Salomon August Andre. The Mystery of Solomon Andre's Expedition

Solomon August Andre was born on October 18, 1854 in the small Swedish town of Grenna into a large family of a pharmacist (Andre's family had five sons and two daughters).

Under the guidance of his mother, Solomon learned to read and write, then entered the Grenn high school, and in 1865 moved to the high school in Jonkoping. After finishing five classes, he left for Stockholm, where he completed a preparatory course and entered the Royal Higher Technical School (Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan). Andre chose physics as his specialty, in the study of which Professor Robert Dalander helped him. In 1874, after graduating from school, Solomon Andre began working as a draftsman at the Göransson mechanical factory in Stockholm.

Two years later, the young physicist went to Philadelphia (USA), where, with the help of the Swedish Consul General, he got a job in the Swedish department of the 1876 World's Fair. flights.

Six months later, seriously ill, Andre left America and returned to Sweden. For some time he worked as an engineer, then he acquired a mechanical workshop. However, things were not going well in the workshop, and André was forced to sell it. With the help of Professor Dahlander, André obtained a position as an assistant in physics at the Royal Higher Technical School.

In 1882, Sweden took part in the exploration of the Arctic under the program of the First International Polar Year, organizing a polar observatory at Cap Thordsen (Svalbard). An employee of the Meteorological Society in Stockholm, Nils Gustav Ekholm, was appointed head of the observatory. Solomon Andre was also enrolled among the participants in the expedition, who was entrusted with making observations on atmospheric electricity and terrestrial magnetism.

The expedition arrived in Svalbard in July 1882, and on August 15 regular meteorological observations began at Cape Thordson. Andre was actively involved in the work. According to Eckholn, the observations on electricity organized at the station by a young physicist were exemplary. Thanks to the energy and ingenuity of André, research was carried out without interruptions due to technical problems; about 15,000 observations were made during the year of the station's operation. On August 23, 1883, the observatory completed work on the program of the First IPY, and André returned to Stockholm.

In 1885 he was appointed head of the technical department of the Patent Office. While in this position, he was able to achieve some improvements in the laws on inventors, as well as initiate the organization of the Swedish Society of Inventors.

Andre did not forget his youthful hobby - aeronautics. In order to become better acquainted with the manufacture of balloons, he traveled several times to France. In 1893, Andre received a small amount of money from a charitable organization to buy a balloon. Andre made his first ascent on the Svea balloon in Stockholm on July 15, 1893. The novice aeronaut carefully prepared for this event, and during the flight he studied the meteorological conditions at different altitudes, the nature of air currents, air composition, etc. In August, he made a second flight , in October - the third. This flight almost became the last - the balloon was blown away by a strong wind, and only ten hours later Andre was able to land on a deserted island in the Finnish skerries.

In total, in 1893-1895. Andre made nine flights in the Svea balloon, lasting a total of more than 40 hours. During this time, the balloon flew about 1500 km, it reached its highest ascent in flight on April 7, 1894. On November 29, 1894, during the eighth flight, Andre set a distance record - in 3 hours 45 minutes the balloon flew from Gothenburg to Gotland, covering a distance of 400 km. André made his last flight on the Svea on March 17, 1895.

Flights on the Svea were not only training for Andre, the aeronautical enthusiast was constantly improving the ball: for the first time he used a guidedrop dragging along the ground in combination with a retractable control sail, which made it possible to force the ball to deviate from the direction of the wind, used an explosive device when landing, which gave the ability to release gas from the ball in one to two minutes. During all the flights, Andre carried out scientific work, performing a total of more than 400 scientific observations.

In 1894, at one of the meetings of the Swedish Society of Geographers and Anthropologists, Andre met the famous polar traveler E. Nordenskiöld and told him about his cherished dream - to undertake a scientific expedition to the Arctic in a balloon. Nordenskiöld approved André's idea and promised his help in organizing such an enterprise.

Solomon Andre first presented his plan for organizing an air expedition to the North Pole on February 13, 1895 at a meeting of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, and on February 15 he repeated his report at the Swedish Geographical Society.

According to Andre's plan, it was necessary to build a balloon capable of lifting three people, provisions, appliances and tools (the total carrying capacity of such a balloon was to be about 3 tons). This ball was planned to be made of a dense material so that it could stay in the air for at least 30 days. Andre proposed to fill the balloon with gas directly in the polar region. André's experience gained while flying the Svea led him to suggest that the balloon be fitted with sails and guides for maximum control.

Andre planned to start from Svalbard and cover the distance to the Pole (about 1200 km) in two days. It was proposed to take food for four months, and in the event of a forced wintering, the expedition members had to replenish their supplies by hunting and fishing.

The balloon expedition plan proposed by André was widely discussed in Swedish public circles. The organization of such an expedition required significant funds, for which a collection of donations was announced. The first of the donors was the engineer Alfred Nobel, who contributed half of the required money. The rest of the funds were provided by King Oscar II, the industrialist Dixon and Professor Retzius.

The balloon for Andre's polar expedition was built in Paris. During its construction, all the latest achievements of science and technology were taken into account.

In June 1896, the head of the expedition, Solomon Andre, the meteorologist and astronomer Nils Ekholm, and the physicist and photographer Nils Strindberg were taken to Svalbard on the cargo ship Virgo. It was planned that the expedition would begin in August, but due to unfavorable weather, the flight was delayed for a long time, and at the end of August, Andre decided to postpone the expedition to the next year.

Returning in the fall of 1896 to the Patent Office in Stockholm, Andre continued to prepare for the expedition. The place of Nils Ekholm in the group was taken by a young engineer Knut Frenkel. On May 18, 1897, the gunboat "Svenskund", provided by the Swedish government at the disposal of the expedition, left Gothenburg. On board were a balloon, a gondola and an apparatus for extracting gas. At the end of May, the boat anchored off the coast of Svalbard. Members of the expedition also arrived there on the ship "Virgo".

On July 11, 1897, at 1:46 p.m., the balloon, which the aeronauts called the Eagle, took off from Danes Island. During the ascent, three guide drops broke off, and the ball became almost uncontrollable. Driven by a tailwind, the "Eagle" flew in a northeasterly direction for about 480 km, then rising to a considerable height, then descending almost to the surface and hitting the ice. On July 14, Andre made the decision to terminate the flight. The ball landed on the ice 800 km from the goal of the expedition - the North Pole.

After a week of preparation for a hiking trip, on July 22, the travelers set off towards Cape Flora (Franz Josef Land), where the expedition's food warehouse was located. The way through drifting ice was extremely difficult, it was necessary to overcome cracks and leads, to get over hummocks. Despite the lack of food, cold and fatigue, during this campaign, brave researchers did not stop scientific research: they made astronomical determinations of their location, performed meteorological observations, and entered descriptions of the animals they met in diaries. At the end of September, the expedition members reached the southern coast of Bely Island, set up a tent on it and started building a house.

After 33 years, on August 6, 1930, the last camp of Solomon Andre's expedition was discovered by the crew of the Norwegian vessel Bratvog. Documents found at the site of the death of the expedition suggest that Andre, Frenkel and Strindberg died in mid-October 1897.

The remains of the brave aeronauts were delivered to Sweden in October 1930 on the gunboat Svensksund, accompanied by an honorary escort.

In honor of Solomon Andre, the northern part of the island of Western Svalbard is named Andre Land.

M.V. Ducalskaya,

Deputy Director for Science RSMAA

The Mystery of Solomon Andre's Expedition

The day of August 6, 1930 turned out to be clear and warm on White Island. The sea was calm, and the motionless icebergs surrounding this small island covered with a powerful ice cap seemed to be asleep. Sunlight flooded the glacier, and the island seemed transparent. Only in the southwestern and northeastern parts of the island could be seen small strips of gently sloping rocky land. The deepest silence reigned around. The captain of the Norwegian fishing schooner "Bratvaag" ("Bratvaag") Gunnar Horn, puffing on a smoking pipe, slowly examined the easternmost island of Svalbard.

That morning, his sailors went ashore and, led by skipper Peder Eliassen, began hunting for walruses. Unexpectedly, a couple of hours after the start of the hunt, the skipper hastily returned to the ship.

Mr. Horn, - breathing heavily, he said to the captain of the schooner, - it seems to me that our guys found the lost camp. Take a look at this. - And Eliassen handed the captain a shabby and wet notebook in a black leatherette cover. On its very first page one could make out: "... a sledge journey of 1897."

How did it happen? - asked the captain and heard the skipper's chilling story.

In search of fresh water, two of our sailors - Karl Tusvik and Olaf Salen - in the rocky tundra accidentally stumbled upon a canvas boat that had melted out of the snow, loaded to the brim with things. Crates and tins of food, the Swedish flag and empty sledges lay in disarray nearby. About two hundred meters away from her, a human corpse could be seen frozen into the ice in a warm jacket with a monogram in the form of the letter “A”, in which this diary lay on his chest, well preserved, despite the destructive effects of moisture. The upper part of the body and the head were missing - apparently, bears have been here. Nearby lay a gun with a barrel sunk into the snow, a rusty primus stove half-filled with kerosene, and a saucepan with leftover food. Approximately 30 meters from the remains of the first traveler, under a small pile of stones, the remains of another person could be seen. This corpse was laid directly on the ground and covered with stones. Legs in Lappish kangas stuck out from under the stones, and further on, the left shoulder was visible. The shoulder blade of the deceased was lying on the stones: it is clear that polar bears were in charge here too.

Later it was possible to make out that the leader of the polar air expedition, Solomon Andre, was the first to be found. The second, according to the marks on his clothes, was identified as the youngest of the aeronauts - Niels Strindberg. More than a hundred different items of equipment were found, each of which Horn meticulously entered into the inventory. When the sensational news of the fate of the Swedish expedition, which mysteriously disappeared 33 years ago, quickly flew around Norway, another Norwegian fishing vessel, the Polar Bear, landed another search party on the White Island, in which the photojournalist Knut Stubbendorf had the task of photographing Andre's camp and its surroundings.

The Norwegian photojournalist had no idea what a discovery was waiting for him in the midst of the autumn snow that continued to melt. He managed to find the third member of the expedition - Knut Frenkel. Nearby lay the flight magazines of the aeronauts and several reels of photographic film, which they even managed to develop. And here's what the finds said.

André's polar flight plan came to light in March 1894. Many Swedes knew well this restless engineer, who tried in every possible way to reach the North Pole in a balloon.

Solomon A. Andre was born in the south of Sweden in the small town of Gren in 1854. At the age of 20, he graduated from the Higher Technical School and worked as a designer at a mechanical plant in Stockholm for two years. In 1876 he traveled to Philadelphia, where at the World's Fair he met and befriended the experienced aeronaut Wise, who taught the young Swede the basics of aeronautics. In 1882, Andre took part in the work of the International Scientific Association for the meteorological and physical research of the polar regions in Svalbard. Three years later, Solomon André was appointed head of the technical department of the Patent Office. And in the years 1893-1895, he made 9 flights alone in the Svea balloon.

In the break between these flights, in the spring of 1894, Solomon Andre shared his plans with the famous polar explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, who immediately invited him to speak with them at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.

In his speech, Andre pointed out the futility of many sleigh and sea expeditions into the depths of the Arctic desert. Courageous travelers, at best, disappeared into the ice for a long time and starved, and at worst, they were wrecked, lost ships and often died from scurvy. “But there is a means, as if specially created to reach the North Pole,” Andre said. - It's a balloon. On such a balloon you can fly through the icy deserts. The young engineer intended to fly to Svalbard in 6 days, and then across the pole to Russian Siberia or the Bering Strait, where whaling or hunting ships could be found.

The Swedish academicians, after a short discussion, approved André's plan. Disagreements arose only on the question of possible wind directions in the circumpolar regions. In those years, information about the weather and winds in the Arctic was extremely scarce: more guesses and assumptions. And then Andre decided to use a balloon with a system of three sails, which helped him maintain a given course in flights on the Svea.

The necessary funds were collected in a few months. Large sums were donated by the "dynamite king" Alfred Nobel and the famous polar philanthropist Baron Oscar Dixon. A balloon with a volume of almost 5,000 cubic meters was made by the French inventor Henri Lachambre, a prominent specialist in the field of aeronautics. The balloon could fly with three travelers and with all their equipment for more than 30 days. The upper part of the aircraft shell was made of three layers of lacquered silk. In the gondola, woven from Spanish reed, known for its exceptional elasticity, there was a working, it is also a sleeping compartment, as well as a photographic laboratory. Andre was going to do photographic mapping and develop the collected material right in the air. He planned to spend most of the time on the roof of the gondola, protected from the wind by canvas panels. And only in case of severe cold - go down to the gondola. Food and water supplies were placed in a bearing ring around the ball. Three ropes-gaydrops of different lengths were supposed to act as a ballast, show the flight altitude and automatically hold the ball at a height of 150-200 meters: if it began to descend, then the ropes fell to the ground and thereby lightened the weight of the entire air system. Andre was going to send messages to the mainland using carrier pigeons marked with a special brand and drop cork buoys with notes. No less original was the problem of cooking in flight. The cooking apparatus was suspended several meters below the gondola and remotely actuated. Combustion was controlled using a mirror.

In the summer of 1896, the expedition went to the Danish Island, located in the northeast of Spitsbergen, about 1000 kilometers from the North Pole (according to other sources, Virgo Bay, the northwest coast of Spitsbergen, was chosen as the base). A hangar for a balloon was built here. Many Swedish enthusiasts wanted to fly with Solomon Andre, but he chose only two as companions: twenty-year-old Nils Strindberg, an excellent photographer and physicist, and meteorologist Nils Ekholm. Strindberg was born in Stockholm in 1872. He graduated from a real school and then from the Higher School, where he later taught physics. In preparation for the flight, he went to Paris in the spring of 1896 and made 6 flights there.

But in 1896 the flight did not take place. Without waiting for a fair wind on the island, Andre's group returned to Sweden. On the way back, the future Swedish aeronauts met with Fridtjof Nansen, who had just returned from the legendary drift on the Fram. During the meeting, the Norwegian traveler declared that he had studied the Arctic air currents enough to "boldly doubt the success of the air expedition to the Pole." In the fall, Ekholm left the expedition, who came to the conclusion that the balloon did not meet the necessary safety requirements and the flight was obviously doomed.

Failures did not change Andre's desire to reach the North Pole in a balloon, and the following summer, together with Strindberg, he again went to Svalbard. Instead of Ekholm, the 27-year-old engineer Knut Frenkel was invited to the expedition.

At the end of June, the balloon, proudly named "Eagle", was assembled and filled with hydrogen. On July 11, the long-awaited strong south wind finally blew. Short goodbye. Happy flight wishes. And - the sailors cut the ropes holding the ball near the ground.

The "Eagle" soars up easily, and is irresistibly pulled by the wind right above the waves of the bay. Soon it turns into a barely noticeable dot. Four days later, the skipper of the Norwegian ship "Alken" shot a pigeon persistently circling over the ship, but just as stubbornly not landing on its deck. Andre's first note was tied to his paw, which did not cause concern: the ball confidently flew 250 kilometers, although to the southeast. But this was the first and last news from the Swedish aeronauts.

A year passed, and there was no news from the Swedes. A few years later, several cork buoys from the Orel washed up on the shores of Iceland and Norway, but only two of them contained notes by Andre indicating the coordinates of the flight. A buoy was discovered in King Charles Land, which Solomon Andre planned to drop only at the North Pole. And it turned out to be empty, which immediately led to the idea that the buoys were dumped in an emergency along with ballast. But why did travelers begin to dump ballast?

From time to time, the most incredible speculations about the fate of the Swedish air expedition appeared in the press. So, the crew of the fishing vessel "Salmvik" saw in August 1897 off the coast of Greenland a balloon that flew at an altitude of 200 meters and quickly flew to the west. In 1910, the Eskimos living on the shores of Lancaster Strait told the Canadian missionary Turcotill about a white "house" entwined with ropes, which allegedly fell from the sky on the shores of Hudson Strait, six days from Fort Churchill. In this house were three white people who tried to find the way to the nearest housing, but later died. There were others. However, none of them was confirmed, and the disappeared Swedes could not be found in the places indicated by the "eyewitnesses". It turned out to be a hoax and ... Andre's diary, allegedly found in the Olonets province by the St. Petersburg publisher Kolotilov immediately after the disappearance of the Eagle. By 1930, Solomon André's expedition was largely forgotten. It seemed that the first three polar aeronauts were forever lost in the white silence of the Arctic deserts. But the terrible discovery of Norwegian sailors from the fishing schooner Bratvaag, who landed on the shore of the White Island, led by the skipper Eliassen, revealed the mystery of the disappearance of Solomon Andre's expedition.

Engineer Andre kept his real diary especially carefully. Before he died, he wrapped it in a sweater and hid it under his jacket. His pencil notes are perfectly preserved and tell what cruel tests fell on the lot of the courageous team of "Eagle".

Immediately after the launch of the balloon, the flight did not go at all as Solomon Andre had dreamed. First, the guides were lost, and later the sail control mechanism failed. And the "Eagle" turned into a free-floating balloon. But Andre and his team continued to fight for their dream.

Having lost part of the precious ballast, the "Eagle" again rose to about 600 meters. Strindberg began to photograph the drifting ice field, on which the balloon almost landed. Then a wooden box was dropped over the island of Vogelsange, where, in addition to some expedition items, Solomon Andre's farewell letter to his bride was enclosed. And the Swedish travelers flew on.

The Eagle was in flight for a little over 60 hours, during which time the capricious arctic winds carried it in various courses between 70 and 80 degrees north latitude and 10 and 30 degrees east longitude. The ball continued to lose height, and in order to reduce its weight, in addition to ballast, travelers began to throw away personal items, including the aforementioned cork buoys.

On the morning of July 14, all the ballast was thrown overboard, but the condition of the Eagle left no hope of taking off beyond the clouds, where the sun could melt the ice, heat the gas and increase lift. The aeronauts released the gas from the shell of the balloon and landed on the ice floe. There are still at least 800 kilometers to the North Pole, but at the last stage, the flight became a real nightmare for Andre's team. During these hours of flight, he hit the ice several times, the gondola, on the outside of which a white fur coat had formed, cracked terribly at each impact. It looked like she was about to crumble. These consequences were clearly not foreseen by engineer Andre, although they were well known to Arctic sailors, whose ships often even capsized under the enormous weight of ice buildup on masts and gear. Yet the situation did not seem hopeless.

Andre's team was well prepared for a possible luge trip. They unloaded sledges, fur shoes, a small canvas boat, food supplies from the gondola and equipped a small ice camp under the side of the balloon basket. The next week passed in agonizing contemplation. Finally, the travelers headed southeast and headed for Cape Flora (Franz Josef Land), where an intermediate camp with food supplies was prepared in advance.

The Arctic summer was in full swing, and the road was difficult. And even painful. Polynyas and leads alternated with fields of ragged ice. And the crew of the "Eagle" decides to unload the sleigh, get rid of excess cargo, including some of the food. They supplemented their food supplies by hunting seals and polar bears. The sled was now easier to pull, but the surrounding terrain became difficult. Increasingly, travelers began to stumble upon huge, several meters wide cracks. Again and again they had to open the collapsible boat and transport all three sledges and the load lying on them in turn. From time to time, one or the other member of the expedition fell into the water on treacherously thin ice. Some variety in the painful transition was made by hunting for bears, which Andre jokingly called "mobile butchers" and "the best friends of polar travelers." By August 4, having traveled more than 160 kilometers through the icy deserts, Andre's group was only 48 kilometers closer to the cherished goal of the journey. The worst fears were confirmed: drifting ice, along which she made her way to the southeast (to Franz Josef Land), all these days carried to the west. In those days, Andre wrote in his diary that at a short council it was decided to change the direction of movement and head to the area north of Svalbard - to the Seven Islands. And there, in 5-6 weeks, they will be able to get to the nearest land. The physical strength of the aeronauts was running out, and there was a desire to quickly feel the earth under their feet. Each silently dragged a sled with a load of about a hundred kilograms.

Unfortunately, the weather began to worsen. The short Arctic summer is over: the daylight hours have drastically reduced, and the nights have become colder. For three whole days, from September 15 to 17, the aeronauts could not get out of the tent because of a fierce snowstorm. There were still more than 100 kilometers to the Seven Islands. But the worst thing is that the travelers realized that they were being irresistibly carried south, between Svalbard and Franz Josef Land. Everything went to the fact that they would have to spend the winter among the ice.

Several days of recent aeronauts have been spent hunting in order to stock up enough food for the winter. Then they set about building an ice house, where they were to spend the next six months. By this time, the White Island was not far away, but Andre did not want to land on this inhospitable land covered with bare stones. For two weeks in a row, members of the expedition cut down ice blocks to build their future home. But they failed to complete the work: on October 2, the ice floe broke right at the wall of the snow house. It became clear that the ice would not be a safe haven. The detachment quickly collected all the most necessary property and a small supply of food and nevertheless moved to the White Island.

On October 5, the travelers landed on the southwestern tip of this remote Arctic island, today called Cape Andre, and set up their last camp.

Here Solomon Andre began his second diary, but managed to complete only 5 of its pages. On October 7, the last entry was made ... Strindberg mysteriously dies or dies first.

According to some historians, he could drown while chasing a bear on the ice. However, some of his personal belongings were later found in Andre and Frenkel's pockets. The surviving aeronauts released the sled from under the load, transported the body of a comrade to the crevice and filled it with stones. And what is strange: Andre noted in his diary even minor events and details of the campaign, but he does not mention the death of Strindberg in a single word! Most likely, he was so shocked by his death, or simply did not dare to trust the diary with his thoughts about her. And how many days did Andre and Frenkel live? Presumably, their mysterious death occurred shortly after Strindberg's death.

The official version of the death of the aeronauts was "death from cold during sleep", despite the apparent obviousness at first glance, it was clearly in conflict with the known facts. This was immediately noticed by many polar explorers. Everything that was found on the White Island, they believed, testifies: the two main enemies of many polar expeditions - cold and hunger - were not the direct cause of the death of the aeronauts. The bodies of Andre and Frenkel were found not in a sleeping bag. In October, the air temperature on the island did not fall below minus 10 degrees, the stove, when Horn found it, was in perfect working order. Nearby there was an abundance of driftwood and more than a hundred boxes of matches in a galvanized box. Bear skins were found in the camp, and the aeronauts had a sufficient amount of warm clothes. Among the things - untouched tins of food, rifles in perfect working order, a lot of bullets in zinc. Yes, and Andre himself wrote in his diary that after a successful hunt, the expedition got 30 bears and provided themselves with fresh meat until spring.

Perhaps they died as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning released during the operation of the stove. It is well known that incomplete combustion of kerosene produces carbon monoxide. In the fresh air, this is not very noticeable, but if the primus works in conditions of poor ventilation or limited space, carbon monoxide, which also has no smell, can lead to loss of consciousness, and even death. In the Arctic, even a short-term loss of consciousness can lead to freezing. The following circumstantial evidence speaks for the lethality of this hypothesis.

Primus on White Island was found with a closed air valve. In addition, Andre's diary indicated that he periodically simply refused. The tent of the aeronauts was made from the shell of a balloon and was completely gas-tight. Judging by the latest entries in Andre's diary, a blizzard raged on the island on October 6 and 7. Perhaps it lasted a few more days and the travelers had to stay in a tightly closed tent, that is, in precisely those conditions that contribute to the accumulation of carbon monoxide.

There was another version of the reason for the death of the expedition. In 1952, the Danish doctor Ernest Adam Traid, while reading the diaries of dead travelers, drew attention to the symptoms of their mysterious illness: vomiting attacks, indigestion, constant runny nose, abscesses on the body, not only on the shoulders, rubbed with sleigh ropes, but also under the armpits. , on the hips and on the feet. Then he compared the notes on the well-being of travelers with clinical signs of trichinosis and found a striking coincidence. This discovery made Tride go to the André Museum, established in Stockholm. Among its exhibits, he managed to find the bones of a polar bear with insignificant dried remains of meat and, during a microbiological study, found trichinosis pathogens here.

The causative agents of this disease are small larvae that can be seen without a microscope, with a trained eye. They can enter the human body if he eats poorly cooked bear meat. The larvae multiply, are carried by the blood stream throughout the body, penetrate into the muscles, including the heart, and in severe cases lead to sudden heart attacks. Scientists began studying trichinosis only after the end of the Second World War. This was facilitated by the case of the illness of Nazi polar explorers on the island of Alexandra Land (Franz Josef Land) in the spring of 1944.

The meteorological expedition "Treasure Detector" under the leadership of Lieutenant A. Makus and supervisor V. Dress began its work on October 15, 1943. But the very next spring, her polar explorers were poisoned by bear meat and were hastily evacuated by plane. But the German doctors in those days were not up to finding out the consequences of this story, and the analysis of the activities of the "treasure hunters" was classified. Only in September 1951, the expeditionary camp abandoned by the Nazis was accidentally found when the Semyon Dezhnev icebreaking steamer arrived in the Cambridge Strait, dividing the islands of the archipelago - George Land and Alexandra Land, carrying Soviet researchers from the Arctic project. Soviet polar explorers examined the Arctic island and not far from the edge of the eastern glacier, at a point with coordinates 80 degrees 50 minutes north latitude 47 degrees 04 minutes east longitude, they found a fascist weather station: 5 dugouts for about 30 people, a meteorological platform and an antenna radio mast. The weather station was located half a kilometer from the coast at an altitude of 30 meters above sea level and was completely invisible from the coast.

Residential log bunker consisted of 7 rooms. He was surrounded by trenches with machine gun nests, in which 2 company mortars, several light machine guns, a large amount of ammunition and a powerful radio station were found. Secret charters and meteorological observation logs were thrown into the soldiers' dugout. Later it was found out that a minefield of a dozen galvanic mines with a centralized control system was placed on the approaches to the weather station. From everything it was clear that the secret base was abandoned with great haste. At the same time, the food warehouse and important mechanisms of the base were not destroyed. After examining the abandoned documents, it was established that Soviet hydrologists found the base of the naval meteorological and direction finding service Kriegsmarine No. 24, created by the German meteorological expedition "Treasure Detector". It operated successfully until the end of May 1944. But after a successful hunt, the Nazi polar explorers were poisoned by bear meat and fell ill with trichinosis. Only a month later, when the duty group returned from Cape Nimrod, they learned about the incident in Tromso. On July 7, 1944, sick German polar explorers were taken out by a seaplane BV-138.

Service magazines found in abandoned bunkers told about the unexpected illness of the “treasure hunters” in full detail. Probably, the same information somehow got to the Danes, including into the hands of the aforementioned Ernest Adam Tride. Possibly before the end of the 1950s. How did the Danes get to the Soviet island of Alexandra Land? This is an extremely interesting topic for another book. But it's definitely worth considering! And it's in the future! In the meantime, in the late autumn of 1930, the remains of the dead aeronauts on the Svenskund gunboat - the same one that delivered them to the Danish island 33 years ago - were sent to Sweden and solemnly buried. This, as it were, drew a line under another polar tragedy ... And the mystery of the expedition of Solomon Andre.

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