The First Party Vanishes

The men who followed Bartlett’s orders did so not because they believed in the march’s success but because the alternative—fragmentation, individual survival in an environment that killed the solitary—was worse. They had watched the Karluk die in the ice, had hauled her stores across pressure ridges that rose like frozen breakers, had learned to read the snap and boom of the pack as a sailor reads wind in the rigging. Now, in the third week of February 1914, they were being asked to believe that a journey of fifty miles across moving ice could be accomplished by dividing their strength and sending one party ahead.

Bartlett’s telescope showed nothing. He lowered it from his eye and wiped the frost from the brass barrel with a mittened thumb. The sky had cleared in the night, stripping away the protective haze that followed the last gale, and the ice plain ran westward in blinding white to a horizon that seemed to curve upward like the rim of a bowl. Somewhere in that emptiness, four days gone now, was First Officer Alexander Anderson and the men who had left with him. They carried a sledge, two weeks of rations, the best of the remaining fur clothing, and orders to reach Wrangel Island, establish a cache, and return with word of the route. They had not returned. The instrument revealed only granular glitter of wind-packed snow and occasional dark lines of pressure ridges too distant to read.

The captain snapped the telescope shut. Behind him at Shipwreck Camp, twenty-one men moved through their routines with exaggerated care—the caution of people who had seen how quickly competence could become catastrophe. Their camp sat on a floe large enough to seem permanent, though they no longer trusted permanence in anything. Tents stood in a loose cluster, guy lines tensioned against the easterly wind. Templeman maintained the galley tent, producing thin stew from seal meat and pemmican that kept men working but did not satisfy. Meteorological instruments salvaged from the Karluk’s bridge recorded temperatures near thirty below zero Fahrenheit. The readings were dutifully logged. No one knew who would read them.

Bjarne Mamen had returned alone. On February 4, 1914, he had scouted for a four-man team led by First Officer Alexander Anderson toward Wrangel Island in the Beaufort Sea. He reported to Bartlett that he had left them a few miles short of land that was evidently not Wrangel Island—probably Herald Island instead—38 miles (61 km) from their intended destination. Mamen was the last to see Anderson’s party alive.

On February 4, 1914, the Norwegian ski champion had scouted for Anderson’s four-man team to the north shore of Wrangel Island, then turned back to Shipwreck Camp to report to Bartlett. The ice, which from a distance presented the smooth continuum of a frozen sea, resolved at ground level into chaos—blocks, leads, and pressure ridges that forced constant detours. Progress was measured in yards rather than miles, against a cold that found every gap in clothing, every moment of stillness. Mamen left Anderson, Henri Beuchat, John Brady, and a fourth man still moving westward, still believing they could reach the island and return before their rations failed.

Thirteen days later, the calculation had changed. Anderson’s party carried food for fourteen days. They should have turned back even if they had reached Wrangel Island. They had not turned back. They had not been seen. The ice between Shipwreck Camp and the island had shifted—leads opening where there had been solid surface, floes grinding together that had offered passage. The party might be delayed. They might be lost. Bartlett held these possibilities in suspension as he walked toward the tents, the telescope heavy in his pocket, his face showing nothing the men could read.

The decision to send an advance party had seemed necessary. Shipwreck Camp, established after the Karluk’s sinking on January 11, consumed stores without prospect of replenishment. Seal and polar bear hunts produced occasional success but not enough. Bartlett calculated that remaining food, carefully rationed, might sustain the full party for two months. Two months was not enough. The ice pack’s drift carried them westward, away from Alaskan coasts where rescue might be expected, toward Siberian shores where no one knew their position. Wrangel Island, visible on clear days as a dark smudge on the southwestern horizon, offered the only fixed point in this movement. It had been mapped, however imperfectly. It had been visited. It offered possibility of game, shelter, a position from which rescue might be sent or received.

The march would test every limit. Fifty miles of Arctic pack ice in winter meant fifty miles of surface that changed between morning and evening, that could open beneath a sledge or rise in barriers requiring hours to circumvent. Bartlett divided his force because he could not do otherwise. The full party, moving together with all supplies, would be too slow. An advance group, lightly equipped and unburdened by the sick or inexpert, might establish a depot on the island and return to guide the main body.

They departed February 13, 1914, in conditions that seemed favorable. Temperature had risen to twenty below, almost mild by recent standards. Wind dropped to a breeze carrying loose snow in drifting veils rather than driving it like shot. The party waved from the first pressure ridge, small figures already diminished by distance, then dropped from sight into the hollows of the ice. Mamen followed for two days as scout, then turned back with his report of difficult but manageable conditions. That report, delivered February 4, had justified Bartlett’s decision. It had also, in retrospect, created expectation that word would come quickly, that the advance party would prove the march’s feasibility and return with encouragement for those who waited.

Expectation had hardened into anxiety, then into dread. Each day without sighting brought new theories. Perhaps Anderson had reached the island and waited for stable weather before returning. Perhaps he had encountered a lead too wide to cross and was working north or south to find passage. Perhaps the ice had carried him past the island entirely, the westward drift affecting his smaller party more severely because they were farther from land’s stabilizing influence. These theories were discussed in tents, in low voices that did not carry to Bartlett’s shelter, as if speaking them aloud might make them true.

The captain maintained routines with visible precision. Each morning he inspected tents, checked guy lines, verified stoves were vented properly, ensured no man slept with his face buried in fur. He consulted with William McKinlay on meteorological records, though consultation was brief because there was little to say. The barometer fell and rose without pattern. Temperature followed no predictable curve. Wind, when it blew, came from directions that shifted within hours. The Arctic they had studied from expedition manuals and previous accounts was not the Arctic they inhabited. The Beaufort Sea pack in 1914 behaved according to rules no one had codified, that perhaps could not be codified, that punished the assumption of pattern with sudden violence.

On February 17, 1914, Bartlett assembled the remaining men and stated what they already knew. Anderson’s party was overdue. Conditions that had allowed their departure had not persisted. The ice had moved. Weather had closed in. Possibility of their return diminished with each hour. He spoke without emotion, listing facts as a navigator lists bearings, then announced his decision. They would wait two more days. If no sign appeared, they would assume the advance party lost and proceed with the second phase of the march.

The announcement was received in silence. The men understood its implications. They had been divided, by accident of Anderson’s selection, into those who marched first and those who waited. The division now appeared as separation between living and likely dead. They were being asked to follow the same route that had swallowed their companions, to trust in the same calculations that had failed, to believe that larger numbers and heavier loads would succeed where a lighter party had not. The logic was not comforting. But the alternative—to remain at Shipwreck Camp until food ran out—was not acceptable.

McKinlay recorded the moment in his diary with the restraint that characterized his observations throughout. He set down the date, the temperature, the state of ice visible from camp. He noted Bartlett’s announcement without comment on its emotional effect. He noted his own physical condition, which was weakening, and the condition of scientific instruments he had salvaged, which remained functional. The diary, maintained through conditions that made writing an act of will, became in these days a record of surfaces because surfaces were all that could be verified.

The two days passed. The telescope showed nothing. Wind rose on the second evening, driving snow that reduced visibility to the dimensions of camp, and when it cleared on the morning of February 19, the ice had changed. New pressure ridges had formed to the west, visible as dark lines against the white, and a lead of open water had opened to the southwest, cutting off the direct route to Wrangel Island that Anderson had attempted. Bartlett studied these changes without visible reaction. The lead might close. The ridges might be crossed. The essential fact was that they could not remain. Food was diminishing. Men’s strength was diminishing. The drift carried them toward an unknown western horizon where no help waited.

He gave the order to prepare for departure. The sick—those whose feet had frozen in the evacuation from the Karluk or who had developed respiratory infections that spread in crowded tents—would be carried on sledges. The able would pull double loads. The route would follow Anderson’s bearing as far as the new lead permitted, then deviate north to seek a crossing. Travel would occur by night when possible, resting in the relative warmth of the dim Arctic day. Depots would be established at intervals, food cached against possibility of retreat.

Preparations consumed the daylight hours of February 19. Sledges were loaded, balanced, tested. Tents were struck and repacked in configurations allowing quick erection in wind. Rations were divided into daily parcels, each wrapped against moisture and marked with its intended consumption date. These rituals of expedition travel, learned from previous Arctic journeys and modified by particular constraints of their situation, produced temporary order. Men who had waited in paralysis of uncertainty found purpose in physical demands of preparation. Most did not believe the march would succeed. They believed movement preferable to stillness, that effort of travel was preferable to effort of watching food diminish and hope expire.

Bartlett walked the camp perimeter that evening, checking each sledge personally. He had known Anderson for two years, had selected him for the Karluk’s first officer from among available candidates in Victoria, had trusted him with navigation of the ship through waters that killed the careless. That trust had been justified. Anderson had managed the crew, maintained discipline, supported Bartlett’s authority during difficult weeks after Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s departure. His loss, if confirmed, would remove the one officer who understood the ship’s people as Bartlett understood them. The captain did not permit himself to calculate this loss as he checked lashings and verified loads. He permitted himself only the observation that ice was changing, that time was short, that the decision to divide the party had been correct in theory and disastrous in execution.

The theory had seemed sound. Divide the force, establish a forward position, concentrate resources on the critical objective. Standard military practice, standard expedition practice, validated by polar journeys of Nansen and Scott and Shackleton. What the theory did not account for was the particular instability of the Beaufort Sea pack in winter 1914, the speed with which leads opened and closed, the violence of pressure events that could transform navigable ice into impassable chaos within hours.

The morning of February 20, 1914, brought clear sky and temperature of thirty-five below. Men rose from sleeping bags with reluctance of those who know what the day will demand. Templeman served the last hot meal they would have for an unknown period—seal meat and tea—while Bartlett made his final survey of the route. The lead to the southwest had partially frozen overnight, forming a bridge of young ice that might bear weight or might not. The pressure ridges to the west remained, their dark lines sharp against the horizon. Between these obstacles, a possible passage wound northward before turning west again, adding miles to the journey but avoiding immediate barriers.

They departed at noon, the sun a pale disk just above the southern horizon, shadows long and blue on the snow. Bartlett led, breaking trail where surface was soft, following sledges where it was hard. Behind him came the main body in single file, each man connected to the next by invisible cord of shared effort and mutual dependence. They made three miles before light failed and they were forced to camp. Tents rose slowly in the cold, canvas stiff, poles reluctant to fit their sockets. Inside, stoves raised temperature to ten below, luxurious by comparison with outside air, and men ate cold rations with mechanical patience of those who have learned to separate the act of eating from the experience of satisfaction.

In the days that followed, they developed rhythm of the march. Travel by night, when cold was most intense but ice was most stable. Camp by day, when relative warmth allowed necessary repairs and rest that made further travel possible. Watch the ice constantly, reading its surface for signs of movement, for cracks that preceded leads, for hummocks that marked pressure building beneath. Bartlett maintained this rhythm with discipline of a man who understood that discipline was the only resource that could not be exhausted.

They found the first sign on February 24, 1914. A sledge runner, broken and discarded, lay on the surface of a floe that had drifted north of their intended route. The wood was familiar—salvaged from the Karluk’s stores, marked with the expedition’s initials. It had not been abandoned lightly. A sledge without a runner was useless, and the runner could not be repaired in the field. Anderson’s party, or some member of it, had chosen to lighten their load rather than attempt repair. The choice suggested urgency, perhaps desperation. It suggested that the party had encountered conditions that forced them to sacrifice equipment for speed.

Bartlett studied the runner without touching it. Ice around it showed no tracks—snow had drifted, or the floe had moved, erasing traces of passage. The runner itself gave no indication of how long it had lain there. Days? Hours? The cold preserved without dating. He ordered the party to continue, leaving the runner as they found it, a marker whose meaning they could not fully read.

More signs appeared in following days. A cache of food, partially buried in a snowdrift, containing pemmican that Anderson’s party had apparently stored against their return. A discarded mitten, frozen stiff, large enough to suggest Brady’s hand. A fragment of sledging harness, cut rather than unbuckled, suggesting haste. Each find was discussed in low voices, each interpretation proposed and modified. The party had passed this way. They had been moving fast, sacrificing equipment and supplies. They had not returned to reclaim their cache. These facts were clear. What they meant for the survival of the men who left them remained obscure.

The search for Anderson’s party became, in these days, a secondary purpose of the march. Bartlett maintained his bearing toward Wrangel Island, but he watched the ice with doubled attention, scanning the surface for any movement, any figure, any signal. The telescope came out at every halt, trained on the horizon in all directions. The men understood that they were searching for bodies as much as for survivors.

On February 28, 1914, they reached a position from which Wrangel Island was visible, closer now than it had been from Shipwreck Camp, its dark mass rising above the ice with the solidity of land that did not drift or change. The sight produced complicated reaction. They had made progress, half the distance covered in eight days of marching. But the island that had been Anderson’s objective was still ahead, and Anderson had not returned from it. The gap between their position and his fate narrowed with each mile, without closing into certainty.

Bartlett made the decision to establish a forward camp. They had reached a floe large enough to seem stable, with access to open water where seal might be hunted. The main party would rest here while a scouting group, led by the Inuit hunter Kataktovik, probed the remaining distance to the island. This was the original plan modified by loss: instead of Anderson’s party guiding the main body, the main body would send a new party to discover what had become of the guide. The circularity was apparent to everyone. It was also unavoidable.

Kataktovik departed March 1, 1914, with two of the fittest seamen. They carried light loads and instructions to return within three days regardless of what they found. Bartlett watched them go with the same expression he had worn when Anderson’s party disappeared—attention without apparent emotion, the face of a man who had learned to receive bad news without display. The remaining men established camp, building snow walls against the wind, setting tents in the formation that had become routine. They waited.

Three days passed. Kataktovik did not return. Ice between the forward camp and the island, visible from slight elevation of a pressure ridge, showed movement—leads opening and closing, floes rotating in the current. The conditions that had delayed Anderson might have delayed the scouts. Or they might have killed them. The camp divided between those who believed patience would be rewarded and those who believed each departure reduced the party that remained, that the ice was consuming them in sections, that Bartlett’s strategy of division was proving as fatal for the second party as for the first.

Bartlett did not address these divisions directly. He maintained routines of camp, inspected men for frostbite, supervised hunting that produced occasional seal, recorded meteorological observations that continued to show no pattern. His authority, never explicitly claimed, was exercised through the assumption that there would be a tomorrow, that the march would continue, that the goal of Wrangel Island remained achievable. This assumption was becoming harder to maintain. Food was lower than calculated, men’s strength depleted by effort of travel in extreme cold, psychological burden of the missing parties growing heavier with each day of silence.

On March 4, 1914, he assembled the men and announced a change of plan. They would abandon the forward position and retreat toward Shipwreck Camp. The retreat was not surrender—it was consolidation. They would establish a new base closer to their original position, with access to hunting grounds they knew, and await conditions that would allow renewed attempt on the island. The announcement was received with relief that could not be openly expressed. The march westward had become associated with disappearance, with the runners and mittens and caches that marked passage of men who did not return. To move east, even toward the site of the Karluk’s sinking, was to move toward the known, toward survival that was possible if not probable.

They broke camp on March 5, 1914, in conditions that had deteriorated overnight. Wind rose as they loaded sledges, driving snow that reduced visibility to the length of the sledge team. Bartlett set a bearing that should have carried them back toward their previous position, but the ice had moved in the days of their advance, and the landmarks he remembered—particular pressure ridges, the shape of a large floe—had shifted or disappeared. They traveled for six hours before he recognized that they were not where they should be, that the drift had carried them north of their intended route, that they were lost on the ice that had swallowed Anderson and might now swallow them.

The recognition produced not panic but a change in method. Bartlett stopped the party and established an emergency camp, tents pitched close together against a snow wall that took two hours to build. Inside, with stoves raising temperature to survivable levels, he explained the situation with the same precision he had applied to the announcement of Anderson’s departure. They were off their bearing. The ice was moving. They would wait for visibility to improve, then use the sun’s position to establish their location. They had food for ten days at full ration, longer if they reduced. They would not starve. They would not freeze. They would navigate by methods that had served Arctic travelers for generations, and they would find their way.

The men believed him because the alternative was not belief but despair, and despair was a luxury they could not afford. They settled into routines of waiting, sleeping in shifts, maintaining the stoves, watching the weather through tent flaps for any break that would allow travel. The wind continued for two days, then dropped on the third to a calm that brought new cold, forty below, air so clear that distant objects seemed close enough to touch.

Bartlett took his observations on March 8, 1914, the sun’s altitude at noon establishing latitude, the chronometer and his pocket sextant giving longitude that placed them northwest of Shipwreck Camp, farther from their goal than they had been when they started. The calculation was discouraging but not catastrophic. They had drifted with the ice, as the Karluk had drifted, as Anderson’s party had presumably drifted. The difference was that they were still together, still equipped, still capable of movement. The captain revised his bearing and gave the order to break camp.

They marched for four days, following a route that curved southeast to compensate for westward drift. Conditions were the worst they had encountered—cold that made metal dangerous to touch, wind that found every gap in their clothing, ice surface so broken that sledges had to be unloaded and carried across pressure ridges that rose like frozen waves. On the fourth day, they recognized a pressure ridge they had passed on the outward march, and on the fifth they sighted the dark stain on the ice that marked Shipwreck Camp.

The camp had changed in their absence. Snow walls had drifted over, tent sites were barely visible, but the essential structure remained—a place that had been inhabited, that bore marks of human effort, that offered possibility of shelter and rest. They reached it on March 13, 1914, having traveled in a circle that consumed thirteen days, having found no trace of Anderson or Kataktovik or any of the men who had left with them, having demonstrated that the ice would not yield its secrets to determination alone.

Bartlett established new routines with the same discipline he had maintained throughout. The camp was rebuilt, tents pitched in new positions, hunting parties organized to exploit the open water they knew. He did not speak of the parties that were lost, except to record their names in the expedition log with the dates of their departure. The log, maintained through conditions that made writing painful, became the official record of what had happened, what was happening, what might still happen. It did not include the calculations that Bartlett must have made—how many men remained, how much food, how long until ice broke up for summer, whether any rescue could arrive in time.

The disappearance of the first party left the camp in a state of shattered hope. Men who had believed, despite everything, that organization and discipline could overcome the Arctic’s indifference now confronted evidence that organization was not enough. They had followed Bartlett’s orders because the alternative was worse, and the orders had led them in a circle that returned them to their starting point with fewer resources and less confidence. The captain’s authority remained intact because no alternative authority existed, because the ice recognized no rank, because the only choice was to continue following orders or to surrender to the separation that had killed Anderson. They established their watch on the ice, scanning the horizon for movement that did not come, waiting for the break in weather that would allow another attempt, another departure, another risk of the same route that had already proven fatal.