The news of the “discovery” was met with awe and wonder among the global public-and deep curiosity, excitement, and intrigue among the world’s scientific community. In early september 1912, a sinewy, sun-seared, elfish-looking man disembarked a steamer at the Port of Seattle with stunning news: He’d encountered a previously unknown tribe of red-haired, blue-eyed, light-skinned “Eskimos” of Scandinavian origin who’d never seen another white person.* He also claimed that he’d met about a thousand Native people with blond eyebrows and beards, who were taller than other Eskimos, suggesting a mixture of European and Eskimo blood. The Sun (New York City), September 10, 1912 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.AMERICAN EXPLORER DISCOVERS LOST TRIBE OF WHITES, DESCENDANTS OF LEIF ERICKSSON He would take one of the young Inuit hunters and attempt a 1000-mile journey to save the shipwrecked survivors. Captain Bartlett now made a difficult and courageous decision. Under Bartlett’s leadership they built make-shift shelters, surviving the freezing darkness of Polar night.

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.

As the ship became icebound, Stefansson disembarked with five companions and struck out on what he claimed was a 10-day caribou hunting trip. Just six weeks after the Karluk departed, giant ice floes closed in around her. The expedition’s visionary leader was a flamboyant impresario named Vilhjalmur Stefansson hungry for fame. At the helm was Captain Bob Bartlett, considered the world’s greatest living ice navigator. In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine Karluk departed Canada for the Arctic Ocean.

The true, harrowing story of the ill-fated 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition and the two men who came to define it.

Empire of ice and stone by buddy levy