The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  “Oh my, how35 it blows now,” wrote Mamen. “The rigging is swinging to and fro, the masts shake so we feel it now and then, the courage is sinking in most of them, all are prepared for a catastrophe. Well, such is life in the north, it is a gamble, not with money, but with what is more valuable than gold, it is human life one plays with. The strong and hardy ones most often come out of the game with happy results, while the poor and frail individuals may pay with their lives.”

  They were, as Beuchat observed, the lost and headless expedition.

  And so they looked toward November and waited.

  November 1913

  It is a dreary1 existence but one must put up with it and be thankful as long as one has a roof over the head.

  —BJARNE MAMEN, ASSISTANT TOPOGRAPHER

  By afternoon on the first of November, the gale was so powerful that the men could barely peer outside. Any more than that would have been deadly in the slicing cold and bitter wind. Because all flesh had to be covered or it would freeze instantly, the men tucked themselves safely inside the drafty wooden walls of the ship and stayed there, listening anxiously to the cry of the wind and the crashing of the ice.

  When they did look outside they saw a wild and powerful scene. The snow swept and twisted angrily, like the funnels of a thousand small tornadoes. It swirled into clouds and blew with such force that mountainous drifts were forming while some patches of ice appeared flattened—blown perfectly clean and glistening. The ship, still without power, was being carried westward by the current with remarkable speed, at the mercy of the ice floe that held her.

  November, it appeared, would bring no relief. Bartlett wore the strain on his weathered, ruddy face, shadows of it appearing around the cracked smile, his keen blue eyes splintered with lines. He was the only one out of the entire ship’s company to realize fully the dangers they faced. But he vowed he was never going to let them see his own anxiety.

  The men were terrified of losing the Karluk, knowing that the swift current would make it near impossible to reach land. If the ship was crushed and lost, their fate would probably be a long and painful death on the ice from exposure or starvation.

  Outside, the wind raged sixty miles per hour. A massive snowdrift, blinding and unforgiving, swept over and around the ship. The depth was only thirty-six fathoms now, but the Karluk was taking in a good amount of water from a slight forward leak. There was no steam available since the engine had broken down again and was being repaired. The crew and staff—two and two together at a time—used the hand-pump to empty her. It was a long and sobering job, and as they worked they wondered how long the Karluk would be able to hold together.

  Bartlett ordered a good stock of supplies and provisions to be transferred to the ice nearby. He wanted to lighten the Karluk—thus minimizing her chances of being crushed—and give them a solid base of stores, should anything happen to the ship. Working in the teeth of the storm, they began with the sacks of coal and tins of biscuits lined on the poop deck, unloading them onto the ice from 10:00 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon.

  Afterward, Mamen sat in his cabin, listening with great delight to the tick-ticking of his watch. Many of the men had similar treasures from home. For McKinlay it was the Bible given to him by his local pastor before he left Glasgow; for fireman Fred Maurer a Bible from his mother; and for mess room boy Ernest Chafe his trophies for marksmanship and shooting. For Mamen, it was this watch, which was a gift from his brother Trygve before Mamen had left for Canada. The watch had stopped working months ago, however, and try as he may to get it going again, it had remained silent and unmoving. Suddenly, one afternoon, it began to tick, out of the blue and for no apparent reason. So Mamen sat there now, warm and safe while the storm raged outside, and listened with joy to the sound.

  THE DAYS WERE GROWING SHORTER. About noon they caught a glimpse of the sun, which hovered only three degrees above the horizon. It was now dark by 12:30 P.M.

  The men were dreading the onset of the long winter night. Day by day, the light slipped away, the sun sank lower on the horizon, and the darkness seeped up and over the icescape, settling oppressively over the ship.

  Bartlett kept his men on a strict routine. When there was no work to be done, he invented tasks for them to do. The sense of order was good for them and it was the only way to keep their minds occupied. Mamen, McKinlay, and a few of the others realized what he was doing and appreciated his methods. “Captain Bartlett,” wrote Chafe2, “kept us to work certain hours every day. . . just to keep us fit for the hardships we would have to encounter in case we lost the ship, which we expected at any time. As long as we were working, it seemed that we were living for a purpose, and were still a part of the busy world.”

  A chess league was launched for the officers and scientists to while away the dull evenings, with Bartlett promising a box of fifty choice cigars to the grand prize winner, and a box of twenty-five cigars to the man who took second place. “I for my3 part have no chances of getting a prize,” wrote novice Mamen, “but I promised the others to help them smoke, which I suppose they are not particularly delighted about.”

  As Bartlett had hoped, the chess tournament quickly became a much-needed distraction. Caught up in the spirit of the game and competition, the men found themselves wholly absorbed in the new nightly activity. It temporarily took their minds away from the loneliness and the great fear—the feeling of being disconnected from the rest of the earth. No radios, no airplanes, no ships could possibly know where they were or reach them if they did know. Because of the rapidly changing drift, even Bartlett and his men had lost all sense of their own whereabouts.

  On the morning of November 4, Malloch was shaken awake at 5:30 a.m. by the night watchman, informing him that the stars were out. He pulled himself reluctantly from his bed, dressed hurriedly, and lumbered up to his usual place on the bridge to try for an observation by starlight, as his instruments were still imprecise. But the sky clouded up as soon as he set foot outside. Determined to learn their position, and now wide awake, he stayed out until 9:00 A.M., pacing back and forth, squinting up at the sky and waiting for it to clear, but—with the help of the brilliant star Vega—he was only able to fix the longitude.

  Mamen, meanwhile, resorted to climbing up the rickety rope ladder to the crow’s nest to take a look around. Each time he made the climb, he prayed he would see land, or at the very least, a way out of their plight. Those minutes seemed to stretch endlessly as he swung up one rung and then another, step by careful step, hoping there would be something wonderful waiting for him at the top. But each day it was, as always, “ice and still4 more ice as far as the eye could see.”

  There was a narrow ledge that surrounded the ship for half a mile or so, the result of the shifting ice, which had broken and piled into pressure ridges. These towering ice hills dotted the horizon, but other than that, it was flat and clear and looked like fine going. There was absolute stillness and no sign of life. In fact, as Mamen remarked bleakly, “it looks as5 if everything were dead . . ..”

  Everyone realized that the ship was unreachable, that even if Stefansson knew where they were, he might have already given them up for dead, and even if he hadn’t he would not be able to send help. Yet Stefansson was the only hope.

  “Presumably Mr. Stefansson6 will come in contact with the outer world,” Mamen wrote, “and after the weather we have had lately I am sure his supposition is that Karluk has gone down and most of us with her. It is this that worries me.. . .”

  AFTER DAYS OF grueling work, the transfer of supplies to the ice was, at last, completed. Now when the men looked out on the frosty Arctic landscape, the white blankness surrounding the ship was interrupted by the dark outlines and shapes of boxes stacked and stored on top of the ice. There were 2507 sacks of coal, 6 cases of codfish, 5 drums of alcohol, 114 cases of biscuit, 19 barrels of molasses, 2,000 feet of lumber to build winter quarters, 33 cases of gasoline, 3 cases of codsteaks, 4 cases of dried eggs, 5 casks of beef, 9
sleds, 3 coal stoves, and 2 wood stoves.

  Kuraluk and Kataktovik went out daily now, diligent and patient, to try to replenish the dwindling meat supply. The Eskimos were respected by the scientists and befriended by some of them. But the crewmen and officers treated them like servants, or worse. Just as the crew’s quarters and mess room were separated from the scientists’, the Eskimos’ quarters were separated from both crew and staff, and they ate and hunted separately. This was fine with them. They wanted nothing to do with the crewmen and were there simply to do their jobs, to fulfill their contracts. Kuraluk and Kataktovik had been hired to hunt and Kiruk to sew, and they went about these tasks quietly and fixedly.

  Kuraluk and Kataktovik spent hours in the cold and wind, sometimes sitting by a hole in the ice all day long with no results but a nip on the nose and cramped limbs. They did not complain and they did not give up. On one lucky day, they got ten seals at a lead of water a few miles from the ship.

  That made thirty-four seals in the larder now, which they expected would last until the middle or end of January. Beyond that, the men had no idea what they would do. Polar bears were too elusive, and the arctic foxes were sparse. The men were eating seal meat three times a week, and although they were sick of it, they dreaded the day when it ran out.

  “It surely will8 be a dreary winter,” Mamen lamented. “There is not a living thing to be seen, neither bear nor fox, and now when the ice has closed up there won’t even be seal. Preserved meat and preserved meat day out and day in. Our seal supply will not last longer than Christmas, if that long . . ..”

  AT NIGHT, Fred Maurer, Ernest Chafe, gentlemanly seaman Clam, and the rest of the deck crew enjoyed their own gramophone concerts. They spent their evenings in their mess room, much like the staff and officers, playing cards, chess, or checkers, or reading books from the ship’s library. During the day, they found themselves with little to do except clean up and chop ice for water. The large tank in the galley was the primary water source right now. It had a small hatch for dropping the ice into; it worked well, but there was a reserve box on deck, just in case of bad weather. Fresh water could be obtained from the old ice floes—the ones that had been around for years. “The effect of9 the sun upon the ice draws the salt from it,” Chafe explained, “thereby rendering it so fresh that the tongue can trace no saltness in it.”

  Second engineer Williamson removed the copper tank from the Cabin DeLuxe and fixed it up below, running pipes through it from the engine room fire, conveniently located nearby. This way there was hot water for washing, for which McKinlay and Mamen and most everyone else was grateful. It had been at least a month since most of the men had washed their clothes, which were now molding in disreputable and dingy piles on the cabin floor.

  Murray’s observations showed the ship to be drifting due north, the most northerly and westerly drift thus far. The Karluk was still leaking badly, and the staff of the expedition took over the job of pumping her dry. Every day, she had to be pumped free of water, and each day it took longer to do.

  Mamen was positive it was from all the bumping in the ice. “I am sure10 that she has sprung a leak,” he wrote, “if so there will be some fun here in the winter, first to labour early and late with pumping to save her, and then it will, I suppose, go with us as with De Long.”

  NOVEMBER 12 was the last day of the year that they would see the sun. Everyone had risen in the dark, flat morning to eat breakfast, and afterward returned to their bunks to await the slender bit of daylight that remained. It was more of a glimpse than anything else—just a filmy memory of light.

  They all mourned the loss of the sun, although a sort of mystical twilight still crept over the sky around noon. But the darkness became more pronounced each day and, in the absence of that bright orb, thanks were given for the moon and the stars.

  “People talk about11 moonshine,” wrote Mamen. “Today we have a perfectly splendid full moon, it rose early in the forenoon, it shines so it is a joy to see it, the snow and ice crystals sparkle like diamonds in the light . . ..”

  It was a shimmering, glittering world, and the men often stood outside on the deck or on the ice to admire the exotic beauties of the far north. The Pole star burned almost directly overhead, and sometimes they could forget the dangers they faced when they stood on that drifting world of ice and watched the brilliant light displays of the aurora borealis. “It was difficult12 to believe that the elements of this beauty were the very stuff from which could spring disaster and tragedy,” wrote McKinlay.

  He often wrapped himself in his warmest clothes and walked out on the ice at night to enjoy a solitary reverie and to “wonder and admire13, remembering that the same moon will in its own time shine on the dear ones at home. What message could it convey to us, if it could? What news of friends and of the world at large? It is at such times that one realises what it means to be this cut off.”

  WITH THE FALLING TEMPERATURE and no more warmth from the sun, the staff spent the morning huddled in their beds. They were up by noon, though, and the project of the day was to make Karluk as warm as possible. Everyone worked together to insulate the main deck with a six-inch layer of snow, and to cover the poop deck, which was above the Cabin DeLuxe, with blocks of snow eighteen inches deep. All doors and windows not used were covered, too. Bartlett would have roofed the entire ship in to make them the most snug and comfortable; but the drift was too unpredictable, and their winter station was not secure enough.

  That night, an ominous sound rose above the murmurs of mutiny and the snoring of the sailors—the distinctive rumbling of ice pressure. It was, as McKinlay said, “a noise there14 is no mistaking.”

  McKinlay fixed his faulty transit—one of the few magnetic instruments he had on board—and then bundled up in some warm clothes and headed outside for a sighting. Vega was visible to the naked eye. The brightest star in the northern hemisphere, bluish hued and blazing, it was magnificent. McKinlay stayed out to watch it until his right hand became frozen, and the object glass of the transit frosted up, whereupon he went back inside to restore circulation. He rubbed his hand in his hair in an attempt to warm it. His thumb and third finger were skeleton white and badly nipped; but soon the blood began to flow again and he was in agony.

  “It is a pain15 utterly unlike anything I have ever experienced,” he wrote that night, his fingers still tender and stiff, “beating toothache all to sticks. I cannot imagine any more exquisite torture than to freeze a man’s fingers and toes just so far as they are restorable and then to thaw them out.”

  Earlier, McKinlay was strolling the deck when, around noon, a glow appeared in the south. He stood there, admiring it, when he noticed, “just tipping the16 horizon, the upper limb of the sun.”

  According to the Nautical Almanac, the sun was already two days below them, so the only possible explanation for it could have been refraction. But refraction or not, it was light. With great excitement, McKinlay shouted to the others to come look. The men rushed from the saloon, the fo’c’sle, and the engine room to gain one last glimpse of the brilliant star.

  They stood there together and bade the sun farewell and thanked it for its warmth. Shoulder to shoulder, crewmen, officers, scientists, Eskimos, and captain, they watched in a deep, awed hush, chilled, their breath escaping in thin, diaphanous clouds. Yet they were strangely warmed. Then, with great sadness, they saw the radiant fireball dip below the earth for the last time, leaving them in the cold darkness.

  “Now he is17 gone!” McKinlay said afterward. “When we will see him again, who can say? For our position is such that we may see him—at the earliest—in two months’ time; it may be thrice, it may be—well, one wonders what position we will be in when he does return. But as we watched him go, I had other thoughts. We would miss him, but we would buoy ourselves up with the knowledge that he still shines on our friends at home and with the hope that he will shine for us again.”

  ON NOVEMBER 15, the ship was buffeted again by screaming gale winds
that grabbed hold of her until she trembled from the force of it. It was the most violent storm they had seen, and “it blew and18 still is blowing so hard that we feel the wind indoors,” wrote Mamen, “it penetrates everything, nothing can keep it out, we all shiver and freeze although we are inside . . ..”

  McKinlay was out on the ice when the storm hit, and the ship, only a few yards away, was already invisible in a blanket of drifting snow. Even though there was no sign of open water, Bartlett ordered everyone to remain aboard because of the fury of the blizzard.

  The men passed the time as best they could, but they felt their confinement. Mamen, to the delight of his colleagues, spent the day writing out forestry tables, desperate for distraction. Do you intend19 to begin a forest station in the Arctic? they asked him. And he was reminded that he was silly to spend so much time and effort on work that would never be of any use nor ever be seen by the Canadian government. But Mamen was stubborn and did not listen to them. He intended to make his time out here count.

  The mess room light burned all day now because of the darkness. The sun was truly gone, and the moon had disappeared, too, into the blackened and clouded depths of the wild gale. Somehow, this made things even more unbearable.

  The loss of the sun, the endless waiting, the fear, the quiet, the vacuum of that world—all preyed on the minds of these men. “So long as20 the sun was with us to measure the night and day, it was not so bad,” Chafe wrote, “but when the orb disappeared, a sort of sickening sensation of loneliness came over us.”

  ONE AFTERNOON, they saw—or thought they saw—smoke in the northwest, a cloud just above the horizon that seemed like the smoke from a steamer funnel. The winds still blew but the snow had cleared. Their hearts leaped at the faintest glimmer of hope that there was another ship nearby. Half an hour later, they saw another spout of smoke, just west of the first one. And later still another stream appeared to the south-southwest, remaining for quite a while in the sky. There was no ship. It was the most curious phenomenon, and something the men were at a loss to explain.