Empire of Ice and Stone

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, 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.

Auteur

BUDDY LEVY is the author of more than half a dozen books, including Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk; Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition; Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs; River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana and the Deadly First Voyage Through the Amazon. He is coauthor of No Barriers: A Blind Man's Journey to Kayak the Grand Canyon and Geronimo: Leadership Strategies of an American Warrior. His books have been published in a dozen languages and won numerous awards. He lives in Idaho.

Texte du rabat

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.

Contenu

Contents
The Company of the Karluk
Timeline of Artic Exploration

1 Birth of an Explorer
2 Master Mariner
3 Toward the Discovery of New Lands
4 Omens
5 Mirages
6 Beset
7 The Caribou Hunt
8 Adrift
9 "Like Lambs Left to the Slaughter"
10 A Change of Plans
11 Winter is Coming
12 Long Arctic Nights
13 An Arctic Christmas
14 Reunions
15 "Funeral March"
16 Shipwreck Camp
17 The Wrong Island
18 Islands of the Lost
19 A Mountain Range of Ice
20 The Ice Road
21 "Nuna! Nuna!"
22 Searching for Crocker Land
23 An Audacious Plan
24 Hospital Igloo
25 Into the Leads
26 Rationing and Divisions
27 Ferrying
28 Little Molly
29 Smoke from a Distant Fire
30 Separation and Surgeries
31 Heading East
32 "As Long as there is Life There is Hope"
33 Anything Might Yet Happen
34 Snow Blind
35 News to the World
36 Exodus to Cape Waring
37 The Bear
38 Crowbill Point
39 "Our Suspicions Have Been Raised"
40 Salad Oil and Scurvy Grass
41 "Doing Something at Last"
42 The Sea Serpent
43 The World at War
44 "Starvation Tin"
45 "Days to Try a Man's Soul"
46 Confluence
47 "Umiakpik kunno!"
48 Reunited
49 Beyond the Ice
50 Bartlett Versus Stefansson

A Note on the Text and the Sources
Acknowledgements
Document Collections and Selected Bibliography