Chapter IX: Part 9

There followed a series of hearings. At one of these, opposing counsel began a line of cross-questioning which suggested that Mrs. Small had been guilty of a liaison with a Canadian officer who appeared in the records merely as Mr. X. The widow, rising dramatically in court, indignantly denied these imputations as well as the induced theory that her misbehavior had led to an estrangement from her husband and, perhaps, to his disappearance. The widow declared that this suspicion was diametrically opposed to the truth, and that if Small were in court he would be the first to reject it. As a matter of fact, she testified, it was Small who had been guilty. He had confessed his fault to her, promised to be done with the woman in the matter, and had been forgiven. There had been a complete reconciliation, she said, and Small had agreed that one half of the million-dollar check which he received on the day of his disappearance should be hers.

To bear out her statements in this matter, Mrs. Small soon after obtained permission of the court to file certain letters which had been found among Small’s effects after his disappearance. In this manner the secret love affair in the theater magnate’s last years came to be spread upon the books. The letters presented by the wife had all come from a certain married woman who, according to the testimony of her own writings and of others who knew of the connection, had been associated with Amby Small since 1915. It appears that Mrs. Small discovered the attachment in 1918 and forced her husband to cause his inamorata to leave Toronto. The letters, which need not be reprinted here, contained only one significant strain.

A letter, which reached Small two or three days before he disappeared, concluded thus: “Write me often, dear heart, for I just live for your letters. God bless you, dearest.”

Three weeks earlier, evidently with reference to the impending close of his big deal and his retirement from active business, the same lady wrote: “I am the most unhappy girl in the world. I want you. Can’t you suggest something after the first of December? You will be free, practically. Let’s beat it away from our troubles.”

And five days later she amended this in another note: “Some day, perhaps, if you want me, we can be together all the time. Let’s pray for that time to come, when we can have each other legitimately.”

Mrs. Small declared that she had found these letters immediately after her husband’s departure, and that they had kept her from turning the case over to the police until two weeks after the disappearance. Meantime the other woman had been summoned, interrogated by the police, and released. She had not seen Small nor had she heard from him either directly or indirectly. It was apparent that, while she had been corresponding with Small up to the very week of his last appearance, he had not gone to see her.

Finally the will contest was settled out of court, Small’s sisters receiving four hundred thousand dollars, and the widow retaining the balance.

And here the darkness closes in again. Even in the progress of the will controversy no hint was given of the official or family beliefs as to the mystery. There are only two tenable conclusions. Either there is a further skeleton to be guarded, or the police have some kind of information which promises the eventual solution of the case and the apprehension of suspected criminals. How slender this promise must be, every reader will judge for himself, remembering the years of fruitless attack on this extraordinary and complex enigma.

XV

THE AMBROSE BIERCE IRONY

Some time in his middle career, Ambrose Bierce wrote three short tales of vanishment--weird and supernatural things in one of his favorite veins. The three sketches--for they are no more--he classed under the heading, “Mysterious Disappearances,” a subject which occupied his speculations from time to time. Herein lies a complete irony. Bierce himself was later to disappear as mysteriously as any of his heroes.

No one will understand his story, with its many implications, or get from it the full flavor of romance and sardonics without some brief glance at the man and his history. Nor need one make apology for intruding a short account of him in a story of mystery, for Bierce alive was almost as strange and enigmatic a creature as Bierce dead.

Ambrose Bierce, whom a good many critics have regarded as the foremost master of the American short story after Poe, was born in Ohio in 1841. He joined the Union armies as a private in 1861, when he was in his twenty-first year, rose quickly through the ranks to the grade of lieutenant, fought and was wounded at Chickamauga as a captain of engineers under Thomas, and retired with the brevet rank of major. After the war he took up writing for a living, and soon went to London, where his early short stories, sketches and criticisms attracted attention. His cutting wit and ironic spirit soon won him the popular name “Bitter Bierce.”

After 1870, the banished Empress Eugénie of France, alarmed at the escape of her implacable journalistic enemy, Henri Rochette, and the impending revival in London of his paper, _La Lanterne_, in which she had been intolerably lampooned, sought to forestall the French writer by establishing an English paper called _The Lantern_, thus taking advantage of the law which forbade a duplication of titles. For this purpose she employed Bierce, purely on his polemical reputation, and Bierce straightway began the publication of _The Lantern_, and devoted his most vitriolic explosions to the baffled Rochette, who saw that he could not succeed in England without the name which he had made famous at the head of his paper and could not return to France, whence he was a political exile.

In this employment Bierce exhibited one of his peculiarities. His assaults on her old enemy greatly pleased the banished empress, and she finally sent for Bierce. Following the imperial etiquette, which she still sought to maintain, she “commanded” his presence. Bierce, who understood and obeyed military commands, did not like that manner of wording an invitation from a dethroned empress. He did not attend and _The Lantern_ soon disappeared from the scene of politics and letters.

Bierce returned to America and went to San Francisco, where he in time became the “dean of Western writers.” His journalistic work in San Francisco and later in Washington set him apart as a satirist of the bitterest strain. His literary productions marked him as a man of the most independent thought and distinctive taste. Most of his tales are Poe plus sulphur. He reveled in the mysterious, the dark, the terrible and the bizarre.

Between intervals of writing his tales, criticisms and epigrams, Bierce found time to manage ranches and mining properties, to fight bad men and frontier highwaymen, to grill politicians, and to write verse.

Bierce went through life seeking combat, weathering storm after storm, by some regarded as the foremost American literary man of his time, by others denounced as a brute, a pedant, even as a scoundrel. In the West he was generally lionized, in the East neglected. One man called him the last of the satirists, another considered him a strutting dunce. Bierce contributed to the confusion by making something of a riddle of himself. He loved mystery and indirection. He liked the fabulous stories which grew up about him and encouraged them by his own silence and air of concealment. In the essentials, however, he was no more than an intelligent and perspicacious man of high talent, who hated sentiment, reveled in the assault on popular prejudices, liked nothing so much as to throw himself upon the clay idols of the day with ferocious claws, and yet had a tender and humble heart.

Toward the end of 1913, Mexico was in another of its torments. The visionary Madero had been assassinated. Huerta was in the dictator’s chair, Wilson had inaugurated his “watchful waiting,” and the new rebels were moving in the north--Carranza and Villa. At the time Ambrose Bierce was living, more or less retired, in Washington, probably convinced that he had had his last fling, for he was already past seventy-two and “not so spry as he once had been.” But along came the order for the mobilization along the border. General Funston and his little army took up the patrol along the Rio Grande, the newspapers began to hint at a possible invasion of Mexico, and there was a stir of martial blood among the many.

Some say that when age comes on, a man’s youth is born again. Everything that belonged to the dawn becomes hallowed in the sunset of manhood. It must have been so with Bierce. Old and probably more infirm than he fancied, long written out, ready for sleep, the trumpets of Shiloh and Chickamauga, rusty and silent for fifty years, called him out again and he set out for Mexico, saying little to any one about his plans or intentions. Some believed that he was going down to the Rio Grande as a correspondent. Others said he planned to join the Constitutionalists as a military adviser. Either might have been true, for Bierce was as good an officer as a writer. He knew both games from the roots up.

Even the preliminary movements of the man are a little hazy, but apparently he went first to his old home in California and then down to the border. He did not stop there, for in the fall of 1913 he was reported to have crossed into Mexico, and in January his secretary in Washington, Miss Carrie Christianson, received a letter from him postmarked in Chihuahua.

Then followed a long silence. Miss Christianson expected to hear again within a month. When no letter came, she wondered, but was not alarmed. Bierce was a man of irregular habits. He was down there in a war-torn country, moving about in the wilderness with armies and bands of insurgents; he might not be able to get a letter through the lines. There was no reason to feel special apprehension. In September, 1914, however, Bierce’s daughter, Mrs. H. D. Cowden of Bloomington, Illinois, decided that something must be amiss, no word having come from her father in eight months. She appealed to the State Department at Washington, saying that she feared for his life.

The Department quickly notified the American chargé d’affaires in Mexico to make inquiries and the War Department shortly afterwards instructed General Funston to send word along his lines and to communicate with the Mexican commanders opposite him, asking for Bierce. The Washington officials soon notified Mrs. Cowden that a search was being made. General Funston also answered that he was proceeding with an inquiry. Again some months elapsed. Finally both the diplomatic and the military forces reported that they had been unable to find Bierce or any trace of him. Probably, it was added, he was with one of the independent rebel commands in the mountains and out of touch with the border or the main forces of the Constitutionalists.

Now the rumoring began. First came the report that Bierce had really gone to Mexico to join Villa, whose reputation as a guerrilla fighter had attracted the veteran, and whose emissaries were said to have asked Bierce to join the so-called bandit as a military aide. Bierce, it was reported, had joined Villa and had been with that commander in Chihuahua just before the battle there, in which the rebel forces were unsuccessful. Possibly Bierce had fallen in action. This story was soon discarded on the ground that Villa, had Bierce been on his staff, would certainly have reported the death of so widely-known a man and one so close to himself.

A little later came a second report, this time backed by what seemed to be more credible evidence. It was said that Bierce had been at the later battle of Torreon in command of the Villista artillery, that he had taken part in the running campaign through the province of Sonora and that he had probably died of hardships and exposure in those trying days.

A California friend now came forward with the report of a talk with Bierce, said to have been held just before the author set out for Mexico. The old satirist was reported to have said that he had grown weary of the stodgy life of literature and journalism, that he wanted to wind up his career with some more glorious end than death in bed and that he had decided to go down into Mexico and find a “soldier’s grave or crawl off into some cave and die like a free beast.”

It sounded very rebellious and Byronic, but Bierce’s other friends immediately declared that it was entirely out of character. Bierce had gone to Mexico to fight and see another war. He had not gone to die. He was a fatalist. He would take whatever came, but he would not go out and seek a conclusion.

So the talk went on and the months went by. There were no scare headlines in the papers. After all, Bierce was only a distinguished man of letters.

But there was a still better reason for the lack of attention. The absence of Bierce had not yet been reported officially when the vast black cloud of war rolled up in Europe. All men’s eyes were turned to the Atlantic and the fields of Flanders. The American adventure along the Mexican border seemed trivial and grotesque. The little puff of wind in the South was forgotten before the menacing tornado in the East. What did a poet matter when the armies of the great powers were caught in their bloody embrace?

Yet Bierce was not altogether forgotten. In April, 1915, more than a year after his last letter from Chihuahua, another note, supposedly from him, was received by his daughter. It said that Major Bierce was in England on Lord Kitchener’s staff and that he was taking a prominent part in the recruiting movement in Britain. This sensation lasted ten days. Then, inquiry having been made of the British War Office, the sober report was issued that Bierce’s name did not appear on the rolls and that he certainly was not attached to Lord Kitchener’s staff.

Now, at last, the missing writer’s secretary put the touch of disaster to the fable. Miss Christianson announced in Washington that careful investigation abroad showed that Major Bierce was not fighting with the Allies, and that she and his family had been forced to the melancholy conclusion that he was dead.

But how and where? The State Department continued its inquiries in Mexico, but many private individuals also began to investigate. Journalists at the southern front tried to get trace or rumor of the man. Old friends went into the troubled region to seek what they could find. The literary world was touched both with curiosity and grief and with a romantic interest in the man’s fate. Bierce became a later Byron, and it was held he had gone forth to fight for the oppressed and found himself another Missolonghi.

Out of all this grew a vast curiosity. Probably Bierce was dead, though even this was by no means certain. There was no evidence save the fact that he had not written for more than a year, which, in view of the man’s character and the situation in which he was caught, might be no evidence at all. But, granting that he was dead, how had his end come? Where was his body? It was impossible to escape the impression that one whose life had been touched with such extraordinary color should have died without a flame. The men and women who knew and loved Bierce--and they were a considerable number--kept saying over and over to themselves that this heroic fellow could not have passed out without some signal. Surely some one had seen him die and could tell of his end and place of repose. So the quest began again.

For years, there was no fruit. Northern Mexico, where Bierce had certainly met his end, if indeed, he was dead, was no place for a hunter after bits of literary history to go wandering in. First there was the constant fighting between Huerta and the Constitutionalists. Then Huerta was eliminated and Carranza became president. There followed the various campaigns of pacification. Next Villa rebelled against his old ally, leading to a fresh going to and fro of armies. Finally the whole region was infested by marauding bands of irregular and rebellious militia, part soldiers and part bandits. To cap the climax came the invasion of Mexico by the expedition under Pershing.

In 1918 was heard the first report on Bierce which seemed to have some basis in fact. A traveler had heard in Mexico City and at several points along the railroad that an aged American, who was supposed to have been fighting with either Villa or Carranza, had been executed by order of a field commander. From descriptions, this man was supposed to have been Bierce. At any rate, he might have been Bierce as well as another, and, since Bierce was both conspicuous and missing, there was some reason for credence. But no one could get any details or give the scene of the execution. The report was finally discarded as no more reliable than several others.

Another year went by. In February, 1919, however, came a report which carries some of the marks of credibility.

One of the several persons who set out to clear up the Bierce enigma was Mr. George F. Weeks, an old friend and close associate of the old writer’s, who went to Mexico City and later visited the various towns in northern Mexico where Bierce was supposed to have been seen shortly before his death. Weeks went up and down and across northern Mexico without finding anything definite. Then he returned to Mexico City and by chance encountered a Mexican officer who had been with Villa in his campaigns and had known Bierce well. Weeks mentioned Bierce to this soldier and was told this story:

Bierce actually did join the Villista forces soon after January, 1914, when he wrote his last letter from Chihuahua. He said to those who were not supposed to know his affairs too intimately that he, like other American journalists and writers, had gone to Mexico to get material for a book on conditions in that unhappy country. In reality, however, he was acting as adviser and military observer with Villa, though not attached to the eminent guerilla in person. The Mexican officer related that Bierce could speak hardly any Spanish and Villa’s staff hardly any English. On the other hand, this particular man spoke English fluently. Naturally, he and Bierce had been thrown together a great deal and had held numerous conversations. So much for showing that he had known Bierce well, and how and why.

After Chihuahua, the officer continued, he and Bierce had parted company, due to the exigencies of military affairs, and he had never seen the American alive again. He had often wondered about him and had made inquiries from time to time as he encountered various commandos of the Constitutionalist army. Finally, about a year later, which is to say some time toward the end of 1915, the relating officer met a Mexican army surgeon, who also had been with Villa, and this surgeon had told him a tale.

Soon after the breach between Villa and Carranza in 1915, a small detachment of Carranza troops occupied the village of Icamole, east of Chihuahua State in the direction of Monterey and Saltillo. The Villista forces in that quarter, commanded by General Tomas Urbina, one of the most ruthless of all the Villa subcommanders, who was himself later put to death, were encamped not far from Icamole, attempting to beleaguer the town or, at least, to cut the Carranza garrison off from its base of supplies and the main command. Neither side was strong enough to risk an engagement and the whole thing settled down into a waiting and sniping campaign.

In the gray of one oppressive morning toward the end of 1915, according to the surgeon who was with Urbina, one of that commander’s scouts gave an alarm, having seen four mules and two men on the horizon, making toward Icamole. A mounted detachment was at once sent out and the strangers were brought in. They turned out to be an American of advanced years but military bearing, a nondescript Mexican, and four mules laden with the parts of a machine gun and a large quantity of its ammunition.

Both men were immediately taken before General Urbina, according to the surgeon’s story, and subjected to questioning. The Mexican said that he had been employed by another Mexican, whose name he did not know, to conduct the American and his convoy to Icamole and the Carranza commander. Urbina turned to the American and started to question him, but found that the man could speak hardly any Spanish and was therefore unable to explain his actions or to defend himself.

It may be as well to note the first objections to the credibility of the story here. Bierce had been in Mexico almost two years, according to these dates. He was a man of the keenest intelligence and the quickest perceptions. He had also lived in California for many years, where Spanish names are common and Spanish is spoken by many. It seems hard to believe that such a man could have survived to the end of 1915 in such ignorance of the speech of the Mexican people as to be unable to explain what he was doing or to tell his name and who he was. It seems hard to believe, also, that Bierce would have been doing any gun-running or that he could have been alive twenty months after the Chihuahua letter without communicating with some one in the United States, without being found or heard of by the military and diplomatic agents who had then already been seeking him for more than a year. Also, it is necessary to explain how the man who went down to fight with Villa happened suddenly to be taking a gun and ammunition to Villa’s enemies, though this might be reconciled on the theory that Bierce had gone to fight with the Constitutionalists and had remained with them when Villa rebelled. But we may disregard these minor discrepancies as possibly capable of reconciliation or correction, and proceed further with the surgeon’s story.

Urbina, after questioning the captives for a little while, lost patience, concluded that they must be enemies at best and took no half measures. Life was cheap in northern Mexico in those days, judgments were swift and harsh, and Urbina was savage by nature. He took away the lives of these two with a wave of the hand. Immediate execution was their fate.

Ambrose Bierce and the unknown Mexican were led out and placed against the wall of a building, in this case a stable. Faced with the terrible sight, the Mexican fell to his knees and began to pray, refusing to rise and face his executioners. Bierce, following the example of his companion, also knelt but did not pray. Instead, he refused the cloth over his eyes and asked the soldiers not to mutilate his face. And so he died.

“I was much interested in the whole affair,” the nameless Mexican officer told Mr. Weeks, “and I asked my surgeon friend many questions. He did not know Bierce at all and did not know he was describing the death of some one in whom I was deeply concerned. But I had known Bierce well and asked the surgeon for detail after detail of the murdered American’s appearance, age, bearing, and manner. From what he told me, I have not the slightest doubt that this was Ambrose Bierce and that he died in this manner at the hands of the butcher, Urbina.”

Following the reports of Mr. Weeks, the San Francisco _Bulletin_ sent one of its special writers, Mr. U. H. Wilkins, down into Mexico, to further examine and confirm or discredit the report of the Mexican officer. Mr. Wilkins reported in March, 1920, confirming the Weeks report and adding what seems to be direct testimony. Mr. Wilkins says that he found a Mexican soldier who had been in Urbina’s command at Icamole and who was a member of the firing squad. This man showed Mr. Wilkins a picture of Bierce which, he said, he had taken from the pocket of the dead man just after the execution had taken place.

Still the doubt perseveres. No one has been able to find the grave of Bierce. The picture which the soldier said he took from the pocket of the dead man was not produced and has never, so far as I can discover, been shown.

Personally, I find in this material more elements for skepticism than for belief. Would Ambrose Bierce have been carrying a picture of himself about the wastes of Mexico? Perhaps, if it was on a passport or other credentials. In that case General Urbina must have known whom he was shooting. And would a guerilla leader, with much more of the brigand about him than the soldier, have shot a man like Bierce, who certainly was worth a fortune living and nothing dead? I must beg to doubt.

Nor do the other details ring true. If the captured Americano was Ambrose Bierce, one of two things must have happened. Either he would have resorted, to save his life, to invective and persuasiveness, for which he was remarkable, or he must have shrugged and been resigned. This Bierce was too old, too cynical, too tired of living and pretending for valedictory heroics. And he was too much of a soldier to wince. For this and another reason the story of his execution will not go down.

Unhappily, the tale of a distinguished victim of the firing squad asking that his face be not disfigured is a piece of standard Mexican romance. According to the tradition of that country, the Emperor Maximilian, when he faced his executioners at Queretaro, begged that he be shot through the body, so that his mother might look upon his face again. Hence, I suspect the soldierly Mexican _raconteur_ of having been guilty of a romantic anachronism, perhaps an unconscious substitution. If the man whom Urbina shot had been Ambrose Bierce, he would neither have knelt, nor made the pitiful gesture of asking the inviolateness of his face.

Adolphe de Castro, who won a lawsuit in 1926 compelling the publishers of a collected edition of Bierce’s writings to recognize him as the co-author of “The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter,” has within the year published a version of Bierce’s end[11] that has some of the same elements in it. Bierce, says de Castro, was shot by Villa’s soldiers at the guerilla leader’s command. Here is the story condensed:

[11] “Ambrose Bierce as He Really Was,” _The American Parade_, October, 1926.

Bierce was with Villa at the taking of Chihuahua in 1913. After this fight there was nothing for the novelist-soldier to do and he took to drinking _tequila_, a liquor which causes those who drink it any length of time to turn blue. (Sic!) Bierce had with him a peon who understood a little English and acted as valet and cup companion. When he was in his mugs Bierce talked too much, complained of inactivity and criticised Villa. One drunken night he suggested to the peon that they desert to Carranza. Someone overheard this prattle and carried it to Villa, who had the peon tortured till he confessed the truth. He was released and instructed to carry out the plan with the Gringo. That night, as they started to leave Chihuahua, the writer and his peon were overtaken by a squad, shot down “and left for the vultures.”

Though Vincent Starrett[12] records that Villa flew into a rage when questioned about Bierce, a reaction looked upon by some as confirming Villa’s guilt, others have pointed out objections that seem insuperable. The break between Carranza and Villa did not follow until a long time after the battle of Chihuahua, they point out, and Bierce must have been alive all the while without writing a letter or sending a word of news to anyone. Possible but improbable, is the verdict of those who knew him most intimately.

[12] “Ambrose Bierce,” by V. Starrett.

So, applying the critical acid to the whole affair, there is still the mystery, as dark as in the beginning. We may have our delight with the dramatic or poetic accounts of his end if that be our taste, but really we are no closer to any satisfactory solution than we were in 1914.

Bierce is dead, past doubt. That much needs no additional proof. His fierce spirit has traveled. His bitter pen will scrawl no more denunciations across the page; neither will he sit in his study weaving mysteries and ironies for the delectation of those who love abstraction as beauty, and doubt as something better than truth.

My own guess is that he started out to fight battles and shoulder hardships as he had done when a boy, somehow believing that a tough spirit would carry him through. Wounded or stricken with disease, he probably lay down in some pesthouse of a hospital, some troop train filled with other stricken men; or he may have crawled off to some water hole and died, with nothing more articulate than the winds and stars for witness.

XVI

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CENTURY

No account of disappearances under curious and romantic circumstances, or of the enigmatic fates of forthfaring men in our times, would approach completeness without some narration of one of the boldest and maddest projects ever undertaken by human beings, in many ways the crowning adventure of the nineteenth century. Particularly now, when a circumnavigation of the earth by airplane has been accomplished, when the Atlantic has been bridged by a dirigible flight, and men have flown over the North Pole in plane and airship, the heroic and pathetic story of Doctor Andrée and his attempt to reach the top of the world by balloon is of fresh and abiding interest.

No one who was not alive in the late nineties of the last century and of age to read and be thrilled, can have any conception of the wonder and excitement this man and his voyage caused, of the cloud of doubt and mystery which hung about his still unexplained end, of the rumors and tales that came out of the North year after year, of the expeditions that started out to solve the riddle, of the whole decade of slowly abating preoccupation with the terrible romance of this singular man and his undiscoverable end.

In the summer of 1895, at the International Geographical Congress in London, Doctor Salomon August Andrée, a noted engineer, and chief examiner of the Royal Swedish Patent Office in Stockholm, let it be known that he was planning for a flight to the pole in a balloon, and that active preparations were under way. At first the public regarded the whole thing with an interested incredulity, though geographers, meteorologists, geodesists, and some students of aëronautics had been discussing the possibilities of such a voyage for much longer than a generation, and many had expressed the belief in its feasibility. Sivel and Silbermann, of the University of Paris, had declared as early as 1870 that this was the practical way of attaining the pole.

Even so, they had not by long anticipated Doctor Andrée. His first inquiries into the possibility of such a flight had been made in the course of a voyage to the United States in 1876 to visit the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia. On shipboard he had made numerous observations of the winds and air currents, which led him to the belief that there was a general suction or drift of air toward the pole from the direction of the northern coast of Europe and from the pole southward along the Siberian or Alaskan coasts.

With this belief in mind, Andrée had gone back to Sweden and begun a series of experiments in ballooning. He built various gas bags and made a considerable number of voyages in them, on several occasions with nearly fatal results. Mishaps, however, did not daunt him, and he became, in the course of the following twenty years, perhaps the best versed aëronaut on earth. He was not, of course, an ordinary balloonist, but a scientific experimenter, busy with an attempt to work out a serious, and to him a practical, problem. In the early nineties Andrée succeeded in making a flight of four hundred kilometers in a comparatively small balloon, and it was on the observations taken in the course of this voyage that he based mathematical calculations which formed his guide in the polar undertaking.

If, as I have said, the first public announcement of the Andrée project was received by the rank and file of men as an entertaining, but impossible, speculation, there was a rapid change of mind in the course of the following months. News came that Andrée had opened a subscription for funds, and that the hundred thousand dollars he believed necessary had been quickly provided by the enthusiastic members of the Swedish Academy of Science, by King Oscar from his private purse, and by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of nitroglycerin and provider of the prizes which bear his name. Evidently this fellow meant business.

In the late spring of 1896 Andrée and a party of scientists and workmen, including two friends who had decided to make the desperate essay with him, sailed from Gothenburg in the little steamer _Virgo_ for Spitzbergen. They had on board a balloon made by Lachambre of Paris, the foremost designer of that day, with a gas capacity of more than six thousand cubic meters, the largest bag which had been constructed at that time. The gas container was of triple varnished silk, and there was a specially designed gondola, whose details are of surviving interest.

This compartment, in which three men hoped to live through such temperatures as might be expected in the air currents fanning the North Pole, was made of wicker, covered outside with a rubberized canvas and inside with oiled silk, these two substances being considered capable of making the big basket practically air and weather proof. The gondola was about six and one half feet long inside and about five feet wide. It contained a sleeping mattress for one, with provision for a second bed, though the plan was to keep two of the three men constantly on deck, while the third took two hours of sleep at a time. This basket was covered, to be sure, the top having a trapdoor or hatch, through which the voyagers could come up to the deck. Inside and outside the gondola, in various pockets and bags, were fixed the provisions and supplies, while the various nautical instruments, cameras, surveyors’ paraphernalia, and a patent cookstove hung among the ropes, or were fixed to the gondola by specially invented devices. Everything had been thought out in great detail, most of the apparatus had been designed for the occasion, and Andrée had enjoyed the benefit of advice from all the foremost flyers and scientific theorists in Europe. His was anything but a haphazard or ill-prepared expedition.

Toward the end of June, Andrée and his party landed on the obscure Danes Island in the Spitzbergen group, where he found a log cottage built some years before by Pike, the British bear and walrus hunter. Here a large octagonal building was thrown up to shelter the balloon from the fierce winds, while it was being inflated. Finally all was ready, the chemicals were put to work, and the great bag slowly filled with hydrogen. Everything was in shape for flying by the middle of July, but now various mishaps and delays came to foil the eager adventurer, the worst of all being the fact that the wind steadily refused to blow from the south, as Andrée had anticipated. He waited until the middle of August, and then returned somewhat crestfallen to Sweden, where he was received with that ready and heartbreaking ridicule which often greets a brave man set out upon some undertaking whose difficulties and perils the fickle and callous public little understands.

Andrée himself was nothing damped by his reverses, and even felt that he had learned something that would be of benefit. For one thing, he had the gas bag of his balloon enlarged to contain about two hundred thousand cubic feet, and made some changes in its coating, which was expected to prevent the seepage of the hydrogen, a problem which much more modern aircraft builders have had difficulty in meeting.

If the delay in Andrée’s sailing had lost him a little of the public’s confidence and alienated a few lay admirers, his prestige with scientific bodies had not suffered, and his popularity with the subscribers of his fund was undiminished. King Oscar again met the additional expenses with a subscription from his own funds, and Andrée was accordingly able to set out for the second essay in June of 1897. His goods and the reconstructed balloon were sent as far as Tromsoe by rail, and there loaded into the _Virgo_ and taken to Danes Island, accompanied by a small group of friends and interested scientists.

Almost at the last moment came a desertion, a happening that is looked upon by all explorers and adventurers as something of most evil omen. Doctor Ekholm, who had made the first trip to Danes Island and intended to be one of the three making the flight, had married in the course of the delay, the lady of his choice being fully aware of his perilous project. When it came time for him to start north in 1897, however, she had a not unnatural change of heart, and finally forced her husband to quit the expedition. Another man stepped into the gap without a day’s delay, and so the party started north.

The enlarged bag was attached to the gondola and its fittings, and the process of inflation began anew in that strange eight-sided building on that barren arctic island. The bag was fully distended at the end of the first week in July, and Andrée impatiently waited for just the right currents of air before casting off.

In those last few days of waiting a good deal of foreboding advice was given the daring aëronauts by the group of admirers who had made the voyage to Danes Island with them. It is even said that one of the leading scientists with the expedition took Andrée aside, spent a night with him, and tried to convince the man that his theories and calculations were mistaken; that the air currents were inconstant, and could not be depended on to sweep the balloon across the pole and down on the other side of the earthly ball; that very low temperatures at the pole might readily cause the hydrogen to shrink and thus bring the balloon to earth; and that the whole region was full of such doubts and surprises as to forbid the adventure.

To all this Andrée is said to have answered simply that he had made his decision and must stand by it.

Indeed, the balloonist’s plan seems to have been most thoroughly matured in his own mind. In twenty years of aëronautics he had worked out his ideas and theories in the greatest detail. He had not been blind to the problem of steering his machine, once it was in the air, but the plan of air rudders, or a type of construction that might lend itself to guidance through the air, had evidently not struck him as feasible, and was not brought to any kind of success until several years later under Santos Dumont. Yet Andrée was prepared to steer his balloon after a fashion. His gondola was, as already said, oblong, with a front and back. The front was provided with two portholes fitted with heavy glass, through which the explorer hoped to make observations in the course of his flight. As a practical balloonist, he knew that, once his car was in the air, the great bag was almost certain to begin spinning and to travel through the air at various speeds, increasing the rate of its giddy rotations as its rate of travel grew greater. That being so, the idea of front portholes and a prow for the gondola seemed something of a vanity, but Andrée had his own ideas as to this.

The balloonist explorer did not intend to ascend to any great heights, or to subject himself to the rotating action which is one of the unpleasantnesses and perils of ballooning. He had fixed to the stern of his gondola three heavy ropes, each about one hundred yards long, which descended from his craft, like elongated flaxen pigtails. In the center of each hundred-yard length of rope was a thinner spot or safety escapement, by means of which the lower half of any one of the ropes could be let go. And near the gondola was a second catch for releasing all of the rope or ropes.

These singular contrivances constituted Andrée’s steering gear and antiwhirling apparatus. His intention was to fly at an elevation of somewhat less than one hundred yards, thus leaving the ends of his three ropes trailing out behind him on the ice, or in the water of any open sea he might cross. The tail of his craft was expected to keep his gondola pointed forward by means of its dragging effect. Realizing that one or all of the ropes might become entangled in some manner with objects on the ice surface, and that such a mishap might wreck the gondola, Andrée had provided the escapements to let go the lower half or all the ropes.

Just what the man expected to do, may be read from his own articles in the New York and European papers. He hoped to fly low over a great part of the arctic regions, make photographs and maps, study the land and water conformations, pick up whatever meteorological, geological, geographical, and other information that came his way, cross the pole, if he could, and find his way back on the other side of the earth to some point within reach of inhabited places. Andrée said that he might be carried the seven hundred-odd miles from Danes Island to the pole in anywhere from two days to two weeks, depending on the force and direction of the surface wind. He did not expect to consume more than three weeks to a month for the entire trip, but his ship carried condensed emergency provisions for three years.

While a widely known French balloonist, who had planned a rival expedition and then abandoned it, had intended to take along a team of dogs, Andrée’s balloon had not sufficient lifting power or accommodations for anything of this kind, and he was content to carry two light collapsible sleds on which he expected to carry the provisions for his homeward trek after the landing.

When a correspondent asked Andrée, just before he set out, what provisions he had made for a mishap, and just what he would do if his balloon were to come down in open water, the explorer showed his spirit in the tersest of responses: “Drown.”

Yet, for all his cold courage and dauntless determination, it is not quite certain in what spirit Andrée set forth. It has often been said that he was a stubborn, self-willed, and self-esteeming enthusiast, who had worked up a vast confidence in himself and an overweening passion for his project through his flying and experimenting. Others have pictured him as an infatuated scientific theorist, bound to prove himself right, or die in the attempt. And there is still the other possibility that the man was goaded into his terrifying attempt, in spite of his own late misgivings, by the ridicule of the public and the skepticism of some critics. He felt that he would be a laughingstock before the world and a discredit to his eminent backers if he failed to set out, it is said. But of this there is no evidence, and it remains a fact that Andrée’s conclusions were sufficiently plausible to engage the attention and credence of a considerable number of scientists, and his enthusiasm bright enough to attach two others to him in his great emprise.

In the middle of the afternoon of July 11, 1897, Andrée got into the gondola of his car, tested the ropes and other apparatus, and was quickly joined by his two assistants, Nils Strindberg and K. H. F. Frankel, the latter having been chosen to take the place of the defected Ekholm.

At a little before four o’clock the cables were cast off, after Andrée had sent his farewell message, “a greeting to friends and countrymen at home.” The great bag hesitated and careened a few moments. Then it shot up to a height of several hundred feet, turned slowly about, with its three ropes dragging first on the ice and then in the water of the sea, and set out majestically for the northwest, carried by a steady slow breeze.

The little group of men on the desolate arctic island stood late through the afternoon, with eyes straining into the distance, where the balloon hung, an ever-diminishing ball against the northern horizon. What doubts and terrors assailed that watching and speculating crowd, what burnings of the heart and moistenings of the eyes overcame its members, as they watched the intrepid trio put off upon their unprecedented adventure, the subsequent accounts reveal. But the imagination of the reader will need no promptings on this score. A little more than an hour the ship of the air remained in sight. Then, at last, it floated off into the mist, and the doubt from which it never emerged.

Doctor Andrée had devised two methods of sending back word of his situation and progress. For early communication he carried a coop of homing pigeons. In addition, he had provided himself with a series of specially designed buoys, lined with copper and coated with cork. They were hollow inside and so fashioned as to contain a written message and preserve it indefinitely from the sea water, like a manuscript in a bottle. To the top of each of these buoys was fixed a small staff, with a little metal Swedish flag. The plan was to release one of the small buoys, as each succeeding degree of latitude was crossed, thus marking out, by the longitude observations as well, the precise route taken by the balloon in its drift toward or away from the pole.

About a week after Andrée’s departure one of the carrier pigeons returned to Danes Island, with this message in the little cylinder attached to its legs:

“July 13, 10.30 P. M.--82.20 north latitude; 15.5 east longitude. Good progress toward north. All goes well on board. This message is the third by carrier pigeon.

“ANDRÉE.”

The earlier birds and any the balloonists may have released after the night of the thirteenth, about fifty-five hours out from Danes Island, must have been overcome by the distance and the excruciating cold. None except the one mentioned ever reached either Danes Island or any cotes in the civilized world.

All over the earth, men stirred by the vivid newspaper accounts of Andrée’s daring undertaking, waited with something like bated breath for further news of the adventuring three. It was not expected that the brave Swedes could reach civilization again, even with every turn of luck in their favor, in less than two months. Even six months or a year were elapsed periods not considered too long, for the chances were that the balloon would land in some far northern and difficult spot, out of which the three men would not be able to make their way before winter. That being so, they would be forced to camp and wait for spring. Then, very likely, they could find their way to some outpost and bring back the tidings of their monumental feat.

Meantime the world got to work on its preparations. The Czar, foreseeing the possibility that Andrée and his two companions might alight somewhere in upper Siberia, sent a communication by various agencies to the wild inhabitants of his farthest northern domains, explaining what a balloon was, who and what Andrée and his men were, and admonishing the natives to treat any such wayfarers with kindness and respect, aiding them in every way and sending them south as speedily as possible, the special guests of the imperial government and the great white father. In other northern countries similar precautions were taken, with the result that the news of Andrée and his expedition was circulated far up beyond the circle, among the Indians and adventurers of Alaska, the trappers and hunters of Labrador and interior Canada, the Greenland Eskimos, and scores of other tribes and peoples.

But the fall of 1897 passed without any further sign from Andrée, and 1898 died into its winter, with the pole voyagers still unreported. By this time there was a feeling of general uneasiness, but silvered among the optimistic with some shine of hope. It was strange that no further messages of any kind had been received. Another significant thing was that one of the copper-and-cork buoys had been picked up in the arctic current--empty. Still, it might have been dropped by accident, and it was yet possible that Andrée had reached a safe, if distant, anchorage somewhere, and he might turn up the following summer.

Alas, the open season of 1899 brought nothing except one or two more of the empty buoys, and the definite feeling of despair. Expeditions began to organize for the purpose of starting north in search of the balloonists, and Walter Wellman began talking of a pole flight in a dirigible balloon, but such projects were slow in getting under way, and the summer of 1900 came along with nothing accomplished.

On the thirty-first of August of this latter year, however, another, if not very satisfactory, bit of news was picked up. It was, once more, one of the buoys from the balloon. This time, to the delight of the finders, there was a message inclosed, which read, in translation:

“Buoy No. 4. The first to be thrown out. July 11, 10 P. M., Greenwich mean time.

“All well up to now. We are pursuing our course at an altitude of about two hundred and fifty meters. Direction at first northerly, ten degrees east; later northerly, forty-five degrees east. Four carrier pigeons were dispatched at 5.40 P.M. They flew westward. We are now above the ice, which is very cut up in all directions. Weather splendid. In excellent spirits.

“ANDRÉE, STRINDBERG, FRANKEL.”

“Above the clouds, 7.45 Greenwich mean time.”

It will be noted at once that the body of this communication was written the night after the departure from Danes Island, and the postscript probably at seven forty-five o’clock the next morning, so that it must have been put overboard nearly thirty-nine hours before the single returning pigeon was released. No light of hope in such a communication.

The North was by this time resonant with rumors and fables. Almost every traveler who came down from the boreal regions brought some fancy or report, sometimes supporting the product of his or another’s imagination with scraps of what purported to be evidence. A prospector came down from the upper Alaskan gold claims with a bit of tarred and oiled cloth which had been given him by the chief of some remote Indian tribe. Was it not a part of the covering of the Andrée balloon? For a time there was a thrill of credulity. Then the thing turned out to be hide, instead of varnished silk, and so the tale came to an evil end.

In the spring of 1900 a report reached Berlin that Andrée and his party had been killed by Eskimos in upper Canada, when they descended from the clouds and started to shoot caribou. But why go into details? Month after month came other reports of all kinds, most of them of similar import. They came from all points, beginning at Kamtchatka and running around the world to the Alaskan side of Bering Strait, and they were all more or less fiction.