We know that Andrée dropped one buoy on the morning of July 12, 1897, less than sixteen hours from his base, and that he liberated a pigeon on the following night, after an elapsed time of about fifty-five hours. At that time he had attained 82.20 degrees northern latitude and 15.5 degrees eastern longitude. Since Danes Island lies above the seventy-ninth parallel, and in about 12 degrees of eastern longitude, the balloon had drifted about three degrees north and three east in fifty-five hours, a distance of roughly three hundred and fifty miles, as the crow flies. His net rate of progress toward the pole was thus no better than seven to eight miles an hour, and he was being carried northeast instead of northwest, as he had calculated. Evidently he was disillusioned as to the correctness of his theories before he was far from his starting point. The recovered buoys offer mute testimony to what must have happened thereafter. When the big North Pole buoy was brought back to Sweden, the great explorer Nansen shook his head in dismay and said the emptiness of the receptacle was a sign portentous of disaster. Andrée would never have cast his largest and best buoy adrift, except in an emergency, or until he had reached the pole, in which case it would surely have contained a message. Nansen felt that the buoy had been thrown overboard as ballast, when the ship seemed about to settle into the sea. But even then, it would seem, Andrée would have scribbled some message and put it into the float, had there been time. The fact that this main buoy and five others were picked up, with their tops unfastened and barren of the least scrap of writing, seems to argue that some sudden disaster overtook the balloon and its horrified passengers. Either it sprang a leak and dropped so rapidly toward the sea or an ice floe, that everything was thrown out in an attempt to arrest its fall, or there was an explosion, and the whole great air vessel, with all its human and mechanical freight, was dropped into the icy seas. In that case the unused buoys would have floated off and been found scattered about the northern ocean, while the explorer and his men must have met the fate he had so briefly described--“drowned.” The fact that no buoy has ever been recovered bearing any message later than that carried by the solitary homing pigeon would seem also to indicate that death overcame the party soon after the night of July 13th, with the goal of the pole still far beyond the fogs and ice packs of the North. In some such desolation and bleak disaster one of the most splendid and mad adventures of any time came to its dark and mysterious conclusion, leaving the world an enigma and a legend. XVII SPECTRAL SHIPS