The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  Were they beginning to hallucinate? Their world now filled with eerie sights and sounds, some of them explicable, some less easy to understand. “There is a21 peculiar weirdness in those silent stretches of the ice pack,” wrote Chafe. “No sound is heard except the boom or roar of ice breaking and grinding by its own great weight.”

  Spirits hit an all-time low. Only the gramophone seemed capable of invoking anything resembling cheer, except to Dr. Mackay, who was quite vocal in his condemnation of it. The doctor had come to view the thing in general—and all of the noise it emitted—as a serious abomination. Even Harry Lauder seemed to have lost his charm.

  One night—perhaps to placate him, perhaps to quiet him down—Mamen pilfered the handle of the machine and smuggled it to Mackay, who, in an effort to silence the offending beast once and for all, stashed it in his bunk. The staff and officers, as usual, wanted a concert that night. They had come to depend on this evening ritual; it was vitally important to most of them. Williamson tried to wind up the gramophone, but, of course, the doctor had the handle and refused to return it. Not to be outdone, Williamson and McKinlay appealed to the crewmen in their quarters in the fo’c’sle and asked to borrow their gramophone. They set up the borrowed contraption in the saloon and soon were enjoying their favorite music at an even greater volume, as this Victrola played much louder than their own.

  It was minutes before Mackay appeared, having done the impossible and dragged himself out of bed. He volunteered the handle, ready to admit defeat—anything to stop the racket. But no such luck. It was with great pleasure that McKinlay and Williamson replaced the handle, wound the machine, and began spinning a record as the crewmen’s gramophone continued to blare its own tunes. The result was a thunderous concert of dueling gramophones. Mackay was more annoyed than ever, and completely unamused.

  Everyone else was in high spirits over the prank, until the gasoline lamp burned out so that no one could see an inch in front of his own nose. Desperate for light, they lit the dreaded coal oil lamp, which cast a mournful gloom and discharged fumes that caused their heads to ache. One by one, the men retired to their bunks, disheartened and depressed once again. It was amazing the effect that the feeble light of one rotten oil lamp could have. A few stragglers remained, attempting to read or play chess, but at midnight the lamp gave out and plunged them back into darkness.

  They depended on artificial lighting, from morning till night, but their supply of coal oil was running dangerously low and Bartlett gave orders for rationing. During the day, lamps were lit only when absolutely necessary. The gasoline lamp in the saloon was still failing, and they were terrified of it dying altogether. Every day, McKinlay took it apart and tried to fix it, but to no avail. It now gave out only a faint light. When it went, it would be like the sun leaving all over again, and the men did not think they were strong enough to deal with this.

  Midday brought “a faint, twilight22 glow in the South,” wrote a somber McKinlay, “telling us that there is still a sun shining somewhere in the world, but that is all.”

  ON NOVEMBER 21, the Karluk and the floe that held her began drifting west rapidly, approaching the coast of Siberia. The gale continued to blow through the ship. Mamen, Malloch, McKinlay, and Beuchat felt the gusts of cold air all night as the temperature in the Cabin DeLuxe dipped below freezing. They had no choice but to sleep in their clothes, which was both awkward and uncomfortable. And even with that, it was impossible to get warm. There were two degrees of frost on McKinlay’s bunk, and everything that was freezable in the Cabin DeLuxe was frozen and frozen hard. When the men awakened, the room looked like a glittering ice palace. Ice covered everything, and long, jagged icicles shone from the ceiling.

  Outside, the rigging shook, the wind shrieked, and the ship trembled from bow to stern. Now the Karluk rapidly approached Wrangel Island, following an almost identical path to the Jeannette, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the scientific staff and Bartlett.

  Some men had already pronounced the Karluk dead. Almost all agreed that she would not survive the winter. The scientists held a somber meeting on November 24 to discuss the future. It was more of a wake, actually, complete with mourning over the soon-to-be-departed ship. Still the optimist, McKinlay found himself amused by his colleagues. Everyone was all too aware of the Karluk’s deficiencies, but there seemed to be no sense in “meeting trouble halfway23. Certainly we are in a bad predicament, being as far from Pt. Barrow as from Wrangel Island, while in two months we have drifted 300 miles westward. Should we go much farther West, the chances of breaking free are remote, but then—well, one can never count on the behaviour of the ice, nor can we say where our drift may land us.”

  As the Eskimos continued to pile snow blocks against the sides of the ship to give added protection against the severe cold, Captain Bartlett rustled up a small alcohol stove, and once they got it going, it turned the frigid Cabin DeLuxe into a dry and warm little home.

  By afternoon, the cabin had become so dry and warm that they had to clear the ice off a porthole and open it to let the cool air in. At some point, Malloch announced that he could no longer sleep there, and he was taking himself off to the wheelhouse instead. Because it was full of emergency equipment, he ended up in the chart house, bundled stubbornly in his skins and his sleeping bag. The next morning—and all the mornings afterward—he would sit over his breakfast, pinched and blue with cold, rubbing his eyes and yawning, and refusing to admit that he hadn’t slept well. For all of his affability, Malloch was excessively proud and vain and hated to admit defeat, especially after he had made such a fuss. Afterward, he would retire to the saloon, where he could be found catching up on his sleep. He still made his daily observations from the bridge, but most of his days were spent propped up in a chair, his handsome head nodding about as he dozed.

  McKinlay, meanwhile, sat down with the saloon lamp, determined to fix it once and for all. He couldn’t face another day of the feeble and gloomy light of the oil lamp. He was, at last, successful. Now it burned all night, as bright to him as the sun.

  AT MIDNIGHT on November 29, the wind once again hit like a hurricane. The snow blew so fiercely that no one could go outside. The men erupted at each other in frustration and anger. They were edgy, solemn, and quiet, each person in his own way carrying the weight of this frozen world upon his shoulders.

  “It is not24 for themselves they are anxious but for their beloved ones at home,” wrote Mamen. “They sleep with open eyes and ears. It is neither sleep nor rest one gets when one has to be on guard against the powers of nature. ”

  BARTLETT LAY IN BED at night, neither sleeping nor resting, and worried about the winter. His patience was thin, his spirits were low, and the uncertainty of their situation was taxing his nerves. It would be better if only he could sleep, but at night he agonized, and through the walls he had to endure the increasing grumblings of Dr. Mackay, Murray, and Beuchat as they gathered in the saloon after hours. While everyone else slept, they continued to plot and plan to leave the ship and head for land.

  Bartlett had vowed never to confide in anyone about his worries, but when he and Mamen stood up in the barrel—the wind and the snow whipping their clothes and hair, beating their faces with an icy hand—he suddenly found himself talking about the Karluk. It was a relief to speak frankly at last.

  Neither captain nor topographer believed that the ship was strong enough to withstand the ice. They both knew that it was inevitable—the Karluk would go down, and they would have to save themselves and get out of there somehow.

  “Everything that can25 be done will be done to save her,” Bartlett told Mamen firmly, “but whether we shall succeed or not, who knows.”

  Their talk inevitably turned to Stefansson and his departure from the ship. It was a long discourse and an enlightening one. As always, hovering over them was the specter of the Jeannette.

  “I have gone26 to bed lately with a kind of feeling that I shall never wake up again,” wrote Mamen, “and when t
he morning comes and everything is all right, I feel highly surprised to be among the living, it is not exactly a pleasant feeling, but I am now so accustomed to it that it causes me no anxiety. If I must die, let me die like a man and not as a dog. We are all affected. . . as to whether Karluk is so strong that she will stand all the pressing or whether she will follow Jeannette and go to the bottom.”

  In 1880, after a year on the ice, his ship still drifting aimlessly, a weary George Washington De Long had written with a foreboding that the men, Kiruk, and maybe even the two children of the Karluk now understood: “There can be27 no greater wear and tear on a man’s mind and patience than this life in the pack. The absolute monotony; the unchanging round of hours; the awakening to the same things and the same conditions that one saw just before losing one’s self in sleep; the same faces; the same dogs; the same ice; the same conviction that tomorrow will be exactly the same as to-day, if not more disagreeable; the absolute impotence to do anything, to go anywhere, or to change one’s situation an iota. Each day our chances of liberation seem to grow fainter and fainter. Alas, alas! the North Pole and the Northwest Passage are as far from our realization as they were the day the ship left England; and my pleasant hope, to add something to the history of Arctic discovery and exploration, has been as ruthlessly shattered and as thoroughly killed as my greatest enemy could desire. I frequently think that instead of recording the idle words that express our progress from day to day I might better keep these pages unwritten, leaving a blank properly to represent the utter blank of this Arctic expedition.”

  December 1913

  We had suffered1 mishap, and danger had confronted us often; we had been squeezed and jammed, tossed and tumbled about, nipped and pressed, until the ship’s sides would have burst if they had not been as strong as the hearts they held within them; we were not yet daunted, but were as ready to dare as ever.

  —GEORGE WASHINGTON DE LONG, DECEMBER 31, 1880

  On September 21, the day after leaving the Karluk, Stefansson, Wilkins, McConnell, Jenness, and the two Eskimo hunters had reached Thetis Island, just four miles north of the mainland of Alaska. Two days later, a blizzard arrived and the ice, from what they could tell, began drifting swiftly westward. The Karluk was, they figured, being swept along with it. Stefansson could only hope that she would eventually free herself and head on to Herschel Island.

  In the meantime, he and his group crossed over to the mainland and headed west, and on the morning of October 5, they set out for Cape Halkett. When they stopped at a small Eskimo settlement, Stefansson tried to seek out news of the Karluk, but no one knew anything. There was only word of three other vessels—the Polar Bear, the Belvedere, and the Elvira—that were caught in the ice about seventy miles from Herschel Island.

  Stefansson decided that he and Wilkins, McConnell, Jenness, Jimmy, and Jerry should make the trek to Point Barrow, camping at Eskimo villages along the way. Afterward, they would all head east to Herschel Island, where they hoped to meet up with the Southern Party.

  They had reached Point Barrow on October 12 and, according to McConnell, everyone but Stefansson was anxious to get there, presumably because he was not looking forward to telling the Canadian government that the Karluk was missing. They were given a hearty welcome at the Cape Smythe Trading Station and learned that the Alaska and the Mary Sachs were now docked at Collinson Point, where they were planning to winter.

  At Point Barrow, Stefansson was met by Eskimos who told him they had seen a vessel, but that it was too far off to be recognized. Another Eskimo reported2 seeing a two-masted schooner with no signs of life aboard. Still another Eskimo told Stefansson that he had seen the Karluk the week before, and had tried to reach her, but the ice would not permit.

  McConnell observed, “It looks as3 if the Karluk is up against it and has drifted past Pt. Barrow, as she must have been five miles out to sea when he saw her and there will be no opportunity for her to get to shore.”

  Stefansson settled into Point Barrow, sending Jenness and Wilkins on ahead so as to save the cost of boarding them in Cape Smythe. Then he and McConnell got down to the business of writing articles and telegrams and dispatches to newspapers, as well as writing a report to the Canadian government. Stefansson also dictated a form letter addressed to Bartlett to be distributed among Eskimos and “white men” along the coast, in case Bartlett should come ashore.

  On the night of October 25, Wilkins saw a light on the northwestern horizon, which gave them hope of finding the Karluk. Everyone turned out to see if it was, in fact, a ship, far out in the ice. “A field-glass and4 finally a telescope was produced—it was the star Arcturus,” Jenness wrote in his diary. “There was a fine aurora—a bow stretching from the northwest round to the northeast and almost reaching the zenith.”

  STEFANSSON WAS ALSO in no hurry to reach Collinson Point, Alaska, where the Southern Party of his Canadian Arctic Expedition was camped. When he finally did arrive on December 15, he found the Alaska with a hole in her side and the Mary Sachs frozen in the gravel of the beach. No one knew anything of the missing Karluk. No one even knew that she was lost or that Stefansson had broken away from the Northern Party.

  Stefansson’s arrival was something Dr. Anderson and Kenneth Chipman and the other members of the Southern Party had dreaded ever since they had become separated from the Karluk back in August. “What we had5 always expected might happen, had happened,” wrote Chipman. No one was happy to see Stefansson.

  The members of the Southern Party were afraid—and rightfully so—that Stefansson would try to take command over them. Anderson and Chipman were especially worried. From the beginning of the Canadian Arctic Expedition enterprise, Anderson had made it clear that he required complete control of the Southern Party without Stefansson’s usual interference. Otherwise, he wanted no part of it. He had threatened to quit the expedition in July 1913 and agreed to withdraw his resignation only after he was promised that Stefansson would not challenge his authority. Stefansson reassured him once again that he had no intention of doing so.

  Then he promptly began ordering provisions and equipment he felt the Southern Party needed. In addition, Stefansson announced that he intended to take the Mary Sachs from them to use as his own vessel, thus replacing the lost Karluk. Once again outfitted, he would continue on his way and the Southern Party could hire more men and purchase another ship to replace the Mary Sachs.

  Stefansson had already sent the story of the Karluk to the newspapers, although there were a good many inaccuracies in his version. Stefansson had a habit of changing facts to suit himself, sometimes even changing his own altered facts later, therefore giving several different accounts of the same story. Now he claimed he could get away with these falsities in his reports to the papers because they were just that—reports—so “he could never6 be held responsible legally.”

  He broke the story of the Karluk to the members of the Southern Party: he said he knew nothing of his ship’s whereabouts and had no idea if she was still afloat, or had come aground somewhere, or what condition his men were in.

  He blamed the entire catastrophe on Bartlett. Stefansson claimed that he was frightened of the skipper and was unable to stop him from steering the Karluk into the ice pack. Yet it was hard to imagine that a man of Stefansson’s stature and conviction could really be frightened to the point of intimidation by anyone, even someone as imposing as Bartlett, who had treated his leader with the same polite respect he had shown Peary and, in Stefansson’s own words, “always took orders7 pretty well.” Bartlett didn’t admire Stefansson as he did Peary. Yet he treated Stefansson with typically polite “yes sirs,” and “no sirs,” and “anything I can do, sirs.”

  Stefansson claimed that the captain had scored such a victory in getting Peary to the Pole that he was anxious to repeat that glory with the Karluk. The Roosevelt, Peary’s ship on the triumphant 1909 expedition, had followed leads and gone out into the ice, succeeding beautifully. Stefansson also said that G. J. Desbarats
in Ottawa had told Bartlett that he had confidence in him, which Stefansson looked on as interference by the naval service. This official bolstering and encouragement of Bartlett, in Stefansson’s eyes, helped to remove from him some of the moral responsibility for the lost Karluk.

  Stefansson was being criticized sharply by the Canadian Government and by the press for abandoning his ship and her company, and he was quick to defend himself. He had already written his Northern Party off as dead, and as far as he was concerned, the deaths were justified in the name of science and progress. “The newspapers were8 saying that the entire complement of the Karluk had perished, that my plans were unsound, and that the expedition had failed. Editors especially, who presumably had been through high school, were asserting that all the knowledge ever gained in the Arctic was not worth the sacrifice of one young Canadian.”

  THE MEN OF THE KARLUK were disheartened and solemn, grateful only that they had the sanctuary of their ship to protect them. “What a time9 it would be to be adrift on the ice tonight,” observed McKinlay, and they thanked God that they were not.

  Bartlett had never known a colder December. The barometer fell steadily throughout the month, temperatures plunging as low as minus thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. The wind shifted to north-northeast, and the Karluk began drifting south, southeast, west, and then north. Everyone, as usual, was on alert. The sky was thick with snow and the wind was unrelenting. The storms seemed to push away the stars and black out the moon, and when these disappeared, dark, heavy clouds took their places.

  On December 22, the darkest day of the year, the gale was still strong but the starlight was splendid. The cold and the wind crept into the ship, in frigid, whispering blasts, which numbed the men as they worked and slept.