Short description
This text chronicles Salomon August Andree's failed attempt and Walter Wellman's three unsuccessful air-expeditions to reach the North Pole. It investigates the stories behind the quests to reach this outpost and examines how the stories were created and reported by the press.
Long description
The North Pole has long been a lure for adventures. It has drawn those looking for a northwest passage to rich Asian trade routes, and it has attracted those simply hunting fro fame and the glory of being the first to get there. By the end of the 19th century, hundreds had lost their lives pursuing the quest. Inspired in part by the fantasies of Jules Verne and others, the search had intensified to such a degree at the turn of the century that royalty, explorer clubs, and newspapers were funding expeditions. Newspapers in the United States and Europe could not get enough material to satisfy the hunger of their readers for more. This volume chronicles the adventures of Swedish engineer Salomon August Andree, who made the first failed attempt to reach the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon in 1897, and of American journalist Walter Wellman, who organized and led three unsuccessful air expeditions from 1907 to 1909. The book investigates the stories behind the quests to reach this remote and inhospitable outpost by air and examines how those stories were created and reported by the press. P.J. Capelotti takes readers along of the archaeological remains of early polar aviators, the first such study by a professional archaeologist. He looks at the aviation science of these attempts, as well as the brilliance and folly of those who led them. What he uncovers allows readers to reflect on the distortions of the written historical record, particularly unkind to Wellman, and what that may tell us about our own age of exploration as we look to the last frontiers in space.
Review
A well-written tale of two unlucky polar explorers. While undertaking archaeological research in the Spitsbergen archipelago, 600 miles below the North Pole, Capelotti (Social Sciences/Penn. State Univ., Abington) worked with artifacts left behind by the Swedish explorer Salomon August Andree and the American journalist Walter Wellman. Capelotti's book falls into two roughly equal parts; the first treats the failed attempts by first Andree and then Wellman to reach the North Pole by airship, and the second examines the material remains of their expeditions. The first part is the more interesting for general readers, especially because the principals seemed strangely unaware that they were doomed to failure from the outset. Andree, whom history has remembered unkindly as either a lunatic or an idiot, attempted his polar feat in an airship that, though it needed to stay aloft for a month, would not hold its hydrogen gas for more than a few days. The craft disappeared, taking Andree and two crewmen with it. Their remains have never been recovered, although film from their aerial photographs was later found and processed. Wellman, a Chicago-based journalist and incessant self-promoter, participated in the search for Andree's lost ship, and he took up the challenge in three failed airborne expeditions; a rival Chicago paper proclaimed the last "a voyage which for foolhardiness exceeds anything in the history of human recklessness." All this is but a footnote in the history of exploration, but Capelloti tells it well. The second portion of his narrative, which will likely interest only archaeology buffs, looks in close detail ("One cross beam steel tube I inch in diameter remains attached to two side frame members, spacing them apart by a width of 30 inches along the inner edge of the frame and 34.25 inches along the outer edge") at the detritus Andree and Wellman left behind. All in all, a nice job of historical reconstruction. (Kirkus Reviews)