Empire at the Edge of the World

In 1921, explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson attempted to establish a settlement on Wrangel Island and claim the remote Arctic territory for the British Empire. He sent four young men and Ada Blackjack, an Iñupiat seamstress hired for the expedition, into an environment for which the party was inadequately supplied and unevenly prepared. When relief failed to arrive, isolation, hunger, illness and disputes steadily destroyed the group’s prospects.

Giles Milton follows the expedition from its confident planning to its collapse and Ada Blackjack’s struggle to keep herself alive until rescue. Her practical skill and endurance stand against Stefansson’s distant promises and the imperial assumptions behind the venture. The book places an extraordinary survival story within the geopolitical competition for Arctic territory and asks how reputation, ambition and prejudice shaped the way responsibility for the disaster was assigned.