The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  And then the rain changed to snow, which froze everything it fell upon, creating thick layers of frost. The temperature dropped and the pools of water on the nearby ice froze solid.

  There were breathtaking evenings when the haloed moon shone silver in the dark blue sky and the stars burned brightly. McKinlay wanted to linger on deck; but there was a dangerous chill in the air, and it was too cold to stand for very long. But he gazed with wonder at the frost-covered rigging, the bejeweled mast and railings. The ship rose from the icy depths like a magical, majestic statue, her edges softened and blurred by the shimmering white and the starry frost that covered her. She looked, he decided, as if she were enchanted.

  ALL ON BOARD WERE RESTLESS, especially their leader. Stefansson knew now that the chances of the Karluk breaking free and being able to continue on her journey were slim. “It is distressing53 to think that the winter already has come, and here we are, unable to go either back or forth, in the poorest part of the Arctic regions,” wrote Mamen. “I am beginning to get restless and only long to go further north and then home, but . . . the chances are small, yes, infinitely small.”

  The outlook was black, and at Flaxman Island, the Southern Party began to wonder where their Karluk comrades were. They knew all too well the Karluk’s shortcomings and feared she would not be able to make it through the ice. Chipman wrote about Stefansson, “He may be54 good ‘copy’ but I wish he had paid more attention to the Expedition itself both publicly and personally.”

  THE KARLUK WAS DRIFTING now without power. She was trapped in a floe of old ice, easily half a mile wide, and suddenly found herself being carried with the current. Bartlett would not leave the crow’s nest and thought that he could see in the distance signs that the ice was loosening. But he couldn’t be sure anymore, and they were held fast in the viselike grip of the shifting ice pack.

  Murray had never gotten over his dislike or distrust of Stefansson and had maintained a guarded distance from the leader ever since the July showdown in Nome where the scientists had confronted their leader. Now they were all stranded in the ice, and as far as Murray was concerned, it was Stefansson’s fault. Stefansson was, in Murray’s opinion, nothing more than “a self-seeking adventurer55 who deliberately intended to put the ‘Karluk’ into the pack ice for the sake of notoriety and personal glorification.” It would be the surest way for Stefansson to get his name in the papers, to be known as the gallant leader of a lost expedition.

  DAY AFTER DAY, there was no change in the ice. The ship remained a prisoner, helpless to dictate her own course or break free. Bartlett noted Stefansson’s restlessness, as did the members of the crew and staff. Stefansson was a man who hated sitting still. On August 22 he suddenly called the scientists who were supposed to be part of the Southern Party into his cabin and announced again that he intended to send them ashore. Murray, though, was quickly eliminated from the group, because his equipment was too heavy to make the trip. Then it was decided that McKinlay could just as well do his work on the Karluk, and Wilkins would also remain for similar reasons. That left Jenness and Beuchat, who had no equipment and no purpose for being on the ship, since their work was to live with and study the Eskimos.

  The plan was for Jenness and Beuchat to head over the ice to Flaxman Island to seek word of the Mary Sachs and the Alaska, and then continue over the now solid ice by foot and dogsled to Herschel Island, if it turned out the Southern Party had gone ahead. Everyone pitched in to ready the expedition, but it was impossible to locate the equipment and stores they needed for travel because nothing was where it was supposed to be.

  Even though the scientists had tried to establish some sense of order, the Karluk’s stores were still a mess, without any sense of organization or supervision. Templeman always helped himself to whatever he needed from the food supplies and never bothered to document it. The expedition clothing worked in much the same way. It had never been officially issued to the men, as it should have been, upon their arrival to the ship. Instead, it had been handed out sporadically, first to some, then to others at a much later time, and anyone overlooked had to put in a request or help himself.

  It was, thought McKinlay, indicative of the way the expedition was being run. The only clothing he had been issued thus far was a pair of mukluks and some slippers. His government-issued clothing was aboard the Alaska, as was the trunk containing his own clothing and personal items, which he had brought from home. “That was all56 right,” he said, “in the ordinary course of affairs; but no thought has so far been taken of the change in prospects. I do not intend to ask for anything until I need it & then I shall demand it.”

  AUGUST 24 was the most promising morning they had seen for a long time. The ice showed signs of breaking, there was a sprawling open lead to the east, and the ship was abuzz with nervous excitement. The men were hopeful of getting free, but by the end of the day, the wind shifted to the west and killed all possibility of escape.

  By the next morning, the ice had completely closed up again, and there was no sign of open water anywhere. Dr. Mackay had crafted an instrument that determined the speed and direction of the drift, and now they knew that the Karluk was drifting west at one mile per hour.

  If they had been closer to shore, their prospects might have been better for breaking free. As it was, the snow was falling again, land was sighted far in the distance, and adverse winds blew in from the north. The Karluk’s drift shifted daily, and by August 28, she was drifting southeast at a rate of twelve miles a day.

  Meanwhile, unrest was brewing in the engine room over more than just the boiler tanks. Before being recommended for his post on the Karluk, Chief Engineer John Munro had been a junior officer on the British warship Rainbow. A Scot, he had emigrated to Canada and become a Canadian citizen. He was a towering man with a wide puttyish face, a rather soft chin, deep-set eyes, and a high forehead often in a crease when his brows were particularly furrowed, as they usually were.

  Second Engineer Robert Williamson begrudged Munro his position as chief engineer. Munro was fond of shirking his work and putting much of it on Williamson, and Williamson soured at being ordered about by this man, whom he regarded as his inferior. Williamson was thirty-six years old, already weathered from over a decade of a seaman’s life. Tall, brawny, and as sharply angled as a hawk, he had served in the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Baltic. On June 16, the day before the Karluk had sailed from Esquimalt, he introduced himself to Bartlett aboard a local streetcar and by the time the streetcar reached Esquimalt, he had a job as second engineer. Even with the last-minute hiring, he had hoped to join Karluk as chief engineer himself and had been bitterly disappointed over being given the second post.

  STEFANSSON GAVE JENNESS and Beuchat final instructions for their journey, along with a check for two hundred dollars and a letter that gave them full authority to act independently of the expedition should the need arise. They were to attach themselves to the Southern Party as soon as possible, and Jenness was to telegraph any pertinent news to the New York Times on Stefansson’s behalf.

  Kataktovik broke the trail ahead of the two sleds, which were loaded with a large umiak, skins, and provisions for thirty days. Each sled was pulled by a team of seven dogs. The ice was still covered with snow, which made it difficult to pick out a good trail, and they hadn’t gone far when the sleds became immersed in water and the umiak was damaged.

  After dinner aboard the ship, Stefansson and Hadley set out to reach the party, to take a batch of letters to them to mail. When they overtook Jenness and the others, Stefansson was dismayed at their miserable and wet condition. They were soaked to the skin, the provisions were damaged from the rough journey, and the ice was in a treacherous state. Immediately, he ordered their return to the Karluk. They cached the stores on the ice to lighten the sleds and brought back only the most valuable of the equipment. It took twenty minutes to retrace what had taken them two hours to travel on the way out. Somewhere along the way, Beuchat took a tumble int
o the water and had to be carried back in the umiak.

  BY LATE AUGUST it was clear that the men of the Karluk were trapped. The seventeen-degree-Fahrenheit temperature seemed even more bitterly cold. The imprisoned ship was drowning in snow. The wind blasted them from all directions, forever shifting and changing course. Inside the Karluk, they were warm, but the air was close and stale. The world around them was vast and wide—open sky, ice as far as the eye could see in all directions, nothing to obstruct their view of that boundless, frozen wonderland. But they began to feel claustrophobic. They felt smothered by the ice, as if it were not only compressing the sides of their ship, but constricting their throats, and the breath in their lungs.

  “How long will57 this continue?” wrote McKinlay. “This . . . inactivity is becoming unbearable. The ice even reflects the general state of affairs; there is not the slightest sign of movement in it. The small patches of open water have frozen up & all is as still & quiet as death. In the minds of all is the unuttered question, ‘When will things change?’ Will the change come soon? If not, ours will be a tame start; hard luck to be stuck thus early. But hope springs—.”

  THE WEATHER AND THE ICE conditions were growing worse every day. It was too late in the season, too late in the year to hope for a clear passage. Even Stefansson had to acknowledge this. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind now that they would be imprisoned by the ice for the winter.

  Everyone was aware of the hopelessness of the situation, but no one knew exactly what it meant for them or for the expedition, nor did they know what they could expect. They were not afraid, but the wait and the uncertainty were unsettling. On August 31, Bartlett and Mamen had a quiet talk on the ice about it all, just the two of them. Everyone else remained confined to the ship. The sky lit up briefly that night with the first auroral display they had seen. But it was very faint, just an ephemeral glimpse of color in all of that whiteness.

  THE ESKIMOS UNDERSTOOD the gravity of their situation in a way that the scientists and crew did not. Borrowing a piece of writing paper from McKinlay, Kataktovik wrote a letter to a friend in Point Barrow, even though he had no idea if it would ever be mailed. He missed his home, and more than that, he was frightened. He asked his friend to pray for him, that he might get out of this safely.

  “When will you58 prayer’s to God & Jesus help to me,” he said. “Please you tell my daughter’s good her, & like to my daughter very much. Sometime I sorry & sometime happy to God & Jesus if you like to believe to God & Jesus. I like to believe to God & Jesus very much.”

  September 1913

  Goodbye, Stefansson.1 We did not then know that those of us who were left on your luckless ship were not to see you again.

  —FRED MAURER, FIREMAN

  Stefansson was growing more and more restless. Here and there, a lead would open in the ice around them, but the Karluk was held fast by the mile-and-a-half-wide floe that now entrapped her; the crew was helpless, unable to do anything but watch the open water and sit there. The ice was thickening, deepening, the whiteness stretching far across and extending far beneath the ocean’s encrusted surface.

  Stefansson hated being held prisoner by the ice. He could never sit still and he seldom slept. He worried that someone would beat him to his mysterious, undiscovered continent.

  Meanwhile, Bartlett began rationing their coal oil and kerosene, which were already running low, because their full supply was stowed aboard the Mary Sachs. He called “lights out” now at midnight, to conserve fuel. The days were growing shorter and darker, and the lamp in the saloon was lit for the first time, signifying the advent of winter.

  The captain also began to tighten the rationing of food, and the Eskimos went hunting for seal nearly every day, using the rifles Stefansson had issued them. Officers, scientists, and crewmen sometimes joined them, but Kuraluk was by far the best hunter and secured most of the seals himself. Seal hunting was by no means an exciting sport, and the Eskimos were the only ones who seemed to have the patience it required.

  Kuraluk would settle behind a hummock of ice or take his kayak out into the open water and wait. He would sit, still as a statue, for eight hours at a time until a seal appeared out of a nearby watering hole. If the seal saw him, it was over. He had to be ready to shoot at any moment, even though his fingers were stiff and sore from the cold and lack of movement. But the seals were slippery creatures and surprisingly quick, and if he wasn’t fast enough they would disappear before he could take another shot.

  Sometimes hours passed without sighting anything, and sometimes the creatures were too far away to shoot. Seals were exceptionally curious, so whenever Kuraluk or the other Eskimos spied one in the distance, beyond range, they would let out a low whistle and watch as the inquisitive animal disappeared into the water and resurfaced just a few yards from them. Then came the shot, and if they were lucky, the seal was easy to retrieve. More often than not, the wounded animal slipped through their hands and the patient hunters came home empty-handed. At other times, Kuraluk and the others felt lucky enough to capture even one or two after a long day’s work.

  McKinlay, try as he might, could not seem to land even one seal. He was clumsy when it came to sports or hunting, and became the butt of jokes when he sat for twenty minutes on the ice one day and missed a seal that leapt up in front of him, simply because he was wiping his nose with his handkerchief. “Down went my2 ‘hankie,’ up went my rifle, but with a dive the seal was gone.. . .”

  Soon Templeman was replacing the salt meat they were accustomed to with seal meat at every meal. McKinlay, like most of the others, had never tasted seal, and Templeman, never having cooked it before, wasn’t quite sure how to prepare it. It had a strong smell and a strong taste; but the liver and seal kidney pie were delicacies, and Templeman began serving the dishes once a week.

  TO PASS THE TIME, the men of the Karluk hunted, read, skated, slept, posed for Wilkins’s camera, and watched the ice. They gave an orchestral concert one night, with Sandy on violin, Wilkins and McConnell on the harmonica, Hadley on mandolin, and Second Engineer Williamson playing the comb. Under Mamen’s tutelage, they practiced their skiing and had a good laugh at Dr. Mackay, who insisted on wearing short pants, which became filled with snow every time he fell off his skis. Beuchat and Jenness studied the Eskimo language with Stefansson while Jimmy and Jerry shared traditional Eskimo folktales with everyone. Mackay, Chafe, Sandy, Munro, and Jenness engaged in a target-shooting competition with a pound of tobacco as the prize. But many of the staff members stayed in bed until dinnertime.

  Despite their efforts to stay busy, it was a dreary, aimless existence. Templeman received a black eye from sailor John Brady; fireman Breddy received a scalding on the back of his head in an engine room accident; and Kataktovik suffered from a painful bout of venereal disease. Mamen, meanwhile, cursed his fellow scientists, thinking them the laziest men he had ever met. His knee was much better now and he was using every opportunity to exercise, to study, to write letters to Ellen that he hoped he would be able to send. He was also learning to use the sextant at Stefansson’s request. Mamen might be asked to leave the ship soon and head for land, Stefansson told him, and he would need to know how to work the instrument.

  THE SNOW CONTINUED TO FALL, the temperature plunged, the cabins dripped with water from evaporation, and the men held no hope whatsoever of being released from the ice. On September 10, there was an aching in Mamen’s bones that meant a storm was coming. He often suffered from rheumatic pains in his arms and legs, which was the most accurate way he had ever found of predicting bad weather. “Soon,” he wrote,3 “we will be enveloped in the darkness of the winter, so infinitely long.”

  At Bartlett’s request, Murray had continued charting the ship’s drift, and now it appeared that she was in the vicinity of Thetis Island, 140 miles or so east of Barrow, but still a good deal west of the desired goal, Herschel Island. They could just spot Thetis to the west.

  On September 17, Stefansson sent Dr. Mackay and
Jenness out on the ice to search for land to the south. Mamen saw them from the ship, obviously lost and wandering off in a northwesterly direction. He started after them, and when he was close enough, he shouted to them, asking in what direction they were headed.

  “Due south4,” they replied.

  “You must have5 a screw loose,” he yelled and raced to catch up with them and set them on course. They returned after traveling six or eight miles, not having seen any sign of land.

  Stefansson dispatched Mamen and the doctor again to look for land on September 19. Murray had estimated they were eighteen miles offshore of Beechey Point, sixteen miles east of Oliktok Point, on Alaska’s northern coast. Mamen and Mackay walked for twelve miles in a westerly direction, and once again returned having seen nothing.

  After supper that night, Stefansson sent for Mamen, Malloch, and McKinlay and met with them in his cabin. They were to leave the Karluk, he told them, and go ashore where they would be better able to conduct their work. Malloch and Mamen could expect to be on land for at least six weeks, mapping the coast, while McKinlay would make magnetic observations.

  But Stefansson had even bigger plans. He was leaving the ship himself. He summoned Bartlett, Wilkins, Jenness, and McConnell to his cabin and told them of his news. He asked for the assistant steward, Chafe, to be present as well, since he would be in charge of outfitting the party. Stefansson would take Wilkins, Jenness, and McConnell with him. No one was more surprised about Stefansson’s plans than Bartlett. It was a hunting trip, said Stefansson. They would also take Jimmy and Jerry, the first two Eskimo hunters he had hired. They would head southwest toward Thetis Island where they would hunt caribou up the Colville River to supplement their fresh meat supply.