A Wretched and Precarious Situation

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
"The true story of the Crocker Land Expedition to find a new continent northwest of Greenland in the early 20th century." -- What We're Reading - The Independent

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.

A Booklist Best Literary Travel Book (2017) and Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book (2016) "A penetrating study of human character in a challenging environment. . . . [David Welky's] seamless narrative, chilling at times and always thought-provoking, transports the reader to a time when the Arctic was virtually as harsh and inaccessible a place as the Moon or Mars." --Natural History

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.