The Ship and the Plan…he pressure of drifting pack ice. He tapped again. The echo remained flat. In 1914, members of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, organized by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, would be marooned on Wrangel Island for nine months after their ship, Karluk, was crushed in the ice pack. This outcome lay invisible to t…
The Leader and the Captain…han paint and pitch to survive the Chukchi pack. For her role in the Canadian Arctic Expedition, she had been acquired by expedition leader Vilhjalmur Stefansson in 1913 for the bargain price of $10, 000, and sold at cost to the Canadian government when it assumed overall responsibility for the exped…
Into the Gripping Ice…in their immediate assessment, fundamental threat to expedition purposes. The Canadian Arctic Expedition had been organized and directed by Vilhjalmur Stefansson to explore the regions west of Parry Archipelago for the Government of Canada. Three ships were employed: the Karluk, the Mary Sachs, and t…
The Ship and the Plan…umed that an aging whaler could penetrate the Arctic pack and serve as floating laboratory. These assumptions would soon be tested. Captain Robert Bartlett arrived at the dry dock in early July. A Newfoundlander bred to ice navigation, he had commanded Peary’s Roosevelt through the grip of nort…
The Leader and the Captain…3, the whaler Karluk lay in dry dock at Esquimalt, her hull scraped and her seams caulked for a voyage she was never built to make. Captain Robert Bartlett walked her deck with a caulker’s eye, noting where the planks had softened, where the fastenings had worked loose from twenty years of seal…
Stefansson Walks Away…eamen, rather than additional scientists or officers, hinted at mobility and self-sufficiency that a brief foray would not require. Captain Robert Bartlett received the news on the bridge, where he had been plotting the ship’s drift. He was forty years old, a Newfoundlander who had learned ice…
The Ship and the Plan…ile expedition with access to game and open water. They assumed that the ship would not become a stationary hospital trapped far from help. William McKinlay, a young scientist assigned to magnetic observation, watched the loading with mounting concern. He walked the deck and noted how the vessel…
The Leader and the Captain…ry certainty. Stefansson overruled him. The scientific parties would carry what they needed for their work. The ship’s company would adapt. William McKinlay, a young Scottish scientist assigned to the magnetic observations, watched these exchanges with growing unease. He had joined for the scien…
Into the Gripping Ice…called Jerry and Jimmy, whose knowledge of ice behavior and game movement would prove more valuable than any Admiralty chart. That same day William McKinlay, the young Scottish magnetician standing his first Arctic watch, entered an observation in his record. The Karluk was handling well. She wa…
Bartlett and Kataktovik Strike Out Alone…r approach, that the men he had left behind must survive through another two months of hunger and uncertainty. He arranged for the schooner King and Wing, a small vessel that had operated in the region, to stand ready when the ice permitted. He wrote to the families of the dead, to the expedi…
The Walk Across the Chukchi Sea…the survivors through months of hunger, disease, and psychological collapse. Three of them would die before the American fishing schooners King and Wing finally reached the island in September 1914, carrying the news that members of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, organized by Vilhjalmur Ste…
The Ship and the Plan…again. The echo remained flat. In 1914, members of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, organized by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, would be marooned on Wrangel Island for nine months after their ship, Karluk, was crushed in the ice pack. This outcome lay invisible to the officials examining her seams in t…
The Leader and the Captain…been. They had food for weeks, equipment for travel, a captain who knew where they must go and how little chance they had of getting there. Wrangel Island lay two hundred miles to the west, theoretically reachable before their supplies failed. A smaller island lay closer but offered no shelter…
Stefansson Walks Away…nger relevant to the ship’s immediate situation. They were in the Beaufort Sea’s central pack, drifting west toward the Chukchi Sea, toward Wrangel Island, toward the Siberian coast—toward any of the possible endpoints that Arctic currents might provide, none of them reachable by human effort…
Camp on the Ice…recorded scientific observations and personal impressions, now he listed stores and noted the behavior of the ice. The floe that supported Shipwreck Camp was perhaps a mile across, a temporary island in a sea of shifting plates. At night, the men heard it moving: pressure ridges building wher…
The Decision to MarchThe watch continued. The ice drifted toward whatever destination currents and winds had chosen. At Shipwreck Camp, twenty-five survivors had settled into a rhythm suspended between living and waiting. They rose from snow houses, checked meat caches agai…
The First Party Vanishes…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 c…
The Leader and the Captain…hernmost point of Alaska and into the Chukchi Sea. The ice was heavier here, older, more compressed by the currents that circulated through Bering Strait. Bartlett watched the pressure ridges build around them, forty feet of shattered ice that could mount a ship’s hull and crush it like an eg…
Into the Gripping Ice…d to the Canadian government for the ten thousand dollars Stefansson had negotiated. The whaler turned expedition vessel passed through the Bering Strait and turned east along the Alaskan coast, bound for Herschel Island where the Mary Sachs and Alaska would assemble. For three weeks she held…
The Uncharted Territory…arluk was entering a region of institutional absence. The United States Coast Guard, newly established, maintained no presence north of the Bering Strait. The Canadian government, for all its Arctic ambitions, had no infrastructure in the western Arctic capable of reaching a ship in distress.…
The Ship and the Plan…grounds, perhaps, but untested against the pressure of drifting pack ice. He tapped again. The echo remained flat. In 1914, members of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, organized by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, would be marooned on Wrangel Island for nine months after their ship, Karluk, was crushed in the ice p…
The Leader and the Captain…what would kill her. The Karluk, he told the workmen, would need more than paint and pitch to survive the Chukchi pack. For her role in the Canadian Arctic Expedition, she had been acquired by expedition leader Vilhjalmur Stefansson in 1913 for the bargain price of $10, 000, and sold at cost to the Canadi…
Into the Gripping Ice…n ship reached open water. The delay was frustrating but not, in their immediate assessment, fundamental threat to expedition purposes. The Canadian Arctic Expedition had been organized and directed by Vilhjalmur Stefansson to explore the regions west of Parry Archipelago for the Government of Canada. Thr…
The Ship and the Plan…Victoria stepped back and wiped his forehead with a gray handkerchief, leaving a streak of coal dust across his temple. Before him lay the Karluk, a brigantine recently painted government white but still smelling faintly of whale oil and blubber smoke from her working years in the Okh…
The Leader and the CaptainIn June 1913, the whaler Karluk lay in dry dock at Esquimalt, her hull scraped and her seams caulked for a voyage she was never built to make. Captain Robert Bartlett walk…
Into the Gripping Ice…ead, embedded in a voyage already deviating from its promises before the ice made deviation permanent. On the morning of July 13, 1913, the Karluk cleared Nome with twenty-five men aboard, her holds packed with scientific instruments, her deck crowded with dogs and sledges, her ownersh…
The Ice Closes Its Jaws…wait for conditions that would allow them to travel. An advance party of four would later lose their way on the march and be found dead on Herald Island years later. Another party of four would detach themselves and never be seen again. Of the seventeen who would eventually reach Wrangel Isl…
The Ship Gives Up the Ghost…resented a calculation: weight versus survival, the known need against the unknown journey. They had drifted past Point Barrow’s longitude. Herald Island lay somewhere to the west, Wrangel Island farther still. No rescue could reach them. The ice was their only road, and it was closing behind…
The Decision to March…ed. Mamen reported to Bartlett that he had left the group a few miles short of land that was evidently not Wrangel Island, and was probably Herald Island, 38 miles from their intended destination. Mamen’s report was factual, exhausted, precise. He had left Anderson’s party on February 1, with…
The Leader and the Captain…ent the ship’s stores and provide material for the scientific collections. He would take five men, including two Inuit hunters, Kuraluk and Kataktovik, who had joined at Nome. They would be gone days, perhaps weeks, depending on what they found. Bartlett objected. The ice was drifting west…
Stefansson Walks Away…er and two seamen loaded a small sledge with sleeping bags, a tent, cooking gear, and ten days’ rations. The two Inuit hunters, Keraluk and Kataktovik, watched without comment. They had been engaged at Point Hope for their knowledge of ice conditions and animal movements, their skill with…
A Ship Without Its Expedition…915. The possibility that they might drift two years without reaching open water was one he did not share with the crew. The Inuit hunters, Kataktovik and another man named Kuraluk, observed this management with the patience of people who had never assumed that any season would end in surv…
The Ship and the Plan…lating how long the wood could flex before splintering. He understood that they were now passengers on a drift that could carry them toward Siberia or into the basin of the Arctic Ocean. Stefansson studied the ice to the north, searching for an opening that would allow him to continue h…
The Leader and the Captain…rty feet of shattered ice that could mount a ship’s hull and crush it like an eggshell. He had seen the Jeannette’s remains on the coast of Siberia, knew what happened to vessels caught in this particular drift. The Jeannette had been better found than the Karluk, better equipped, bette…
The Uncharted Territory…en by winds that circled clockwise across the Arctic Ocean, carrying the pack in a vast rotation that could carry a frozen ship west toward Siberia, north toward the pole, east toward the Canadian archipelago, or hold it for years in the gyre’s center. The theory of this circulation exi…