Four Against the Arctic is not Dave Roberts' best work, but it certainly is worth reading. For one thing, the main plot is over in the first quarter of the work. The subplot, a plodding effort to confirm the plot, is what this book really is about. Finding a needle in a very large haystack is how Roberts characterized it.

The book centers on four Pomori ("seacoast dwellers") from Mezen, Russia, reportedly marooned from May 1743 to August 1749 on a small island of the Svalbard Archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. They were told to have sailed in a small, indigenous boat ("kotch") across the Barents Sea from Mezen toward Spitsbergen, to hunt for walrus. Blown off course, the vessel was caught in pack ice off the island of Edge?ya. Four of the men left the boat to go ashore in search of a prefabricated hut in which other Mezen Pomori had overwintered some years earlier.

Traveling lightly, the four took with them a musket with a dozen balls and charges, a single knife, a small kettle, 20 pounds of flour, a tinderbox and tinder, and a pouch of tobacco and a wooden pipe each. After making their way off the treacherous ice, they actually found the much-dilapidated hut, where they hunkered down for the night. Returning the next date to hail their shipmates, they were horrified to see the kotch and its occupants gone, lost forever in the drift and mercilessness of pack ice.

Well within the Arctic Circle, Svalbard has the vacation appeal of Kuiper Belt planetoids. It is arguably as harsh a barely habitable landscape as anywhere on the globe. It is a land of rock, cold, wind and dark, interminably long winters. What it lacks in ambiance it makes up for in terror in the form and menace of polar bears.

Overwintering in the archipelago was a tortuous ordeal for the better provisioned, prepared and premeditated original hut builders and the very few foolhardy enough to risk life, limb and sanity thereafter. The four Pomori didn't just overwinter; they were stranded for six consecutive winters before being rescued fortuitously by another ship blown far off its original course. Twenty pounds of flour and a pouch apiece of tobacco don't go very far in 75 months. The island did support a herd of reindeer, and the 12 musket balls and powder charges were used to take 12 of these animals. . .in the first weeks of the exile. Because they were of an amazingly hardy and self-sufficient race, even among Russians of that age, they were said to have survived despite the aforementioned hardships, including nine polar bear attacks, scurvy and what must have been a pervasive sense of hopelessness. They survived on courage, ingenuity, resolve and Cochlearia. Among other privations, they lived without salt for six years and three months (I can usually go without until noon.).

The long-ago castaways' circumstance, if true, was a world-class if not a world-record ordeal and worth both the investigation and telling from fragmentary, dated and second- and third-hand records. Because the vague story was so unbelievable, steeped in local lore and nearly mythological, the first and grueling order of business was to ascertain its veracity. Records from 18th-century Russia were not easily found, translated and convincingly corroborated.

As evident with his many other books, Dave Roberts has the mental make-up of an explorer. In his searching, he is both tenacious and meticulous. And like every pathological historian, he is readily lured into fact-finding tangents that become distractions, if not costly obsessions. Four Against the Arctic was such an obsession, and that's really what this book is about: chasing the myth, rumor, and literary and physical evidence, on the slim and elusive chance of a payoff for the author's speculative and not inconsiderable commitment of time and resources. What Roberts found, in the end, is fascinating. What he discovered along the way, the haystack itself, is the real intrigue of this 320-page book.

Simon and Schuster published Four Against the Arctic in 2003. The dust jacket scene was a ridiculous choice. It has been altered for the better in the $19 paperback version that came out in 2005.