Giles Milton is the author of more than a dozen well-crafted and engaging history books that typically use biography of an emblematic individual as a window into a period. In his new book, illustrated with three excellent maps and more than forty archival photographs, he uses this approach to enter the world of polar exploration for the first time. His subject is the notorious Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who believed the Arctic was a benign and welcoming environment for human settlement. 

Born William Stephenson in rural Manitoba in 1879, he became obsessed with his Icelandic heritage early on and as a student adopted the Icelandic form of his name, creating a persona of glamour and mystique. Although it is hard to see from photographs quite how this dour and unattractive man – who apparently talked in a monotone – managed to hold lecture audiences, scientists and politicians spellbound, his self-belief and optimistic vision clearly smoothed all difficulties away.

After studying anthropology at Harvard, Stefansson was recruited in 1908 for an ethnological survey of the Canadian Arctic, and on Victoria Island he encountered a group of Inuit whom he thought ‘clearly of Scandinavian descent’. DNA studies in this century have shown that their European ancestry is from more recent