Throughout her adult life, Swedish researcher Bea Uusma has followed in the footsteps of “the world’s most failed polar expedition.” The Swedish researcher never ends her hunt for a missing hot-air balloon expedition.
At the age of twelve, Swedish-Estonian Bea Uusma and her older sister wrote a song they called “Trikiner i det!”, intended for Eurovision. A few years earlier, ABBA had won the competition with a song about Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Trikiner (Trichinosis) is a parasitic roundworm that infects animals and can be transmitted to humans if the meat they eat is not properly cooked.
The song refers to the polar bear meat that the Swedes Salomon Andrée, Nils Strindberg, and Knut Frænkel ate to survive what has been called the world’s most failed polar expedition, a hot air balloon trip to the North Pole that ended on Kvitøya, in the far north of Svalbard, in October 1897.
In the mid-1990s, she sought to learn what happened to the expedition’s members, and her research resulted in the book The Expedition, published in English by Head of Zeus in 2014, for which she was awarded The August Prize in 2013. The book explores the fate of Andrée’s balloon expedition.
Last year, in August, she and a group of researchers from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research and the University Museum of Bergen returned to Kvitøya in search of more answers about the ill-fated expedition.
Kvitøya is one of the most remote islands in the Svalbard archipelago. On this island, S.A. Andrée and his two expedition members landed after an unsuccessful attempt at becoming the first in the world to reach the North Pole by air.
The Northeast and Northwest Passages had already been conquered. Leaving only the North Pole remained to be reached. Previous expeditions had attempted to get to the pole by ship but had to turn back due to sea ice. Andrée, a forward-thinking Swedish engineer, aimed to fly to the North Pole with a hydrogen balloon, crossing the ice from above. In 1897, they set out from Virgohamna on the northwest coast of Spitsbergen, Svalbard’s largest island. However, they disappeared without a trace.
“I’ve been trying to solve the medical polar-historical puzzle about what happened to the Andrée expedition for two decades. Thirty-three years later, the remains of their last camp were found frozen in the snow and ice on a remote island in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. When they finally set foot on Kvitøya, they had all they required to survive the winter. But despite warm clothes, supplies, and working rifles, they perished on the island, one by one. What happened?” asks Uusma.
The 2024 project was a collaboration between polar researcher Anne-Cathrine Flyen, archaeologist and drone pilot Jani Causevic from NIKU, and Dr. Bea Uusma, a physician at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Dr. Uusma has researched the cause of death of the Andrée expedition for two decades and is the author of the award-winning factual book ‘Expeditionen,’ published in 13 countries. Dr. Björn Nilsson, archaeologist and department head at the Department of Cultural History, University Museum in Bergen, and Dr. Clara Alfsdotter, forensic osteologist and archaeologist, are also part of Dr. Uusma’s team. Additionally, two archaeology dogs participated in the expedition and fieldwork on Kvitøya.
However, due to six polar bears permanently in the area, no landing was possible, and the team was unable to visit the site. Thus, documentation was made with video and photographs taken from the air/ drone. Both the site itself and the nearby area were documented from the drone.
“The Andrée expedition is my life project, and it never seems to come to an end. The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know,” says Bea Uusma, still searching for answers.
The Swedish Researcher Who Never Ends Her Hunt for a Missing Hot-Air Balloon Expedition, written by Tor Kjolberg.