New York Times wrote, “There is no reason whatever for distrusting the good faith of the story. There are no yellow journals in North Siberia, and few of any hue, and whatever interest there may have been among the few educated Russians in those parts about the fate of Andrée has long ago lapsed. It is not a rumor-breeding atmosphere.” They went on to say, “In any case, there can scarcely now be a doubt that Andrée and his companions have perished, and in any case their fate cannot affect the heroism of their exploit. To push out into space backed only by one’s own faith in one’s own theory, and to take a chance against overwhelming odds, is the very bravery, for which Columbus has been so honored for these four hundred years. That he found a continent and that poor Andrée has found only a grave makes no difference in the quality of the courage involved.”
Nordenskiöld, however, remained confident. In his dining room in Stockholm he had a photograph of Andrée’s balloon ascending, and next to it a space where he planned to hang a photograph of Andrée’s return—“for I am firmly convinced that he will return,” he said.