Pacing sled dogs, bundled explorers, and meandering ice floes could be scenes from any early Arctic expedition. But the 23 minutes of footage captured near the North Pole 116 years ago isn’t just the earliest film in National Geographic's archives—it’s a peek into a pair of wildly disastrous scientific adventures.

At the turn of the 20th century, America was in a polar frenzy. During the 1890s, a Swedish balloon expedition, two Norwegians on skis, and an Italian Duke on a steam whaler all failed to reach the North Pole. Meanwhile, famous authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe set their characters against the mysterious and stark Arctic, and reputable sources theorized that a lost race of