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Summary
Summary
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
Author Notes
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.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this original addition to the annals of Arctic exploration, historian Welky (The Thousand Year Flood, 2011) recounts an expedition that evolved out of Robert Peary's quests for the North Pole. Mounted in 1913, it was to find Crocker Land, an unexplored continent Peary claimed to have seen. Peary's reputation made it credible and fired the ambition of his acolytes. Donald MacMillan organized the campaign. A meticulous quartermaster, he managed supplies better than men, overcoming a shipwreck to deliver his expedition to winter quarters. MacMillan also prepared his team well for their sledge journey. But this central act in the drama revealed MacMillan's limitations; he was so fixated on his objective that he little noticed the mental instability of his American companion, Fitzhugh Green, or the worries of his two Inuit guides. After a brutal experience of cold, wind, and starvation, the party found no Crocker Land, and an incident occurred that was so ghastly MacMillan concealed it: Green murdered a guide named Piugattoq. For reasons that polar epics always attract readers the hero confronting nature, the pitiless extremities of that nature, and the psychological warping polar regions seem to induce Welky's well-judged and well-written revival of this obscure expedition augurs to be as popular as any in the polar-exploration genre.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN 1906, Robert E. Peary, "the world's most famous explorer," managed, as the historian David Welky puts it, to "literally put Crocker Land on the map." This shimmering and hitherto unknown territory, spied across a stretch of Arctic ice floes off the northwest corner of Ellesmere Island, was promptly named after a sponsor of Peary's most recent expedition. "Was it an island, an archipelago or something larger?" According to Welky, the answer to that question "symbolized the conclusion of the global journey of exploration begun many thousands of years ago when a few hundred bipedal hominids living in East Africa set out to learn what lay over the horizon." In "A Wretched and Precarious Situation," Welky tells the rather less epic story of the Crocker Land expedition, which headed north in July 1913 to find out exactly what Peary had seen. Donald MacMillan, a prep-school teacher, and his younger colleague, George Borup, had conceived the idea when both accompanied Peary to the Arctic in 1908, two years after he had sighted the new territory. They thought they might find a new continent - and it might be inhabited. This newspaper announced that the journey, sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and the American Geographical Society, would be "the most ambitious ever undertaken by any scientific institution for the purpose of discovery." The expedition's bad luck began just months before departure when Borup, who was engaged to Peary's daughter, drowned in a canoeing accident, leaving MacMillan as its sole leader. And the bad luck continued. MacMillan's ship, the Diana, a 43-year-old sealer, smashed into some rocks off the coast of Labrador, and his team was obliged to transfer to another hastily hired vessel. Setting off from the "bottle-shaped port" of St. John's in Newfoundland, they established winter quarters in Greenland, and the ship departed. Welky, who teaches at the University of Central Arkansas, has researched all the available material, published and unpublished. Notable among the unpublished sources were MacMillan's journals, archived at the explorer's alma mater, Bowdoin College. Welky pays particular attention to the 50 Inuits, one of the indigenous peoples of the high Arctic, whom MacMillan hired - along with their dog teams - to assist the expedition. They emerge from this story with more dignity than the explorers. One in particular, called Ittukusuk, "saved the group again and again." In December 1913, a sledding party set out from the base camp for Crocker Land, sinking caches of supplies into the ice as they went along. But about 500 miles from the North Pole - and halfway through Welky's book - the men discovered the awful truth. There was no Crocker Land. In MacMillan's own subsequent book, "Four Years in the White North," he writes that he saw nothing but a "will-o'-the-wisp, ever receding, ever changing, ever beckoning." Had Peary invented the sighting to secure his fame? Or had he seen a fata morgana, an optical illusion, common in the Arctic and caused by temperature inversion? Welky concludes that Peary, who had made false claims before, probably "misled the world" deliberately. Most historians would agree. Welky's narrative captures the details of life in a polar camp, conjuring its "yowling dogs" and bottles of wine exploding from the cold, even the way an Inuit hunter kills an auk by squeezing its heart before eating it raw. He writes a good deal about the way individual characters change, along with the dynamics of the team. Dr. Elmer Ekblaw, the geologist, "blossomed into a steady contributor," while Ensign Fitzhugh Green, a "troubled young man whose spirits rose and fell like the tides," went steadily mad. One day, while out sledding, he murdered one of the Inuits. The second half of Welky's book reveals how the Crocker Landers survived until a ship arrived to pick them up. They had planned to maintain wireless communication, but the equipment failed. Increasingly out of contact with their sponsors, they occasionally received mail, months old, carried by sledge from a trading post. As this story rattles along, Welky betrays an increasing weakness for cliché: MacMillan's "heart sank"; someone else "went ballistic"; an uneven surface would surely "wreak havoc" with the sled dogs' feet. More seriously, he deploys a crude novelistic style in an attempt to sustain narrative drive: "MacMillan set down his pencil and limped outside." Welky writes, plausibly enough, that "Crocker Land's disappearance proved devastating." Supplies ran low, and the team began to deteriorate, physically and psychologically. The Americans were counting on the Inuits' willingness to exchange fresh meat for oil and bullets, but too much open water created difficult conditions for hunting, so even that source of food declined. When four men left in a relief ship, that vessel needed rescuing. Four winters had elapsed, and the expedition had turned into a "fiasco" before the group was able to come home. Their struggles are as tedious to read about as they must have been to endure, and the book ends on a sustained note of bathos. Polar historians - and perhaps some aficionados - will be grateful to have the Crocker Land expedition properly documented, but one wonders whether the story merits recounting at such length. World War I was incinerating Europe when the men finally returned, and America had become, Welky writes, "a society whose faith in mankind's goodness, wisdom and idealism had dissipated as thoroughly as the illusion of Crocker Land." Public interest in the expedition dwindled. What had it all been for? ? Four winters passed before the Crocker Land polar expedition was able to come home. SARA WHEELER'S books include "The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle."
Choice Review
Though squarely aimed at a general audience, historian Welky's book is a solid piece of original research that makes a major contribution to polar history. It details Donald MacMillan's 1914-17 expedition in search of "Crocker Land," which Robert Peary claimed to have sighted from afar in 1906. But all MacMillan accomplished was to prove its non-existence. Subsequent evidence has shown that Peary simply invented Crocker Land to coax money from the millionaire he named it after. Welky (Univ. of Central Arkansas) bases his narrative largely on original sources, most previously untouched by other scholars. He has read them so carefully that subtle connections come naturally, as only they can to one who has taken such a thoroughgoing approach. This allows him to bring forward previously unknown facts about the inside preparations and inner workings of the expedition and to paint interesting portraits of all its participants, willing and unwilling, as the planned two-year expedition stretched to four and its costs skyrocketed due to repeated, failed rescue attempts. Nevertheless, there is room for scholarly reservations, because Welky sometimes embellishes his source materials' accounts or chooses to rely on MacMillan's published narrative rather than his conflicting original diaries. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Robert M. Bryce, independent scholar
Kirkus Review
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 Pearys blessing and the sponsorship of the American Museum of Natural History, the young explorersBowdoin graduate Donald MacMillan and Yalie George Borupset 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 expeditions surprising discovery upon approaching Crocker Land in a way that enhances the fascination of his story. Long, leisurely, and vastly entertaining. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
A Note on Names and Words | p. 1 |
Introduction "Mine by the Right of Discovery" | p. 3 |
Book 1 | |
1 The Tenderfeet | p. 19 |
2 The Best Year | p. 35 |
3 "I Wish I Were There Now" | p. 59 |
4 Commander Borup? | p. 75 |
5 A Fine Fellow | p. 93 |
6 The Boys | p. 105 |
7 Goodbye | p. 115 |
8 A True Leader | p. 122 |
9 Blocked | p. 134 |
10 Home | p. 144 |
11 Arctic Living | p. 155 |
12 Reaching Out | p. 171 |
13 The Evil Spirit | p. 186 |
14 Slaughter Ground | p. 205 |
15 On the Ice | p. 228 |
16 Pujoq | p. 241 |
17 Crocker Land | p. 251 |
Book 2 | |
18 Panic | p. 267 |
19 Sundown | p. 282 |
20 Mail | p. 295 |
21 The World Beyond | p. 303 |
22 Disintegration | p. 315 |
23 In a Pickel | p. 323 |
24 Flight | p. 340 |
25 Discovery and Disappointment | p. 351 |
26 Waiting | p. 359 |
27 Reunion and Separation | p. 367 |
28 Off the Map | p. 376 |
29 Last Days | p. 393 |
30 No Hero's Welcome | p. 405 |
31 Endings | p. 420 |
Epilogue Mysteries Solved | p. 433 |
Acknowledgments | p. 441 |
Notes | p. 445 |
Select Bibliography | p. 485 |
Index | p. 493 |