By Airship to the North Pole: An Archaeology of Human Exploration - Hardcover

Capelotti, P. J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813526337 ISBN 13: 9780813526331

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1999

Synopsis

 By Airship to the North Pole 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. 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.

About this title

About the Author

Historical archaeologist P.J. Capelotti, Professor of Anthropology at Penn State University, Abington College, is author or editor of more than a dozen non-fiction histories, including By Airship to the North Pole: an archaeology of human exploration (1999), Sea Drift: Rafting Adventures in the Wake of Kon-Tiki (2001), Life and Death on the Greenland Patrol (2005), The Whaling Expedition of the Ulysses (2010), and Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The expeditions of Benjamin Leigh Smith, England's forgotten explorer, (2013).  His theory of archaeological research in space: The Human Archaeology of Space, was published in 2010 by McFarland.  A volume of essays and poetry, Gods Meadow: a summer of poems on the edge of Oslo fjord, was published in 2005, and his first novel, Nautilus: a modern sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, has been described by Clive Cussler as "an amazing tale filled with enigmas filled with riddles and dark mysteries. Truly a fascinating read."  Nautilus will appear under the pen name Pete Shaw.

From Kirkus Reviews

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 Andre and the American journalist Walter Wellman. Capelottis book falls into two roughly equal parts; the first treats the failed attempts by first Andre 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. Andre, 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 Andre 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 Andres 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 1 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 Andre and Wellman left behind. All in all, a nice job of historical reconstruction. (31 b&w illustrations) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0813526337
• ISBN 13: 9780813526331
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 236