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.
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