Two Against the Ice

Ejnar Mikkelsen was a Danish arctic explorer and writer who lived from 1880 to 1971. This book covers his (frankly amazing) expedition to East Greenland from 1909 to 1912.

It took me some time to warm to Mikkelsen, his attitude and his writing were brusk (I had to check my definition of this seldom used word: Abrupt and curt in manner or speech; discourteously blunt) and he had an air of cruelty in dealing with his sledge dogs which put me off side. I understand the realities that dogs are generally making a one way voyage when an expedition involves them, but it seemed an unnecessarily uncaring way to present various situations.

Nevertheless, as the reader I worked this out with Mikkelsen and came to understand he was a driven and focussed man, who was as rough around the edges, and wasted little time with the sugar coating of a statement.

In short, his expedition was established in order than he could recover the diaries of members of a previous expedition who had perished - thus his expedition needed to succeed where the previous had failed and the explorers had died - presumably from lack of food and exposure. It became an immediate reality and realistically a likely outcome for Mikkelsen and his companion, and really this story is an ‘against the odds' survival story.

As a companion, Mikkelsen has to find, in the middle of nowhere a replacement for his planned companion, Jorgensen, who succumbs to terrible frostbite and the amputation of toes on the initial sledging attempt to locate the dead men and lay in stores for the return journey of their larger expedition. Iver Iversen, mechanic on the ship ask if he might join this initial expedition and then becomes Mikkelsen's number two for the primary expedition. Both men are aware of this risks involved in this remote place.

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“Elsewhere in the world of man a sprain was an easy thing to cure, but here it was a mortal hurt, not only for the one who suffered it, but also for his companion who would have to wait till the other had recovered and could put his weight on that foot before he could continue. There was nothing he could do, if one of us met with the least accident; there was no help to be had, however badly we needed it, not refuge to be found: either we both got through, or we both died and became as still and frozen as everything around us.”