On the evening of July 22, they began walking southeast toward the depot that Jackson had left for them on Franz Josef Land. Their sledges weighed between 300 and 450 pounds. Strindberg noted that they were very hard to pull. Two hundred and fifty pounds had been the weight that had led Nansen’s crewman to conclude that “if a man had to draw a load like that he might just as well lie down at once—it would come to the same thing in the end.”
At midnight they camped, and Strindberg wrote Charlier, “Well, now your Nils knows what it is to walk on the Polar ice. We had a little mishap at the start. When we were crossing from our ice-floe with the first sledge it went crooked and fell in. It was with difficulty we succeeded in getting it up. I climbed down up to the knees and held fast the sledge so that it should not sink. Andrée and Fraenkel crossed over to the other ice-floe and then suddenly we managed to get the sledge up but I expect that my sack which was on the sledge is wet inside. And it is there that I have all your letters and your portrait. Yes, they will be my dearest treasure during the winter. Well, my dear, what will you be thinking all winter? That is my only anxiety.—Well, after we had got the sledge up again we piloted ourselves across some floes with channels of water between. The way we did it was by making the ice-floes move quickly so that they came near each other. This was slow work with the large floes of course. At last we came on to a large field of ice across which we travelled with our sledges two or three kilometers. Each is loaded with about 160 kg. so that they are very heavy and during the last hour what we did was for all three of us to help with one sledge at a time. Now we have encamped on a picturesque bit of ice and have pitched our tent. In the tent we have our sleeping-sack in which all three of us are now lying side by side. It is a squeeze but the fellowship is good. Well, there is much I should write about but now I must sleep. Good night.”
When they woke at eleven-thirty in the morning, the sun was among clouds. To make breakfast and pack the sledges took an hour and they started walking around one. The leads were hard to cross and Strindberg and Andrée had different ideas about how to, although neither wrote them down. Andrée wrote, “The traveling bad and we were extremely fatigued. Dangerous ferryings and violent twistings, etc. of the sledges among the hummocks.” They discussed whether to lighten the sledges but reached no conclusion. It was Charlier’s birthday, and they gave her four cheers.
“We have just stopped for the day,” Strindberg wrote her, “after drudging and pulling the sledges for ten hours. I am really rather tired but must first chat a little. First and foremost I must congratulate you, for this is your birthday. Oh, how I wish I could tell you now that I am in excellent health and that you need not fear for us at all. We are sure to come home by and by.”
What Strindberg wrote next has faded away. When the text began again, he said, “Yes, how very much all this occupies my thoughts during the day, for I have plenty of time to think and it is so good to have such pleasant memories and such happy prospects for the future as I have, to think about!
“(Later.) Now we have camped for the night and had coffee and eaten our sandwiches with cheese and h … biscuits and syrup and … Just now we are putting up the tent and Fraenkel is taking the meteorological observations. Now we are enjoying a caramel, it is a real luxury. You can fancy we are not over-delicate here. Yesterday evening I gave them (for it is I who attend to the housekeeping) a soup which was really not good, for that Rousseau meat-powder has a bad taste one soon becomes tired of it. But we managed to eat it in any case.…
“Well, we have stopped for the night on an open place, round about there is ice, ice in every direction. You saw from Nansen’s pictures how such ice looks. Hummocks, walls, and fissures in the sea alternating with melted ice, everlastingly the same. For the moment it is snowing a little but it is calm at least and not especially cold (–0.8°). At home I think you have nicer summer weather.”
Strindberg’s tone then turned downcast. “Yes, it is strange to think that not even for your next birthday will it be possible for us to be at home. And perhaps we shall have to winter here for another year more. We do not know yet. We are now moving onwards so slowly that perhaps we shall not reach Cape Flora this winter, but, like Nansen, will have to pass the winter in an earth-cellar. Poor little Anna, in what despair you will be if we should not come home next autumn. And you can imagine how I am tortured by the thought of it, too, not for my own sake, for now I do not mind if I have hardships as long as I can come home at last.
“Now the tent is in order and we are going to our berths. We are all rather tired but in good humour. We discuss our mental characteristics and our faults, a very educative … I chat with …”
They awoke on the twenty-fifth to rain and stayed in their tent, sleeping, until three. “Then we rose and I cooked a little food—cocoa and condensed milk and biscuits and sandwiches,” Strindberg wrote Charlier. “At 4.30 o’cl. we started and now we have drudged and pulled our heavy sledges for four and a half hours. The weather is pretty bad: wet snow and fog, but we are in good humour. We have kept up a really pleasant conversation the whole day. Andrée has talked about his life, how he entered the Patent Office, etc. Fraenkel and Andrée have gone ahead on a reconnoitering tour. I stayed with the sledges and now I am sitting writing to you. Yes, now you are having evening at home and you, like I, have had a very jolly and pleasant day. Here one day passes like another. Pulling and drudging at the sledges, eating and sleeping. The most delightful hour of the day is when one has gone to bed and allows one’s thoughts to fly back to better and happier times. But the immediate object now is our winter-place. We hope to find things better in the future. Now the others are coming back and we shall continue the drudgery with the sledges, Au revoir.…”
Strindberg did not tell Charlier that he had fallen into water deep enough that he “was in imminent danger of drowning,” Andrée wrote. After being rescued, he was “dried and wrung out and dressed in knickerbockers.”
That evening Andrée made a list of all the items he carried on his sledge, which weighed 459 pounds. It included a shovel, three bamboo poles, a hose, a tarpaulin, a boat hook, and one “basket with contents,” which on its own weighed 143 pounds. Strindberg calculated that in pulling one sledge and returning for another, they had made perhaps a mile and no more than two in the last five days. They decided to shed what they could so that each man’s sledge weighed little enough that he could pull it himself. What they would do is take sufficient provisions and equipment to last forty-five days. Andrée got his sledge down to 285 pounds, and Fraenkel got his to three hundred. “Strange feelings and great indulgence in food on making reduction,” Andrée wrote.
That day Strindberg shot a bear, his first. They soaked it for an hour in salt water which made it, according to Andrée, “immensely good.” The wind, having blown from the north, swung around to the south, which Andrée hoped would make the ice drift with them as they walked.
On the twenty-seventh, to lighten the sledges again, they got rid of some meat powder and bread, which they thought they wouldn’t need, since Fraenkel had also shot a bear. They had tried to frighten it off by blowing a whistle and a hunting horn, then Fraenkel had “put in a beautiful shot at 38 m.,” Andrée wrote. With the skin they patched their sleeping sack.
Most of the day they spent crossing leads, one while rowing, two others pushing the boat across. The leads had ice in them that was difficult to move, and cut the boat. The day was “extremely fatiguing,” Andrée wrote, so that even Fraenkel said he was tired.
In the tent the next day, they drank a bottle of champagne, possibly the one they had brought to celebrate crossing the pole, and ate some biscuits with honey. The day was easier than many. They saw bear tracks but no bears. “Now we have turned in 12 o’cl. noon the 29th after having thus been at work 16 hours,” Andrée wrote. “We learn the poor man’s art: to make use of everything. We also learn the art of living from one day to the next.” Then he made a note to “Describe in detail. Difficulties with the ice, the ice-humps, melted snow-water, the sludge pools and the leads and the floes of broken ice.”
On the thirtieth Fraenkel had incipient snow blindness but didn’t take any treatment. Their camp tasks had fallen into a pattern. Strindberg boiled and fried, serving bear meat twice a day, and Fraenkel took meteorological notes, oiled the guns, made sandwiches, and set the table and cleared it. “I reconnoiter,” Andrée wrote. At meals they sat on a medicine chest, a piece of photographic equipment, and a case of matches. To protect his hands from drying and cracking Andrée smeared them with bear grease.
“Now it is a long time since I chatted with you,” Strindberg wrote Charlier on the thirty-first. The brief letter, roughly five sentences long—because parts have faded it is not possible to be certain—describes their changing the loads on their sledges a few days earlier. It was a letter Strindberg didn’t finish, and it was the last he wrote to her. After that he wrote only in his diary. It is an indication, perhaps, that he felt less hopeful.
They took astronomical measurements and discovered that the ice had drifted west faster than they had walked east. “This is not encouraging,” Andrée wrote. “Out on the ice one cannot at all notice that it is in movement.”