A coworker was telling us about an article she had read (and of course, can't remember the subject's name), about an explorer who went to the arctic in some vague historical period and got lost, was rescued, went back, lost again, and his wife went to rescue him and succeeded, because SHE was the talented explorer, not him. This seems like enough information it should be readily findable, but it's not, so foes it ring any bells for anyone?
I wonder if that was a story about Peter Freuchen, whose first wife was a Canadian Inuit woman. I don't know if she ever saved his life, but I wouldn't be surprised if she had.
He wasn't so much getting lost as just winding up in bad situations. Once he'd gotten frozen into a kind of ice-tomb and wound up digging his way out with knives he fashioned out of his own frozen feces. He also amputated his own frostbitten toes.
He wrote a few books about his exploits, and made a few films, and also won The $64,000 Question (category: The Seven Seas).