Description
The harrowing—and often amusing—true survival story of two mismatched Arctic explorers on a historic expedition gone horrible wrong.
Now a Netflix film co-written by and starring Game of Thrones actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau!
Ejnar Mikkelsen was devoted to Arctic exploration. In 1910, he decided to search for the diaries of the ill-fated Mylius-Erichsen expedition, which had set out to prove that Robert Peary’s outline of the East Greenland coast was a myth, erroneous and presumably self-serving. Iver Iversen was a mechanic who joined Mikkelsen in Iceland when the expedition’s boat needed repair.
Several months later, Mikkelsen and Iversen embarked on an incredible journey during which they would suffer every imaginable Arctic travail: implacable cold, scurvy, starvation, frostbite, snow blindness, plunges into icy seawater, impossible sledding conditions, Vitamin A poisoning, debilitated dogs, apocalyptic storms, gaping crevasses, and assorted mortifications of the flesh. Mikkelsen’s diary was even eaten by a bear.
Three years of this, coupled with seemingly no hope of rescue, would drive most crazy, yet the two retained both their sanity as well as their humor.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who co-adapted the book into a screenplay, provides the foreword to this new edition of the classic exploration memoir, which was one of The Explorer’s Club’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
The Start of a Greenland Expedition
East Greenland at Last
Sledging in Darkness and Storm
Goodbye to Ship and Comrades
Alone between Heaven and Earth
Still on the Inland Ice
Last Days on the Inland Ice
On Land Again
In Danmarks Fjord
Sledging in Slush
Water and Hunger
Things Get Worse
The Days Shorten
The Last Spurt
Winter Again
Spring and Summer Hope
The Third Winter
The Last Six Months
Hopes Fulfilled
Postscript
