(no subject)
From the moment the three were grounded on July 14, Strindberg's highly specialized cartographic camera, which had been brought to map the region from the air, became instead a means of recording daily life in the icescape and the constant danger and drudgery of the trek. Strindberg took about 200 photos with his seven-kilogram (15 lb) camera over the course of the three months they spent on the pack ice, one of the most famous being his picture of Andrée and Frænkel contemplating the fallen Eagle (see image above). Andrée and Frænkel also kept meticulous records of their experiences and geographical positions, Andrée in his "main diary", Frænkel in his meteorological journal. Strindberg's own stenographic diary was much more personal in content, and included his own general reflections on the expedition, as well as several messages to his fiancée Anna.
On September 12, the explorers resigned themselves to wintering on the ice and camped on a large floe, letting the ice take them where it would, "which", writes Kjellström, "it had really been doing all along" (p. 47). Drifting rapidly due south towards Kvitøya, they hurriedly built a winter "home" on the floe against the increasing cold, with walls made of water-reinforced snow to Strindberg's design (see plan, below, left). Observing the rapidity of their drift, Andrée recorded his hopes that they might get far enough south to feed themselves entirely from the sea. However, the floe began to break up directly under the hut on October 2 from the stresses of pressing against Kvitøya, and they were forced to bring their stores on to the island itself, which took a couple of days. "Morale remains good", reports Andrée at the very end of the coherent part of his diary, which ends: "With such comrades as these, one ought to be able to manage under practically any circumstances whatsoever." It is inferred from the incoherent and badly damaged last pages of Andrée's diary that the three men were all dead within a few days of moving onto the island.