The Bratvaag was hired during the summer of 1930 to take Dr. Horn’s geological expedition to Franz Josef Land, with the provision that it would also hunt seals and walruses; the owner wouldn’t lease it otherwise. White Island lay in its path, sufficiently secluded that until 1925 its place on the map was east of where it actually is. Over the years the island, which is now called Kvitøya and belongs to Norway, had different names. The first appears to have been Giles Land, sometimes also written “Gillies Land,” after a Dutch cartographer named Giles, whose maps describe it as an “ice highland,” discovered in 1707. It was called White Island—the name being descriptive of its appearance—in 1876 by a Norwegian sealing captain named Johan Kjeldsen. (In 1887 another captain named it New Iceland, but the name didn’t stick.) It was seventeen miles long, eight miles wide, and entirely occupied by a dome of ice that was 660 feet tall.
Horn described the island as “a dazzling white shield seeming to float on the waves from which it rose in precipitous walls of ice.” All around it were icebergs, some of them grounded on shoals and reefs. The Bratvaag’s captain went slowly among them, taking soundings, since the charts gave no depths, and finally anchored half a mile offshore. Horn collected his “geologist’s hammers, botanizing boxes, nets, and other scientific equipment,” and rode in a launch to shore, passing a herd of walruses. He spent the day hammering at rocks and startling flocks of birds.
The next day, August 6, was “a glittering day, with the sun shining in a cloudless heaven,” Horn wrote. “A most intense silence prevailed everywhere, broken only now and then by thunder from the glacier to our north.” The walrus hunt began around noon. After a few hours the captain returned to the ship. “He approached us calmly and quietly and told us that they had made a great find. They had found Andrée.”
The captain then handed Horn the book. “We were astonished to see how neatly and orderly everything was written,” Horn wrote. “It was just as if the notes had been put down in a warm room, and yet the calculations had been made and written during the course of a death-march across the ice.”
Ashore, Horn found the sealers gathered around Andrée’s boat. “It was strange to stand there and let our gaze wander over the same landscape and the same sea that Andrée and Strindberg and Fraenkel looked at for the last time thirty-three years before,” Horn wrote. “It was as if we saw them before us.” He pictured them coming toward him, struggling with the boat and their belongings. Seeing the island at last, he thought, must have filled them “with renewed courage, with fresh hopes.” He imagined them climbing the glacier to look for other signs of land. “Maybe, one day of clear weather, they caught sight of Great Island’s white dome in the west. They knew that behind it lay North-East Land, and behind that again Spitzbergen, whence there was the path home to Sweden.”
The camp was beside a sloping rock against which snow had drifted. The boat was on the snow, and one side was covered with it. By the end toward the water were some books, one of which had tables of figures. “Of other objects lying about in the snow we noticed: a square, heavy box which certainly contained ammunition, trousers, a piece of black-and-red cloth, an oblong instrument-box, a barometer; a piece of canvas was found farther off, probably a part of the covering of the boat which had been torn loose by the wind. At about right angles to the boat lay an empty sledge, the upper rail of which was on a level with the surface of the snow, and by the side of which there was found a handkerchief with the monogram N. S. marked with red thread.”
Andrée lay about thirty-five feet away. In a pocket inside his jacket was a pencil, a pedometer, and another diary with a few pages of writing. Close by, was the butt of a shotgun whose barrel was in the snow, and a camp stove, which had fuel in it. When they pumped the stove, “the paraffin came out of the burner in a fine spray,” meaning it still worked. (In Stockholm it boiled a liter of water in six minutes.) There was also a “china pot of lanoline,” a bottle of white tablets, and about sixty yards east a pelvis, which they decided was Andrée’s. About forty yards north was “a typical Arctic grave”—stones, that is, piled on a body laid on the ground in the cleft between two rocks. From the stones “feet in their Lapp boots stuck out,” and a shoulder. Bears had disturbed the grave; nearby a skull, bleached by the sun, “lay there dreadfully smiling.”
Working with mattocks and spades, they began to free the boat from the ice, then discovered that it was lashed to a sledge underneath it. They were too heavy to lift, so the men cut the boat free and began to excavate the sledge.
For a while they stood beside Andrée, wondering if it was proper to move him. They decided that he should be brought home, along with whoever was buried beneath the stones. Having removed them, they discovered that the body was frozen to the ground and had to be hewed free, which was difficult because the cleft was so narrow that they could work only from the ends.
Others among the crew piled stones on a ridge above where Andrée had lain. Inside the cairn they placed a bottle containing a note that described their having found “the relics of the Swedish Andrée Expedition,” and so that the cairn could be seen from the water they put up a white pole steadied by three guy wires.
On a tarpaulin they carried the bodies to the shore, then went back for the boat, which was filled with ice and so heavy that when they placed it aboard a whaleboat, the whaleboat sank nearly to its gunwales. Towing it to the ship by a motorboat took an hour. “Later on, Ole Myklebust made a chest, rather more than two yards long, with two compartments,” Horn wrote. “The skeletons were placed in the larger compartment—Andrée with the gun by his side—while in the other were put all the smaller objects that had been found beside Andrée.”
The next day they left, watching White Island disappear in fog.