En recension av Bea Uusmas bok Vitön

Many readers of polar history will remember Bea Uusma's The Expedition: Solving the Mystery of a Polar Tragedy — the extraordinary August Prize–winning book that transformed our understanding of the 1897 Andrée balloon expedition and how the expedition members perished on White Island (in Swedish: Vitön). It combined scientific investigation, historical reconstruction, and an almost personal passion for the fate of Andrée, Strindberg, and Frænkel.

Now, more than a decade later, Uusma has returned to the same mystery with Vitön — so far only available in Swedish, though an English version is expected in time. If The Expedition was the map, Vitön is the descent into the crevasse: darker, narrower, and more intimate.

The premise is simple but remarkable. Despite all that has been written about the expedition, no one had ever conducted an archaeological excavation at the site on White Island where the three men died in 1897. Uusma, now a trained physician and experienced researcher, gathered a team of archaeologists, bear guards, and skeletal detection dogs to return there. She has discovered new evidence — from fragments of bone possibly still buried on the island to microscopic traces of blood and tissue — and used modern forensic techniques to re-examine Andrée's final diary, Strindberg's photographs, and even a rusted firearm found beside the bodies.

But Vitön is not just a catalogue of findings. It is an immersion into obsession itself — the cost, the loneliness, and the strange joy of never being done. The prose is clipped, icy, and precise, yet charged with emotion beneath the surface. Uusma compresses years of work into short, crystalline passages that feel both scientific and lyrical. Her collaborator Lotta Kühlhorn's elegant design and imagery make the book as visually striking as it is intellectually compelling.

There are also deeply human moments. Uusma writes that she "gave that island everything, and it gave nothing back." Still, she cannot let go. Her persistence has outlasted nearly all other researchers. She has become, in a way, part of the expedition's story herself.

I was personally involved in one small thread of that story. Our collaboration on tracing where Nils Strindberg's tin can — containing his final letter to his fiancée Anna — was thrown from the balloon eventually became a chapter of its own in Vitön. It was a privilege to see how rigorously Bea pursued even the smallest clue, treating each lost object as a vital coordinate in a century-old map of human endurance.

If The Expedition was a revelation, Vitön is a reckoning. It brings closure to some mysteries and opens others. It asks not only how Andrée and his companions died, but why Uusma — and, by extension, we readers — continue to care so deeply.

For anyone fascinated by polar exploration, historical puzzles, or the limits of human persistence, Vitön is essential reading. And when the English edition finally appears, it will surely take its place beside The Expedition as one of the most haunting and important contributions to modern polar history writing.