How Did Andree Die ?

By VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON.

THE death of Andree and his companions is a mystery story whose authors died before the final chapters were written. I submit here a tentative draft of the missing chapters and offer a solution of the final problem.

The tragedy must have come soon after the landing. The diary entries are few and there is no material help from them. We therefore turn to the evidence on White Island.

When Dr. Gunnar Horn's expedition discovered the Andree remains on White Island, they found them remarkably preserved, although not so miraculously as the newspapers said in the first accounts. This preservation of diaries, shreds of flesh, the remains of food, and other normally perishable things was due to Andree's European propensity for making a camp in shelter, where the lee accumulates huge snowdrifts that become deep in the autumn and last far into the summer. The remains were well preserved after thirty-three years.

Plenty of food shows that hunger was not the cause of death ; there was plenty of fresh meat, so scurvy was not the cause. There was driftwood, so that Andree could have built a house more easily than Nansen did in the same neighbourhood two years before. Nansen had had to burn animal fat for fuel, as he had neither driftwood nor kerosene ; Andree possessed both, and grease besides. His blue flame stove for the petrol was found by Horn to be still in good working condition. The cheerful tone of the Andrec and Strindberg diaries seems to have been justified. But death came instead, and with it mysteries that cloud otir view.

We see plainly that Strindberg died before the other two, .for his body had been buried. It may have been simple illness in his case, for people die of normal causes in the Arctic no less than in the tropic or temperate zones. It may have been a fall over a cliff in hunting or the accidental discharge of a gun. Just possibly it could have been the attack of a polar bear.

Everything goes to show that Andree and Fraenkel died together, or at least that one of them died when the other was too weak to care for his body. Apart from some depredations by bears, everything about this double tragedy was therefore found in that condition which a police officer desires when he wants to solve by a study of clues the problem of a death that has no living witness.

When the two men died they were lightly clad. Committed to the traditional view that every death in the Arctic must be either from starvation or from cold, and deprived of the starvation theory by the abundance of every variety of food, the discoverers ignored the three kinds of fuel (the fat of animals, the scattered driftwood, the kerosene in the blue flame stove) and misinterpreting the light clothing of Andree and Fraenkel they concluded that : " They died in their sleep ! The cold finished them."

There was a sleeping bag on the tent floor but the inadequately clad men had not died in it. Yet they are said to have frozen to death in their sleep !

In many European countries the favourite method of suicide is with carbon monoxide generated by charcoal braziers. When a chemist decides on suicide deliberately, rather than under a sudden stress, he commonly uses monoxide. A notable proportion of all deaths that arc connected with automobiles is from poisoning in garages when motors are running.

Last summer in England, when the Andree story appeared in the newspapers, one of the veterans of Polar exploration who lives there said that there was no Polar expedition of the last thirty or forty years which had not had one or more narrow escapes from death by carbon monoxide.

A case occurred on Admiral Byrd's expedition in the Antarctic last year. A similar incident in the Arctic occurred during an expedition of mine twenty years ago. Anderson and Tanaumirk were sitting on a three-foot- high bed platform in a deserted Eskimo snowhouse on Coronation Gulf. Natkusiak was sitting lower, I higher. I was cooking with a blue flame kerosene stove and listening to a story which Tanaumirk was relating with much pantomime. Suddenly he threw himself backward. I thought the gesture was part of the story, but, when he lay still, I said to Dr. Anderson, " Sec what is the matter with Tanaumirk." When he turned half around to look, he fell unconscious, face downward on top of the Eskimo. Fortunately I guessed that our trouble was monoxide and with half a turn of the wrist I released the pressure on the stove and the flame went out.

Then I told Natkusiak to break away a snow block which he had incautiously (and against my orders) placed so as to close the door. In breaking this block he partly collapsed, but was able to crawl outdoors on hands and knees.

I first considered trying to drag out our two unconscious companions, but had strength only for pulling Anderson off Tanaumirk and turning him on his back. Then I crawled out after Natkusiak,. trusting that the fresh air would be coming in through the door fast enough to give them a chance of recovery.

Outside, Natkusiak and I were in some danger of freezing, for the temperature was about forty degrees below zero and our vitality was probably lowered by the partial poisoning. In about fifteen minutes Dr. Anderson came crawling out and Tanaumirk soon after. By that time I had strength to get back into the house for the sleeping bags. A little later we were all indoors again and cooking our food, this time with plenty of ventilation. The last of us to recover from the monoxide felt well by the following evening.

As we discussed these events carefully afterwards, we could not think of any symptoms that gave hint of the poisoning except that one or two of us thought we had felt something like a pressure on our temples just before the collapse. There was no odour, neither was there interference with the burning of the flame.

Now, Andree and Fraenkel's tent was nearly air-tight, for it was made of balloon silk and it had a floor that was sewn to it in one piece. The tent stood in a lee. In the first storm of the year the air-tightness of the tent was increased by a blanketing of softly falling snow. One of the men was cooking when the other fainted. The cook then released the pressure so that the stove went out, just as I had done on Coronation Gulf. We know he did that because the stove was discovered half filled with kerosene. Then he fainted, too, before he was able to make a hole in the tent for ventilation.

This solution, the only one so far proposed that fits and explains all the facts, also has other arguments in its favour.

The first is that it leaves Andree without heavy responsibility in the immediate cause of the tragedy. Nansen had been the pioneer in using a blue flame kerosene stove and Andree was only the second. He did not therefore have those warnings to guide him which we later travellers had, and was less to blame than we have been. The second is that no death is more wholly devoid of warning. And a third argument is that if we adopt this explanation we do not have to criticize Andree, as the Norwegian discoverers of his camp and the Swedish editors of his book have done, for dressing himself and his men inadequately.

The reason why the bodies were found insufficiently clad for outdoors was that Andree and Fraenkel died warm indoors. Similarly the reason why they were not found in their sleeping bag was that they were overcome by carbon monoxide as they sat cooking a meal.