The Last Deaths and the Dividing Party

On July 25, 1914, the arithmetic had become simple and terrible. Seaman George Breddy died in his tent on the gravel beach of Wrangel Island; scurvy and starvation killed him, though by then the distinction between diseases of deficiency and diseases of despair had ceased to matter. His body was buried in a shallow scrape above the tide line, and before the earth was smoothed over, his possessions—a knife with a cracked handle, a wool cap, a tin cup—were distributed among the living. That same evening, two men moved their tent thirty yards up the slope, away from the smell and the flies. By late August, among those who would not rise from their sleeping bags were the two unnamed sailors McKinlay had recorded, their fate already settling into the island’s cold silence.

This was how the Karluk disaster counted itself out in its final summer: one death, ten survivors, and a camp that had begun to scatter across the island like debris from a wreck still settling.

—-

The eleven who had come ashore in March were now ten. The count had become a morning ritual, performed with the mechanical precision that men once reserved for checking weather or ice. William McKinlay noted it in his diary without commentary. First Officer Alexander Anderson marked it against the rations. The Inuit seamen had always known the number without speaking. Now Kuraluk and his family kept their own counsel in a separate tent cluster near the beach, close enough to trade seal meat for tobacco, far enough to avoid the quarrels that rose from the scientists’ tents like smoke.

Breddy’s death was no surprise. The signs had accumulated for weeks: swollen joints, loosened teeth, the characteristic rot of the gums that Arctic veterans called by its old names. What distinguished his final days was the solitude. Unlike the deaths of Bjarne Mamen and Burt Malloch in June, which had drawn the whole camp to improvised nursing and collective grief, Breddy expired in a tent shared with one other man who was too weak to offer more than water and presence. The expedition’s social fabric had thinned to transparency. Men died now as they had lived in the final weeks aboard the drifting Karluk: in parallel isolation, their suffering visible but somehow unshared.

McKinlay recorded the mechanics without sentiment. Breddy had been a stoker, transferred from the ship’s engine room to her boats, then to the ice, then to this beach. His skills—tending coal fires, maintaining pressure, feeding the voracious appetite of a steam engine—had no application on an island without fuel or machinery. The expedition’s organizational chart, already fractured by Stefansson’s departure and the ship’s loss, now bore no relation to the work of survival. Firemen and seamen, scientists and hunters, officers and enlisted: these categories had dissolved into a raw hierarchy of strength and weakness, of those who could still walk to the bird cliffs and those who could not rise from their sleeping bags.

Anderson attempted to impose structure. As senior surviving officer, he issued the morning assignments, distributed the pemmican, and maintained the fiction of a chain of command. But his authority rested on no visible foundation. Bartlett had carried the captain’s commission and the captain’s knowledge; his departure for Siberia in March had removed both, leaving Anderson to preside over a diminishing company without the means to enforce obedience or the resources to reward it. The men called him “Mr. Anderson” still, but the title had become a habit rather than a recognition of power.

The division of Breddy’s effects revealed the new economy. In a functioning naval expedition, a dead man’s possessions would be inventoried, sealed, and held for his estate or his family. On Wrangel Island, the knife went to the man who needed a knife, the cup to the man whose cup had been lost, the cap to whoever’s head it fit. This was not callousness. It was the logic of scarcity applied with the same ruthlessness that the ice had applied to the Karluk’s hull. Objects, like men, were valued for their immediate utility. The future had contracted to the span of days for which food could be found.

—-

John Brady died eleven days later, on August 5. The fireman had been Breddy’s shipmate in the stokehold, and his symptoms followed the same progression: the joint pain, the bleeding gums, the gradual failure of will that preceded the failure of body. But Brady’s death occurred in a camp already altered by Breddy’s. The men had learned the sequence. They recognized the terminal phase and adjusted their attention accordingly, diverting care toward the still-ambulatory, the still-productive. This was not a decision announced or debated. It emerged from dozens of small choices: who received the last of the lime juice, who was helped to the latrine, who was visited in the evening hours.

McKinlay, recording these deaths, found himself returning to a question that had no comfortable answer. The pemmican that sustained them had been prepared under contract for the Canadian Arctic Expedition. Stefansson, in his later writings, would attribute the expedition’s health crises to faulty pemmican, blaming “our pemmican makers” for failures that led to nephritis and accelerated decline. Whether this diagnosis was accurate or convenient, it pointed to a structural failure that preceded the ice. The food that was supposed to preserve life had become suspect. The men ate it because there was nothing else, but they ate it with the knowledge that it might be poison.

This suspicion poisoned something else: the remaining bonds of trust. If the pemmican was bad, who was responsible? If Stefansson had known, why had he left? If Bartlett had known, why had he allowed it to be distributed? These questions had no practical answers on Wrangel Island, but they circulated nonetheless, providing a vocabulary for grievance that required no resolution. The men’s bodies failed from scurvy, from nephritis, from the cumulative damage of cold and hunger. Their solidarity failed from the same causes, more slowly but no less certainly.

—-

The physical camp began to mirror this psychological dispersion. Where the survivors had initially clustered in a single encampment near their landing site, maintaining the naval discipline of shared space and shared labor, they now separated into distinct settlements. Anderson and his adherents—seamen mostly, men who recognized his nominal rank and preferred its certainties to the chaos of self-organization—occupied the central position, closest to the cached supplies and the signal flag that still flew in hope of rescue. McKinlay and the remaining scientists, anthropologist Henri Beuchat and the remnants of George Malloch’s equipment, established a separate tent some two hundred yards to the west, near a freshwater stream and a colony of nesting birds.

The Inuit family—Kuraluk, his wife Kiruk, and their daughter Helen—maintained their own station at the eastern edge of the beach, where the seal hunting was best and where their expertise gave them independence from the white men’s rations. This separation was not hostility, exactly. Kuraluk continued to trade seal meat for ammunition and tobacco. Kiruk occasionally treated the sick with remedies from her store of Arctic knowledge. But the family operated as a unit, answerable to no one, surviving by skills that the expedition members could neither share nor supervise.

Between these three poles, individual men drifted or settled according to temperament and capability. Seaman Charles Barker, who had been part of the original Herald Island party that lost its way in January, attached himself to Anderson’s group with the desperate loyalty of a man who had already seen what isolation could do. A younger seaman, more resilient, ranged between camps, hunting birds and gathering eggs with the energy of someone who had not yet accepted the logic of decline. Ernest Chafe, the ship’s stoker who had kept the Karluk’s fires burning until the ice crushed her, withdrew into silence and his journal, recording observations that would later form the basis of his published account.

The summer’s attrition produced a definitive splintering. Not a single dramatic rupture, but a gradual recognition that collective survival had failed and individual survival was the only remaining option. The expedition as an organized entity (Canadian Arctic Expedition, flagship Karluk, scientific mission of discovery) had ceased to exist. What remained was a collection of desperate individuals, governed by survival instinct alone, occupying the same island without sharing the same purpose.

—-

McKinlay’s retreat into his diary was itself a form of separation. The young Scottish scientist had come north to study magnetism, to take readings that would advance the understanding of Earth’s magnetic field in high latitudes. His instruments were now buried in the snow or abandoned in the ship’s wreckage. His work had become the recording of death: dates, symptoms, distributions of effects. He wrote with the precision that scientific training demanded, but the precision could not disguise the transformation of his subject. He was no longer observing natural phenomena. He was documenting the disintegration of a human community.

The diary entries for late July and early August show this tension. On August 7, two days after Brady’s death, McKinlay recorded Anderson’s proposal to move the camp to higher ground and his own opposition, noting that the bird cliffs and water were here, questioning the logic of abandoning what little they had. On August 9, he noted that a hunting party had brought twelve eggs, and calculated their insufficiency when divided among ten men. He recorded that the hunter had eaten three himself, walking back from the cliffs, and added that he did not blame him. On August 12, he wrote of dreaming of bread, waking to pemmican, and observed that the pemmican dreams were worse.

These entries do not describe a man losing his mind. They describe a man maintaining his observational discipline in circumstances that made observation itself a form of resistance. McKinlay continued to note the weather, the ice conditions visible from the beach, the behavior of the birds. He recorded Anderson’s proposals and his own objections. He tracked the declining health of the remaining men with the same method he had once applied to magnetic variation. Denial had nothing to do with it. This was the only strategy available to someone who had defined himself through systematic knowledge and who faced a situation that defied system.

—-

Anderson’s proposals for camp reorganization accelerated after Brady’s death. The first officer had concluded (correctly, as subsequent events would suggest) that their position on the exposed beach was untenable for another winter. The wind scoured the gravel without obstruction. The snowdrifts buried the tents in October and buried them deeper in November. The signal flag, maintained at enormous cost in calories and morale, was invisible to any vessel that might pass beyond the ice horizon. Anderson argued for a move to the island’s interior, to the valleys where driftwood accumulated and where a proper shelter might be constructed before the cold returned.

McKinlay resisted. The bird cliffs were their only reliable food source. The fresh water, though it required melting snow, was accessible. Any move inland would sacrifice these advantages for theoretical benefits: shelter that might not be completed, wood that might not be found, a position that would be even more invisible to rescue than their current one. The argument between them was not personal, or not primarily so. It was a clash of survival strategies developed from different experiences and different temperaments. Anderson had spent his career in ships, subject to naval discipline, accustomed to the captain’s absolute authority and the crew’s absolute obedience. McKinlay had worked in scientific stations, where authority was distributed and decisions emerged from consultation. Neither system functioned on Wrangel Island. Their conflict was the sound of two broken machines, still grinding.

Other men chose sides or declined to choose. Chafe recorded the dispute without committing to it, noting that Anderson wanted to move, McKinlay wanted to stay, and he himself wanted to hunt while he could still walk. This was the practical wisdom of the stokehold, where the immediate demand of the fires overrode any theoretical preference. The younger seaman hunted. Barker followed Anderson. The Inuit family watched, and continued their own preparations for winter, which did not depend on the white men’s decisions.

—-

The deaths of Breddy and Brady had removed two more roles from the expedition’s diminished table of organization. Seaman and fireman: these were functions that had once mattered aboard ship, that had been filled by men with specific skills and specific duties. Now the distinctions meant nothing. The remaining seamen did not sail. The remaining firemen did not tend fires. They were all hunters now, or gatherers, or invalids, or the attendants of invalids. The expedition’s original purpose (scientific discovery, geographic exploration, the extension of Canadian sovereignty into the Arctic archipelago) had been reduced to a single imperative: to be alive when rescue came.

Whether rescue would come was a question that divided the camp as fundamentally as any dispute over location. Anderson maintained the signal flag, organized the watch for smoke on the horizon, and spoke of Bartlett’s journey to Siberia as a promise rather than a possibility. McKinlay recorded these preparations without sharing their optimism. The captain had left in March. It was now August. The distance to the Siberian coast was 150 miles across moving ice, then an unknown journey to civilization, then the organization of a relief expedition, then the navigation of Arctic waters that might remain closed until the following summer. The arithmetic was not encouraging.

Yet hope, or its performance, remained a necessity. The men who had given up hope died faster. This was not metaphor. McKinlay observed it directly: the slackening of effort, the refusal of food, the turn toward the tent wall that preceded the final decline. Breddy and Brady had not surrendered in this way; their bodies had failed while their wills remained engaged. But others had shown the pattern. To maintain hope was therefore a medical intervention, a prophylaxis against the disease of despair. Anderson’s signal flag, McKinlay’s diary, Chafe’s journal, the very act of arguing about camp location: these were technologies of survival, no less essential than the birding guns or the seal hooks.

—-

The final division of the summer came not from any single decision but from the accumulation of small separations. By mid-August, the survivors occupied three distinct camps, communicating by occasional visits rather than shared labor. Anderson’s group maintained the fiction of central authority, flying the flag, keeping the ration accounts, assigning the hunting parties that still went out. McKinlay’s group, which included Beuchat and sometimes Chafe, pursued a more independent strategy, focused on the bird cliffs and the immediate procurement of food. The Inuit family remained apart, connected to both groups by trade but committed to their own survival.

The survivors had divided into separate, distrustful camps on Wrangel Island. The expedition that had sailed from Victoria in June 1913, twenty-five men under the leadership of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, had become ten men in three factions on a gravel beach, waiting for rescue that might not come. The ice that had crushed the Karluk had also crushed the social structures that the ship had carried. What remained was the bare human material: bodies, needs, the elementary bonds of family and the elementary antagonisms of scarcity.

McKinlay, writing on August 15, recorded the situation with characteristic precision. Ten of them now. Anderson talked of building a house. He talked of gathering eggs. The eggs were certain. The house was not.

This was the voice of a man who had learned to trust only what he could see and handle. The authority that had once flowed from Stefansson’s plans, from Bartlett’s commands, from the expedition’s official purpose, had evaporated like the summer snow. What replaced it was not chaos but a different order: the order of immediate necessity, negotiated daily among men who no longer shared a common definition of their situation. The flag still flew from Anderson’s camp, visible to no one but themselves. The bird cliffs still yielded eggs to those who could make the walk. The pemmican, however suspect, still kept the weakest from immediate death. And the three camps, separated by yards that had become miles in their significance, prepared for the winter that would come whether rescue arrived or not.