The true, harrowing story of the ill-fated 1913 Canadian Arctic
Expedition and the two men who came to define it.
In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine Karluk departed
Canada for the Arctic Ocean. At the helm was Captain Bob Bartlett,
considered the world's greatest living ice navigator. The expedition's
visionary leader was a flamboyant impresario named Vilhjalmur Stefansson
hungry for fame.
Just six weeks after the Karluk departed, giant ice floes closed in
around her. As the ship became icebound, Stefansson disembarked with
five companions and struck out on what he claimed was a 10-day caribou
hunting trip. Most on board would never see him again.
Twenty-two men and an Inuit woman with two small daughters now stood on
a mile-square ice floe, their ship and their original leader gone. Under
Bartlett's leadership they built make-shift shelters, surviving the
freezing darkness of Polar night. Captain Bartlett now made a difficult
and courageous decision. He would take one of the young Inuit hunters
and attempt a 1000-mile journey to save the shipwrecked survivors. It
was their only hope.
Set against the backdrop of the Titanic disaster and World War I, filled
with heroism, tragedy, and scientific discovery, Buddy Levy's Empire of
Ice and Stone tells the story of two men and two distinctively
different brands of leadership: one selfless, one self-serving, and how
they would forever be bound by one of the most audacious and disastrous
expeditions in polar history, considered the last great voyage of The
Heroic Age of Discovery.
