"On July 27, 1853, when Elisha Kent Kane stood on the deck of the brigantine Advance off the coast of Greenland, he faced a monumental challenge: if Sir John Franklin and his men were trapped beyond the ice fields in the fabled Polar Sea, what was the best way to rescue them? The thirty-three-year-old explorer knew that if he reached them before the British did, he would secure a place for himself in the annals of Arctic discovery." "Already, despite his youth and recurring heart problems, Kane had descended into a volcano in the Philippines, infiltrated a company of slave traders in West Africa, and narrowly survived getting stabbed during hand-to-hand combat in the Sierra Madre. After getting trapped in the polar ice, Kane forged a unique alliance with the Inuit and so survived two horrific winters before leading the most spectacular escape in Arctic history." "This extraordinary young man, having failed to find Franklin, would lead his team 1,300 miles in eighty-three days, traveling by sledge and dogsled, then in small open boats. Returning home to international acclaim, Kane faced another dilemma: he had fallen desperately in love with the beautiful spiritualist Maggie Fox, a young Canadian woman deemed unsuitable by his prominent Philadelphia family. How this star-crossed relationship combines with Kane's tragic early death to deny the explorer his rightful place in history is one of the most fascinating aspects of this story."--BOOK JACKET.