Empire of Ice and Stone

The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk

By: Buddy Levy

Narrated by: Will Damron

"...Damron's able narration carries listeners through this arduous journey with a steady tone that lightens at moments of joy and becomes grave at times of deep sadness and loss. While the tale has all of the trappings of a great adventure novel, neither the author nor Damron let listeners forget that the toll here was real, human, and significant."- Booklist

"Will Damron sweeps listeners onto the Arctic ice with the shipwrecked crew of the Canadian KARLUK."- AudioFile

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.

My Second Favorite Polar Exploration Book

I've audiobooked a lot of the polar exploration stories over the years: the Greely Expedition, Jeannette Expedition, Belgica Expedition, Erebus (South Polar) Expedition, Vitus Bering Expedition, etc. Sometimes the content of the expedition isn't all that interesting, sometimes the author just doesn't know how to write an enticing narrative. In the case of this book the story itself is fascinating and the writer Buddy Levy definitely knows how to write the history of the people to make them come to life. I noticed this when reading his book River of Darkness which I couldn't put down and finished in a week after I started it, which is rare for me to do with hardcopy books anymore.

I will say it's only my second favorite though after the Jeannette Expedition book "In the Kingdom of Ice", but only because the actual story I found slightly more fascinating. Though the Jeanette and Karluk are very similar stories start to finish. In my mind the two books are almost like a first half and second half of the same narrative because the Karluk's crew were reading the Jeannette logs for tips on how to survive in relatively the same place. This book (Empire of Ice and Stone) I will say started off a little dry in the first hour or so but it definitely picks up after.

But the end of the book my jaw was on the floor just hearing about the afterward portion of what happened to all of the survivors afterward. The child Mugpi's afterward left the greatest impression on me. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in tales of survival or history in general.

Great listening!

I’m always happy to discover new authors (to me) as well as stories of historical import.

Amazing!

Very well done! Recommend this book to everyone I know! So interesting I have been searching other material on the voyage.

Fascinating and harrowing

Well-written saga of the Karluk and those who survived the shipwreck (and some who didn’t). As the narrator says, there is a hero in this story and there is a narcissistic villain. There are echoes of these 2 in the crew and staff. Shackleton is so much heralded as the best kind of leader, but Bartlett is nowhere near as well known. He should be. Enjoyed this one a lot, and will be thinking of it for a long time.

Never Dissapoints

Fist the wonderful tale of Greely, now a tale of arctic betrayal and abandonment. Buddy Levy strikes again!