Who finally discovered the pole is disputed. Frederick Cook, an American, said he reached it on sledges, with two Inuits, in 1908, but he couldn’t prove it. Another American, named Robert Peary, said that he got there in 1909, but among his party, which included a black man from Maryland named Matthew Henson and four Inuit, he was the only one who could read navigational instruments. Also, as he closed on the pole, his sleds, according to his diary, went faster and faster, sometimes twice as fast as they had gone earlier in the approach. In addition Peary described traveling a straight path to the pole, whereas Henson said they had had to make detours around hummocks and leads. The first sighting of the pole no one quarrels with was made in 1926, when Roald Amundsen, who had been first to the South Pole, fifteen years earlier, flew over the North Pole in an airship, seeing it from exactly the vantage that would have been Andrée’s.
Oscar Strindberg died in 1905, not long after he had begun writing a book about Nils, in which he described him as his favorite son.
Nils Eckholm died in 1923. Early in the twentieth century he became known for expanding the ideas of Svante Arrhenius, Strindberg’s physics teacher, and predicting that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning coal would “undoubtedly cause a very obvious rise of the mean temperature of the earth.” Rather than be harmful, though, this circumstance would enable human beings to “regulate the future climate of the Earth,” Eckholm wrote, and prevent the arrival of the ice age that had been predicted by a respected Scottish scientist named James Croll.
Fridtjof Nansen died in May of 1930, a few months before Andrée was found on White Island. After his Arctic trip he became a statesman. Toward the end of his life he worked at the League of Nations, overseeing refugee rights, and in 1922 he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Adolphus Greely died in 1935. He retired from the army as a major general. There is a Greely Island in the Franz Josef Archipelago, which is now part of Russia, and a U.S. postage stamp, issued in 1986, which shows him with a full beard, more or less as he looked several days after he was rescued. So far as I can tell, no journalist sought him out to ask what he thought of Andrée’s being found. Enough years had passed that perhaps no one recalled his opposition to Andrée’s plan.
Anna Charlier died in 1949, having never reconciled herself to Strindberg’s disappearance and death. She had periods of illness and poor health and was in and out of hospitals and sanitariums. She once wrote of herself that she was “ill in body and soul.” Now and then she lived with Strindberg’s family. Oscar Strindberg wrote of her in 1900, “There are times when she is mourning, but she never torments anyone with her pain and despair.” Having watched her shaken by each episode of news about Andrée—by that time simply reports of a buoy being found, or a story emerging from the frontier—he wrote, “Her faith is cruel and hurts my heart … I cannot believe how brutal life sometimes can be.”
In 1901 Charlier lived in Switzerland, where she worked for a clockmaker, handling Swedish correspondence. Late in the year she went back to Stockholm and became godmother to Sven’s son, Ake. She continued to study piano and perform but had to stop frequently from illness. For a time she worked as a housekeeper.
After thirteen years Charlier married a saintly Englishman named Gilbert Hawtrey, who taught French at St. Paul’s School, in New Hampshire. At St. Paul’s she gave music classes, and on Saturday nights led a music club that met at her house. The students would discuss a different composer each week and sometimes play one of his works. Then they would have a meal characteristic of the country the composer was from. For Verdi they ate spaghetti, and for Wagner they had sauerkraut. A reminiscence in the school’s archives describes her as being “old and tottering but known in youth for her beauty. As a pianist, she had played in all the great concert halls of Europe.” In a window in the living room of the Hawtrey house was a stuffed pigeon with its wings spread.
On September 4, 1949, which would have been Strindberg’s seventy-seventh birthday, a few people gathered at his grave in Stockholm. Tore Strindberg held a small silver box, conveyed by Gilbert Hawtrey at his wife’s request.
“Anna could never forget her heart’s first love,” Tore said. “For her it stood as something sacred. And something broke within her during the latter years of her life—perhaps due to grief.
“When her worried life came to an end—and we remember with sadness the joyous dream of her youth, her musicality, in which her lively and warm intellect perhaps most clearly shone and through which a strong bond with Nils grew forth.”
The case was inscribed:
Ashes from near the heart of Anna Albertina Constancia Hawtrey
(nee Charlier)
to be placed near the grave of Nils Strindberg
to whom she was engaged in 1897
—and may the Great Conductor allow them both to share in the
Music of the Spheres.
“May peace be with her,” Tore said.