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.