In 1921 the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson decided that Wrangel Island, ninety miles off the Siberian coast, ought to belong to Britain or Canada. Neither government had asked him to. He sent four young men north with six months of supplies, on the published theory that the Arctic was a friendly place that would feed a competent man. He did not go himself. The fifth member of the party was Ada Blackjack, a twenty-three-year-old Iñupiaq seamstress hired to make the skin clothing that would keep the others alive. She took the job because it paid fifty dollars a month and her son was in an orphanage. Nobody had thought to ask whether the seamstress could shoot. The relief ship could not get through the ice in 1922. This episode is about the second year, and about what she taught herself to do when there was nobody else left to do it.

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In November of 1942 the German submarine U-172 put two torpedoes into the SS Benlomond in the South Atlantic. She went down in about two minutes. Fifty-five of the fifty-six people aboard died, most of them when the boilers went. Poon Lim, a twenty-four-year-old second steward from Hainan Island, got onto a wooden float roughly eight feet square and stayed on it for a hundred and thirty-three days. He bent a fish hook from the wiring inside a torch, unpicked rope for line, dried his catch in strips in the sun, and collected rainwater in an emptied biscuit tin. Two ships saw him and did not stop. This episode explains why — and why the Royal Navy took his account apart before they believed it. The record has not been broken in more than eighty years.

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In January of 1915 the Endurance was frozen into the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, within sight of a continent she never reached. Nine months later the ice crushed her and she went to the bottom, leaving twenty-eight men standing on a drifting sheet of frozen sea, three hundred and fifty miles from the nearest land, which was uninhabited. No radio could reach anyone. Nobody knew where they were. There was no search to suspend, because there was nowhere to begin. They came home because one of them got into a twenty-two-foot boat and went to find help himself. This episode also covers the Ross Sea party — the other half of this expedition, stranded on the far side of the continent, and the three men who died there, who are almost never mentioned in the retelling.

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