The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  By 10:45 P.M., eleven feet of water filled the ship’s engine room. Scientists and crew continued working, however, helping themselves to hot coffee in the galley when they needed it. This helped warm their frozen hands and bones, and they greatly appreciated it. A gale had blown up from the north by now, and the snow was beginning to blow wildly. The temperature was between minus twenty-six and minus twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit, and the men were soon wet through from snow and perspiration, in a completely miserable state.

  Nevertheless, they kept working. Just after midnight, the blue Canadian ensign was hoisted and run down again, and then hoisted once more and left. A ship should go down with her flag flying, said Bartlett.

  By 1:00 A.M., the men of the Karluk had done all they could do. Although half of the provisions remained on board, Bartlett finally put a stop to their work, with a quiet, “That is enough19 boys.”

  The Karluk was now listing at thirty-five degrees to port, and the water already covered the engine and the cylinders in the engine room. Thus far, the ice imploding around the ship had kept her from sinking, but now she was visibly settling down at the stern.

  Earlier in the day, Kuraluk and Kataktovik had built two houses on the ice, one out of snow, and the other out of snow and boxes, renovating the old dog hospital and installing a stove in one of the shelters. There were fresh boards on the floor and a fire laid ready in the stove. It was to these sanctuaries that the men now turned, weary and frozen. McKinlay, Mamen, Dr. Mackay, Murray, Beuchat, Clam, Golightly, Chafe, and the Eskimos were assigned to the box house, and Munro, Williamson, Breddy, Maurer, Brady, Templeman, Sandy, Barker, Malloch, and Hadley took the snow house, which they would share with the captain. Crew and staff were no longer separated by forward and aft, and would need to learn to live together.

  Mackay, Murray, and Beuchat had turned in long ago. As their exhausted colleagues wandered into the shelter, the three scientists refused to move or make room, and the rest of the men were left to do the best they could with what was left.

  “One cannot speak20 too strongly of the conduct of Murray, Mackay & Beuchat,” wrote McKinlay. “After hauling a sled with nothing but their own personal belongings—they would allow nothing else on it—they retired to the house & made no attempt to help us in the work but staked out their claim to about one third of the place.” The cramped quarters and the intense cold, along with the barking of the dog Nellie and her new batch of puppies, helped to make sleep “a hopeless job,” according to McKinlay.

  When Mamen turned in at 4:00 A.M., the Karluk was still floating. He had no idea if she would still be there when he opened his eyes again. But she had not given up yet, and after everyone was safely tucked away into the snow houses, Bartlett returned to the ship. Munro and Hadley stayed with him for a while, but then Munro left, and at some point the captain told Hadley to go on and join the others. He wanted to be alone with his ship during her final hours.

  The captain went below deck, sat in front of the stove and wound up the Victrola, which he had moved into the galley. One by one, he ran through the collection of records they had on board. He quickly disposed of the jazz and ragtime albums in the pile, tossing them immediately onto the fire without a listen. He never had liked the stuff.

  As the boat creaked and groaned around him, he sat listening to music he loved, tossing each record into the fire after the last note was finished. He drank tea and coffee and ate when he was hungry, and he got up now and then to stroll the deck and check the position of the ship. All the while, he listened to the antiphonal sounds of the groaning ship and the encroaching water below, and the classical music (mostly Chopin and Brahms) coming from the mouth of the Victrola.

  By 5:00 A.M., water was over the gratings in the engine room, just five or six feet below the main deck. Maurer had gone to bed on the ice that night, bone weary, but wide awake. He prayed the ship would be there when he opened his eyes again, and that he would be able to find the black kitten.

  In the box house, McKinlay wrote in his journal and tried, along with Clam and the other sailors, to dry out wet clothing. When the men awoke, the Karluk was still afloat but lying much deeper, with the port side of her deck flooded with water.

  That morning, the kitten was found aboard ship, finally wandering out from her hiding place. Fred Maurer asked Bartlett for permission to take her off and bring her along with them, and the captain agreed. Everyone loved the little black and white cat Nigeraurak, but fireman Maurer was especially fond of her. When she first came aboard ship, they had kept her in the forecastle. But after a while, she made her way aft and Hadley had taught her tricks. Now she was lifted into loving arms and placed on a bed of skins in a basket in the box house, where she made herself at home.

  The first thing McKinlay did when he awoke was to check on Bartlett and the Karluk. Bartlett strode up and down the ship for a while as his men watched him. “I am sure21 that he feels the end of the Karluk very keenly . . .” noted McKinlay. Bartlett went below again and wound the Victrola, listening to more music.

  Out on the ice, the men rummaged through the various boxes that lay in wild, unorganized piles in the snow and found some stale bread, cheese, frozen milk, and tins of preserved meat, which they ate cold for breakfast. In the other house, McKinlay discovered, they had found some cigars and were enjoying a much-needed smoke. Bartlett had not allowed any tobacco to be taken off the ship, because it was just one more unnecessary thing to weigh them down, but the cigars had been saved. Having a leisurely smoke seemed an odd thing to do at such a time, but McKinlay joined in, grateful for the pleasant distraction.

  Going out later in the afternoon, McKinlay saw that the port side of the Karluk was now underwater, and Bartlett was still pacing the main deck on the starboard side. At 2:00 P.M., they took a sounding, which showed the depth at thirty-eight fathoms, and McKinlay took the temperature with a sling thermometer; it read minus seventeen degrees Fahrenheit.

  On the gramophone, Mary Garden was singing an aria from Aida when the ship began to settle, and soon the lower decks were awash. The Karluk groaned, and then fell silent, as if resigned to her fate. Bartlett stood up, placed Chopin’s “Funeral March” on the Victrola, wound it one last time, and listened to the first beautiful notes.

  As the water splashed its way across the upper deck and began to sweep down through the hatch, the captain raced up top and lowered the flag to half-mast. Then he climbed onto her rail and stood there, moving with the ship as she dipped into a header. He held on to her, clutching the smooth wood, running his hands along it, as if to soothe her. The men had come back, summoned by the thundering of the wood and the ice, and a shout: “She’s going22.” As they stood there watching, no one spoke.

  They probably thought he was going down with the ship, their irascible old captain, so stubborn and strange. He had deplored her Arctic seaworthiness when he first saw her, but he did not want to lose her. She was all they had out there, and she had done the best she could. Finally, the rail dipped until the Karluk was level with the ice, and Bartlett left his ship.

  The bow slipped under and the bowsprit broke then, but she still remained afloat. Then, between 3:15 and 3:30 P.M., they watched her settle slowly by the head, sinking with a grating noise until she was brought up by the bowsprit to meet the ice again. Bartlett stood there on the ice with his crew and watched as she went down by the head. They could still hear the music echoing from the galley.

  She sank foot by foot, a slight puff of steam showing that the water had risen over the galley fire. Soon they saw the barrel on the foremast, and then the stern rose. The Karluk seemed to straighten with great dignity as the stern sank lower. She disappeared rapidly and gracefully after that, her flag fluttering to the last.

  On January 11, 1914, at 4:00 P.M., the Karluk went under into thirty-eight fathoms of water. The only remaining signs of her existence were the two umiaks, a whaleboat, and other gear from the deck floating in the water above her grave.

  I
t was the first shipwreck most of them had ever witnessed. It wasn’t anything Hadley hadn’t seen before, but he was as respectful as the others in those last moments. Mamen and McKinlay, meanwhile, stood together in silence while the tight-lipped sailor Clam revealed nothing. Malloch, his usual affability and good-humored obliviousness faded, was now exceedingly nervous and white. And Chafe, the mess room boy, was overwhelmed by the great loss he felt as the Karluk disappeared. “As we watched23 her settle and sink beneath the sea, a feeling of intense loneliness came over us, but we gave the old ship three hearty cheers as she disappeared. All the water visible was that in which the ship sank.”

  As Maurer held on to the black cat, he observed quietly, “Our home was24 gone.”

  All were sickened and saddened by the sight of the Arctic water closing over the Karluk. “She was a25 good sea-boat, as we had proved,” wrote McKinlay, “but that she was quite unsuited for her present purpose was proved by the fact that she failed at the first time of asking. She was gone & we realised that we were at the parting of the ways. Should we win through, we will never forget this day.”

  As her mast slipped beneath the sea, Bartlett, visibly moved, pushed back his hood and bowed his head. It was always a tragedy when a ship sank, especially one that had been your home for months. And yet he was amazed at how the death of this ship affected him. He had, after all, condemned her from the start. Yet now he could feel the tears welling up as he imagined the Karluk in her lonely descent to the ocean floor.

  “Good-bye, old girl,”26 he said.

  AFTERWARD, THERE WAS ONLY CHAOS. The dogs were wild and fighting, and the men were panicked. Any sense of peace to which they had clung had just drifted to the bottom of the ocean.

  Bartlett sifted through the items salvaged from the ship—piles of objects, flung slipshod onto the ice. They had only pulled the essentials from the ship, no personal souvenirs or frivolous items unnecessary to survival or that would take up too much room on the sled.

  Still, a few of the men had managed to walk away with one or two treasured possessions. Chafe saved the camera that was given to him by a friend before leaving Victoria, as well as the binoculars he won as first prize for shooting at the long ranges when he was sixteen. “That, and a27 few medals, were the only things I had saved from the wreck out of forty-seven athletic and sixteen shooting prizes which I had with me on board . . ..”

  Bartlett, too, saved the thing that meant the most to him—his copy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Now, in the midst of the madness, he knew where his book was, but he could not find his boots.

  “Where in hell28 are my boots?” Bartlett yelled, but no one paid attention to him. “Where in hell are my boots?” He just kept yelling at the top of his voice. He wanted those boots. It was cold. His feet were damp and half-frozen. His toes ached with the chill.

  He didn’t know how many times he had yelled that same phrase over and over before he felt a hand on his arm. He shook it off angrily and whirled around in the flying snow. It was Kiruk.

  “I fix Captain’s boots,” she said.

  She held them up and he grabbed them out of her hand. Then he noticed that her lips were bleeding.

  Bartlett roared, “Somebody hit you?”

  “No.”

  “You fell down?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what in the devil is the matter with your face?”

  She didn’t even flinch at his yelling.

  “I chew Captain’s boots.”

  Then he got it. At the risk of her own life, she had made a dash for his cabin as the ship was going down, just to save his spare boots, something he didn’t even think of at the time, too busy playing records and reflecting on the music.

  Bartlett knew the boots must have been wet and in bad shape, which is why she had, in the Eskimo way, chewed the thick leather into a pliable state and filled the soles with grass. Between the snow and the freezing temperature and the tough hide of the boots, she had split her lips in twenty places. But she had saved his feet.

  Later, the men turned into their houses and sewed and sewed until every bone ached, “preparing for our29 fight,” said McKinlay, “which has become a tougher proposition than ever.” They made hot chocolate, drinking it out of two mugs, which they passed around between them because it was all they had. They were stunned by the ship’s demise, still in a state of shock, barely able to digest what had happened in the past thirty-six hours.

  One thing was clear to some of them, though. “Mr. Stefansson is30 to blame for everything,” said Mamen. “It is a scandal to bring such a poor ship up in the Arctic, and we could hold both Stefansson and the Canadian government responsible for this; it is terrible to jeopardize so many human lives.”

  That night, they huddled together in their snow and box houses and slept the sleep of total exhaustion.

  It was true, as Mamen wrote, that they “had now only31 ourselves to rely upon. It is up to everybody to do his utmost so that the outcome may be a happy one, but there are a few here who will be the cause of considerable trouble.”

  MCKINLAY STILL COULD NOT SLEEP more than a few hours. They were lost in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, adrift in the middle of the Arctic night. There was nothing beneath their feet but ice. For the first time in his life, McKinlay knew utter terror, and even though he was surrounded by twenty-four other people who were in the same exact situation, he knew what it was to be completely alone. For once, it struck him how far away from everyone else they were. There was a great, busy, important world spinning below them, far, far away. People were safe and happy and sitting with their families and sleeping in warm beds.

  Where was he? What had he agreed to? What would happen to him and the others now? McKinlay had stood there with his colleagues—this strange clan with whom he had little in common, excepting their situation—and stared at the void in the ice where the ship used to be. If the cold had not bitten into his skin, reminding him venomously that he was alive and not dreaming, he might have had to pinch himself.

  This could not be happening. It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened to William Laird McKinlay, schoolmaster, or to any people he knew. It was the most sobering moment of his life and one he would never forget.

  “This has made32 a man of you,” the captain had told him earlier that night, or that morning, he couldn’t be sure which anymore. And McKinlay believed he was right. The Arctic was making him a man, and he was doing a man’s work. He just prayed to God that he would not fail.

  And there, in the great Arctic darkness, he could swear he still heard the strains of Chopin, very faint and whispering, an echo. He could hear the notes, clear, precise, and mournful, a final, distant wail.

  Somewhere, thirty-eight fathoms below their feet, perhaps that Victrola was still playing.

  By morning, the lead in the ice had frozen over completely. The last trace of the Karluk and her descent into the sea was gone. One would never know that she had ever been there at all. One would never know that there had been a lead of water wide enough to pull her down. As far as the eye could see, there was only ice. Ice everywhere. Ice and darkness.

  THEY NAMED IT SHIPWRECK CAMP, that particular area of floating ice pack, marked by latitude 73 degrees north and longitude 178 degrees west. They set about making the most of it, willing themselves to forget that it was shifting, fragile ice instead of solid earth, and trying to make the place seem as much like a home as possible. As Maurer remarked, “The ice that33 held us in its grip and destroyed our ship was now the only means of safety—precarious as it might be.”

  January 12, their first day living on the ice, was raw and overcast, the temperature hovering steadily at minus twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit. The water’s depth was thirty-eight fathoms, and somewhere, in the vast blackness beneath them, lay the Karluk.

  She had gone down at exactly the point where De Long’s Jeannette had been frozen in just before she began her westward drift to Henrietta Island, where she was eventually cru
shed by the opening and closing of the ice—just like the Karluk.

  By law, Bartlett was still in command of these men, and Kiruk, Helen, and Mugpi, even without a ship. “But I was34 in command of a shipwrecked party. Had we been on a desert island things might have been brighter. But to be out there on the ever-shifting ice pack, far from land, and faced with the coldest months of the winter night, I could not look ahead without some uneasiness.”

  McKinlay was awakened at 8:00 A.M. by Seaman Morris yelling “Coffee!”35 The men stumbled from their makeshift beds and grabbed their mugs, which, by now, were coated with a layer of old cocoa, butter, and tea. They scrambled for food because most of the supplies still had not yet been uncovered, and then all hands were summoned onto the ice. Everyone, except for Dr. Mackay, Murray, and Beuchat, turned out, fatigued and spent from the past two days. Their colleagues, Bartlett included, knew it was hopeless to rouse the trio, so they were allowed to remain in bed all day long.

  The rest of the party did their best to sort through the provisions salvaged from the ship. They dug through the furs, skins, and blanketing, piling them all together. They found the pemmican intended for the dogs and put it aside. They found their own pemmican and laid it in another pile. The oil and the oil tins were separated into a stack. The rifles and ammunition were placed in another. So it went, time-consuming and tiring. The men were already exhausted from the exertion of the past two days, a bone-weary fatigue that none of them could shake.

  Each of the “living shacks” had a stove at the center. The snow igloo was fifteen feet long and twelve feet wide and had a canvas roof supported by rafters. The box house was twenty-five feet long and eighteen feet wide. The bed platforms were raised and built out from the walls on three sides of the stove. In the box house, Chafe and Clam smuggled out the small stove and replaced it with the former engine room stove, which was much bigger and made their little quarters almost too warm.