MIKKELSEN, Ejnar. Two Against the Ice … Translated from the Danish by Maurice Michael. London, Rupert Hart-Davis, [1955].
8vo. Original boards with illustrated dust-wrappers (not price-clipped); pp. 224, sketch map and plates after photographs; very light rubbing to the rarely seen wrappers, minimal offsetting from endpapers, otherwise remarkably clean and fresh.
First edition in English (and not the Travel Book Club edition) of a classic tale of survival by an unheralded but important figure in the history of Arctic exploration. 'In 1910 he [Mikkelsen] decided to search for the diaries of the ill-fated Mylius-Erichsen expedition, which had set out to prove that Robert Pearys 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 expeditions boat needed repair. Several months later, Mikkelsen and Iversen embarked on a journey during which they would suffer virtually every travail in the Arctic repertoire: implacable cold, scurvy, starvation, frostbite, snow blindness, plunges into icy seawater, Sisyphean sledging conditions, Vitamin A poisoning, debilitated dogs, apocalyptic storms, gaping crevasses, and assorted mortifications of the flesh. Mikkelsens diary was 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 and their humor. Indeed, what may have saved them was their refusal to become as desolate as their surroundings' (blurb of the first US edition of 2003).
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