In 1881, 25 men led by Lieutenant Adolphus Greely sailed from the harbor of St. John's, Newfoundland. Their destination was Lady Franklin Bay in the high Arctic, where they planned to collect a wealth of scientific data from a vast area of the world's surface that had been described by a British admiral as a 'sheer blank.' Three years later, only six survivors returned, with a daunting story of shipwreck, starvation, mutiny, and cannibalism.