The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  “It was getting23 late,” he wrote, “and before many weeks the ice might close in around the island and render it inaccessible to a ship, but it was not altogether this danger alone that worried me but also the feeling that the longer the men were kept on the island the greater would be their suspense and the harder it would be for them to keep up their spirits.”

  As they steamed across the Arctic Ocean, fighting the ice, the thought that his men might never be rescued did not even occur to Bartlett. The only thing that he was afraid of was the possibility of thick fog or snow or ice creating an obstacle, which would delay their progress. But he pushed the thought to the back of his mind and instead focused his eyes on the horizon and watched for the first sign of Wrangel Island.

  The days of waiting, he wrote, “had been nightmares24 to me, the more so because naturally under the circumstances I was not in a position to do anything to hasten matters. My feeling of relief at being at last on the way to the goal of all my thought and effort may be imagined.”

  AUGUST 27 WAS, as McKinlay observed to Hadley, the day their “mental barometer” dropped out, leaving them with the great and sudden realization that they were doomed. Bartlett was not coming. No ship was coming. Instead, they must try to survive the winter here.

  Kuraluk and his family left camp and scouted the surrounding area for a good site to build a house. He went out nearly every day, sometimes alone and sometimes with his family, to climb one of the nearby hills and check on the ice conditions in the bay and beyond. At the beginning of August, he had seen nothing but water all around, which, when he told the others about it, gave them a great deal of hope. For days, they had expected a ship at any time.

  But now prospects seemed dim. There was no game, even though they saw geese flying overhead now and then, probably heading south for the winter. Kuraluk had made a throwing stick out of materials he had found on the beach. He also had made a bird spear to save on ammunition, but he rarely had the chance to use either now.

  If a ship didn’t arrive, Kuraluk wanted them to move camp to the west—still remaining on the north coast—where they would build their house on the banks of the river. There was plenty of wood there to build a decent shelter, and he expected they might also find fish and walrus, if they were lucky. Hadley approved. He had taken a stroll over that way one day and come across a flock of molting geese, which he took as a good sign. They would begin building the house at the end of the month.

  On August 29, Hadley and Kuraluk left camp after breakfast in search of birds. They didn’t expect to find any. There had been no game for as long as they could remember now, and it seemed futile to even try. The ice was weak and rotten and it was dangerous going, but they reached the rookeries and somehow managed to catch thirty ducks and sixty ducklings. It was a miracle and gave them their first real meal in weeks. They knew they had been lucky, that they couldn’t count on getting more, and that it was only temporary relief.

  In his tattered black notebook, Hadley scrawled, “If the ship25 Don’t show up very soon now I guess it’s all up with us I guess something will have happened to the capt & the Canadian Government Don’t know about us & it will be up to me & the native to get the crowd out of this the Best way we can which will be Siberia by sled if we can get grub if not the Lord Help us. . .. ”

  IN THE CREWMEN’S TENT, rotten food did not harm them anymore. Their stomachs seemed able to put up with anything now. Back at home, with a well-stocked larder and a handsomely laid table, Chafe, Williamson, and Clam would have never imagined eating some of the things they were now forced to eat. But as long as it sustained life, they ate it, “and things that26 would poison the ordinary person had no effect on us at all,” wrote Chafe.

  They did anything they could to sustain themselves. Chafe, Clam, and Williamson dug up kelp from the beach, half rotten, discolored, ancient, and tried to eat it but it made them sick. They worried about winter and their lack of warm clothes, especially footgear. They had sealskins to make boots, but they needed the skins for sustenance, and besides, there was no material for making socks.

  Then one of them said, “That blanket that27 we buried with Breddy would have come in handy for making socks.”

  The next morning, Williamson and Chafe opened the grave and removed the blanket along with Breddy’s boots. Someone would be able to use them. Afterward, they cleaned the blanket as well as they could by covering it with snow and tramping up and down on it so that the snow would soak it through. Then they hung it up to bleach and dry.

  Every day, one of the men would climb to the top of a nearby hill and scan the horizon with the field glasses, hoping to see the smoke of a ship. Williamson, Clam, and Chafe made holes in their tent, facing southeast, so that they could watch for the arrival of their rescuers. Every time one of them got up during the night, he would peer through the holes with great expectation. The expectation never seemed to die, no matter how often they looked and were disappointed. And the first thing they did when they arose in the morning was to look out the holes—or the “windows”—again.

  “No, no ship28 yet, fellows,” was always the report.

  And then someone would reply with great discouragement, “I don’t think there is one coming for us.”

  “We had been29 expecting a ship every day since the first of August, but now we were beginning to wonder whether there was one after us or not,” wrote Chafe. “We knew that if Captain Bartlett had succeeded in his hazardous undertaking and reached civilisation, the Canadian government would spare no expense in trying to rescue us. But had Captain Bartlett succeeded? Did anyone know we were there? These were the questions we were beginning to ask ourselves. It was the uncertainty of the whole thing that worried us—for if we knew that they were trying to get us, and that ice conditions only, were preventing them, then we would be content to wait for the day that would bring us relief. The last day of August came and went, but no rescue ship. So we came to the conclusion that our faithful Captain Bartlett had met with some accident that had caused his death, and that we were doomed to stay on this desolate looking land for another winter. There was very little chance for any of us to survive another winter, and we knew it, but, nevertheless, we had made up our minds to try it, and were determined to fight to the bitter end.”

  THE WEATHER WAS AS DEPRESSING and dreadful as ever, and winter had clearly arrived. The blizzard had begun on August 20, bringing gusting winds, frigid cold, heavy snow, and, worst of all, hail and sleet, which sliced the air, the ground, their tent, like a thousand sharpened knives.

  If a ship didn’t come soon, Munro, Maurer, and Templeman would have to try for the other camp where they hoped they could beg for food. Even as low as he felt right now, Munro’s pride was still intact, and the last thing he wanted to do was ask Hadley, McKinlay, and the others for something to eat. But they were starving, and if they were strong enough to make the trip, which was doubtful, they would have to be strong enough to beg. The storm was too fierce, though, for them to attempt the journey yet. They would have to pray for the weather to break, and then they would have to pray they were strong enough by that point to leave.

  “Will relief ever30 come?” Munro did not know anymore. They had expected a ship for so long, and nothing. Nothing. “The strain is awful on our minds,” he wrote. “We are still hopeful trusting in the Lord for delivery.”

  MCKINLAY HAD, AT LAST, given up hope. Until now, he alone had clung to the belief that everything would work out.

  He had revered and admired Bartlett like no other man he had ever known. But now he was faced with the hard reality that Bartlett was fallible, mortal, and human, vulnerable to the elements. In the real world, he could have survived anything. But out here, the same rules didn’t apply. Out here, he was just like any of the rest of them. He was known as the greatest ice master in the world, but the ice had taken away his power. He must have died trying to reach Siberia.

  There was no doubt in McKinlay’s mind. Bartlett was gone and no
one knew where the lost men of the Canadian Arctic Expedition were. They would have to try to survive there as best they could, until spring. Then, if they were still alive, they would try for the mainland. But McKinlay knew here was no way of surviving another winter on the island without ammunition, without game, without proper covering. They would all die here, in this cold, hostile place, thousands of miles from their homes and their families, hundreds of miles from civilization, just as Mamen had died, and Malloch, and Breddy.

  THE BEAR WAS ENGULFED in fog so thick that it was impossible to see what lay before them. For days, it had been the same drill—the ship steaming slowly toward land before the engines were stopped at night. They had taken in the square sails on August 24, when they had first run into the fog bank. Every now and then, the haze would clear enough for Bartlett to glimpse birds circling in the distance, which suggested land. But then the mist would close in about them once again, and the Bear would be unable to move.

  The ice was heavy and loose, but just as treacherous and hard to travel as the thicker, more tightly packed ice field through which they had already passed. As well as Bartlett could guess, they were no more than twenty miles from Wrangel Island. As soon as the fog lifted, they would be there in no time at all to bring the castaways to safety. The Bear was well stocked, with ninety tons of coal in her bunkers. But the fog didn’t lift, and on the evening of August 25, the engines were once again silenced and the Bear was allowed to drift.

  The next morning, the wind carried them away from Wrangel and swept the Bear toward the Siberian shore. For two days, they struggled to fight the wind and the ice, to regain the ground they had lost, but they only succeeded in exhausting their coal supply. On August 27, at 4:12 in the morning, Captain Cochran announced his decision. They would have to turn back to Nome for more coal. They would never make it on what they had left.

  Bartlett was devastated. There was nothing he could do to change the situation, short of miraculously producing coal out of his pocket. He knew Cochran was right and that they had no choice, but he was bitterly disappointed. “The days that31 followed were days to try a man’s soul,” he said. “I spent such a wretched time as I had never had in my life.”

  The Bear, so close to her goal, now pointed her nose toward Siberia and headed away from Wrangel Island. She stopped first at Cape Serdze, and Bartlett rushed ashore to inquire about the Russian icebreakers Taimyr and Vaigatch, which had also been sent to Wrangel, but no one seemed to know anything about their whereabouts or progress.

  Afterward, the Bear steamed over to East Cape, and Bartlett again went ashore in search of information. The Vaigatch, he was told, had managed to get within ten miles of Wrangel Island, closer than any other ship thus far. But on August 4, she received a wireless message that Russia had gone to war, and she immediately headed south with the Taimyr to Anadyr, where they would join the battle and serve their country.

  This was a bitter blow because, with the Bear delayed, Bartlett had held great hope for the Russian ships. They were the strongest of all the possible rescue ships, and the best equipped to deal with the icy waters. But there was nothing to be done now as the Bear headed once again for Nome. Nothing to do but hope that the coaling would go as quickly as possible. Bartlett’s eye was on the sky and on the calendar. Winter had already arrived, it seemed, and soon they would be in the thick of it. He prayed his men had enough to eat and shelter to keep them warm. “I could only32 hope,” he wrote, “that when we reached Nome, we should hear that some other ship had been to the island and taken the men off.”

  But when they got to Nome on August 30, no such word awaited them.

  September 1914

  There were twenty1 white men on board the ‘Karluk’ when she began drifting with the great ice pack north of Alaska. Nine survive to tell the story.

  —ERNEST F. CHAFE, MESS ROOM BOY

  McKinlay stood atop the lookout point, scanning the hori-zon for a sign—of moving ice, of open water, of a ship. September had begun with sunshine, which was quickly obliterated by heavy snow, thick fog, and chilling winds. Now hunger wasn’t their only problem. It was already turning bitterly cold and they weren’t prepared for it. Auntie worked at repairing their clothes and creating new ones out of what scant materials she had, and the men helped when they could. But there was little they could do to improve the state of their clothing, which was filthy, thin, and tattered. Still, all hands worked at sorting boots, stockings, and skins and doing the best they could to ready their clothes for winter.

  It was too cold now to dig for roots. There was too much open water to go duck hunting; the ducks were now migrating to the bigger space of water, away from the island. The men saw seals out on the ice, but were unable to reach them as well. Hadley sat for hours by holes in the ice, waiting for a seal or an uguruk, but always returned to camp empty-handed. Kuraluk set fox traps, and Williamson wasted thirteen cartridges trying to shoot the crafty little devils, which watched him with what appeared to be great amusement before disappearing unharmed. The men prayed the fox traps would work; they couldn’t afford to waste any more ammunition.

  Hadley, McKinlay, and the Eskimos were engaging in a healthy competition to see who could save the most food for winter. Kuraluk and his family seemed “bent on outdoing 2Hadley and I in the saving line,” wrote McKinlay, “but Hadley swears he won’t be beaten by a native, even when it comes to saving meat.”

  On September 2, Hadley and McKinlay walked just outside of camp to survey the game and ice conditions, neither of which looked good, although there was some open water to be seen in the distance and the ice seemed to be drifting. It was too late in the season, however, for this to inspire hope in the men. After all, they had been disappointed for too long. For two months, they had waited for a ship, expecting one to arrive any day. Now they figured there was no ship coming for them.

  The people in Hadley’s tent rose every morning before 8:00 to hunt, to chop and pile wood, to forage for scurvy grass, to brace themselves for another miserable winter. Even Auntie and the girls were hunting daily, fishing for tomcod in cracks along the beach. The men in Williamson’s tent meanwhile slept until the afternoon, showing their faces around 2:30 P.M. or so, and spending more and more of their time in the tent. They kept to themselves even more than usual and gave little help around camp. It was worrisome, but there was nothing McKinlay or Hadley could do to change their behavior.

  On September 5, Kuraluk caught a young fox in one of his traps, and Hadley’s tent made a small meal of it for supper that night. The meat was tender and tasty, although Hadley told McKinlay that foxes were generally eaten only out of desperation, since the meat was so “rank.” But they were desperate, and the meat tasted wonderful.

  By the next morning, that meal of fresh meat was already a distant memory. On September 6, Hadley, McKinlay, and the Eskimos were forced to eat breakfast from their winter stores. All of their food was gone now except for the scraps they had saved for the coming months. Miraculously, Hadley and Kuraluk returned from the day’s hunt with a seal. It was a glorious sight, and that evening they feasted on seal meat and blubber, gorging themselves on meat and blood soup. Tomorrow they would be back on short rations, trying to save every scrap of this seal for the winter. Who knew if or when they would find more meat?

  They stayed up later than usual that night, discussing their situation, not that there was anything new to say. They had exhausted the game in this barren region. There was nothing left for them at Cape Waring, and no reason to stay. They decided the only thing to do was move up the north coast to a new winter site. They would build a hut out of driftwood and pray that there was still some wildlife left on the island. They would pack up camp and leave for the new location tomorrow. There, they would build their house and prepare for the winter they now thought they would have to face.

  AT RODGER’S HARBOUR, Munro, Maurer, and Templeman could hear the walrus bellowing, the low, mournful cries thundering and booming like a series of
foghorns. The sound was grim, disturbing, and continuous, the men helpless to do anything about the noise or the walrus.

  There was heavy ice off the coast, but a cold wind had started blowing. They had been hoping for such a wind to buffet the ice and open the way for a ship to come. Still, they didn’t dare let themselves dream that a ship could reach them this late in the season.

  They talked at night of pies and other foods they craved, and of their friends back home. On September 2, they ran out of the sealskins they had been living on, but later that day they were lucky enough to get three foxes. The next day, by some miracle, they were able to kill three more.

  They rationed the food and trusted in the Lord, who, they knew, must be providing for them and who would not see them lost. They were counting the days, hoping that each one would bring a ship. They encouraged each other as much as they could, but it was little consolation. Their minds were strained past the breaking point and their bodies were wasting away.

  But as Munro said, “Every cloud has 3a silver lining.” On September 6, he wrote in his diary, “The Lord had 4been good to us.”

  THE BEAR WAS STILL LOADING coal on September 3 when Bartlett lunched with Japhet Linderberg, a millionaire mine owner and operator who had shown him so much kindness when the Karluk had stopped in Nome the previous July. Bartlett was on edge, after having been forced to turn back from Wrangel Island, and now having to wait five days already while they took on more coal. The wait was agonizing, and the strain showed in his face.