On the morning of the thirty-first, they got under way at four. A fog kept them from seeing the best route. The snow was deep, and repeatedly they sank to their knees; Strindberg fell often, “flopping,” Andrée called it. When they came to an immense field of pressure ice—ice heaved up by collisions, that is—they had to cut their way through it. “The Polar dist. is certainly the source of the idea of the stumbling block,” Andrée wrote. He climbed a large pyramid-shaped piece of ice, but could see no land or water, even though, while resting earlier, they had heard “a murmuring noise as from a sea.”
Toward evening they crossed bear tracks. “He had gone down in the soup a couple of times so hard that not even he is above making mistakes in this regard,” Andrée wrote.
They saw the back of an animal they hadn’t seen before, “which looked like a long snake 10–12 metre long,” Andrée wrote—about thirty-three to thirty-nine feet—“of a dirty yellow color and, in my opinion, with black stripes running from the back for some distance down the sides.” He heard it breathing heavily and supposed it was a whale.
The day was not difficult but when Andrée woke up more tired than usual the next morning, he wrote, “It seems as if good country were more fatiguing than half-good.”
They began to run out of food. “The last bear meat was cut into small pieces so that it might at least look like being a lot.” An hour after breaking camp, however, Andrée shot a bear in the chest at 125 feet, “an old worn-out male animal with rotten teeth.” Strindberg and Fraenkel had shot at it too (“both fired outers”). Andrée hoped that the remains would draw other bears “so that we shall always have fresh meat at our heels.” From heavy wire Andrée made a fork for Fraenkel because the bear meat was so tough that it bent the forks they had. Strindberg stood the fork against a box in the boat and took a photograph of it.
In ten hours they made a little more than a mile. Cutting a path, they destroyed their ax. When they came to a challenging place to cross, one of them would say, “Is it easy to get across?” and another would answer, “Yes, it is easy with difficulty.”
On August 4 they gave up walking east. “We can surmount neither the current, nor the ice,” Andrée wrote. They decided to start southwest, toward a smaller depot on the Seven Islands, which they hoped they might reach in six or seven weeks. The temperature dropped to about twenty-eight degrees. “Each degree makes us creep deeper down into the sleeping sack.” The cold froze leads inconsistently, which left the three of them sometimes having to cross uncertain ice on hands and knees. When they ran low on bear meat, they ate mainly bread, biscuits, and water. In “extremely clear air” Andrée searched with a spyglass for land or water and saw none. “Only ice and very difficult ice visible in all directions,” he wrote.
Between August 4 and 6 they were at nearly the same place they had been in the balloon between one-thirty in the morning and three on July 12.