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 ice fields with Captain Abraham 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. The Terra Nova carried Scott to the Antartic in 1910. In 1922 she carried England and his notebook to the ice to pen this remarkable work. In his prefatory note to the Vikings of the Ice, writing in 1923, England wrote, "This book was written as the result of some six weeks' experience on two sealing steamers, the Terra Nova and the Eagle, out of St. John's, Newfoundland. Its purpose is to fill a gap which has persisted astonishingly long. For many years the Newfoundland seal hunt has been the greatest hunt in the world, and that so little has been written about it is a mystery. The world as a whole knows little of it. Even many Newfoundlanders of the better class remain comparatively ignorant of this gorgeous epic of violence, hardship and bloodshed. In so far as personal observation can avail, I have tried to record and portray all the essential features of Newfoundland sealing." England's book on the Newfoundland seal hunt resembles Kipling's Captains Courageous as a study of men and the sea. - The New York Times, Obituary on G.A. England