Ejnar Mikkelsen: 5 Things You Didn’t Know

In the 1912 photograph, Ejnar Mikkelsen looks like a ghost who refused to leave his own body. His beard is ragged, his clothes hang loose, and his eyes have that hollow, far-off look you see in people who have outlived something they probably should not have.

By the time that camera shutter clicked, the Danish explorer had survived two and a half years stranded in northeast Greenland with a single companion, Iver P. Iversen. They had lost their ship, buried their comrades, eaten their dogs, and walked thousands of kilometers over shifting sea ice. They spent long months in a frozen hut, talking to imaginary visitors and rationing moldy biscuits while they waited for a rescue that never quite came when they expected.

Ejnar Mikkelsen was a Danish Arctic explorer who led the 1909–1912 Alabama Expedition to Greenland. He and Iver Iversen survived 2.5 years stranded after their ship was crushed by ice. Their survival story mixed polar science, national politics, and sheer stubbornness.

Here are five things about that ordeal that most people miss, and why this half-forgotten expedition mattered far beyond two men shivering in a hut.

1. The whole ordeal started as a border dispute with the United States

What it is: Mikkelsen did not go to Greenland just to plant a flag in the ice. He went to settle a legal argument. Denmark and the United States were quietly wrestling over who owned a chunk of northeast Greenland, and the answer depended on where a dead American explorer had actually been.

The concrete example: In the late 19th century, American explorer Robert Peary and his associate Frederick Cook claimed to have explored large parts of northern Greenland. If they had truly reached and mapped certain areas, the United States could argue that its explorers had priority in the region. Denmark, which claimed sovereignty over all of Greenland, wanted proof that earlier Danish expeditions had been there first.

That is where the 1906–1908 Danmark Expedition comes in. Led by Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, it mapped parts of northeast Greenland but ended in disaster. Mylius-Erichsen and two companions died on a sled journey, and their maps and diaries were lost somewhere along the coast. Without those papers, Denmark lacked the evidence it needed.

In 1909, Ejnar Mikkelsen proposed a fix: sail to the same region, search for the dead men’s records, and bring them home. The Danish government gave cautious support, but most of the money came from private backers. The expedition ship was a small schooner named Alabama, and the plan sounded simple enough: sail in, winter once, sledge out to find the records, and go home.

So what? Because the mission was about maps and sovereignty, not just adventure, Mikkelsen took risks that a purely scientific expedition might not have taken. The political stakes pushed him deep into dangerous territory, which set the stage for two and a half years of survival rather than a tidy one-season trip.

2. Their ship was crushed, their crew left, and they chose to stay anyway

What it is: The famous photo of Mikkelsen in 1912 is the end of a long chain of bad luck and hard choices. The most important of those choices was this: when their ship was destroyed and the crew evacuated, Mikkelsen and Iversen refused to leave.

The concrete example: The Alabama reached northeast Greenland in 1909 and wintered in a bay that Mikkelsen named Alabama Fjord. Ice closed in. Temperatures dropped. The following season, the pressure of the pack ice crushed the ship’s hull. The expedition lost its only real way home.

Most of the crew, facing another winter with dwindling supplies, made a rational decision. They built a small boat from the wreckage and, when conditions allowed, sailed away to try to reach help. Mikkelsen and a mechanic-turned-explorer, Iver P. Iversen, stayed behind. They believed they were close to finding the missing records from the Danmark Expedition, and Mikkelsen felt responsible for finishing the job.

By staying, they traded a difficult escape for near-total isolation. They built a small hut on the shore, which they called the “Alabama cottage,” and prepared to live there through the long Arctic night. They had no working ship, no radio, and only the food they could salvage, hunt, or haul on sledges.

So what? That decision to stay turned a risky expedition into a survival epic. It meant that every later problem, from starvation to hallucinations, played out without backup. The photo from 1912 shows not just a man who survived the Arctic, but a man who had consciously chosen to stay in harm’s way to finish a mission.

3. They survived by eating their dogs and their own leather gear

What it is: The romantic image of polar exploration usually involves noble sled dogs and sturdy equipment. In Mikkelsen and Iversen’s case, both became food. Survival meant stripping their world down to calories, no matter where they came from.

The concrete example: In 1910 and 1911, Mikkelsen and Iversen made repeated sledge journeys north along the coast, searching for traces of Mylius-Erichsen. They battled deep snow, open water leads, and temperatures that could drop below −40°C. Food was always tight. The dogs burned enormous energy pulling sledges, and the men could not carry enough meat to feed them for long.

As their supplies ran low, they did what many polar expeditions had done before them. They began shooting the weaker dogs to feed the stronger ones, and sometimes themselves. When even that was not enough, they boiled leather from their boots and harnesses to extract a few more calories. Mikkelsen later wrote about chewing on frozen dog meat that had gone rancid, knowing that the alternative was worse.

Back at the Alabama cottage, their diet was not much better. They rationed moldy biscuits and whatever foxes, bears, or seals they could catch. At one point, they found a cache of food left by their own crew before departing. The relief was brief. Much of it had spoiled or been gnawed by animals.

So what? The way they ate their way through dogs and leather shows how thin the line was between life and death. It also explains the haunted look in that 1912 photo. Their bodies were running on the bare minimum, and their minds were not far behind.

4. Isolation pushed them into hallucinations and imaginary visitors

What it is: The Arctic nearly killed their bodies, but it also went after their minds. Months of darkness, hunger, and isolation led both men into hallucinations and elaborate fantasies about visitors who never existed.

The concrete example: After their long sled journeys, Mikkelsen and Iversen spent extended periods alone in the Alabama cottage. Winter in northeast Greenland meant weeks of near-total darkness. Storms could trap them indoors for days. They had no radio contact and no certainty that anyone even knew they were alive.

In his later account, Mikkelsen described how they began to hear voices and footsteps that were not there. They would imagine that a ship had arrived or that other men were outside the hut, only to open the door to the same empty ice. At times, they held conversations with people who existed only in their minds.

They also developed rituals to keep from sliding completely into madness. They read and reread the same few books. They kept a strict routine of chores, even when it felt pointless. They talked about food and home in almost obsessive detail. Anything to keep their thoughts from circling the same dark drain.

Modern psychologists would recognize what was happening. Extreme isolation and malnutrition can cause hallucinations and distorted thinking. Polar explorers from Shackleton to Nansen reported similar experiences, but Mikkelsen’s story is unusually stark because there were only two of them. There was no larger group to absorb the strain.

So what? The mental breakdowns show that survival was not just a physical contest with cold and hunger. It was a psychological siege. When people today look at that 1912 photograph and sense something haunted in Mikkelsen’s eyes, they are not imagining it. He had spent years fighting his own mind as much as the Arctic.

5. Their success helped Denmark keep Greenland, but they came home to almost no fanfare

What it is: Mikkelsen and Iversen did not just survive. They actually found what they were looking for: the lost records of the Danmark Expedition. Those papers strengthened Denmark’s claim to Greenland. Yet when they finally returned, the world barely noticed.

The concrete example: On one of their long sledge journeys, Mikkelsen and Iversen located a cairn left by Mylius-Erichsen’s party. Inside were maps and notes that showed where the Danes had been before they died. The documents confirmed that certain stretches of the coast were not a separate channel, as some had suspected, but part of the main Greenland landmass.

This mattered for international law. By showing that Danish explorers had reached and mapped the area, the records supported Denmark’s argument that Greenland was a single territory under Danish sovereignty. The United States never pressed a strong legal claim in the northeast, and in 1933 an international court in The Hague confirmed Denmark’s sovereignty over all of Greenland.

By then, Mikkelsen was back in Denmark, working as an inspector in Greenland and writing about his experiences. His book about the expedition, often translated under titles like “Two Against the Ice,” told the story in spare, matter-of-fact prose. It did not turn him into a celebrity. Compared to the drama around Amundsen’s South Pole victory or Shackleton’s Endurance saga, two Danes freezing in a hut for years did not capture the same global attention.

In 2022, a Danish film, “Against the Ice,” brought the story to a wider audience, more than a century after the events. The photograph from 1912, shared and reshared online, has done the same. People see the gaunt face, read a caption about two and a half years stranded, and want to know what happened.

So what? The quiet political success of the expedition, contrasted with the lack of fame, shows how much of polar history sits in the background of modern maps. Greenland is Danish in part because two half-starved men refused to quit on a mission that almost no one remembers.

Seen from a distance, Ejnar Mikkelsen’s story looks like a classic survival tale: ship crushed, men stranded, long wait for rescue. Up close, it is stranger and more human. It is about a border dispute that sent a small ship into bad ice, a pair of stubborn men who chose to stay when everyone else left, and the slow erosion of body and mind in a hut that might as well have been on another planet.

The 1912 photograph catches him at the moment when it was finally over. He had the documents he came for. He had outlived the winter, the dogs, the hallucinations, and the odds. The world moved on quickly. The map did not. That is the quiet legacy of Ejnar Mikkelsen and Iver Iversen: a line on a globe, and a face that still makes people stop scrolling for a second and wonder what survival really costs.