Thanks, Fritz! Oh, my, yes, another tale of woe... Artic exploring was/is not for the faint hearted. Your reading is PL OK!
You know, when you wrote in your post
"more doom and gloom from the north," I made a guess, based on an article I had seen in the
NYTimes on August 13, that your reading was going to be about the Robert Falcon Scott artic expedition, which perished in 1912. However, on re-reading the newspaper article, I found I was at the wrong pole! The
Times article was interesting. Archeologists discovered a 106 year old-fruitcake at Scott's camp in Antarctica. They reported that aside from a very slight rancid butter smell, the fruitcake
"looked and smelled edible," the extreme cold in Antarctica having
"assisted its preservation."
https://nyti.ms/2vulyeZ