285: The Last Voyage of the Karluk w/ Buddy Levy - A True Crime History Podcast

Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast

Erik Rivenes

True Crime, History, Education

4.7 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2023

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

My guest, is Buddy Levy, the award-winning bestselling author of "Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk". He joins me to talk about this remarkable story of disaster, death and survival in a frigid and desolate polar landscape.

Buddy's website: https://buddylevy.com/

Go here to download the Zocdoc app for free to find a top-rated doctor (and support the show) https://www.zocdoc.com/most

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome all to another episode of the most notorious
0:29.9	podcast. I'm Eric Rivness. Thank you for listening. Staying subscribed. I so appreciate
0:37.2	you sticking with me week after week. I've got another fascinating story for you now.
0:42.4	My guest today is New York Times Best Selling Author Buddy Levy. He is the author of many books
0:49.9	and his work has been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,
0:55.3	NPR USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, and The List Goes On and On. You may also
1:03.6	know him as a co-star on the History Channel's Hit Docu Series, decoded. He was also a contributing
1:12.1	writer on the award-winning 2018 documentary The Weight of Water. His most recent book, which
1:19.3	of course he is here to talk about today, is called Empire of Ice and Stone, the disastrous
1:26.7	and heroic voyage of the Karloch. And it's so great to have you with me today. Thank you for coming
1:33.3	on. Eric, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Yeah. So what inspired you to write this book?
1:40.1	Where did you get the idea? Yeah, that's a great question. I guess the short version is that I
1:48.0	started working as a journalist covering adventure sports around the world back in the late 90s
1:53.1	and the early 2000s and near the end of my run following people all over the world, I mean,
2:01.0	places like Borneo and New Zealand, Argentina. I found out that there was this blind adventure
2:08.3	who was going to be racing in this Eastern Greenland. And I wanted to see what that was all about.
2:16.8	So I embedded myself into its team and followed them around for a couple of weeks in the mountains
2:21.8	in the fiords of Greenland. And there was a Norwegian woman who I met there who introduced me to the
2:29.3	book, The First Crossing of Greenland by Sri Chaf Nansen. And this famous Norwegian explorer
2:35.8	named Nansen, who was just a remarkable person and humanitarian and won the Nobel Prize later.
2:42.7	And I started really getting interested in Arctic exploration at the time and started reading
2:49.9	widely about it. And the sidebar note, I was also the son of a Nordic ski racer who my father
	...

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