Andrée decided to cross in the boat to another floe, bigger and “richer in ice-humps” than their own, which was “low and small and full of saltwater pools.” Theirs, they thought, would break up in the spring. On the new floe they hollowed out a big piece of ice, then built walls from blocks of ice and snow over which they threw water to harden them. Andrée shot a seal through its head, so it didn’t sink. Over the following three weeks they ate all but the skin and bones. Bears seemed to have disappeared from the territory, and all they had of animal life were the gulls, which Andrée said were “not to be despised” but cost a lot of ammunition. “May we shoot some score of seals so that we can save ourselves,” he wrote.
Fraenkel’s foot had gotten a little better but was weeks from being healed. Strindberg’s feet were now bad, too. “Our humour is pretty good,” Andrée wrote, “although joking and smiling are not of ordinary occurrence. My young comrades hold out better than I had ventured to hope.” Andrée thought that perhaps they might drift far enough south that they could get food from the ocean. Also, closer to the water might not be as cold as on the land. “He who lives will see,” he wrote. “Now it is time to work.”
On the nineteenth, “for the first time since 11 July,” Andrée wrote, they sighted land. He was sure it was New Iceland—White Island—and he made a drawing of its long, low outline, rising and sloping from one edge to the other like the curve of an eye. He guessed it was about six miles away.
Going ashore appeared to be impossible, since the “entire island seems to be one single block of ice with a glacier border,” Andrée wrote. On the west and east, however, it might be reached. Seeing land meant that the ice had moved so rapidly beneath them that Andrée wrote, “If we drift in this way some weeks more perhaps we may save ourselves on one of the islands east of Spitsbergen.”
The following day, the eighteenth, Jubilee Day in Sweden—the twenty-fifth anniversary of King Oscar II’s reign—Andrée shot a seal. Cutting it up, he discovered that the skull was “as thin as egg-shell,” and should therefore easily be killed by a shot to the head. They hoisted the Swedish flag, drank to the king’s health, and sang the national anthem. Strindberg wrote down the menu:
BANQUET, 18 SEPT. ’97
ON AN ICE-FLOE IMMEDIATELY EAST OF
Seal-steak and ivory gull fried in butter and seal-blubber, seal-liver,—brain, and kidneys.
Butter and Schumacher-bread.
Wine.
Chocolate with Mellin’s-food flour with Albert biscuits and butter.
Gateau aux raisin.
Raspberry syrup sauce.
Port wine 1834 Antonio de Ferrara given by the King.
Toast by Andrée for the King with royal Hurrah:
The national anthem in unison.
Biscuits, butter, cheese.
A glass of wine.
Festive feeling.
During the day the union-flag waved above the camp.
“The general feeling was one of the greatest pleasure and we lay down satisfied and contented,” Andrée wrote.