BRUNSWICK, Maine (AP) — Bowdoin College has finished preserving a rare film of some of Arctic explorer Donald MacMillan’s journeys to Greenland.

The Brunswick school used a National Film Preservation Foundation grant to have a film lab preserve what is believed to be the only existing copy of MacMillan’s first film, “Visiting with the Eskimos of Smith Sound,” made in 1930.

The 15-minute silent film — apparently shot between 1923 and 1925 in northwestern Greenland — shows footage that staff at Bowdoin’s Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum had never seen before. The film was given to Bowdoin by a man whose parents had owned a film studio in Boston that MacMillan used to edit his film footage.

MacMillan graduated from Bowdoin and made more than two dozen scientific journeys to the Arctic Circle.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.