Using stone points and local copper for arrows and spearheads, living off seals, walrus, and caribou, they’d flourished in one of the last unexplored and unmapped regions on earth. Spurred by his initial recounting and a number of highly imaginative journalists’ embellishments, the narrative grew: Descendants of the great Erik the Red, who had landed on Greenland in the late tenth century, had managed to make their way to Canada, where they traveled west, intermarried with Indigenous peoples, and survived. Of his first meeting with these people, Stefansson proclaimed, “That morning … I knew I was standing face to face with an important scientific discovery.” But there was something else he knew: the story was gaining traction, garnering an audience, and-perhaps most important-the “discovery” was making him famous. Rudolph Anderson, had safely returned with a remarkable haul of zoological and ethnological collections, but it was Stefansson’s story of the lost tribes-alleged Norse descendants of the legendary Leif Eriksson-that fired the public imagination. Stefansson’s 1908–12 Arctic Expedition, which had been sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, was a resounding scientific success.

He was a daring explorer and ethnologist who had just returned from a four-year odyssey roving about North America’s Arctic coastal regions, exploring, mapping, and living off the land and among the Native peoples he encountered around Coronation Gulf and Victoria Island. The man telling the story of this spectacular find-one journalist sensationally ranked it “next in importance only to the discovery of the lost tribes of Israel”-was an Icelandic American named Vilhjalmur Stefansson. The news of the “discovery” was met with awe and wonder among the global public-and deep curiosity, excitement, and intrigue among the world’s scientific community.

In early september 1912, a sinewy, sun-seared, elfish-looking man disembarked a steamer at the Port of Seattle with stunning news: He’d encountered a previously unknown tribe of red-haired, blue-eyed, light-skinned “Eskimos” of Scandinavian origin who’d never seen another white person.* He also claimed that he’d met about a thousand Native people with blond eyebrows and beards, who were taller than other Eskimos, suggesting a mixture of European and Eskimo blood.

The Sun (New York City), September 10, 1912

AMERICAN EXPLORER DISCOVERS LOST TRIBE OF WHITES, DESCENDANTS OF LEIF ERICKSSON

Empire of ice and stone by buddy levy