Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk

by Buddy Levy

They’d managed to salvage a few books from the Karluk’s extensive library and had varied reading to pass around in the evenings: Jane Eyre, Villette, and Wuthering Heights, plus a handful of more recent novels. Bartlett read passages of his beloved Rubáiyát, turning the brittle pages slowly and carefully in the smoky lamplight. His treasured volume, which was so worn that he’d repaired numerous well-read pages with surgeon’s tape, had been with him on his early sea voyages to South America and Europe during his apprenticeship, and on both his Arctic expeditions with Peary. He seemed always to be reading it, and when someone asked him what it was that he enjoyed so much about the book, he mused, after consideration, “Perhaps it is because there is something in its philosophy which appeals to my own feeling about life and death. For all my experience and observation leads me to the conclusion that we are to die at the time appointed and not before; this, I suppose, is what is known as fatalism.”