United States
£ GBP
In Gilded Age America, Arctic explorers were fabulous celebrities assured of riches and near-immortality so long as they reached the North Pole first. Of the many attempts to meet that goal, three American expeditions, launched from the Russian archipelago of Franz Josef Land, ended in abject failure, their exploits consigned to near-oblivion. Even so, these ventures the Wellman expedition (1898 99), the Baldwin-Ziegler (1901 2), and the Fiala-Ziegler (1903-5) have much to tell us about the personalities, politics, and economics of exploration in their day. In The Greatest Show in the Arctic, the first book to chronicle all three expeditions, P.J. Capelotti explores what went right and what, in the end, went tragically wrong.
The cast of colourful characters from the Franz Josef Land forays included Walter Wellman, a Chicago journalist and bon vivant running from debts, his mistress, and an illegitimate daughter; Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, a deranged meteorologist with a fetish for balloons and a passion for Swedish conserves; and Anthony Fiala, a pious photographer in search of God in the Arctic. Featuring an international cast of supporting characters worthy of a three-ring circus, The Greatest Show in the Arctic follows each of the three expeditions in turn, from spectacular feats of financing to their bitter ends. Along the way, the explorers accumulated considerable geographic knowledge and left a legacy of place-names.
Through close study of the expeditions journals, Capelotti reveals that the Franz Josef Land endeavors foundered chiefly because of poor leadership and internal friction, not for lack of funding, as historians have previously suspected. Presenting tales of noble intentions, novel inventions, and epic miscalculations, The Greatest Show in the Arctic brings fresh life to a unique and underappreciated story of American exploration.
P. J. Capelotti, Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, is author or editor of numerous books on history and archaeology, including Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The Expeditions of Benjamin Leigh Smith, England's Forgotten Arctic Explorer and Life and Death on the Greenland Patrol, 1942.
"As this thoughtful and finely textured book makes clear, Franz Josef Land represented the spectacular final act of America's Arctic quest. A story of noble intentions, new inventions, and epic miscalculationsplaying out on the icy shores of an Arctic archipelago, this is a dramathatonce commanded the attention of the world."
– Michael F. Robinson, author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture
"Superbly written and deftly researched, P.J. Capelotti's The Greatest Show in the Arctic is vastly more than a comic saga. It sheds considerable light on a previously obscure cast of explorers and on the history of Franz Josef Land, one of the least-studied regions in the Far North. Of all the Arctic books I ve read in recent years, I'd rank Capelotti's very close to the top. It is astonishingly good."
– Lawrence Millman, author of Last Places: A Journey in the North
