When she was ten months old Kari Herbert's father took her and her mother to live in north-west Greenland with an indigenous tribe of hunters then known as Polar Eskimos. The family spent several happy years on Herbert Island (the name is a coincidence), a remote sliver of land that was home to what was then the second most northerly continuously inhabited settlement in the world. There was no running water in the 1970s, and the old women still grinned gummy smiles, their teeth worn to stumps from years of softening sealskins.

Kari's father, Wally Herbert, was and is a pioneering polar traveller. In 1969, with three other men and forty dogs, he made the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean by its longest axis. It took sixteen months, and the expedition is now widely regarded as the first to have