"GRIPPING. ... One of the greatest polar rescue efforts ever
mounted." —Wall Street Journal The riveting true story of the
largest polar rescue mission in history: the desperate race to find
the survivors of the glamorous Arctic
airship Italia, which crashed near the North Pole in
1928. Triumphantly returning from the North Pole on May 24, 1928,
the world-famous exploring airship Italia—code-named N-4—was
struck by a terrible storm and crashed somewhere over the Arctic
ice, triggering the largest polar rescue mission in history.
Helping lead the search was Roald Amundsen, the poles’ greatest
explorer, who himself soon went missing in the frozen wastes.
Amundsen’s body has never been found, the last victim of one of
the Arctic’s most enduring mysteries . . . During the Roaring
Twenties, zeppelin travel embodied the exuberant spirit of the age.
Germany’s luxurious Graf Zeppelin would run passenger service
from Germany to Brazil; Britain’s Imperial Airship was launched
to connect an empire; in America, the iconic spire of the rising
Empire State Building was designed as a docking tower for airships.
But the novel mode of transport offered something else, too: a new
frontier of exploration. Whereas previous Arctic and Antarctic
explorers had subjected themselves to horrific—often
deadly—conditions in their attempts to reach uncharted lands,
airships held out the possibility of speedily soaring over the
hazards. In 1926, the famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen—the
first man to reach the South Pole—partnered with the Italian
airship designer General Umberto Nobile to pioneer flight over the
North Pole. As Mark Piesing uncovers in this masterful account,
while that mission was thought of as a great success, it was in
fact riddled with near disasters and political pitfalls. In May
1928, his relationship with Amundsen corroded beyond the point of
collaboration, Nobile, his dog, and a crew of fourteen Italians,
one Swede, and one Czech, set off on their own in the airship
Italia to discover new lands in the Arctic Circle and to become the
first airship to land men on the pole. But near the North Pole they
hit a terrible storm and crashed onto the ice. Six crew members
were never seen again; the injured (including Nobile) took refuge
on ice flows,unprepared for the wretched conditions and with little
hope for survival. Coincidentally, in Oslo a gathering of famous
Arctic explorers had assembled for a celebration of the first
successful flight from Alaska to Norway. Hearing of the accident,
Amundsen set off on his own desperate attempt to find Nobile and
his men. As the weeks passed and the largest international polar
rescue expedition mobilized, the survivors engaged in a last-ditch
struggle against weather, polar bears, and despair. When they were
spotted at last, the search plane landed—but the pilot announced
that there was room for only one passenger. . . . Braiding together
the gripping accounts of the survivors and their heroic rescuers,
N-4 Down tells the unforgettable true story of what happened when
the glamour and restless daring of the zeppelin age collided with
the harsh reality of earth’s extremes.
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