The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  Several of the survivors and relatives of those who had been on the Karluk continued to speculate: “Another member of 13the crew, named Breddy, had been shot by another member of the crew at Cape Waring,” wrote Mrs. Rudolph Anderson in a 1922 memorandum. Whatever happened to Breddy—whatever truly happened—was left on the icy shores of Wrangel Island.

  Stefansson’s conduct was another matter. “Over the years 14I have done my best to forget the whole sorry Stefansson affair, but not very successfully, I fear,” wrote McKinlay in the years that followed. It was hard to forget about Vilhjalmur Stefansson. His name appeared frequently in the newspapers, and McKinlay could never seem to escape hearing of him. Stefansson had returned from the Arctic in 1918, after everyone, including the Canadian government, had given him up for dead. He returned triumphantly, having discovered the last unmapped islands of Canada: Brock Island, Borden Island, and Mackenzie King Island. Afterward, the National Geographic Society presented him with the prestigious Hubbard Medal, and famed explorers Admiral Peary and General Greely paid Stefansson glowing tributes. At no time did Stefansson mention the Karluk or its crew or the men who were lost.

  In 1922, he published The Friendly Arctic, which presented his theory that the Arctic generally was a “friendly” place where any sensible person could survive. In the book’s appendix, he included the account of the Karluk disaster that Hadley had supposedly written, critical of Bartlett and championing Stefansson, and vastly different from the journal Hadley had kept in 1914 on Wrangel Island. Stefansson, not surprisingly, was the only person who could verify the authenticity of the account. No one else could vouch for it, and Hadley, by that time, was dead. In the book, Stefansson also accused the Southern Party of mutiny.

  Stefansson’s great reputation, though, did not emerge untarnished from the failure of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. The Expedition was originally designated to cost $75,000, but ultimately cost the government half a million dollars, thanks to Stefansson’s extravagance and disorganization. It was embarrassing, too, when he claimed Wrangel Island for Canada, basing this solely on the fact that Munro, Maurer, and Templeman had raised the Canadian flag on the island. “Wrangel Island, claimed by the Explorer Stefansson for Canada, is in reality the property of Russia,” reported Harry L. Rogers in the Washington Times on May 23, 1922, in an article entitled “State Department Inquiry Refutes Claim of Canada filed by Explorer.”

  Stefansson died in 1962 at the age of eighty-two. Long after the expedition, he continued openly and publicly to blame Bartlett for the tragedy of the Karluk. Bartlett, in typical dignified fashion, never responded to his criticisms, although in private, to his closest friends, he expressed his opinions of that “blankety blank liar”15 in his usual colorful language. Others felt similarly about Stefansson. “I think he 16came to believe the myths that were created about him,” one observer wrote to McKinlay. “He was a . . . great Arctic traveller. But he created a mythology of The Friendly Arctic and a lot of people died because of it.”

  “I want to17 destroy the Stefansson Myth,” McKinlay wrote on January 14, 1977, “for the man was a consummate liar and cheat, who did his best to destroy not only the reputation, but also the health and happiness of anyone who dared to differ from him.” He also wrote, “As far as 18I am personally concerned, the whole venture was a miserable, disastrous failure which I would have done much to be able to forget. But almost every other person associated with Stefansson in any position of responsibility is unstintingly traduced, and, in every case, unjustly so.”

  The Southern Party of the Canadian Arctic Expedition was, at least, a success. Its members had continued to map the geology and topography of the Mackenzie delta, charting hundreds of miles of Arctic coastline. Diamond Jenness spent two years studying the Eskimos, and Fritz Johansen discovered a new species of moth, which he named “Homoglaea murrayi” in tribute to James Murray. The Southern Party ceased their work when they were called home at the end of 1915 because of the war.

  After the publication of The Friendly Arctic, members of the Southern Party, Dr. Rudolph Anderson, Kenneth Chipman, J. J. O’Neill, and Diamond Jenness, petitioned Charles Stewart, the minister of mines for the Canadian government, asking “that a commissioner 19be appointed to investigate the organization, conduct and events of the expedition, and to determine the truth or falsity of charges made by Mr. Stefansson. Mr. Stefansson has made statements which reflect upon the undersigned and are such serious reflections upon their personal honor that they are determined . . . to clear themselves of the unjustifiable charges made against them.” The request for an inquiry was ultimately declined for the reason that “no good could 20come of such an inquiry and much harm might be done.” In response to Stefansson’s charges of mutiny in his book The Friendly Arctic, the Canadian government made clear to Stefansson that the men of the Southern Party had simply been following the orders of the Geological Survey under which they were working.

  In 1922, Stefansson organized another expedition, an attempt to colonize Wrangel Island. He sent a crew of four men and one Inuit woman, opting at the last minute not to participate himself. All four of the men perished, but the woman survived. Fred Maurer was one of the dead.

  McKinlay had heard from Maurer once or twice and had sent him some Scottish shortbread in 1915. Maurer had returned to New Philadelphia, Ohio, taking the Karluk’s black cat with him. With Stefansson’s help, he traveled the lecture circuit, speaking about his time in the Arctic. In 1922, he was married, and only a few days later left for Wrangel Island. His three male colleagues were completely inexperienced in Arctic travel or survival. One of the men grew ill on the island and died after Maurer and the other two had set out for help, heading toward Siberia in an attempt to duplicate Bartlett’s brave journey over the ice and through the wilderness. Maurer and his companions were never seen again. Maurer was twenty-nine years old. “By the time he got a chance to go on Stefansson’s expedition of 1921 he considered himself sufficiently well grounded in Arctic matters to take up exploration as a career,” wrote the Montreal Daily Star on October 24, 1923.

  The black cat outlived him, surviving to a grand old age, and producing numerous litters of kittens, all black with white feet and white bibs under their chins, and all named “Karluk.” Maurer had made presents of these to various members of the expedition, including McKinlay and Dr. Anderson.

  McKinlay and the other Karluk survivors were stunned to hear of Maurer’s return to Wrangel Island. McKinlay could not imagine what had inspired Fred Maurer to go back. Maurer himself had said that he needed to go to reclaim a part of himself that he had lost there, and to seek validation for the deaths of his friends Bjarne Mamen and George Malloch.

  All of the men of the Karluk were lost, in one way or another. McKinlay felt this, but he never ceased thanking God for helping him survive. He believed that, more than anything else, it was his faith that sustained him.

  Bartlett never married, but remained faithful to his first love—the sea. In 1938, he said of his own ship, the Effie Morrissey, “She’s all I’ve 21got. When she stops, so do I.” He led seventeen more excursions into Arctic waters, and never again lost a life. He wrote to McKinlay sometimes, his letters stamped with postmarks from exotic points around the globe. The letters were gruff, colorful, and full of exciting news. McKinlay yearned to write a biography of Bartlett someday to pay tribute to him.

  In the years22 following the Karluk tragedy, the captain had faced an admiralty commission that found him guilty for putting the Karluk into the ice, and for allowing Dr. Mackay’s party to leave, even though Mackay and the others had given him a letter absolving him of responsibility. In the eyes of the public, however, Bartlett was a hero, no matter what Stefansson or the Government of Canada claimed.

  Years after the expedition, McKinlay received a copy of a letter Bartlett had written to a mutual friend, in November 1914: “McKinlay is a 23good boy, with a level head upon his shoulders, a true loyal friend, a good shipmate, and a
hard worker. I cannot begin to tell you of the pillar of strength he was to me and shall never be able to repay him. Strange, when we wishes [sic] each other good-bye, it was as if we both grew up together and our being together just an ordinary event.. . . I can truthfully say he was everything that a fellowman requires of another.”

  The letter meant more to McKinlay than he could say. Until the day he died, he never forgot the debt he owed Bartlett. “Speaking of heroes,24” McKinlay wrote, “there was for me only one real hero in the whole 1913–18 story—Bob Bartlett. Honest, fearless, reliable, loyal, everything a man should be.”

  “When I die,25” Bartlett said, “I don’t want a monument. I just want some boy to say I taught him how to navigate . . . and how to tell when the ice is safe.” He died in 1946 at age seventy, and in 1948, a monument was built for the “Master Mariner” in Brigus, Newfoundland, just yards away from his grave.

  In 1926, the Canadian government created a memorial plaque in honor of the sixteen members of the Northern and Southern Parties of the Canadian Arctic Expedition who lost their lives “for Canada and for science.” The plaque was hung in the entrance of the Dominion Archives building in Ottawa, but disappeared in the 1960s when the archives moved to a different structure. No one knows where the plaque can be found now, and it lies, one imagines, in the far corners of an attic, covered in dust and cobwebs, forgotten, just as the men of the Karluk have been forgotten all these years.

  McKinlay lived what he considered a rich and fulfilling life, and he felt blessed. He was promoted to headmaster of Shawlands Academy and spent the rest of his days collecting articles and information on Stefansson and the Canadian Arctic Expedition. In 1977, he returned to the Arctic with his daughter Nancy, visiting Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa, and the high Arctic islands. It was an emotional visit for him, and the memories of 1913–1914 came sweeping back. At home in Scotland, his young granddaughters uncovered boxes filled with expedition-related materials hidden in his basement and encouraged him to write his own version of the story. At the age of eighty-eight he wrote his tale, published in 1976 as Karluk: The Great Untold Story of Arctic Exploration. In his last years, he was obsessed with his work on a more honest, revealing account of the story. “I owe that 26to the memory of my dead comrades,” he wrote, “and to Captain Robert Bartlett, who saved my life.”

  He would live to be an old man, but McKinlay would never be able to make sense of the enormous loss suffered on this Canadian Arctic Expedition.

  “My writing, I 27must confess, had reawakened all the harrowing feelings which have bedevilled my life for so many years, but I am hoping that, once I have finished, I may find some measure of peace,” he wrote.

  The account, in which William McKinlay planned to tell the full truth about what he had experienced in the Arctic, was still unfinished when he died in 1983 at the age of ninety-five.

  Epilogue

  On October 14, 1924, The Victoria Daily Colonist carried a report of Captain Louis Lane’s gruesome discovery on Herald Island of an Arctic ghost camp, littered with artifacts—knives, pemmican, snow goggles, matches, ammunition—and human remains.

  HERALD ISLAND—

  Some bones, a corroded rifle, pemmican, ammunition, a sled, and other camp equipment established beyond a doubt the identity of the men.

  Savage winds and polar bears have tumbled their skulls about. A few more years and there would have been nothing to tell what became of them.

  It was one of our few days of sunshine, and the calm, gravelly beach was covered with a thin layer of snow, blown bare in spots, drifted in others and cris-crossed by tracks of Arctic foxes and huge polar bears. Beyond, near the foot of the islet’s ridge, we could see gaunt outlines of a sled, and around about, a number of black objects which later proved to be tins of pemmican.

  One of the first things we discovered was a 30-30 Winchester rifle lying on a bare patch of gravel . . . cut into the wood, the initials “B.M.” being distinctly to be seen. The barrel of the gun was thickly corroded with rust and the magazine partly eaten away, disclosing the cartridges inside, green with age and exposure. A loaded rifle cartridge nearby indicated that death had not come to the party, on whose camp we gazed, through shortage of ammunition. This was amply confirmed before many minutes by the discovery of whole packages of cartridges, untouched.

  The beach was strewn with driftwood and a large log lay right in the middle of the camp. On the side opposite to the sled we found the remains of the party’s tents. The end had collapsed upon the bed, and those in it, for, as we scraped away the snow and carefully pulled the frozen canvas from what was beneath, we found parts of human skeletons; they lay as if the men had died in their sleep.

  Sandy Anderson, Charles Barker, John Brady, and Edmund Lawrence Golightly had, at last, been found.

  There were no records, no diaries, no written account of what had happened to them. But there were clues.

  “I am not1 sure,” said Captain Lane, “how long they may have been on the island before they died. Perhaps a month or two.. . . The ashes of their fire indicate they were here more than just a few days.” Sandy and his men had made it across the ice and indeed reached land.

  From what Lane and his party could determine, the four men did not die of starvation, disease, or an attack by polar bears. “All seem to2 have perished about the same time. Starvation is an impossible theory because of the great quantity of food still remaining in camp.” Lane’s theory was that their vulnerable tent might have been blown away by the violent winds that swept continually through the area, and that the men quickly froze to death in their sleep. “I believe they died suddenly and unexpectedly,” he said. Others, including Vilhjalmur Stefansson, later theorized that the men died of monoxide poisoning inside their airtight tent.

  The rifle turned out to belong to Burt McConnell, who had left it aboard the Karluk when he departed with Stefansson in September of 1913.

  Captain Louis Lane took the human remains of Sandy Anderson’s party back to San Francisco. Afterward, the bones were shipped to Ottawa for observation and examination, and then sent back in early 1925 to Messrs. H. Liebes and Company in San Francisco, the shipping company that employed Captain Lane. Initially, there was some question as to which Karluk party the bones belonged—Sandy Anderson’s or Alister Forbes Mackay’s. The relatives of the eight missing men waited for official word as to whether their loved ones had been found. Based on the evidence discovered on the island, the Canadian government ultimately determined that these were the bones and artifacts of the first mate’s party. The remains were never sent to the relatives, however, nor did they make it back to San Francisco. Somewhere along the way, the bones of Sandy, Barker, Brady, and Golightly disappeared.

  For seventy-five years, no one knew what had happened to the bones or the artifacts discovered on Herald Island. In the summer of 1999, returning from a research trip to Scotland, I came back to an e-mail that read simply: “I found something that might be of interest to you.” It was from a friend in Wales, who had enclosed a link for an auction on the Internet auction site eBay.

  “Arctic Expedition Remains from Stefansson’s ill-fated expedition . . ..”

  Seventy-five years after they had been lost, these relics had somehow resurfaced: a rusted pocket watch now missing its hands; a tattered leather belt buckle; a pair of snow goggles, one of the lenses cracked; a long snow knife with a carved ivory handle, the blade blunt and rusted; and a human jawbone. It is, as Captain Louis Lane and his party had observed in 1924, “a firm, capable jaw, cleft as to chin and with fine, regular teeth.”

  The remains arrived encased in a wooden box. They are fragile and worn. The jawbone is the most haunting relic of all, a tangible link to a young man’s life. There is no way to tell for certain whose jawbone it is, but it seems to be that of Karluk first mate Sandy Anderson. It is my intention to take him home to Scotland, to return him to his family and his homeland, just as I have hoped to bring the men of the Karluk home by te
lling their story.

  Notes

  LEGEND

  BC (Archives)—British Columbia Archives

  BWD—Bowdoin College, Maine

  CAE—Canadian Arctic Expedition

  DRT—Dartmouth College

  JNC—Jennifer Niven’s Collection

  KGC—Kenneth Gordon Chipman

  MMBC—Maritime Museum, British Columbia

  OJ—Official Journal of the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913–1918

  NAC—National Archives of Canada

  NLS—National Library of Scotland

  RAB—Robert Abram Bartlett

  RMA—Dr. Rudolph Martin Anderson

  WLM—William Laird McKinlay

  PRIMARY SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY

  This book is based on the diaries, journals, letters, unpublished manuscripts, and papers written by the members of the 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition, and on other pertinent letters and journals, as well as on documents and public records in government archives.

  Providentially, most of the scientists and crew members kept diaries and journals, wrote letters home, and composed official reports and, despite the calamities the Karluk endured, many of these invaluable documents have survived. Some of the diaries, as in Mamen’s case, were kept up until the days just before death. Other materials, as in McKinlay’s case, included writing composed by memory over the course of several decades. My objective has been to bring the reader as close as possible to these primary sources and, through them, to the actual time and experiences documented by the people who lived them.

  Over the years, as I conducted my research in the Unites States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, I constructed day-by-day calendars, juxtaposing all the firsthand accounts recorded by the participants themselves. This process allowed me to weave together and compare all the accounts of each event.

  In addition to relying on the primary written sources, I conducted interviews and/or carried on extensive correspondence with the following: