Author(s): Buddy Levy

History | Recent arrivals: Non-Fiction

<b>The true, harrowing story of the ill-fated 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition and the two men who came to define it.</b> In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine <i>Karluk</i> 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 <i>Karluk</i> 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 <i>Titanic </i>disaster and World War I, filled with heroism, tragedy, and scientific discovery, Buddy Levy's <i>Empire of Ice and Stone </i>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.