The Second Party Is Lost

They had watched the first party diminish across the ice until the white swallowed them, and now it was their turn to step onto the same fractured surface. At Shipwreck Camp, Chief Engineer John Munro checked his sledge harnesses with the methodical precision that had governed twenty years at sea, calculating weights, inspecting runners, speaking to his assigned men—seaman George Breddy, fireman Thomas Smith, and the scientist William McKinlay—only of practical things: ration portions, the angle of haul, the bearing west-southwest toward Wrangel Island. He offered nothing of what they all knew. The silence where Murray’s party should have sent back word had lasted twelve days.

McKinlay recorded the same moment differently. In his diary, the engineer’s operational calm appeared as a kind of madness. The scientist had noted the conditions that swallowed the first group: pressure ridges rising like broken walls, leads that could widen in hours, the grinding of floes colliding in darkness. His entries carried the particular terror of informed imagination. He understood enough to fear accurately, and he wrote this fear down while Munro spoke of harness leather and snow texture.

The contrast measures more than temperament. It reveals the fracture within the expedition itself, the gap between institutional procedure and lived experience that had widened since Stefansson’s departure. The leader’s walk across the ice in September 1913, nominally a hunting foray, had removed nominal authority from Shipwreck Camp. What remained was Bartlett’s command, exercised under conditions that no naval manual addressed. The captain could order men to stay or go, could allocate provisions and designate routes, but he could not make the ice predictable or the weather kind. Each party that left carried this uncertainty dressed either in the engineer’s methodical calm or the diarist’s honest dread. Amid this activity, the anthropologist Henri Beuchat and others had played little part in the general life of the camp and expressed their determination to leave it, independently, as soon as possible.

They set out in late February, following the same bearing that had absorbed Murray’s group. The choice was not arbitrary. Wrangel Island lay documented, with shelter and possible game. Bartlett’s original plan had envisioned the entire company making this march together, twenty-five souls moving in disciplined formation. The first disappearance had broken that plan. The second departure represented not strategy but necessity: the supplies salvaged from the sinking Karluk would not sustain the whole company indefinitely, and the ice showed no sign of releasing them to open water. Someone had to attempt the island. Someone always had to attempt what others had failed.

Why did they proceed despite the known risk? The question reaches past individual courage to the architecture of their predicament. At Shipwreck Camp, the remaining survivors faced a calculus of diminishing options. The stores were adequate for weeks, not months. The ice continued its westward drift, but slowly, too slowly, carrying them toward no certain rescue. The hunting that Stefansson had promised as the expedition’s sustenance had proved impossible from the camp’s fixed position; seal and bear remained visible sometimes but beyond practical reach. Each day of waiting consumed resources that could not be replaced. Each day of inaction eroded the physical condition required for any future march. Munro’s party left because staying had become its own form of death, slower and more certain than the hazards of the ice.

They traveled in conditions that McKinlay would later describe with the particularity of trauma. The surface presented no continuous path. Pressure ridges, formed by floe collision, rose in jagged lines that forced constant detours. The snow between obstacles varied from wind-hardened crust that supported a man’s weight to powder that swallowed sledge runners and exhausted the haulers. Temperatures fluctuated across a range that made clothing strategy impossible: too many layers and sweat froze against the skin; too few and extremities numbed. The party developed its own rhythm, two hours of hauling, then rest, then movement again, measured against the declining arc of the winter sun.

The ice itself moved beneath them. This was the condition that distinguished their march from any terrestrial journey. The pack was not a fixed surface but a collection of independent plates, driven by currents and winds that the travelers could not perceive directly. A floe that seemed solid at noon might crack by dusk. A lead that appeared as impassable water might freeze overnight into a bridge, or widen into a barrier that forced days of detour. The first party had encountered this instability and failed to navigate it. Munro’s group possessed no superior knowledge, only the same inadequate charts and the same human limitation.

They became separated through a mechanism that McKinlay’s account renders with the clarity of immediate record. The party was crossing a broad floe, the sledges moving in line, when the ice began to move. Not gradually, as in the ordinary drift of the pack, but suddenly, a shudder that traveled through the frozen surface like a wave.

McKinlay felt it through his boots before he heard the sound: the grinding of ice against ice, the opening of a lead where moments before there had been solid surface.

He turned to see the floe behind him separate from the one he stood upon, a dark line of water widening with visible speed. Munro and Breddy were on that retreating plate, with one sledge and half their provisions.

Smith had been between the groups; McKinlay never established whether he reached Munro’s floe or was lost to the water. The scientist found himself with two companions, seaman Fred Maurer and fireman Charles Barker, and the second sledge, stranded on a floe that was itself beginning to drift.

Why could they not recover? The question addresses both the immediate crisis and the deeper failure of preparation. In the first minutes, McKinlay attempted communication across the widening lead. The distance was already too great for reliable voice contact, and the parties possessed no signal equipment, no flags, flares, or mirrors that might have bridged the gap. The ice continued its movement, driven by forces indifferent to human connection. Within an hour, Munro’s floe had disappeared into the maze of pressure ridges, visible only as occasional dark shapes against the white horizon, then not visible at all.

The separation was complete. What followed for McKinlay’s group showed how exhaustion reshapes decision-making. They had provisions for perhaps two weeks of careful rationing. Their location relative to Wrangel Island was uncertain; without Munro’s navigation, they possessed only McKinlay’s limited training and the general bearing of the sun. The ice surface that had separated them from Munro now presented itself as their only highway, but a highway that led nowhere certain. They attempted to follow the general drift, hoping to intersect land or rescue, but each day’s travel consumed more energy than it yielded progress. The cold penetrated. The rations diminished. The mental effort of maintaining hope in the absence of information became itself a form of labor.

McKinlay’s diary entries from this period record a consciousness narrowing to immediate survival. The scientific observations that had structured his earlier entries, notes on ice formation, temperature, wind direction, gave way to bare record: distance traveled, food consumed, hours of sleep. The prose itself became fragmented, sentences shortened, connections elided. This was not merely physical depletion but the collapse of the cognitive framework that made experience meaningful. The expedition had been organized around purposes: geographic discovery, scientific data, national prestige. Stranded on a drifting floe, these purposes dissolved into the single imperative of continuing to exist.

The institutional root of this collapse lay in the command structure that Stefansson had abandoned. The expedition’s original design had assumed centralized leadership: Stefansson’s authority over scientific staff, Bartlett’s over nautical operations, clear channels of decision and communication. Stefansson’s departure had severed this structure at its apex. Bartlett’s subsequent authority was real but limited. He could command the ship and its company, but he could not command the ice, could not compel rescue, could not guarantee the survival of parties sent into the pack. Each group that left Shipwreck Camp operated under delegated authority that ceased to function once separation occurred. Munro had received orders to reach Wrangel Island; once separated from McKinlay, he had no orders applicable to his new situation, no communication with the source of command, no framework for improvising cooperation with the other fragment of his own party.

The environmental conditions that completed the disaster were not unprecedented. The Arctic pack had always behaved with this violence, this indifference to human presence. What made the Karluk disaster distinctive was the collision between this environment and a human organization that had misunderstood its own fragility. Stefansson’s conception of the expedition, mobile, flexible, sustained by hunting rather than supply, had assumed a mastery over northern conditions that the actual experience contradicted. The ship’s entrapment, the leader’s departure, the successive losses of marching parties: each stage revealed the gap between this conception and the resistant reality.

The second party’s fate also illuminated a pattern that the first disappearance had only suggested. Both groups had been composed of men selected for particular skills: seamen, firemen, scientists, engineers. None possessed the full range of competencies that Arctic survival required. Munro’s mechanical expertise did not extend to ice navigation. McKinlay’s scientific training did not include the Inuit techniques of reading floe movement that might have warned them of the impending separation. The expedition had been organized around Stefansson’s theory that modern equipment and scientific method could substitute for indigenous knowledge. The ice proved this theory false.

For the men stranded with McKinlay, the immediate problem was not theoretical but visceral. They had watched their companions drift away with most of their food. They stood on a floe whose dimensions they could not measure, surrounded by a surface that shifted and cracked without warning. The temperature dropped at night to levels that made sleep dangerous, requiring them to maintain watch in rotating shifts, burning calories they could not replace. Maurer and Barker, less educated than McKinlay, responded to this crisis with a kind of practical fatalism, concentrating on immediate tasks: melting snow for water, repairing sledge straps, gathering ice chips for the stove. McKinlay’s diary records his own struggle to match this focus, his mind returning again to the image of Munro’s floe receding, the question of whether they could have done something different, the recognition that such questions served no purpose.

The drift of their floe carried them westward, as the pack’s general movement carried all fragments of the Karluk’s company. This was the same current that had taken the ship itself, month after month, from its entrapment off Alaska toward the Siberian coast. But the current was not uniform. It eddied and slowed, accelerated through narrow channels of open water, deposited floes against stationary ice masses that blocked progress for days. McKinlay’s group could not predict or influence their course. They could only observe their position relative to the sun and stars, noting with despair or hope how the bearings changed.

Their survival, when it came, was not the result of any action they took but of the same environmental forces that had destroyed them. After eleven days of drifting, their floe approached a larger mass of stable ice, and from this vantage they sighted land: the low, dark line of Wrangel Island, finally achieved by accident rather than effort. The crossing to the island’s shore, though dangerous, was possible; they abandoned their sledge and swam the final stretch through water that numbed them to the bone. They dragged themselves onto a beach where other survivors, from parties that had taken different routes through the chaos, were already gathered. Among these they learned fragments of what had happened to those who had preceded them: Murray’s group, never found; Munro’s group, seen once from a distance by another party, then lost again in the ice maze.

The news confirmed what McKinlay had suspected. The ice pack had not merely hindered their march; it had transformed their organized expedition into scattered groups of isolated individuals, each struggling for survival without knowledge of the others’ fates. This was the operational reality that Bartlett, back at Shipwreck Camp, was also confronting. Two parties sent toward Wrangel Island had failed completely. The resources for a third attempt were depleted in men, equipment, and confidence. More fundamentally, the premise of coordinated movement had been disproved by experience. The ice pack could not be navigated as a highway because it was not a highway. It was a dynamic, hostile environment that transformed any human group into isolated units, vulnerable to forces beyond their perception or control.

The loss of the second party completed a transformation in the situation of the remaining survivors. Where Bartlett had once commanded a ship’s company with established routines and clear hierarchy, he now presided over scattered groups scattered across miles of ice and, for those who had reached it, the uncertain refuge of Wrangel Island itself. Communication between these groups was impossible. Coordination was impossible. The original plan of a disciplined march to safety had dissolved into a series of separate survival struggles, each dependent on chance drift and individual endurance. The captain’s authority, already strained by Stefansson’s departure, now extended only to those within direct sight and hearing. For the rest, he could do nothing but hope that their paths might eventually converge.

The weight of precedent pressed upon Munro’s party with a particular cruelty that McKinlay’s diary entries only gradually reveal. They were not merely following a route; they were following ghosts.

Every pressure ridge that forced them to detour, every lead that required testing with the butt of an ice-pike, carried the possibility that they were tracing the exact path where Murray’s group had made their final, fatal choices. McKinlay noted this explicitly on the third day of their march, describing how he found a piece of canvas frozen into a ridge—weathered, torn, possibly from the first party’s sledge covers, possibly from some earlier Arctic tragedy impossible to date.

The object served as both warning and omen. Munro examined it briefly, pronounced it useless, and ordered the march to continue. McKinlay pocketed a fragment, though he never explained this impulse in his diary, perhaps because he could not articulate the need to possess physical proof of those who had preceded them into silence.

The composition of Munro’s party reflected the expedition’s increasingly desperate arithmetic of survival. Where Murray had taken a mix of seamen and scientific staff, Munro’s group represented the remaining skilled labor: an engineer who understood engines but not ice, a fireman whose expertise with coal furnaces translated poorly to the management of small blubber stoves, a seaman whose Arctic experience was limited to shipboard duty, and McKinlay himself, whose meteorological training had prepared him to observe conditions rather than survive within them. This was not a party selected for Arctic travel; it was a party composed of whoever remained capable of hauling a sledge.

The institutional failure that Stefansson’s departure had initiated now manifested in the mismatch between the men available and the demands of the environment. They possessed, collectively, every skill necessary to operate a ship in northern waters; they lacked, almost entirely, the knowledge that indigenous travelers had accumulated across generations of ice travel.

George Breddy’s presence in the party introduces a particular pathos that McKinlay’s later writings would emphasize. The seaman had shipped on the Karluk as a replacement for a man who had taken ill in Nome, joining the expedition without the months of preparation that the original company had shared.

He had formed no close attachments, developed no theories about the expedition’s purposes, accumulated no stake in its success beyond the wages he would collect if he survived. McKinlay described him as competent, silent, apparently indifferent to the scientific discussions that occupied the ship’s intellectuals.

This very detachment may have made him valuable to Munro, who required men who would haul without questioning, who would accept the engineer’s authority without the resentment that knowledge sometimes breeds. In the crisis of separation, Breddy’s anonymity would become significant: he was, for McKinlay, simply gone, one of several figures on a retreating floe whose individual fates would never be established.

The specific mechanics of the separation deserve closer attention, for they reveal how environmental violence could exploit the smallest vulnerabilities in human organization. The party had been traveling in a standard polar formation: single file, with Munro leading navigation, the sledges spaced to prevent collision on uneven terrain, the men walking alongside to reduce weight on the runners. This formation assumed a stable surface. When the ice began its sudden movement, the file structure became a liability. Those at the front, Munro and Breddy with the lead sledge, had momentum carrying them forward onto a plate that was separating from the main mass. Those behind, McKinlay’s group with the second sledge, found themselves on the stationary or more slowly moving portion.

McKinlay’s eventual rescue, and the rescue of those with him on Wrangel Island, would come from outside: from Bartlett’s own desperate journey, from the Inuit hunter Kataktovik who would accompany him, from the ships that would finally reach the island in September 1914. But this rescue was not yet conceivable when the second party was lost. In the immediate aftermath of the separation, the survivors at Shipwreck Camp faced only the knowledge that two attempts had failed, that more men had walked into the ice and not returned, and that the remaining options narrowed with each passing day. The ice that had seemed a temporary obstacle had revealed itself as the dominant force of their existence, reshaping their human purposes to its own indifferent movement.

The scattered survivors now faced a landscape of isolated groups, each cut off from the others by moving floes and impassable leads. Any hope of a coordinated march had ended with Munro’s disappearance. What remained was the possibility that individuals might survive, might drift or struggle to some point of accidental convergence, might be found by rescue that could only come from beyond the ice itself. This possibility would drive Bartlett to his final decision: to abandon the main body of survivors and attempt, with a single companion, the nearly impossible trek to Siberia that represented the last chance of bringing help.