Station 81°44. Triumph and Tragedy of Lieutenant Adolf Greely's Polar Expedition

"In 2003, I had the fortune of traveling to Greenland as a journalist to cover the adventures of another expedition, and I was literally pinned to these harsh lands with their majestic detachment from the world, a unique people, and its history. Discovering the history of the Greely expedition (1881-1884), I was struck down by it. Like any stories of a great past, it has been retold, rewritten, and interpreted many times before me, but I immediately wanted to present it in my own way. I did everything to ensure that in my interpretation, the spirit of adventure and victory, unity and brotherhood, patriotism and courage was the focus. Adolf Greely was an ambitious man, fanatically devoted to his cause and at the same time a very complex and controversial personality. The power of his intellect made him equally knowledgeable in the natural sciences and mathematics, languages and culture, history and the arts. A man of encyclopedic knowledge, a chosen one by fate, without whose wise and sensitive guidance hardly anyone from the expedition team would have had a chance to survive in the conditions they found themselves in."