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A Wretched and Precarious Situation

In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier

David Welky author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:WW Norton & Co

Published:25th Nov '16

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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A Wretched and Precarious Situation cover

In 1906, from the ice fields northwest of Greenland, Commander Robert E. Peary spotted an unknown land in the distance. He called it “Crocker Land”. Scientists and explorers agreed that Peary had found a new continent. Several years later, two of his disciples, George Borup and Donald MacMillan—with the sponsorship of the American Museum of Natural History—assembled a team to investigate. They pitched their two-year mission as a scientific tour de force to fill in the last blank space on the globe. But the Crocker Land Expedition became a five-year ordeal that endured a fatal boating accident, a drunken captain, a shipwreck, marooned rescue parties, disease, dissension and a crewman-turned-murderer. Based on a trove of unpublished letters, diaries and field notes, A Wretched and Precarious Situation is a harrowing adventure.

"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

ISBN: 9780393254419

Dimensions: 244mm x 168mm x 41mm

Weight: 732g

512 pages