
Captain Bartlett held the remaining group together, boosting their spirits and providing food and shelter. Ignoring their expedition mates trapped, they continued without sending word about their plight. When the ship became trapped in the ice, Stefansson and a small group left to go "hunting." They escaped over land back to civilization. Captain Bartlett, at the helm of the ship, had extensive experience in the frozen north. Stefansson, the expedition leader, put the trip together at the last minute, skimping on supplies. In 1913, the Karluk expedition set up to explore the northwest passage. 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"- … ( más) 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.
