“Ultimately, with ice pressing in on them from all sides, Greely had made the decision to commit the boats and men to the mercies of the floes, with the forlorn hope that tides and winds would propel them south to Cape Sabine. If that failed, they would abandon everything not essential and attempt to cross ice bridges from floe to floe until they reached land. Some of Greely’s men disagreed with him, muttering that his decisions were madness and amounted to suicide. One of the men said he feared “another Franklin disaster.” The expedition doctor scribbled furiously in his journal: “It is terrible to float in this manner, in the snow, fog, and dark. This seems to me like a nightmare in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories.” And in many ways, it was.”