In 1930, a 24-year-old Cambridge undergraduate named Gino Watkins led fourteen men to the east coast of Greenland on one of the most ambitious Arctic expeditions of the twentieth century. Their mission: to prove that aeroplanes could fly the Atlantic by mapping an unmapped coastline, discovering unknown mountain ranges, and manning a weather station in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet — through winter, in the dark, in winds of 130 miles per hour.

Gino Watkins never lost a man. He discovered the highest mountains in the Arctic, became the first non-Inuit to master the Greenlandic kayak, and is now regarded as the godfather of British kayaking. By twenty-five, he had led three major expeditions and earned the Polar Medal from the King. And then, on a solo hunting trip during his next expedition, he disappeared - leaving only his kayak an ...