“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.