Final Pages

Lost (and Found) Journals and their Secrets

This journal can send you to a secret place of wonders, when you click it.

For 33 years, no one knew what happened to S. A. Andrée and his two companions after they lifted off from Svalbard in July 1897, flying a hydrogen balloon toward the North Pole. The plan was audacious: sail the jet streams, drift over the Pole, and come down near Alaska or Russia. Two days in, the balloon bled hydrogen, sagged, and skidded into the pack ice. They were alive, but suddenly on foot in a white world that moved and shifted beneath them.

They began to march—pulling sledges, shooting seals, dodging polar bears, and trying to outthink the ice.

The drift carried them the wrong way. Weeks later, they reached an island at the edge of nowhere: Kvitøya, “White Island.” There, the record stops.

Until 1930.

A Norwegian seal-hunting ship nosed up to Kvitøya that summer and stumbled onto what the Arctic keeps better than any archive: a final camp sealed in cold and ice. Here they found the men’s remains—along with their cameras, film, and diaries.

The developed photographs showed the balloon wrecked on the ice and the men slogging south. The journals—kept to the end—turned rumor into history.

What the Diary Says—and Doesn’t

Andrée’s entries are steady, practical, and human. They logged distances, weather, rations, fatigue. You can feel the shift from optimism to stubborn resolve. Nils Strindberg’s last entry is dated October 5, 1897. Andrée wrote his on October 7. After that... silence. The island kept its own counsel, only willing to give up what little the two men left behind.

To this day, the exact cause of death is uncertain—cold, illness, exhaustion. There’s even been some debate it might have been trichinosis from undercooked polar bear. But the diary refuses melodrama as much as it denies us further information. It just stops. And we are left to speculate on the ending for ourselves.

That’s the eerie magic of a journal. The well-observed mundane becomes a lifeline across time. Those pages carried the men’s voices out of the ice after a third of a century, turning their vanishing into a story with dates, faces, and choices we can argue about. The diary narrowed the mystery without killing it.

Words Left for the Horizon

Robert Falcon Scott’s last diary, recovered eight months after his team perished on the return from the South Pole in 1912, tells a similar tale in a different key. It’s not “lost for decades,” but it turns a tragedy into a human document—clear, composed, and finished almost at the moment of death. The pages don’t sensationalize, they testify.

The entries are stripped of anything unnecessary. They record temperatures, supply counts, and the physical state of the men. But threaded through the matter-of-fact tone is a quiet awareness of the inevitable.

Scott knew, before penning those final pages, that he wasn’t going to walk out of the snow. Yet he kept writing—not for himself, but for whoever would find the book. His words transform from a log into a farewell. The ink becomes the final act of leadership.

When the search party uncovered the tent, the diary was beside Scott’s body, wrapped carefully against the cold. Those pages became his voice in absentia, telling the world not just how they died, but how they carried themselves in the dying. No drama. No embellishment. Just the steady, unflinching record of a man watching the horizon grow still.

And maybe that’s the quiet power of such journals. They don’t have to survive centuries to change history—they just have to survive long enough to be read. In Scott’s case, the diary took a private ordeal and turned it into a shared human experience, bridging the distance between the ice and the rest of the world. That’s a form of immortality paper can still grant.

A NOTE AT THE END

I haven’t done any Arctic or Antarctic exploration. At least, not outside of the confines of the page. I’ve written at least two novels set in the Antarctic and have read and watched a great deal of content about the continent. But that’s a poor substitute for actually going there and freezing one’s tuchus off, and I’m good with it. I like for my tuchus to be well above freezing.

But I have traveled a lot. Other states, other countries. And throughout, I’ve kept journals. It’s part of my daily discipline. And I have several I keep up at any given time.

There’s something about the practice that’s always appealed to me. It’s therapeutic and cathartic. But the aspect of perseveration is maybe the most important (and most obvious) reason to do it. It’s how we supply answers to any mysteries that may crop up, before they actually become mysteries.

There are certainly a lot of question marks in history. Wouldn’t it have been nice if someone had just written things down?

If you needed a prompt to start keeping a journal, this was it.

THINGS I WRITE BESIDES JOURNALS

All that travel gave me a hankering for telling stories about the people and places and events I experienced. Still does. As Kara and I continue to move about the world, I continue to document it—though I tend to side-load it into fiction.

Find that fiction—novels, novellas, short stories—on my Books page at https://kevintumlinson.com/books

And share that link with everyone you know, so I can keep traveling and writing even more books. Also, I like to eat, and this definitely helps.

Click me for worlds of wonder.