Though born in Manitoba to Icelandic parents in 1879, the explorer Vilhjelmur Stefansson (born William Stephenson – he changed it to an Icelandic form in 1899) grew up in North Dakota in the United States. In the first decade of the twentieth century Stefansson worked in Iceland for a time, before spending an extended period between 1906 and 1912 conducting ethnographic surveys of the Indigenous populations of the North American Arctic, spending the winter of 1906-7 with Inuit in the Mackenzie River delta in Yukon.

In 1913 Stefansson organized the Canadian Arctic Expedition, arranged by the Canadian government to explore the sea west of the Parry Archipelago, the northernmost islands in the Canadian Arctic. The expedition set off from Nome, Alaska, but soon ran into trouble. The lead ship Karluk became trapped in ice and Stefansson disembarked to continue his travels, purportedly to gather provisions, but, in the eyes of the crew, in order to avoid drifting off course.

The Karluk drifted westward in the ice floes, eventually being crushed in January 1914. Survivors attempted to reach Wrangel Island, north of Siberia, but many perished, either from carbon monoxide poisoning or from the severe cold. Eventually, the captain of the ship, Robert Bartlett with Inuit guide Kataktovik ventured across the sea ice first to Siberia and then to Nome, where they arrived in May 1914, and arranged a rescue party to pick up the rest of the survivors.

Stefansson continued his expedition across the frozen Arctic for a further four years, discovering numerous islands that were unknown even to Inuit and better surveying many others. The Friendly Arctic is his published account of the expedition and was printed in 1922. This copy was presented by Stefansson to King George V in 1923 and contains a map of the Arctic annotated by the explorer to show the routes taken, the new lands discovered and to pinpoint the place where the Karluk was wrecked.