Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 was an effort to reach the North Pole in a voyage by hydrogen balloon from Svalbard to either Russia or Canada, which was to pass, with luck, straight over the North Pole on the way.
Spoiler alert: it didn't end well.
Spoiler alert: it didn't end well.
All three Swedish expedition members – S. A. Andrée, Knut Frænkel, and Nils Strindberg – perished.
The explorers minutes before takeoff on 11 July.
The best-known theory that suggests what caused their deaths was made by Ernst Tryde, a medical practitioner, in 1952: the men succumbed to trichinosis, which they had contracted from eating undercooked polar bear meat.
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