The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  A ship. Their ship. A two-masted gasoline schooner, just four or five miles off to the east, at the edge of the ice that surrounded the island. From what he could tell, she was steaming northwest.

  Hadley, McKinlay, and Kuraluk “raised a shout 17that must have scared all the seals in the Arctic Ocean,” wrote McKinlay. And then McKinlay raced over to Williamson’s tent. “The ship, Charlie, the ship!” he shouted, and Chafe quickly bandaged his lame foot and pulled on his boots so that he could hobble outside and join the others. Clam and Williamson had been down the beach collecting wood, but at the sound of the shouting, they rushed back to see what was happening.

  They all stood there, shoulder to shoulder. It was too much to imagine that this ship was there to take them home. They had already resigned themselves to the fact that they would never be rescued, and it was easier for McKinlay to believe that she had gotten off course or been chasing walruses.

  Suddenly, their hearts sank. She was hoisting her sails and seemed to be going past without stopping. Perhaps she was not a rescue ship. Instead, she might very well be up there walrus hunting. She might not even know they were there at all.

  Frantically they ran toward the ship, shouting as loudly as they could. Hadley grabbed his revolver and started blazing away the precious ammunition. He aimed the gun into the air, firing at the sky, and quickly emptied the entire magazine. Kuraluk ran faster than any of them as they tried to head off the ship.

  McKinlay had never run so hard in his life. He used every last ounce of his strength to run and shout. He screamed himself hoarse. The ground at Cape Waring was as thick with snow and ice as Rodger’s Harbour was barren, and he stumbled over his boots, but still kept going.

  Then she lowered her sail and McKinlay stopped running. He stood transfixed. Around him, his fellow castaways did the same. As they watched, a party of men disembarked from the ship and began the long walk across the ice toward their beach.

  The survivors shook hands with one another and then began to dance deliriously. These were the happiest moments of their lives, said Chafe. Auntie was there by now with the little girls, having just returned from up the beach with a pot of fish.

  As much as they’d dreamed of rescue, none of them was prepared for that moment. It was so much like a dream that, not knowing what to do with themselves, they went back to their tents, cooked their catch, and had a feast. For so long, they had lived on instinct, and instinct now told them to eat and to not waste the food they had been lucky enough to find. Hadley’s tent traded some of the fish with Williamson’s tent in exchange for tea, and soon the entire population of Cape Waring was gathered around the fire, eating.

  Their rescuers arrived in the middle of the meal, having traversed the nearly five-mile stretch of ice that had kept them from sailing any closer. They must have thought everyone there crazy to be sitting down to a lunch of fish when a ship filled with provisions awaited them.

  They invited their rescuers to join them in the meal, but Swenson and the others politely declined. “No, thank you 18. . . we have dinner waiting for you aboard, so you had better not eat any of that truck.”

  “Truck!” replied McKinlay, Hadley, Chafe, and the rest of them. “Why, if we could have had as good as that every day since we have come here, we would not have cared so much.”

  The campsite was now chaos, as everyone rushed about, collecting their few possessions. There were two motion picture photographers who asked if the survivors would mind posing for their cameras. “Now that we19 know we are safe,” they said, “you can keep us here and take movies of us for a whole week.”

  At the request of the photographers, the survivors paraded up and down the snow-covered ground and posed for them. They held up the puppies and the black kitten, who did not like being wakened from her morning nap, even to be rescued. Auntie and her two little girls stared stoically into the camera, and Kuraluk tried to avoid it altogether. McKinlay knew how pitiful all of them must have looked, with their hollow cheeks and sunken faces and their wild hair, not to mention their miserable clothing. But he paused and smiled for the camera, unable to hold back his joy. Finally, the cameramen gathered all of the survivors together and photographed the group of them. The men were beaming, their grubby faces shining with exhilaration. Hadley puffed away contentedly on a cigarette, savoring every drag of tobacco, while beside him McKinlay grinned from ear to ear. Clam stood next to him, his reserve melting at last, unable to hold back his smile or his tears. Auntie and Helen hung back, heads bowed, while Kuraluk clutched Mugpi as the tears streamed down his cheeks. Unashamedly, he wiped his eyes with open and obvious gratitude. “We’re alive now,20 aren’t we?” Mugpi had said to him repeatedly, when he had doubted the most.

  Afterward, McKinlay cleaned out his bunk, taking the few personal items that had survived shipwreck and ice and theft and hardships. He abandoned the rest, including his old clothing and furs.

  They left the tents standing, and McConnell and McKinlay fixed notes to the poles in case anyone else should arrive, looking for the survivors. One by one, they did a last, thorough going-over of the tent and the camp. They were patient, calm, and meticulous. And then it was time to leave.

  They were frail, but there was no reason they couldn’t walk the five miles to the ship unaided. It made for better pictures, though, if each one of the survivors had assistance, so each was supported by two men from the King and Winge. McKinlay walked across the ice for the last time, in a daze.

  He talked with Olaf Swenson as he walked, his boots crunching in the snow. He used a walking stick and stopped every now and again to point out landmarks to Swenson.

  From a distance, the abandoned tents seemed particularly forlorn. It was back to civilization now and all things familiar. Yet, at 1:30 P.M. on September 7, as they ascended the wooden ladder to the ship, McKinlay knew that his life would never be the same again. He was shaking as he climbed to the deck of the King and Winge. His feet didn’t know what it was to walk on something other than ice. He climbed, rung by rung, and someone was waiting at the top, extending a hand to pull him on board.

  They were reunited with Munro and Maurer and Templeman, and McKinlay was glad to see them. The men of the King and Winge were euphoric. They crowded around the rescued party and slapped them on the backs and shook their hands and then wiped their own eyes. McKinlay and his comrades were taken aback. They had been so isolated from everything that was happening that they didn’t understand why these strangers exhibited such emotion, such joy and elation at their rescue. They didn’t know the world had been talking about them, and following their doomed journey, or that so many people cared. They had no idea that many had long ago given them up for dead.

  They were told that almost all of Europe was at war: Germany, Russia, France, Belgium, Austria, Britain. This stunning news barely made an impact. As McKinlay said, “it didn’t mean 21a thing.” Compared to their rescue, war seemed to the people of the Karluk a small matter. Chafe wrote, “I don’t think 22we would have cared if the whole world had been involved in war, now that we were saved from starving to death on that desolate Island.”

  The starving men were offered food—real food—the kind they had dreamed of and talked about for months. Time and again, they had all imagined those first mouthfuls and how they would savor them. They had talked and dreamed of little else.

  They sat down together and ate. McKinlay barely tasted anything. He ate mechanically—they all did—as if they had lost the ability to taste. The first thing McKinlay ate was bread and butter. It was toast—just plain, simple toast, slathered with butter. He consumed it without tasting it. After that, he devoured cereal and soft-boiled eggs and coffee with heaping spoonfuls of sugar and condensed milk. He barely tasted those either. He ate till he was full and then he stopped. And then he could hardly remember what he had just eaten.

  That first day, when the castaways were not eating, they were smoking. There was an endless supply of tobacco and they feasted on it. Afte
rward, McKinlay soaked in a tub, washing as much of the months of grime off his body as he could. The water was black when he was finished, and he still wasn’t rid of the dirt.

  Next, he had his first shave in eight months. He was startled as he looked at his reflection. He hadn’t seen himself since the Karluk went down. His hair was wild and long and his beard was full. The bath and shave gave him the first semblance of normalcy that he had felt in a long time.

  As his beard fell away, exposing the sunken flesh beneath it, he could see the toll the months of hunger and sickness had taken. His cheeks were hollow and the circles under his eyes were dark.

  Early that evening, he walked up on deck and watched the Arctic wasteland disappear into the dark horizon. One of the ship’s hands was standing at the rail with a pile of their sodden, tattered clothing, which he flung overboard. McKinlay watched as the threadbare shirts and trousers hit the ice and the water, and drifted away.

  THEY ENJOYED ANOTHER hearty meal before going to bed and were told that the table would be left set and ready, should any of them feel like eating during the night. McKinlay and the others turned in, lying down on beds of skins, and tried to sleep, but sleep was impossible. After an hour or so, they returned to the table and spent the rest of the night drinking tea and coffee—as much as they could stand—and eating. They talked about Wrangel Island and all that had happened there, and then they began to talk about the present.

  Later, it was almost impossible for any of them to remember what they talked about that night, or what they did, or what they ate, because, as McKinlay said, “my head was 23not my own. Everything was unreal.” McKinlay lay down in the warm, clean bed again at 10:00, but was still unable to sleep. He rose once more and smoked the first pipe he had smoked in months. He lay down again, but quickly got up and smoked two cigarettes. He lay down again, but was soon back on his feet. In this way, he spent his first night aboard the rescue ship, back and forth between the chart house and the saloon, drinking coffee, eating “all sorts of 24indigestibles until we could hardly move,” trying to sleep at intervals, but wide awake until breakfast time. And then he ate again, as much as he could.

  “God bless the 257th of September!” wrote McKinlay in his journal. “God bless the King & Winge, her skipper & her crew!!!”

  ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 8, the King and Winge headed toward Herald Island. After all, eight men were still unaccounted for: first mate Sandy Anderson; second mate Charles Barker; seamen John Brady, Edmund Golightly, and Stanley Morris; Dr. Alister Forbes Mackay; oceanographer James Murray; and anthropologist Henri Beuchat.

  At last, the craggy mountain peaks of Herald Island could be seen through the field glasses, and then the giant ice cliffs, which circled her. All leads surrounding the island had closed, however, sealed with solid, forbidding ice. They traveled forty miles along the edge of the pack without finding a lead. There were no openings. Not even the adroit, determined King and Winge could subdue this ice. It formed a perfect prison around the land.

  They circled the area for a good part of the morning, but the closest they could get was within forty miles. It was hard to imagine anyone breaking through to land, as vigorously protected as it was. McKinlay was horrified at the sight of that churning ice, the solid shelf behind it, the cliffs beyond that, and the rugged mountain peaks. Had Sandy and the others ever been able to reach land?

  Reluctantly, Swenson gave the order, and the schooner turned to the southeast and headed for Nome. The men stood on deck, watching the jagged edges and white points of Herald Island disappear.

  AT DAWN ON SEPTEMBER 8, the Bear steamed full speed ahead again. The ice around the ship was loose and maneuverable, although some distance away, on her port bow, they could see it was thicker and close-packed. They made fifty miles by afternoon, just seventy-five miles total from Wrangel Island. Bartlett was determined, this time, to make it through.

  He had been working all morning in the chart room, and after lunch he returned to it. He was standing there looking out to sea when he saw a schooner dead ahead, running before the wind.

  Bartlett grabbed a pair of field glasses and adjusted them to his eyes. It was the King and Winge. It was too soon for her to be coming back from her walrus trading. There could be only one of two explanations. Either she had broken her propeller and was taking advantage of the favoring wind to put for Alaska—or she had reached Wrangel Island.

  After all this time, he could hardly dare to think the latter. He had tried again and again, and so had many others, but no one had been able to break through the ice mass to the island. Now, so late in the season, he could not imagine there was a chance in hell they had steamed through.

  Bartlett stood, transfixed, as the little schooner drew closer. A number of men lined the deck, but it was impossible to see who they were. Finally, she hove to and he peered at the men aboard, hoping to spot a familiar face. There were one or two who looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t recognize them as any of his men.

  Then he spotted McKinlay. He was emaciated and looking like the wild man of Borneo, but it was unmistakably McKinlay.

  The rest of them fell in now—Munro and Chafe, and he thought he recognized Hadley as well. They were haggard, but he could identify them. There, too, were the Eskimos, and Helen was holding the cat—who was looking more fat and fit than the day they picked her up from the Esquimalt Naval Yard.

  As the Bear pulled up alongside the King and Winge at 69 degrees 55'' north longitude, latitude 175 degrees 35'', Bartlett could read the emotion in the faces of his men. Nothing had prepared him for that moment—not the anguish he had suffered ever since leaving them on the island, not his fierce determination to reach them, not the months spent struggling to rescue them.

  They gave Bartlett three hearty cheers when they saw him, and unable to contain their excitement, they began to shout their news to him. A boat was lowered from the Bear, and Bartlett was soon clambering over the side of the King and Winge, standing face to face with these men he had not seen since March.

  In the six months since he had seen them last, there were many times when he had feared he would never lay eyes on them again. Now, as he stared at their ghastly, wasted faces, he was hit with emotion. None of these men had been given any survival training before joining this Arctic expedition. And none of them had had any experience with the Arctic. Most of them had never even been far from home.

  Now here they stood, barely alive, survivors, all of them. They had endured, and it was a miracle.

  As Bartlett stepped onto the deck of the tiny schooner, McKinlay, Munro, Hadley, and the rest of them rushed forward to greet him, eager to shake his hand and tell him their story. His great, horselike face was full of emotion as he shook their hands “as heartily as 26ever men did,” according to McKinlay.

  “All of you 27here?” were the first words out of his mouth.

  McKinlay stepped forward. “No, sir,28” he answered. Bartlett studied the group, surveying each gaunt face. He did not see Dr. Mackay, Murray, Beuchat, or Morris. Nor did he see Sandy, Barker, Brady, and Golightly. He had prayed that they would somehow make it to the island. He had told both the Canadian government and the papers that he was confident of it. Now he wondered if he had only convinced himself because he wanted to believe it.

  McKinlay took a breath and continued, “Malloch and Mamen and Breddy died on the island.”

  This was a bitter and unexpected blow. Bartlett fell silent. There was nothing to say when three of the men he had seen to safety on Wrangel Island “had thus reached 29safety only to die.” It was incomprehensible, and the most brutal, tragic loss he could imagine.

  AFTERWARD, BARTLETT TRANSFERRED the survivors to the Bear, even though they were reluctant to leave the ship that had saved their lives. But Bartlett said the move was for their own good. The Bear had a doctor aboard, as well as clothing and other provisions Bartlett had on hand just for them.

  Aboard the Bear, they lived in “luxury unqualified,”
30 according to McKinlay. They were treated to bunks made up with the finest sheets, the first they had slept in for over a year.

  Williamson’s craggy face was permanently lined with grief, the signs of which would not fade, no matter how much distance he put between himself and the Arctic. Clam would be forever crippled. Chafe had lost his youthful spirit, and his young face, hanging above his bony neck and collarbone, had aged alarmingly. Munro’s eyes were troubled, his jaw clenched, the lines of his face revealing turmoil. Templeman’s stare was haunted and vacant.

  The ship’s doctor examined and questioned each of them extensively. The mystery illness, he said, was nephritis, an inflammatory disease of the kidneys caused by too much protein and fat in the diet. The very pemmican that had been keeping them alive had also been killing them. As long as they had had biscuits, they were fine, but without the carbohydrates in the biscuits to balance their intake of protein, they were doomed. The fresh meat had been much better for them than the pemmican, but there had not been enough of it. The pemmican, when eaten by someone suffering from hypothermia, was even quicker to damage the kidneys. It was the pure pemmican diet that had killed Mamen and Malloch, and it was the pemmican that had made the rest of them so desperately ill. Before the expedition began, Stefansson had damned the purity tests and purchased the pemmican without having it analyzed. There was no way of knowing if the outcome would have been any different if he had. Years later, in a letter to Mamen’s family, McKinlay wrote, “I have clear 31evidence that it was he who was responsible for the faulty pemmican that was the cause of the tragedy.”

  It was the first any of them had heard of the disease. They were lucky to have survived it, and the doctor pronounced them all in remarkably sound condition, considering all they had endured.

  ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 9, the Bear sailed within ten miles of the northeast point of Herald Island. As far as they could see, there was no life onshore—no sign of Sandy and his men, no sign of Dr. Mackay and his party. The Bear carried no dogs, umiaks, or sleds, but even with these, they knew a trek to the island would be impossible, given the wretched condition of the ice. They had no choice but to accept that Sandy and the others were dead.