Most of us know Roald Amundsen as the man who beat Scott to the South Pole. But En avion vers le pôle nord (By Airplane to the North Pole) captures a different, later chapter: his 1926 journey to conquer the Arctic by air. This isn't a sweeping epic written years later; it's his immediate, first-person log from the airship Norge.

The Story

The book follows the meticulously planned, yet inherently risky, flight from Spitsbergen to Alaska over the North Pole. Amundsen, along with explorer Lincoln Ellsworth and Italian airship designer Umberto Nobile, crammed into a hydrogen-filled airship. The narrative is a minute-by-minute chronicle of that tense flight. You're with them as they lift off into the unknown, battling freezing fog, navigating with primitive instruments, and staring down at a terrifyingly beautiful landscape of broken ice that offered no place to land. Every calculation of wind speed and fuel consumption is a cliffhanger. The climax isn't a dramatic flag-planting—it's the sustained, nerve-wracking effort of simply surviving the transit and proving the air route was possible.

Why You Should Read It

What got me was the stark, practical voice of Amundsen. There's no boastful heroics. His writing is focused, detailed, and charged with the quiet anxiety of a leader responsible for everyone on board. You feel the weight of command. He notes the temperature, the engine performance, the shape of ice floes, all with a scientist's eye, but the human worry pulses underneath. It strips the romance from exploration and shows it for what it was: a brutal test of planning, technology, and nerve. Reading this after knowing his fate (he disappeared two years later on a rescue mission) adds a profound, almost haunting layer to his matter-of-fact prose.

Final Verdict

Perfect for anyone who loves real-life adventure stories, but is tired of the glossed-over versions. This is for the reader who wants to feel the chill and the pressure right alongside the crew. It’s a short, focused blast of history that reads with the urgency of a thriller. If you've ever looked at a map and wondered about the blank spaces, Amundsen’s journal shows you exactly what it cost to fill one in.