But the imagination of the world was nothing daunted by such cold douches of fact, and more reports of Andrée’s death, of his survival in the igloos of detached tribes, of the finding of his camps, of his balloon, of parts of his equipment, of the skeletons of his party, and of many fancies came down from the northern sectors of the world, season after season. There was a great revival of these yarns in 1905, once more due to some imaginative Eskimo tale spinners, and in 1909, twelve years after Andrée’s flight, there was an even more belated group of rumors, all centering about the fact that one Father Turquotille, a Roman Catholic missionary residing at Reindeer Lake, and often making long treks farther into the arctic, had found a party of nomadic natives in possession of a revolver and some rope, which fact they explained to him by telling the story of the Andrée balloon, which was supposed to have landed somewhere in their territory. The good priest reported what he had been told to Bishop Pascal, of Prince Albert, and that worthy ecclesiastic transmitted the report to Ottawa, whence it was spread broadcast. But Father Turquotille, after having made a special journey to confirm the rumors, was obliged to discredit them. And so another end to gossip. Thus it happens that there is to-day, more than thirty years after that heroic launching out from Danes Island, after the pole has long been attained, and all the regions of the Far North traversed back and forth by countless expeditions and hunting parties, no sure knowledge of Andrée’s fate. All that is absolute is that he never returned, and all that can be asserted as beyond reasonable doubt is that he and his companions perished somewhere in the North. The probabilities are more interesting, though they cannot be termed more than inductions from the scattered bits of fact. The chief matters of evidence are the buoys, which were picked up from time to time between the spring of 1899 and the late summer of 1912, when the Norwegian steamer _Beta_, outward bound on September 1st, from Foreland Sound, Spitzbergen, put into Tromsoe on the fourteenth, with Andrée’s buoy No. 10, which had been picked up on the eighth in the open ocean. This buoy, like all the others, except the one already described, was empty and had its top unsecured. It rests with the others in the royal museum at Stockholm. When Andrée flew from Danes Island he took twelve of these buoys, eleven small ones, which he expected to drop as each succeeding degree of latitude was crossed, and one larger float, which was to be dropped in triumph at the North Pole. This biggest buoy was picked up in the closing months of 1899, and identified by experts at Stockholm, who had witnessed the preparation for the flight. In all, seven of these floats have been retrieved from the northern seas.