The Island’s Summer of Hunger

Seen from above, the machinery that turned one man’s suffering into another man’s permission ran through channels Bartlett could not see. Down below, he had walked across the Chukchi Sea for seventy-six days with Kataktovik, surviving ice and storms and hunger that worked at their bones like a file, to reach the Siberian coast and then, by sled and reindeer and steamer, to arrive in Alaska. Assisted by local populations, the pair eventually reached Alaska, but sea ice conditions prevented any immediate rescue mission. Five days later Pedersen arrived in the whaler Herman and, without delay, took Bartlett on board. They reached Nome on 24 May, but ice prevented landing. The machinery had begun to turn, yet its gears caught and slipped, and while they slipped, eleven people waited on Wrangel Island in a season that would test whether survival itself could become a kind of dying.

Bartlett had left them in March with what he believed to be adequate provisions, with the promise of his return, with the discipline he had imposed through the long winter since the Karluk sank. The island party had twenty-five people when the ship went down in January 1914. By the time Bartlett and Kataktovik set out across the ice, death and the splitting of the company had reduced that number: three men sent to Herald Island who never returned, four under First Officer Alexander Anderson who struck north and vanished into the white. What remained was a core of sailors, scientists, and Inuit families—twenty-two souls when Bartlett turned his back on them, twenty-two who watched his diminishing figure until the ice swallowed him.

They had reason for hope. The Arctic summer was coming. The ice would loosen. The caribou would migrate across the island’s interior as they had always done, and with caribou would come the chance to replenish their stores, to build reserves that would carry them through another winter if rescue did not come. Such was the logic of the North, the logic Bartlett had relied upon when he divided the remaining food and set the rations, when he chose Kataktovik for the journey and left the others to wait.

But the Arctic does not recognize human logic. It recognizes only its own patterns, its own indifferent timing.

—-

In early June, with snow still clinging to the island’s ridges but daylight stretching toward the twenty-four-hour mark of midsummer, the survivors made a gesture of faith. They gathered what remained of the ship’s biscuits, the hard, durable naval ration that had come with them from the Karluk, and cached them. The act was deliberate, ceremonial in its precision. These were not the daily rations, scraped thinner each week as stores dwindled, but a reserve, a deposit against a future they could not see but refused to abandon. They wrapped the biscuits in what waterproofing they could fashion, buried them in a marked spot above the high tide line, and recorded the location in the diaries that several kept with the stubborn discipline of men who still believed someone would read their words.

William McKinlay, the expedition’s magnetician, noted the caching in his journal with the flat precision that would characterize his record of the months to come. A Scot trained in scientific measurement, he brought to his diary the same method he brought to his instruments. The biscuits were counted. The location was fixed by reference to landmarks. The date was recorded. Such was how men imposed order on chaos, how they refused to let circumstance reduce them to mere animals scrabbling for existence. The cache was proof of their intention to survive, their confidence that rescue would come before it was needed, their trust in the system Bartlett had set in motion.

Three weeks later, McKinlay’s hand had begun to shake when he wrote.

—-

The caribou did not come.

The caribou did not come. This was the first betrayal, the environmental failure that undid all their calculations. The herds that should have crossed Wrangel Island in their thousands, following ancient routes from the Siberian coast to the Alaskan shore, simply failed to appear. The reasons would be debated later: altered ice conditions, hunting pressure on the mainland, some deeper cycle of Arctic ecology. To those waiting on the island, the reasons mattered less than the fact. They had planned for meat, prepared themselves for the work of hunting, butchering, preserving, building up stores that would make survival secure. Instead they found empty tundra, silent valleys, tracks of foxes and lemmings but none of the heavy hoof-prints that meant life.

Seal hunting, which had sustained them through winter, changed with the season. The ice that held seals close to shore, visible and reachable, broke up and dispersed. Seals became scattered, wary, harder to approach. What had been a reliable if meager source of protein grew erratic, unpredictable, subject to the luck of the hunt and the skill of the hunters. The Inuit families—Kuraluk and his wife Kiruk, their daughters Helen and Mugpi—carried the heaviest burden, for it was their knowledge the party relied upon, their techniques of stalking and harpooning that had kept others alive. But knowledge has limits when prey itself becomes scarce, and the Arctic summer, despite all its light, offered no compensation for what it took away.

The cached supplies, carefully husbanded through winter, began to dwindle with terrifying speed. The mathematics of survival, which Bartlett had calculated with such precision, assumed certain inputs: so much seal meat per week, supplemented by so much caribou when herds arrived. Without caribou, the equation collapsed. Rations, already reduced to subsistence levels, had to be cut again. And again.

—-

The social fracture began with the food.

Rationing in a survival situation is never merely technical. It is moral, a problem of justice and suspicion and the raw fear that others are getting more than their share. Bartlett had managed this fear through force of personality, through absolute authority as captain, through example: eating what others ate, or less, inspecting portions, making cuts himself, accepting resentment as his due. With him gone, the structure he imposed began to weaken.

McKinlay’s diary records the first disputes in early July, written with the reticence of a man who does not wish to name names, who perhaps fears his words will be read by those he must continue to live among. Arguments arose over distribution of seal meat, over apportionment of blubber that provided both calories and lamp fuel, over precise measurement of remaining pemmican. Sailors, accustomed to rough equality of shipboard life, resented perceived favoritism toward scientists. Scientists, conscious of their education and contribution to expedition purpose, resented being treated as ordinary hands. The Inuit family, essential to hunting yet culturally apart, found themselves caught between worlds, their needs negotiated by others in a language they barely spoke.

Kuraluk said little. This was his way. He hunted when he could, shared what he brought back according to the customs of his people, and watched the qallunaat, the white men, tear at each other with patience that might have been contempt or might have been pity. His daughters, Helen and Mugpi, eleven and eight, grew thin and silent. His wife Kiruk, who had lost a child in the desperate winter march to the island, bent her energies toward keeping her family alive with skills her mother had taught her: finding eider duck eggs, gathering seaweed from rocks, rendering last goodness from bones others would discard.

—-

The scramble for eggs began in late June.

McKinlay recorded it without ornament, but the flatness of his prose conveys the humiliation of the descent. Men who had cached biscuits in faith of rescue now crawled on hands and knees along shingle beaches, eyes fixed on the ground, searching for scrapes and hollows where eider ducks had laid. The eggs were small, fragile, unpredictable in freshness. Some held embryos already formed, beginnings of birds that would never hatch. Others were rotten, contents transformed by time and bacteria into stinking fluid. Collectors developed techniques: floating eggs in water to test density, holding them to light, sniffing shells with desperate expertise of starvation.

Seaweed came next, gathered from tidal pools where it rotted in brief Arctic warmth. It was not food in any meaningful sense, not nourishment that could sustain hunting or camp maintenance. It was bulk, texture, something to fill the stomach and trigger satiety without providing calories survival demanded. Men ate it because they had nothing else, because seal hunts failed, because caribou did not come, because cached biscuits were finite and hunger was not.

McKinlay, writing in early July, noted he had lost weight he could not afford to lose. A slight man built for precise movements of scientific observation rather than heavy labor of Arctic survival, he found his clothes hanging loose, tendons standing out like cords in hands that held his pencil. He continued magnetic observations, recording compass variations with dedication that seems, in retrospect, almost unbearably poignant: a faith that data mattered, that expedition had purpose, that someone would come to read his notebooks and be grateful for their accuracy.

—-

Blame began circulating in mid-July, though its roots went deeper—to the Karluk itself, decisions that trapped her in ice, Stefansson’s departure that left them leaderless, the splitting of parties that sent good men to their deaths.

Anderson’s party, four men who marched north into the unknown, became first focus. Why had they gone? Who authorized division of already weakened force? Questions were asked in darkness of tents, in long hours of Arctic night that was no longer night, when sleep would not come because bodies were too hungry to rest. Answers varied by teller. Some said Anderson insisted, driven by military pride or scientific ambition. Others remembered Bartlett’s role in the decision—Bartlett now safely in Alaska, eating regular meals, sleeping in a bed, working machinery of rescue while they starved.

The Herald Island party—Dr. Alister Forbes Mackay, James Murray, and Stanley Morris—received different blame, tinged with superstition the Arctic breeds in those who wait. Sent to search for cache on an island offering nothing, a rocky outcrop in frozen sea, they had not returned. Their fate was unknown, probably unknowable, and this uncertainty made them both present and absent in survivors’ minds. They were invoked as examples of what happened when discipline failed, when men struck out on their own, when Arctic was treated as something other than enemy to be survived through collective submission.

But deepest blame, blame that could not be spoken directly because it touched fundamental structure of their predicament, attached to Stefansson. The expedition leader who walked away from trapped ship in September 1913, who took his hunting party and disappeared over ice, who left them to drift and sink and die while he pursued his own purposes—his name became a curse, shorthand for betrayal, way of understanding how they had come to this beach, this hunger, this slow dissolution of everything they had been.

McKinlay wrote of Stefansson rarely and carefully, but the absence in his diary is itself instructive. The expedition leader is not discussed as factor in their situation, not analyzed as cause of their suffering. Yet the structure of McKinlay’s narrative, his obsessive attention to daily facts of survival, implies a world in which leadership has failed and must be replaced by individual discipline, by scientific method, by refusal to surrender to despair. He does not say Stefansson abandoned them. He shows it, by recording what abandonment looks like when measured in ounces of pemmican, in hours of daylight, in number of eggs found on a given morning.

—-

The first death came in late July, though conditions that made it inevitable had been building since June.

Fred Maurer was twenty, a sailor from Ohio who signed on to the Karluk seeking adventure and found instead imprisonment more complete than any he could have imagined. He survived the sinking, the march to the island, the winter that followed. He did his share of hunting, hauling, endless labor of maintaining camp. But his body, like McKinlay’s, was not built for Arctic deprivation. Weight fell from him faster than from others. Strength failed in seal hunts. He took to his sleeping bag, and from his sleeping bag did not rise.

McKinlay’s entry for July 28 records the death with same precision he brought to magnetic readings. Time of death. Symptoms that preceded it: weakness, edema, swelling of limbs signaling final breakdown of protein-starved tissue. Disposition of body, buried in shallow soil above beach because ground was too frozen for proper grave. Reading of burial service by whoever remembered the words, spoken over canvas-wrapped form that weighed almost nothing, that had become, in final days, more burden than companion.

Maurer’s death changed terms of their waiting. Before, they were hungry men hoping for rescue. After, they were hungry men who had seen what hunger did, who understood that machinery Bartlett set in motion might not turn fast enough, that conversions of endurance into information into permission into money into ships might take longer than their bodies could give. The cached biscuits, gesture of faith from early June, were brought out and counted again, mathematics of survival recalculated with one fewer denominator.

—-

The apathy that followed Maurer’s death was, in its way, more dangerous than arguments that preceded it.

McKinlay described it in his diary as a kind of drifting, surrender of will expressed in small things: men who did not rise when hunting party was called, who let equipment fall into disrepair, who stared at endless daylight with eyes that seemed to see nothing. The discipline Bartlett imposed—routines of measurement, maintenance, preparation—dissolved into present-tense existence in which future had ceased to offer purchase. They ate what they found. They slept when they could. They waited.

This was drift morale in its terminal phase: not active despair of mutiny or suicide, but passive dissolution of social bonds that made collective survival possible. The Inuit family withdrew further into itself, Kuraluk hunting alone or with his wife, children kept close, customs of sharing gradually abandoned as qallunaat proved unable to reciprocate. Sailors clustered by watch, by mess, by informal hierarchies of shipboard life, conversations reduced to immediate, edible, rumors of rescue no one quite believed. Scientists, McKinlay among them, retreated into instruments, measurements, data that no longer connected to larger purpose but still provided structure of day’s work.

The island itself seemed to conspire in their diminishment. The Arctic summer, despite all its light, brought no warmth that could sustain life. Wind blew cold from ice-choked sea. Tundra, briefly green, offered nothing edible to human stomachs. Birds that nested on cliffs—auks, murres, guillemots—defended eggs with ferocity of species evolved without land predators, and men who climbed for them risked falls, injuries, expenditure of energy that could not be replaced. Foxes that had been companions in winter, scavenging camp’s refuse, grew thin and desperate, competing with humans for same scarce resources.

—-

By early August, physical signs of irreversible decline were visible on every member of the party.

McKinlay, recording his own condition with detachment that had become defense against despair, noted gums bleeding when he brushed teeth, skin bruising at slightest pressure, heart racing when he rose from sleeping bag. These were classic symptoms of scurvy, the vitamin deficiency that had killed more Arctic explorers than cold itself. Lemon juice that should have prevented it, standard naval ration, had been lost with Karluk or consumed in early months of drift. What remained of medical supplies was inadequate to scale of their need.

Others showed different symptoms, different paths toward same destination. Some developed edema that killed Maurer, limbs swelling with fluid while bodies consumed own muscle tissue. Others suffered neurological effects of starvation: confusion, irritability, hallucinations McKinlay recorded without comment, as if to name them would give them power. Collective psychological state that decayed through summer—helplessness of passive drifting—found physical correlate in bodies that could no longer respond to will, that had begun shutting down non-essential functions to preserve heart, brain, last flicker of consciousness.

Cached biscuits were gone by mid-August, consumed in desperate weeks after Maurer’s death when seal hunts failed completely and egg gathering yielded nothing but broken shells and memory of food. Gesture of faith from June had sustained them through July; its absence in August left them with nothing but what they could scavenge from landscape that had proven itself fundamentally hostile to their presence. They were eleven people—the number that would survive, though they could not know this—reduced to elemental struggle for existence that Bartlett and Kataktovik had faced on ice, but without movement, purpose, forward momentum that had carried those two men across Chukchi Sea.

McKinlay’s diary entries from this period grew shorter, handwriting less controlled. He recorded weather, state of ice, absence of ships on horizon. He noted deaths of birds, movements of foxes, slow erosion of beach by summer storms. What he did not record, what reticence of his prose suggests more powerfully than explicit statement, was knowledge that they had crossed threshold, that conditions for survival were no longer present, that machinery of rescue would have to operate with perfect efficiency to reach them before Arctic completed its work.

Last entries of August describe camp in which social order has collapsed into something more primitive than discipline of ship or expedition. Watches no longer kept. Instruments neglected. Diaries themselves, McKinlay’s included, become sporadic, entries missed for days, dates uncertain in continuous daylight. What survives in record is image of men who have become ghosts in their own lives, waiting for rescue that has ceased to feel real, sustained by habits they no longer understand and hope they can no longer feel.

Physical decline was now irreversible. Bodies had entered final phase of adaptation to starvation, consuming last reserves of fat and muscle, preserving only essential functions of heart and brain. Mind, in this condition, becomes erratic, capable of sudden lucidity or complete withdrawal, subject to chemical changes accompanying breakdown of body’s systems. McKinlay, trained to observe, continued observing himself, noting symptoms with precision of man who knows his record may be all that survives, that data of his dying may serve some purpose he cannot see.

On August 20, McKinlay wrote that he could no longer stand without dizziness. The entry was three sentences long. He did not write again for six days, and when he resumed, his hand had changed, letters larger and less regular, as if fine motor control required for usual script had become too expensive to maintain. Compass still sat in its case, theodolite in wooden box, but he no longer opened them. Measurements had ceased to matter. What mattered now was counting of days, watching of horizon, slow recognition that body he had relied upon for thirty years was failing him in ways that could not be reversed by will or discipline or scientific method he had trusted above all else.

Arctic summer, which should have brought relief, had delivered only more protracted form of death. Island that seemed refuge in desperate march of March and April had revealed itself as trap, place without resources to sustain human life beyond brief window of cached supplies. Caribou had not come. Seals had dispersed. Eggs and seaweed and fox meat had proved inadequate to needs of eleven people through months of waiting. Machinery of rescue, set in motion by Bartlett’s extraordinary journey, continued to turn in world beyond ice, but its products—ships, men, food, medicine—had not yet reached beach where survivors waited, where first death had already occurred and others would follow, where social bonds of expedition had dissolved into isolated struggle of individuals too weak to help each other and too far gone to ask.

McKinlay’s last entry of August, dated the 28th, noted that two sailors had taken to their sleeping bags and would not rise. He did not name them. He did not speculate on their chances. He wrote only that weather had turned colder, ice was still heavy in offing, no ship had been sighted. Flatness of prose, absence of anxiety and hope that animated earlier entries, suggests man who has completed work of mourning his own life and now waits only for formality of its end. Diary that recorded caching of biscuits in June, that gesture of faith in future rescue, now recorded failure of that faith in only terms available to scientist: observable facts of physical decay, measurable approach of death.