“Since I wrote last in my diary much has changed, in truth,” Andrée wrote ten days later—it was the seventeenth of September. Snow had fallen, making sledging harder. Fraenkel’s foot was no better, and Strindberg and Andrée were still pulling his sledge. One of Strindberg’s feet had also begun to hurt. In addition they were nearly out of meat. The current and the wind carried them persistently “down into the jaws between North-East Land and Franz Joseph Land,” Andrée wrote. Pinned down by the wind on the eleventh and twelfth, they concluded that they had no chance of reaching the depot on North-East Land. Between August 4 and September 9 the ice had carried them eighty-one miles south-southeast, instead of southwest as they had intended. Spending the winter on the ice had become unavoidable. “Our position is not specially good,” Andrée wrote.
Wintering in the Arctic, and especially on the ice, was nothing anyone other than Nansen had ever wanted to do. Horrifying things happened, and the best that could come of it, everyone knew, was that you might still be alive in the spring, although likely diminished. The approach of a winter in the ice led the venerated sledger McClintock to write, “The dreaded reality of wintering in the pack is gradually forcing itself upon my mind,—but I must not write on this subject, it is bad enough to brood over it unceasingly.”
The first people to overwinter were those who had their ships frozen in place. Among these was a ship commanded by Willem Barents, the Dutch navigator, which got stuck in 1596. Barents was making his third Arctic voyage, on which he discovered Spitsbergen. At the end of August, in a harbor called Ice Haven, the ship was caught and violently bound, and the crew realized, as one of them wrote, that they would have “in great cold, poverty, misery, and grief to stay all that winter.” From driftwood, since no trees grew on the land, they built a house, which took a month. Often they had to quit work to run away from bears. The house was so cold that the fire hardly warmed them. They put their feet in the fire so that their socks burned. They knew to withdraw their feet because they smelled the wool burning, not because they felt the heat.