New lands within the Arctic circle

In 1872, the Austrian steamship Tegetthoff sailed into the Arctic and never returned. Or rather, it returned only as an ice-bound coffin, drifting for nearly two years with its crew of thirty-two men trapped in the frozen wasteland north of Russia. Julius Payer, explorer and artist, documents every harrowing day of this doomed expedition: the crushing ice that finally devoured their ship, the desperate sledge journeys across unmapped territory, and the extraordinary moment when they stumbled upon a previously unknown archipelago (later named Franz Josef Land). This is expedition literature at its rawest: a first-hand account of men who ate their dogs to survive, who watched companions die of scurvy, and who somehow, against all odds, dragged themselves back to civilization with the spoils of genuine discovery.