To Light a Camp Stove

Jørgen Brønlund was a Greenland-born Inuit and the last to die.

If you read this blog, you probably have read Jack London's famous short story about an Yukon prospector set in the early 1900s, "To Build a Fire." (Actually there were two versions with diffrent endings. The second one is the one most of us have read.)

Only a few years later, the last survivor of a 1906–1908 expedition, sponsored by the Danish government and known formally as the Denmark Expedition to Greenland's Northeast Coast, died after failing to light his kerosene (?) stove in a freezing cave.

His body and his diary were found in 1908, but the stove itself was recovered only in 1973. 

A possible reconstruction of his last hours suggest he might have tried to use a diary page — and other stuff — to help pre-heat the fuel.