(Advanced) A Journey to the North

The forgotten story a perilous one way journey to the furthest ends of the earth.

Link to original article:

Journey to the North


Language task version:

© SCOTT POLAR RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Adjectives: 

perilous   ill-fated     forgotten     howling     surreal    mad      dangerous     brave    furthest

This is the  _______ story of a  _____ (and perhaps slightly ______) scientist and his two men, who made a  _______ one way journey to the   _______ ends of the earth. And if an expedition to the North Pole in itself wasn’t  _______ enough, they decided they would do it in a hydrogen balloon. Thirty-three years after their vessel lifted off into the _______ Arctic winds, the remains of their last camp was discovered, along with five exposed rolls of film documenting their ________ and  _________  adventure into the unknown.

© PERSPEKTIVET MUSEUM

Cloze:

Salomon Andrée was a Swedish balloonist, engineer, physicist, polar explorer– and before all ____ , he was a janitor. ___ a young man, he’d just graduated ____ a degree in mechanical engineering when he travelled to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and found employment as a janitor at the Swedish Pavilion. It was _____ that he met the American balloonist John Wise, and ___ began his lifelong fascination with balloon travel. 

Nouns:

pressure    centre    founder     scheme     exploration   subject   interest   celebrity  government

Back in Sweden, by the age of 43, Andrée was a national ______; the man at the ______ of a daring polar ________ to fly over the North Pole, which was the _______ of enormous _______, seen as a brave and patriotic ______. He had the backing of the Swedish _______, the royal family and the ______ of the Nobel prize himself, Alfred Nobel. (No_____).

© PERSPEKTIVET MUSEUM

Verbs:

On July 11, 1897, Andrée and two fellow countrymen s___ o___ to l____ their hydrogen balloon n____ the Örnen (the Eagle), which h__ b____ m_____ in Paris – a hub for hot air balloon innovation (the first aerostatic flight in history t___ o___ in Versailles).

The French manufacturer h__ en____ the balloon w___ b__ a___ to survive the brutal temperatures of the Arctic and Andrée intended to st___ the craft with long ropes that would dr__ on the ice to pr_____ some control.

PHOTOCHROM PRINT MADE OF THE HANGAR AND BALLOON IN 1897

A special hangar for inflating the balloon was shipped to the launch point on Danes Island, a Norwegian territory 400 miles north of Scandanavia.

INSIDE THE HANGAR BEFORE LAUNCH

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And they were off! But almost immediately, trouble began…

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Adverbials and participle clauses:

having made promises      Moments after       during which time      At that height            never to rise again        despite knowing             We can never really know why 

___________ take-off they lost two of the three steering ropes, which weighed half a ton each, causing the balloon to shoot up to high altitude without the extra weight. __________, the seams froze and started leaking gas, which is when Andrée, an experienced balloonist, engineer and physicist, should have made the call to land at once and call off the expedition. _________________he didn’t, but with an entire nation back home counting on him to succeed, _____________ and getting this far, perhaps it was his pride that kept his expedition going, ___________ so early on that the flight had no chance of success.

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The balloon drifted for three days, _________ the men got no sleep, before crash landing into the arctic ice, ____________.

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS OF EXPEDITION PHOTOGRAPHER NILS STRINDBERG © TEKNISKA MUSEET

© TEKNISKA MUSEET

Cloze:

___ the wireless radio ___ been invented, Andrée would ___ had the chance to alert base, “the Eagle has landed” (long ___ Neil Armstrong got to say it when he landed a space shuttle on the moon). But calling for back-up was ___ an option ___ the three men, who ____ found _______ stranded in the middle of the North Pole ___ a very long walk home.

© TEKNISKA MUSEET

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS OF EXPEDITION PHOTOGRAPHER NILS STRINDBERG © TEKNISKA MUSEET

© TEKNISKA MUSEET

Add the necessary punctuation:

for two months they survived with the emergency equipment on board including a tent sleds guns snowshoes skis and a small boat their food supplies were plentiful and they even had crates of champagne port and beer donated by sponsors after the first week they began ditching the non-essential food supplies and equipment that overloaded their sleds

Insert these words in the correct place: 

towards    would be    instead  where

They hunted for seals, walruses and polar bears while marching a camp an emergency food depot waiting for them.

Scrambled words:

touughhrot their journey, the expedition’s photographer, Neil Strindberg, used his hlyigh spaliseecid cartographic camera, igillyorna intended to map the egiorn from the air, but now served as their avisul diary, documenting their daily sruglegt to reach safety.

NILS STRINDBERG’S CAMERA, DISCOVERED IN THE ICE IN 1933

Word form:

All three men also  KEEP  journals; Strindberg’s was more    PERSON   and Andrée and Frænkel’s were more meticulous in    RECORD   their geographical   MOVE  , which has helped us track the party’s movements    LEAD   up to their deaths (all three diaries were    COVER   from the ice in 1930).

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS OF EXPEDITION PHOTOGRAPHER NILS STRINDBERG © TEKNISKA MUSEET

© TEKNISKA MUSEET

Cloze: 

_____ their lack of experience as explorers __ foot, they managed to get pretty ___. You can see ___ far they travelled after the crash on the above map (the dotted line ____ their journey south __ foot).

At ___ point, they even hurriedly built a winter “home” _____ the increasing cold. Pictured ____ is Strindberg’s plan for their winter home on the ice floe, used only for a few days _____ the ice broke up under it. ___ contained, shown from top to bottom, a bedroom with their triple sleeping bag, a room with a table, and a storeroom.

They never ____ it to any of the food depots, but reached another small island called Kvitøya. It was concluded ____ the last pages of Andrée’s diary that _____ a few days, one of the men died and was buried, and _____ after, Andrée and his last comrade, froze to ____ in their tents. Morale had _______ high to the very end. “With such comrades,” wrote Andrée in their last days, “one _____ be able to manage under, I may say, ___ circumstances.”

THE DOOMED EXPEDITION CREW: NILS STRINDBERG, KNUT FRÆNKEL, S. A. ANDRÉE.

Write the missing sections of the sentence using common sense:

No one back home had ______________________________ to the explorers – only that the expedition had been lost. The story became an urban legend, shrouded in mystery. False and disrespectful _____________________ accused indigenous peoples of the Arctic of being savages, guilty of _____________________.

REMAINS OF THE THREE EXPLORERS ARE BROUGHT STRAIGHT FROM THE SHIP THROUGH THE CENTER OF STOCKHOLM IN 1930

Assemble these words into units to fill the gaps:

It   burial   until   permanent    exhibitions   wasn’t   glaciers  studying  a ceremonial

_______________ thirty years later that two Norwegian ships  _____________ found the remains of the Andrée expedition. Their bodies were sent back to Sweden for ____________ and their belongings from the expedition found homes in museums and __________________.

SCHOOLCHILDREN AT A 1930 EXHIBITION OF THE KVITØYA FINDS

The photographs from the recovered rolls of film can now be seen in the Nordic Museum in Stockholm.

LEFT: A SWEDISH ANDRÉE BOARDGAME FROM 1896

Match the sentence halves:

A. Salamon Andrée was a man who preferred to face death than to face failure,
B. But Andrée’s hot air balloon journey to the North Pole is an impossible story,
C. So here’s to our mad scientist du jour, Salamon Andrée,

1. one that you wouldn’t believe outside of a Jules Verne novel.
2. who dreamed of the impossible and kept exploring to the very end.
3. and his foolhardy polar expedition has been overshadowed by history’s more successful adventures.