At the heart of this account of a compelling tragic adventure in the far north is a comparison of two very different styles of leadership: one single-mindedly selfish, and the other heroically self-sacrificial. Empire of Ice and Stone tells the true story of the Karluk, the flagship of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, which left Nome, Alaska, in July of 1913 enroute to Herschel Island off the north coast of Alaska. It never reached its destination. Instead, it became helplessly trapped in polar ice and commenced drifting westward, encased in a large floe, until it was north of the Siberian coast.

The captain of the Karluk, Robert Bartlett, managed to oversee the evacuation of the ship and most of its supplies before the floe crushed the ship and it sank. He then supervised an odyssey of the survivors over dangerous pack ice to nearby Wrangel Island, a barren, storm-swept wasteland in the East Siberian Sea. The pitiful encampments of survivors included crewmembers, scientists, two Eskimo hunters, and the wife and two young daughters of one of the hunters. Under terrible conditions they lived off the ship’s stores and whatever seals, foxes, polar bears, and birds they could find. Sometimes they were reduced to eating nothing but sealskins and blubber. Realizing their desperate plight, Captain Bartlett and one of the hunters undertook a hazardous winter journey over the sea ice to the mainland and then seven hundred miles overland across the northern Siberian coast to find a ship that would take them back to Alaska, inform the authorities about the survivors, and mount a rescue mission. Bartlett’s thoughts were always on the lives entrusted to him and how he could save them.

In contrast, the leader of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, Vilhjalmer Stefansson, was obsessed with the expedition as a means to further his own career. Under his orders, the Karluk packed quickly and haphazardly and left Nome with insufficient winter clothing for all of its members. He initially sailed aboard the Karluk, but as soon as it became trapped in the ice, Stefansson jumped ship, ostensibly for a hunting expedition, and was not aboard when the floe in which it was trapped broke loose and began drifting to the west. Historians still debate whether Stefansson left because he knew the ship was in danger or because he was sincerely hunting caribou, as he said, but in fact at that time it was well known that there were very few caribou left in that part of Alaska. His main failure came afterwards: instead of reporting the Karluk‘s peril and doing everything in his power to rescue the people trapped on the ice floe, he dismissed the fate of the ship, put it out of his mind, and carried on with the expedition he hoped would make him rich and famous. In effect he abandoned those whose lives had been entrusted to him.

Most of this gripping narrative, though, focuses on the survival efforts of those trapped on Wrangel Island and on Captain Bartlett and his companion’s heroic efforts to rescue them. It is a well-told true adventure that I highly recommend.