Fans of Andrea Barrett's magnificent novel The Voyage of the Narwhal will be interested to read the true story on which it was based.
A six-year-old polar Eskimo boy really was brought from Greenland to New York in 1897 by an American explorer and presented to the Museum of Natural History as one of six prize 'specimens'. Four, including Minik's father, soon died. Minik, upset to discover his father's skeleton on display in the museum, returned to Greenland. But he felt no more at home in the Arctic than he had in New York and died in America in 1918 of Spanish flu.
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