A remarkable true story of adventure, betrayal and survival set in one of the world’s most inhospitable places.
A remarkable true story of adventure, betrayal and survival set in one of the world’s most inhospitable places.
In 1906, from atop a snow-swept hill in the ice fields northwest of Greenland, hundreds of miles from another human being, Commander Robert E. Peary spotted a line of mysterious peaks looming in the distance. He called this unexplored realm "Crocker Land." Scientists and explorers agreed that the world-famous explorer had discovered a new continent. Several years later, two of Peary's disciples, George Borup and Donald MacMillan, assembled a team of amateur adventurers to investigate Crocker Land. What followed was a sequence of events that none of the explorers imagined possible. The men endured howling blizzards, food shortages, isolation, a drunken sea captain, disease, dissension, and a horrific crime.
Populated with a cast of memorable characters and based on years of research in previously untapped sources, A Wretched and Precarious Situation is a classic of Arctic adventure.
16 pages of illustrations
“"What a book!....Excellent writing that combines some of the serious novelist's techniques with information that can only come from hundreds of hours with long-forgotten diaries, letters and newspaper accounts....Comparable but better-known authors in the genre include David McCullough, John Barry and Timothy Egan."”
"Unravels the strange story of one of the world's greatest discoveries that never was." -- National Geographic
"Polar historians will be grateful to have the Crocker Land expedition properly documented." -- The New York Times Book Review
David Welky is the author of The Thousand-Year Flood: The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937, The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II, and other books. He is a professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas.
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