In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette [FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

Descripción

Fine condition gray boards/off white spine/silver spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped color illustrated dust jacket. Includes The Company of the USS Jeannette; Prologue: Baptism by Ice; Epilogue: As Long as I Have Ice to Stand On; Acknowledgments; Notes; Selected Bibliography; and Photo Credits. Illustrated with maps, black-and-white photographs and color illustrated front and rear endpapers. "Drawing on lost letters and diaries, firsthand experience of the polar landscape, and his own masterly storytelling skills, Hampton Sides conjures the doomed USS Jeannette and her courageous crew with haunting power. As the drama escalates - on ice, sea and land - the characters of these men and their extraordinary, gallant leader loom larger and larger. The reader is drawn into the ice from the first page and will not want to leave until the fate of every man is known." - Caroline Alexander, Bestselling author of The Endurance and The Bounty. "Ths extraordinary book overflows with heroic characters and bursts with insight into a young nation flexing its ambitions on a global scale. The result is narrative non-fiction history at its very best. [The book] has earned a place among the great sea adventure stories." - Mitchell Zuckoff, author. "Hampton Sides is a master storyteller, and here he has delivered a stunningly vivid account of perhaps the most dramatic polar mission you've never heard of. Once you start, you won't stop." - Mark Bowden, author. ".not only.a journey into the Arctic but also into the very nature of man." - David Grann, author. "In the late nineteenth century, people were obsessed by one of the last unmapped areas of the globe: the North Pole. No one knew what existed beyond the fortress of ice rimming the Arctic seas, although theories abounded. The foremost cartographer in the world, a German named August Petermann, believed that warm currents fed into a vast Open Polar Sea that sustained a verdant land at the top of the world. National glory would fall to whoever could plant his flag upon its shores. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the eccentric and stupendously wealthy owner of The New York Herald, had recently captured the world's attention by dispatching Stanley to Africa to find Dr. Livingstone. Now he was keen to re-create that sensation on an even more epic scale. He funded an official U.S. naval expedition to reach the Pole, choosing as its leader a young officer named George Washington De Long, who had gained fame for a rescue operation off the coast of Greenland. On July 8, 1879, De Long bid his young wife goodbye, and the USS Jeannette set sail from San Fransisco to cheering crowds in the grip of "Arctic fever." De Long led a team of thirty-two men - carrying the aspirations of a young country burning to become a world power - deep into unchartered waters. After journeying north of the Bering Strait, they found themselves trapped in pack ice. Two years into the harrowing voyage, the hull was fatally breached, and the Jeannette sank to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The men found themselves marooned on the ice cap nearly a thousand miles north of Siberia with three open boats and only the barest supplies. Thus began their long, fateful march across the frozen sea - an ordeal that ranks as one of the greatest struggles for survival in history. Facing everything from snow blindness and frostbite to ferocious storms and bewildering labyrinths of ice, the expedition battled madness and starvation as they desperately strove for the Siberian coast. Based on a wealth of unpublished correspondence and his own travels across the Siberian Arctic, Side's epic narrative resurrects a classic American adventure story with all the twists and turns of a thriller. In the Kingdom of Ice is a spellbinding tale of heroism and determination in the most unforgiving territory on Earth." - from the dust jacket flaps. N° de ref. del artículo 001746

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