In 1922, a forty-five-year-old Nebraskan-born, Harvard-educated, globe-trotting, adventuring writer with an ear for dialect and an appreciation for talk, song and folklore sailed for the icefields with Captain Abram Kean on the Terra Nova. George Allan England was the first and only person to write a detailed account of Newfoundland’s offshore seal hunt. Vikings of the Ice captures the blood, guts, sweat and toil of the “swilin’” life aboard one of the most famous “wooden walls” of all.