A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier

by David Welky

Overview

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

From a snow-swept hill in the ice fields northwest of Greenland, famed Arctic explorer Robert E. Peary spots a line of mysterious peaks dotting the horizon. In 1906, he names that distant, uncharted territory “Crocker Land.” Years later, two of Peary’s disciples, George Borup and Donald MacMillan, take the brave steps Peary never did: with a team of amateur adventurers and intrepid native guides, they endeavor to reach this unknown land and fill in the last blank space on the globe. What follows is hardship and mishap the likes of which none of the explorers could possibly have imagined. From howling blizzards and desperate food shortages to crime and tragedy, the explorers experience a remarkable journey of endurance, courage, and hope. Set in one of the world’s most inhospitable places, A Wretched and Precarious Situation is an Arctic tale unlike any other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393354829
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/21/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	553,368
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

A Note on Names and Words 1

Introduction: "Mine by the Right of Discovery" 3

Book 1

1 The Tenderfeet 19

2 The Best Year 35

3 "I Wish I Were There Now" 59

4 Commander Borup? 75

5 A Fine Fellow 93

6 The Boys 105

7 Goodbye 115

8 A True Leader 122

9 Blocked 134

10 Home 144

11 Arctic Living 155

12 Reaching Out 171

13 The Evil Spirit 186

14 Slaughter Ground 205

15 On the Ice 228

16 Pujoq 241

17 Crocker Land 251

Book 2

18 Panic 267

19 Sundown 282

20 Mail 295

21 The World Beyond 303

22 Disintegration 315

23 In a Pickel 323

24 Flight 340

25 Discovery and Disappointment 351

26 Waiting 359

27 Reunion and Separation 367

28 Off the Map 376

29 Last Days 393

30 No Hero's Welcome 405

31 Endings 420

Epilogue Mysteries Solved 433

Acknowledgments 441

Notes 445

Select Bibliography 485

Index 493

Editorial Reviews

"Polar historians…will be grateful to have the Crocker Land expedition properly documented."

New York Times Book Review

"Welky's fast-moving, evocative narrative paints a vivid portrait of the men who, along with their Inuit companions, risked their lives for ‘dreams of lost continents awaiting discovery.’"

Explorer’s Journal

"David Welky reveals in this engrossing account....the classic litany of illness, privation and howling blizzards, [and] a singularly bizarre finding about [polar explorer Robert] Peary's original sighting."

Nature

"Welky is a superb writer, and he mines the interpersonal relationships of the expedition’s participants – the loyalties, the friendships grown or torn asunder, the cultural insensitivities – as effectively as he describes the travel, the exploration into unknown territory, and the constant flirtation with death at the hands of the elements."

The Arctic Book Review

"Unravels the strange story of one of the world’s greatest discoveries that never was."

National Geographic - Simon Worrall

"A penetrating study of human character in a challenging environment....His 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

"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."

Dallas Morning News - Bill Streever

★ 10/31/2016
Life in the extreme north was a hellish ordeal for early 20th-century American and Inuit explorers, as described in this exciting adventure saga. Historian Welky (The Thousand-Year Flood) recounts the 1913 expedition to find “Crocker Land,” a possible continent in the Arctic Ocean that was glimpsed by Robert Peary during an earlier failed attempt on the North Pole. The trek took the explorers to Greenland and then hundreds of miles west across rugged Ellesmere Island and onto the frozen sea. Drawing on extensive expedition diaries, Welky’s absorbing narrative highlights the perils of polar travel, including ice that piled up in impassable ridges or broke beneath one’s feet, fractious sled-dogs, lethal weather, frostbite, disease, starvation, and exhaustion. It’s also a vivid account of the culture clash between grandiose Americans and the pragmatic Inuit communities they relied on for survival, and an absorbing study of how humans warp under pressure: the men on one sled-trip that ran into a blizzard descended into madness and murder, and expedition members stuck in a cabin during months-long winter darkness—thanks to unlucky weather that iced in rescue ships and marooned the Americans in Greenland for four years—picked mercilessly at one another. This is a classic explorer’s narrative, pitting ambition against the limits of endurance. Photos. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Welky’s fast-moving, evocative narrative paints a vivid portrait of the men who, along with their Inuit companions, risked their lives for ‘dreams of lost continents awaiting discovery.’"

The Explorers Journal

"David Welky reveals in this engrossing account....the classic litany of illness, privation and howling blizzards, [and] a singularly bizarre finding about [polar explorer Robert] Peary's original sighting."

Nature Lib

10/15/2016
The island of Crocker Land was allegedly first "sighted" by American explorer Robert Peary during his 1906 North Pole attempt. On Peary's 1908 expedition, he met fellow explorers Donald MacMillan and George Borup, who were both bitten hard by the Arctic bug. MacMillan and Borup planned an expedition to map Crocker Land, but funding issues and Borup's death delayed its start until 1913. By 1914, MacMillan and his team of Polar Inuit guides determined that Crocker Land was just a fata morgana (mirage). Welky (history, Univ. of Central Arkansas; The Thousand-Year Flood) describes how efforts to return the expedition to New York were thwarted for three years by weather, sea ice, inadequate ships owing to the start of World War I, and funding issues. E.O. Hovey, curator of the American Museum of Natural History (the expedition's sponsor), went to the Greenland base in 1915. The title comes from one of Hovey's journals after an "easy" one-day trip stretched into its fourth day. Welky provides an evenhanded and thoroughly researched portrayal of team leader and explorer MacMillan. VERDICT This book fills in a significant and often overlooked piece of the Arctic exploration puzzle. Arctic enthusiasts, armchair adventures, and dreamers of lost worlds will find much to appreciate.—Margaret Atwater-Singer, Univ. of Evansville Lib., IN

Library Journal

★ Sept. 8, 2016
The story of a 1913 Arctic expedition to investigate what the New York Tribune called “the last considerable mass of unknown land on our planet.”Welky (History/Univ. of Central Arkansas; Marching Across the Color Line: A. Philip Randolph and Civil Rights in the World War II Era, 2013, etc.) recounts the effort by two eager young acolytes of Cmdr. Robert E. Peary to reveal the secrets of Crocker Land, a large, undiscovered landmass the famed explorer reported seeing on his failed 1906 attempt to reach the North Pole. Making magnificent use of documents and re-creating the yearslong Arctic sojourn with the drama and immediacy of a tension-filled adventure novel, the author conjures a romantic quest emblematic of the rugged manliness of the time. In the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt and with Peary’s blessing and the sponsorship of the American Museum of Natural History, the young explorers—Bowdoin graduate Donald MacMillan and Yalie George Borup—set out on a steamer with all the fanfare due an ambitious scientific exploration. Their journey, pitting a seven-man crew against the perils of Arctic life, from blizzards and ice floes to winter darkness and loneliness, involved “triumph, frustration, joy, infighting, betrayal, and murder” in “one of the harshest environments on the planet.” Working with such material and telling his story in vivid scenes rendered in wonderfully sharp declarative sentences, Welky offers a vibrant portrait of the young adventurers, their loyal Inuit helpers, and the ever present dangers of a forbidding place where, as leader MacMillan said, “the evil spirit of the Arctic is always watching.” Examining every aspect of the mission and its historical context, the author captures the can-do, all-American-boy spirit of the age, the constant fears of unforeseen disasters on the ice, and the fossil- and specimen-collecting mania that drove so much exploration. He also describes the expedition’s surprising discovery upon approaching Crocker Land in a way that enhances the fascination of his story. Long, leisurely, and vastly entertaining.

Kirkus Review