In the heroic age of polar exploration, expeditions could disappear for months or even years.
Ships were crushed by ice, men vanished without trace, and rescuers themselves sometimes became stranded.
Few stories illustrate the brutal reality of Arctic exploration better than the Alabama Expedition of 1909–1912.
Led by Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen, the expedition began as a search for the remains and records of three explorers who had disappeared during an earlier expedition to northeast Greenland. It ultimately became something far more extraordinary.
It began with a relatively straightforward objective: to travel to the remote northeast coast of Greenland, investigate the fate of three men who had disappeared during an earlier Danish expedition, and recover their missing journals and reports.
Instead, it became an extraordinary struggle for survival.
The expedition's leader, Ejnar Mikkelsen, and engineer Iver P. Iversen eventually found themselves alone in one of the most inaccessible regions on Earth. Their ship had been wrecked, their companions had departed, their supplies were running down and there was no modern communications system with which they could summon help.
They survived two Arctic winters before finally escaping Greenland in 1912.
The story has since become one of the great survival narratives of polar exploration and was later dramatised in the film: Against the Ice.
But the real story is considerably more complicated — and in some respects more remarkable — than the film suggests.
Why did the expedition go to Greenland?
The story began with the disastrous Denmark Expedition of 1906–1908.
Led by Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, the expedition had been sent to explore and map the largely unknown northeastern coast of Greenland.
Among its members were Niels Peter Høeg-Hagen, the expedition's cartographer, and Jørgen Brønlund.
During a difficult journey across the region, Mylius-Erichsen, Høeg-Hagen and Brønlund became separated from the main expedition party.
Only Brønlund's body was eventually found. Mylius-Erichsen and Høeg-Hagen disappeared. Even more frustratingly, important records relating to their final journey were also missing.
The precise fate of the men therefore remained uncertain.
For Ejnar Mikkelsen, this was an unfinished story. If the missing journals, reports and geographical observations could be found, they might explain what had happened to the three men and provide important information about one of the least explored regions of Greenland.
Mikkelsen therefore proposed a new expedition. Its mission would be part search, part investigation and part geographical exploration.
The resulting expedition became known as the Alabama Expedition.
Ejnar Mikkelsen
Ejnar Mikkelsen was already an experienced polar explorer when the expedition began.
Born in Denmark in 1880, he had previously travelled in both the Arctic and North America and had gained considerable experience of long-distance travel in extreme environments.
He was also no stranger to risk.
Mikkelsen's interest in Greenland was not simply about reaching places that had never appeared on a map.
He was particularly interested in solving the mystery surrounding the missing members of the Denmark Expedition.
His expedition therefore had a very specific purpose. He wanted to follow their trail.
The ship Alabama
Mikkelsen acquired a small Norwegian vessel called Alabama. It had been built in Norway in 1888 and was originally intended for other work rather than as a purpose-built polar exploration vessel.
Before the expedition, the ship was substantially strengthened.
An ice skin was fitted to its hull, additional structural reinforcement was installed and a 16-horsepower engine was added.
Even after these modifications, however, Alabama remained a small vessel by polar-expedition standards.
The expedition would eventually discover just how vulnerable a small ship could be when confronted by Greenland's pack ice.
The original seven men
This is where the personnel of the expedition are often incorrectly described.
Seven men departed Copenhagen aboard Alabama on 20 June 1909:
- Ejnar Mikkelsen — expedition leader and captain
- Wilhelm Laub — Danish naval officer and second-in-command
- Christian H. Jørgensen — army officer
- Hans P. Olsen — navigator
- Georg Poulsen — navigator
- Carl F. Unger — carpenter
- Aagaard — the ship's engineer
This was the original seven-man party.
But one of these men would not remain with the expedition.
Iver Iversen joins the expedition
While Alabama was in Iceland, Aagaard became ill. On 6 August 1909, he left the expedition.
The expedition therefore needed another engineer.
The replacement was Iver P. Iversen, a Danish naval engineer who joined the expedition in Iceland. This distinction is important.
Iversen was not one of the seven men who sailed from Copenhagen. He became the seventh member of the expedition after replacing Aagaard. The original expedition account explicitly records that Iversen joined on 6 August 1909 because Aagaard had left owing to illness.
This seemingly minor change would ultimately have enormous consequences.
Iversen would become Mikkelsen's closest companion and would spend the final two years of the expedition with him.
Into the Arctic
After leaving Iceland, Alabama continued towards Greenland. The expedition intended to reach the northeastern coast and establish a base from which sledging journeys could be undertaken.
But Greenland's sea ice immediately began interfering with the plan.
The expedition had hoped to establish its winter base further north, closer to the territory associated with the earlier Denmark Expedition.
The pack ice made this impossible.
Instead, Alabama reached Shannon Island, where the expedition established its winter quarters. The ship would remain there.
The men began preparing for the sledging journeys that would take them northwards.
The first journey: searching for Brønlund
In the autumn of 1909, Mikkelsen began investigating the route taken by the missing Denmark Expedition.
Mikkelsen, Christian Jørgensen and Iver Iversen undertook a major dog-sledge journey towards Lambert Land.
It was an extraordinarily difficult journey. They travelled across frozen terrain with dogs pulling their supplies, navigating through a landscape in which landmarks could disappear beneath snow and ice.
Eventually they reached the location of Jørgen Brønlund's grave.
The discovery was immensely significant. Brønlund had died during the final stages of the Denmark Expedition. His remains provided the first physical evidence of what had happened to the missing explorers.
But the men also found something even more important.
Brønlund's belongings
Near Brønlund's remains, Mikkelsen's party found belongings including a notebook containing information relating to the final journey.
The discovery provided clues concerning the route taken by Brønlund, Mylius-Erichsen and Høeg-Hagen.
There were also references to cairns and reports left along their route. Mikkelsen now had something he had desperately needed: a trail to follow.
The next stage of the expedition would be even more ambitious.
Across the Greenland ice
In March 1910, Mikkelsen and Iversen set out on their major sledging journey. Their objective was to follow the route of the missing explorers in reverse.
They travelled across the Greenland ice towards Danmark Fjord.
The journey was enormously demanding. The two men had to haul supplies and equipment across the ice while depending upon their dogs for transportation.
Their route took them through terrain that had been barely explored. They eventually discovered cairns containing reports left by Mylius-Erichsen.
These discoveries helped reconstruct the final movements of the missing expedition. The mystery was beginning to yield its secrets.
But there was a problem.
The journey had taken much longer than expected. Meanwhile, Alabama was in trouble. While Mikkelsen and Iversen were away, the situation at the expedition's base was deteriorating.
The ship was trapped in the ice.
The remaining expedition members had to consider their own survival.
Eventually, Alabama was wrecked. The ship could no longer serve as the expedition's means of escape. The other members of the expedition eventually managed to leave Greenland.
But Mikkelsen and Iversen were still away on their sledging journey.
They knew none of this.
They were returning towards their base expecting to find their ship. Instead, they would discover that the expedition had effectively vanished.
The moment everything changed
Mikkelsen and Iversen eventually returned to the vicinity of Shannon Island. They arrived on 25 November 1910.
What they found was devastating. Alabama was gone. The ship had been wrecked. Their companions had left Greenland. Mikkelsen and Iversen had missed them. They were now stranded. The expedition that had begun with seven men had effectively become the story of two.
The two men had no ship. They had no radio. They had no easy means of reaching civilisation. And they were hundreds of kilometres from the nearest settlements.
The Alabama Hut
There was, however, one thing left behind that would save their lives. The expedition members had constructed a shelter from material associated with the wreck.
This became known as the Alabama Hut.
For Mikkelsen and Iversen, the hut became their home. It was tiny, crude and utterly isolated. But compared with sleeping outside on the Greenland ice, it was a lifeline.
The men now had to turn an expedition camp into a permanent survival shelter.
They had to make their provisions last. They had to hunt. They had to maintain their equipment. They had to look after their dogs.
And above all, they had to survive the winter.
Two men against the Arctic
This is the part of the story that made the Alabama Expedition legendary. Mikkelsen and Iversen were not simply delayed. They were cut off.
The expedition records and later accounts document their prolonged isolation and the journeys they undertook during this period. The Arctic Institute's surviving archive includes Mikkelsen's reports, letters and diaries, as well as Iversen's diary from the expedition.
Their isolation lasted through two Arctic winters.
The environment was brutally unforgiving. Temperatures could plunge to lethal levels. Winter darkness limited activity. Snow and ice made travel exhausting.
Food became increasingly important. Every dog mattered. Every item of clothing mattered. Every piece of fuel mattered. A minor injury could potentially become fatal.
There was no possibility of calling for help.
The dogs
The expedition's sled dogs were essential to survival. They were the men's transportation, allowing them to travel distances that would otherwise have been impossible.
But dogs also consumed food.
This created a terrible calculation. The men needed the dogs to travel. The dogs needed food to travel. And food was finite.
As the months passed, the animals suffered from exhaustion and inadequate nutrition.
The loss of dogs could mean the loss of mobility. The survival of Mikkelsen and Iversen was therefore closely tied to the survival of their animals.
The psychological battle
The physical hardships are easy to understand.
The psychological difficulties are harder to imagine.
Mikkelsen and Iversen were living in an environment almost completely cut off from the outside world. They had no newspapers. No telephone. No radio. No regular messages from home. No knowledge of when a rescue attempt might arrive.
Days could become indistinguishable from one another.
The cold, darkness, hunger and isolation created enormous psychological pressure. Mikkelsen later described the mental effects of the ordeal in his published account.
His book Lost in the Arctic, published in English in 1913, became an important first-hand account of the expedition.
The search was not over
Despite their desperate circumstances, Mikkelsen and Iversen continued working. They had not gone to Greenland merely to survive.
They still had their original mission.
They wanted to recover the records of the missing Denmark Expedition. They had already found important information. But they wanted more. Their journeys therefore continued even after the loss of the ship.
This made their predicament even more dangerous. Remaining in the hut was safer. Travelling could expose them to storms, crevasses, exhaustion and starvation. Yet without travelling, they could not complete their mission or improve their chances of finding a route back to civilisation.
What happened to Mylius-Erichsen and Høeg-Hagen?
The expedition helped establish what had probably happened to the missing men.
Brønlund's remains had been found. Reports and cairns discovered along the route provided information about the final journey. But Mylius-Erichsen and Høeg-Hagen were never found.
Their exact final resting places remain unknown.
The evidence strongly indicates that they died during their attempt to return from the remote northeast Greenland region. Their bodies may have been lost beneath snow and ice or otherwise disappeared into the landscape.
The Alabama Expedition therefore answered many questions without completely resolving the mystery.
The irony of the expedition
There is something almost haunting about the story.
Mikkelsen had gone to Greenland to search for men who had disappeared. He found traces of them. He found Brønlund's grave. He found their reports. He reconstructed part of their final journey.
And then he and Iversen disappeared themselves.
For people thousands of kilometres away, Mikkelsen and Iversen were effectively missing explorers. Had they died, their fate might have become another Arctic mystery.
The Alabama Hut becomes their world
For months, the hut was not merely somewhere to sleep. It became their entire world. They ate there. They repaired equipment there. They planned journeys there. They sheltered from storms there.
They waited there.
Outside was an almost limitless landscape of snow, ice and rock. Inside was a tiny human space containing two men attempting to preserve their lives. The contrast was extreme.
The hut was insignificant compared with the landscape around it, yet it was the difference between life and death. The survival of the hut itself is one reason the expedition remains so tangible today.
The final winter
By the time Mikkelsen and Iversen entered their second Arctic winter of isolation, their situation had become increasingly desperate.
They had survived far longer than originally intended. Their physical condition had deteriorated. Their supplies had been depleted. Their dogs had suffered. They had no certainty that rescue would arrive.
Yet they continued.
The expedition had become a test not only of physical endurance but of mental resilience. The two men had to maintain routines simply to keep functioning.In such circumstances, discipline becomes a survival mechanism.
Food had to be rationed. Equipment maintained. Shelter repaired. Journeys carefully planned. The smallest mistake could have enormous consequences.
Rescue at last
Eventually, in 1912, the waiting ended. Mikkelsen and Iversen were rescued.
After nearly three years since the expedition had begun, the two men were finally returning to civilisation.
The remaining expedition members had already returned earlier. But Mikkelsen and Iversen had been left behind for approximately two years after the loss of Alabama. Their rescue brought one of the most extraordinary survival stories in polar exploration to an end.
Archival material held by the Arctic Institute includes records relating to Mikkelsen's return, as well as correspondence and expedition reports from 1911–1912.
What did the expedition achieve?
It would be wrong to remember the Alabama Expedition purely as a survival story. It was also an important scientific and geographical expedition.
Mikkelsen and his companions explored parts of northeast Greenland that were still poorly understood. They recovered reports and information left by the Denmark Expedition. They gathered geographical observations. They contributed to knowledge of the Greenland coastline, sea ice and inland regions.
The formal scientific account was eventually published as Alabama-ekspeditionen til Grønlands nordøstkyst 1909–1912.
Published in 1922, the work formed part of the Danish Meddelelser om Grønland series and contains extensive material on the expedition's journeys, geography, sea ice and meteorological observations.
The expedition's own record
One of the reasons the Alabama story is so valuable to historians is that we do not have to rely solely upon later legends.
Mikkelsen wrote his own account. The English edition, Lost in the Arctic: Being the Story of the 'Alabama' Expedition, 1909–1912, was published in 1913. It runs to almost 400 pages and provides a detailed first-hand narrative of the expedition.
The surviving archives are even broader. The Arctic Institute of Denmark holds expedition documents including correspondence, reports, diaries and other material relating to the Alabama Expedition. Among the archive's holdings is Iver Iversen's diary, covering part of his journey in 1910, as well as Mikkelsen's own diary and later reports.
This documentation is particularly important because it allows modern researchers to separate the genuine events from later dramatisation.
The Alabama Hut survives
The story also has a remarkable physical legacy. The Alabama Hut has survived at the expedition's former site in northeast Greenland.
It provides a tangible reminder of the two men who spent their final Arctic winters there.
For modern visitors and researchers, the hut represents something more than a historical building. It is the physical centre of the survival story. A small shelter in an immense wilderness. A place constructed from the remnants of an expedition vessel. And a place where two men waited for rescue.
A remarkable twist: the ship that became a shelter
Perhaps the most symbolic detail of the whole expedition is the fate of Alabama itself. The ship carried the explorers into Greenland, transported their equipment and dogs and served as their expedition base.
Then the Arctic destroyed it.
Yet material from the ship helped provide the shelter in which Mikkelsen and Iversen survived. In that sense, Alabama continued to serve the expedition even after it ceased to exist as a ship.
The vessel that had brought them into the Arctic ultimately helped keep them alive.
From real-life ordeal to Against the Ice
The story gained a much wider modern audience through the 2022 film Against the Ice. The film stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Ejnar Mikkelsen and Joe Cole as Iver Iversen. It is based upon Mikkelsen's account of the expedition.
The film captures the essential elements of the ordeal: the dangerous sledging journeys, the search for the missing expedition's records, the loss of Alabama, the isolation of Mikkelsen and Iversen and their struggle to survive.
But, as with any dramatisation, some events and relationships are condensed or altered for storytelling. The historical record is considerably richer.
The timeline
1906–1908
The Denmark Expedition, led by Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, explores northeast Greenland.
1908
Mylius-Erichsen, Høeg-Hagen and Brønlund become separated from the main expedition.
1909
Ejnar Mikkelsen organises a new expedition to search for information about the missing men.
20 June 1909
Alabama leaves Copenhagen with seven men aboard.
August 1909
Engineer Aagaard leaves the expedition because of illness in Iceland. Iver P. Iversen joins the expedition, replacing him.
Autumn 1909
Mikkelsen, Jørgensen and Iversen travel by dog sled towards Lambert Land.
1909
The expedition discovers Jørgen Brønlund's grave and associated material.
March 1910
Mikkelsen and Iversen begin their major sledging journey towards Danmark Fjord.
1910
They discover cairns containing reports left by Mylius-Erichsen.
1910
During their absence, Alabama is wrecked.
25 November 1910
Mikkelsen and Iversen return to Shannon Island and discover that the ship and their companions are gone.
1910–1912
The two men survive in isolation, using the Alabama Hut as their shelter.
1912
Mikkelsen and Iversen are finally rescued.
1913
Mikkelsen's account, Lost in the Arctic, is published in English.
1922
The formal scientific report of the Alabama Expedition is published.
Why the Alabama Expedition still fascinates us
The Alabama Expedition contains nearly every ingredient of a classic Arctic mystery. There is a missing expedition. There are unexplored regions. There are abandoned cairns containing mysterious messages. There are men who disappear from contact with civilisation.
Mikkelsen and Iversen did not merely become trapped by bad weather for a few weeks.
They returned from a prolonged sledging expedition to discover that their ship and companions had gone. They then endured two Arctic winters in isolation. They continued to travel, continued to work and continued to preserve the records and information they had risked their lives to recover.
And eventually they made it home.
The Arctic had the final word
The Alabama Expedition succeeded in answering many of the questions that had motivated it.
It found Brønlund. It recovered valuable records. It established important information about the final journey of the Denmark Expedition. It added considerably to geographical knowledge of northeast Greenland.
But the central mystery was never completely solved. Mylius-Erichsen and Høeg-Hagen remain missing. Their final resting places have never been definitively identified.
And so the Alabama Expedition, which began as a search for missing men, remains connected to an unsolved Arctic mystery more than a century later.
There is also an extraordinary irony in what happened to Mikkelsen. He went to Greenland looking for explorers who had vanished. He found their trail. He recovered their records. He discovered their grave. And then he nearly vanished himself.
For two men, a tiny wooden hut became the boundary between civilisation and the wilderness. Beyond its walls was an Arctic landscape that could kill them. Inside were two exhausted explorers determined to survive.
When rescue finally arrived in 1912, Mikkelsen and Iversen emerged from the Arctic having endured an ordeal that few people in the modern world can truly imagine.
The Alabama Expedition was therefore more than an exploration of Greenland.
It was a search for the dead that nearly claimed the living — and one of the most extraordinary survival stories of the heroic age of polar exploration.
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