When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.***Arctic balloon tragedies are a timeless subject, but they seem particularly compelling in the late summer Washington heat. No one wants to be marooned on an ice floe eating uncooked seal meat following the predictable failure of a poorly made polar balloon. Still, it sounds better than stepping outside right now.In 1897, Swedish aeronaut Salomon August Andrée set off from Svalbard on an ill-fated attempt to pilot a balloon over the North Pole. The plan was for Andrée and his two companions to sip champagne and take scientific observations while a silk-wrapped bubble of hydrogen carried them over the ice. This was not what happened.Within hours of their departure, things went badly wrong. After sending out a series of messages by homing pigeon saying all was well, Andrée’s balloon, named The Eagle, began to lose altitude. The crew jettisoned their ballast, then their crates of champagne. The balloon’s steering system — a series of ropes they planned to drag along beneath them — had proven useless. As a result, they were left bouncing along the ice, with no way to gain lift and no way to control their direction.All too quickly, the journey had turned into a metaphor for itself, with Andrée’s reputation ultimately mirroring the trajectory of his balloon. The proposed voyage had initially met with wild enthusiasm both in Sweden and abroad. It had been blessed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and King Oscar himself helped raise funds. Andrée also caught the imagination of advertisers, who used fanciful images of the voyage to market chocolate and various types of tinned meat.