A Wretched And Precarious Situation: In Search Of The Last Arctic Frontier

Description

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.

Author description

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.