Abstract
The account of a group of hunters who developed trichinosis from eating bear meat (p 245) calls to mind the fascinating case of the three Swedish balloonists who disappeared in 1897 during an attempt to fly to the North Pole, an adventure brilliantly recreated by Per Olaf Sundman in his book<i>The Flight of the Eagle</i>.<sup>1</sup> The leader of this absurd expedition was S. A. Andrée, chief engineer of the Stockholm patent office, who decided it would be a feather in Sweden's cap if the first people to reach the North Pole by air were Swedish subjects. With minimal ballooning expertise, accompanied by two equally inexperienced young men, Andrée took off from Spitzbergen into a southerly gale on July 11, 1897. That was the last anyone ever saw of the explorers, though a carrier pigeon bearing a message that all was well was shot down two days after take-off,
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