George F. Tilton and Inupiat helpers at camp during his long trek south. Tilton is the big man in the centre.
Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington
Chapter 9
Gasping for breath, struggling on hands and knees to get clear before another few tonnes of icy water crashed down on me, I crawled up the slope. Behind me I heard the next wave hit. Disoriented, I stood up, after a fashion.
Four staggering paces, with some urgent assistance from my willing hands digging into the beach like claws, took me to the apex of land. My left hand and wrist shot signals of pain up my arm to my brain. I wondered if I had broken something, but a cursory inspection revealed no obvious damage. The pain wasn’t intense enough to be important. I was alive and back on shore. That was all that mattered right then.
Audacity lay inverted, bow aimed at me, propeller and skeg dug in to hold her steady. The sea crashed down on her, pressing her into the loose pebbles. There was nothing I could do. I had no strength left to drag a heavy boat up a wild beach. My own survival was paramount. From where I stood, the raging sea was on one side, Marryat Lagoon on the other. Beneath me lay a narrow strip of barren land, perhaps 50 metres wide and 5 metres high. Behind me the Kukpuk River wrestled with the Chukchi Sea. Somewhere ahead, at least 20 to 25 kilometres west, lay Point Hope.
My body, which had probably been shivering for some time, though I hadn’t noticed it, now began to vibrate. I collected a few small pieces of driftwood, snapping them into tinier pieces.
“Build a fire,” a voice whispered. “You must get warm.”
My waterproof matches, encased in a small tin secreted in a zipped-up pocket, supposedly immune to damp, refused to offer so much as a spark. I tried half a dozen, feeling like Jack London’s doomed character in his classic tale “To Light a Fire.” Abandoning the project as hopeless, I emulated the dog in London’s story and set off to trot to civilization.
The clouds were lowering, desperately trying to become a fog. Hanging malignantly from the heavens, almost close enough to touch, but moving too fast to catch, they scudded inland, tumbling over each other in their haste to meet their own destiny. The rain fell faster still, cutting at my exposed face, stinging my red-rimmed eyes. I jogged in an ungainly fashion: legs stiff, arms swinging wildly, trying to get warm, aware that it might yet be too late.
If I was to die, I intended to die with as much dignity as I could muster, doing something constructive if possible. Curling up in a fetal position, hugging myself in the HELP stance to conserve warmth and energy, seemed futile. I was alone. There was no sign of the man I thought I had seen so long before. Rescue, therefore, appeared an unlikely prospect. Sucking in a deep cold breath, I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. My unsteady line of tracks led from a shipwreck to me as I made my way toward the distant settlement.
George F. Tilton and Inupiat helpers at camp during his long trek south. Tilton is the big man in the centre.
Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington
This was the route followed by whaler George Fred Tilton and two Siberians in November 1897 as they headed south to spread the word about the trapped ships. It was the route followed by Lieutenant Jarvis and Dr. Call a few weeks later as they went in the opposite direction, toward Cape Dyer. They all forced their way through blizzards. I fought a wet and windy summer storm.
Running in waterlogged boots is not easy. I stopped long enough to struggle out of one, empty it and get it back on without falling over. The second toppled me immediately. I sat and poured the water out, most of it going over my naked foot. The sock, I assumed, was tucked up in the toe, sulking at the treatment it was getting. I stuffed the boot on again and continued my run.
Perhaps ten minutes went by. Jogging was hard going. I still wore my life jacket and flotation suit, my armour against the cold, but in my weakened condition the gear was heavy. Screwing my eyes to slits, partly to keep the rain out and partly to increase my less-than-perfect vision, I focused on a constantly moving point three paces ahead.
“You can do this.” My mind urged my legs and body onwards. “You can do it. You’re a survivor. Left leg, right leg. That’s it. Keep it up. Left leg, right leg.”
My breathing was harsh. It sounded as if it came from someone else—someone much older, much more exhausted, than I cared to be. The causes and effects of hypothermia ran through my mind. There was something I remembered about wind effect. Something about adding wind chill to the equation when jogging or running in cold temperatures. Clad as I was, with layers of warm clothing, I assumed that wind chill would only affect my exposed face and hands. My wet clothes were a problem, though. They were unlikely to dry as I ran. It was far more likely that I would start sweating. Sweat, combined with my tortured breathing, would lower my body temperature. It was a no-win situation. If I had to jog all the way to Point Hope, hypothermia could conceivably kill me. If I curled up in a ball on the beach, exposed to the elements, the end result would be the same.
I kept running. Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot.
A low growl, in front and to my left, stopped me in my tracks, quieted the inner voice calling out the rhythm. I chanced a look. Where the spit of land waded into the lagoon, a dark indistinct shape growled softly, menacingly, through the rain.
“Oh no, not now,” I groaned, my heart thumping with accelerated fear. “Not a bear.”
Acutely conscious of the fact that my shotgun was on the sea bed out there in the Arctic Ocean, I was defenceless against a bear. I dropped to the ground immediately, playing dead. Curling in a ball, placing my hands over the back of my head, as I was taught long ago on the mountain trails of British Columbia, I hoped the ploy would be effective. It’s poor protection at best, but better than nothing.
“Mister,” a voice called. “Mister, come here.”
I heard it but didn’t quite believe it at first. I listened carefully. The same voice reached me with the same words. I raised my head and tried to focus. A talking bear I could reason with, especially one that spoke in my native tongue. I dragged my body to an upright position and trotted down the beach to the shape, which metamorphosed into an open aluminium boat and two Inupiat men. Unceremoniously I fell headfirst over the gunwales and crawled forward under the limited space of a miniature deck.
“Get me somewhere warm, fast. I’m dying,” I ordered.
“Where were you going?” one man asked. The boat was still nosed up onto the shore, the motor still growling.
“Just go. Now!” I shouted.
The motor roared in answer as we backed into the lagoon. A sharp turn and I felt the bow lift beneath me, the hull reaching for its maximum speed. Finally out of the wind, I closed my eyes, curled into a ball, wrapped my arms round my chest. My mind tried to stay awake in case it was needed, though I was confident—at last—that I would live.
The boat began twisting and turning at high speed. My rescuers shouted something unintelligible to me. I heard answering shouts, more growling. I understood. A flotilla of boats was looking for me. I draped one arm over the side, the yellow fabric a beacon to show I was safe. At the village a crowd was gathered by the water’s edge as the boat ground its bow onto the shore.
“Have you got him?” a big voice called in English.
“Yeah, we got that guy. He’s okay too,” came the answer from one of my saviours.
I stood up and lifted one leg over the gunwale to step ashore as purposefully as possible. Dignity was suddenly all-important. The intention was admirable, but my coordination was gone. I tripped and fell flat on my face in the mud. Strong arms picked me up and lowered me into the back of a pickup truck. Some men climbed in with me and braced my body between them. We bounced over uneven roads to a locked building. No one had a key. We bounced over more ruts to another building: the fire station, as I later discovered. It was open. The same arms lifted me inside.
Someone stripped me, peeling the wet clothes layer by layer. A thick heavy fire-blanket was draped around my shoulders, wrapped around my naked body. Unknown people picked me up and laid me on a high bed. Confused about my location, I thought it might be an operating table. I tried to get off. Gentle hands and soothing voices calmed me, told me I would be fine.
People spoon-fed me hot water and hot soup, replenishing the heat for my insides. For a long time I lay there, feeling the warmth slowly working its way into my bones. The waves and the storm were far away. I was out of their reach at last.
Soft warm hands held my cold blue bare feet in a tender embrace. It felt so wonderful. I fell in love with those hands.
“Irma. My name’s Irma,” the owner of the hands said. Irma held my feet to her chest with her hands. My feet liked her chest as well.
“They’re turning pink,” she told the assembly after a while, surprised and pleased at the same time. I guessed she was talking about my feet.
“Man, you are one tough son of a bitch,” a male Inupiat voice announced, filled with undisguised awe.
“Who’s that?” I asked. “I can’t see without my glasses.”
“That’s Eric.” The voice was Southern, gentle, vaguely familiar. “He’s the one who saw you out in the storm.”
I pulled my right hand from its cocoon, held it out. Shyly Eric stepped forward until he was by my side. He was a young man, maybe in his mid-20s. Our hands met, holding each other palm to palm, feeling each other’s life.
“Thank you,” I smiled at him, blinking tears away. They wouldn’t go. They trickled in sparkling streams down the sides of my face.
“You’re welcome,” Eric replied formally, still holding my hand. “I’m happy I saw you. You were doing pretty good out there for a while. I was out looking for walrus. They drown sometimes in a storm and get washed ashore. You get good ivory for carving that way.”
If walruses—thick-skinned walruses, weighing 10 times more than I, superbly insulated against the cold, and excellent swimmers—if they could drown in an Arctic storm, how come I was alive? I wondered.
Eric told me he had watched me going up and down the waves. Not sure who I was or where I was going, he kept me in his sights.
“A bad day to be out there,” he said.
He told me I disappeared from view for a while. Then he saw the boat point upwards on a big wave and turn over. He stood up on the saddle of his ATV to see more clearly. Said he saw me wave my arms. Knowing I was alive, but unable to help by himself, he went back to Point Hope for reinforcements.
“You must have fantastic eyesight,” I told him.
“Yeah, I see pretty good. Long distances too. My eyes are okay.”
They must have been good. Even with his binoculars, I wouldn’t have been able to see half as far.
“I wish I could see all of you. My eyes are not good. Where are the guys who brought me in? I didn’t even thank them yet.”
“They’re here and everyone is smiling. We’re all happy to see you alive.” It was the gentle Southern voice again. I looked up. A giant stood at my head.
“I’m Jim Woods,” he reintroduced himself, “the public safety officer. We’ve met before.”
Jim took me home, still wrapped in the fire-blanket. His wife, Mitzi, made me mug after mug of steaming hot chocolate while I told my story. Exhaustion set in. My eyes drooped. Mitzi led me along a corridor and ordered me to bed in a spare room.
In the middle of the night I awoke from a nightmare. I was trapped under Audacity’s upturned hull, fighting to get free. Wrestling with my lifeline, the boat and my clothing, I struggled to find the surface. My sweating head found air and darkness as I managed to disentangle myself from the sheets and blankets. Too disturbed to sleep again, I lay awake the rest of the night, savouring my freedom. My life. While they thought I slept, Jim and Mitzi dried my clothes.
Jim drove me back out to Audacity next morning on his Honda ATV. The sea was down—not calm, just down. Breaking waves, which had been so much taller than I the previous day, now reached no higher than the middle of my chest. Audacity was where I had left her. The fuel tanks were on the beach not far away. On the shore I found a couple of small plastic film canisters containing exposed film. Nothing else was visible. Between us we rolled the boat over. She looked empty and forlorn. All the plastic bottles of engine oil were gone. My waterproof kit bag of food supplies, gone. My camera equipment and exposed film, gone. Sleeping bag, tent, cooking stove, shotgun and shells, all gone.
I reached under the inflated foredeck, half expecting my hand to flap uselessly in a void. It didn’t. I smiled with satisfaction as I looked up at Jim.
“It’s not all bad news. There’s some stuff in here,” I told him.
I had cheated the Arctic Ocean in more ways than one. I was alive, and tucked up forward where it couldn’t possibly move was my other kit bag. My expedition clothing and some emergency gear had survived.
We pulled the plugs, deflating Audacity’s six air chambers. While she slowly settled like a nondescript wrinkled baby beluga whale, we unbolted the motor. Someone had been there before us. The carburetor was missing, but it was no casualty of the storm. Only human hands, equipped with efficient tools, could have taken it. For some reason the insignificant act really bothered me, perhaps because I had already been robbed once at Point Hope.
I removed the wooden floorboards and transom, and we loaded everything on the back of Jim’s Honda and took it back to Point Hope. Later, in response to a suggestion from Jim, I willingly donated the fuel tanks to those who had rescued me. The missing carburettor annoyed me, though. I felt betrayed, violated, as if someone had kicked me when I was down.
That day I phoned Penny and my brother Geoff to tell them the expedition was over. At first Penny failed to understand. Having spent so much time urging me on, boosting my nerve, she couldn’t believe the expedition was to be terminated at Point Hope.
“You get back in that boat and keep going,” she ordered.
Patiently I explained that going on was virtually impossible. I needed a new motor, additional food supplies, complete camping equipment. Most of all, I needed money. Without additional funds, which neither of us had, I couldn’t afford to purchase replacement goods. As I talked, Penny relented, accepting that I could go no farther. Geoff was just happy that I had lived through my ordeal.
The weather, which had been dreadful from day one, showed no signs of improving. The short Arctic summer was drawing to a close. There was no time left to reorganize and continue that season.
Jim and I went out to the mouth of the Kukpuk River one more time. Rather than drive overland, we took Jim’s boat, similar to the one that had carried me to warmth. Racing through Marryat Lagoon I was able to see how far I would have had to run. Too far to be sure of reaching the settlement in my weakened state.
It finally dawned on me, looking at the dirty brown river, that Kukpuk was the same as kukpak—the Inupiat word for coffee. To my surprise, the Kukpuk was flowing fast, much faster than I had expected. I began to understand why it had taken me so long to reach shore. The river’s strong current had been pushing me out while I struggled against it.
We went ashore from the lagoon and walked to the river’s mouth. Waves pounded on the beach. Where they collided with the river’s outflow, a standing wave had built up.
“If it’s like that now, imagine what it must have looked like during the storm,” I said.
Jim studied it for a while and then decided to see how his boat would fare in the rough water. Could he get out of the river? While I watched from the river bank, Jim made a valiant attempt. The shallow Kukpuk was too wild, the incoming surf too strong. The current spun him round, driving him onto a barely concealed sandbar. Twice more he tried. The Arctic Ocean repelled him each time. Defeated, he fought his way back against the current, colliding with another sandbar hidden in the muddy brown waters.
Watching him, thinking of how I had planned to drive Audacity at speed off the waves into the river, I realized I would have suffered certain injury, perhaps fatal. My capsize, traumatic though it was, may have been a better option. Either way, the expedition had reached a resounding conclusion. I was far short of my goals, still south of the ice pack. However, I had weathered and survived an enormous Arctic storm. For the moment I was happy to have my feet firmly on the ground.
Thelma, from the restaurant, donated a weather-worn wooden crate to ship Audacity home. It was big enough to take the flattened and rolled skin, the floorboards, transom, dashboard, the severely damaged outboard motor and little else. Jim found a hammer and nails to close the lid while I borrowed a thick black marker to write a destination address. Instead of proudly continuing north under her own power, Audacity went home in defeat via Kotzebue, Anchorage and Seattle, by air and by road.
I flew out with her in a Cessna. Jim took me, and Audacity, out to the airstrip. We manhandled the crate aboard and stowed my remaining bag with it. A few more small pieces of cargo were added. There were no other passengers. Two men stood by the plane talking. One of them told me he had seen me pass as I rounded the point the night of the storm.
“You were lucky,” he said. “Sometimes those waves get up to 60 feet high.”
“Perhaps,” I answered, knowing that another boat-length or two in height would have made little difference to the end result.
I got in the plane and took my seat beside the pilot. Off to one side, beyond the wing tip, Jim sat astride his ATV. His farewell was a huge smile and an enthusiastic thumbs-up. My smile in return was, I suspect, weak in comparison. The pilot increased power and swung his plane in a tight circle, the prop wash blowing sand and dust over Jim.
“You ready?” he asked through my headphones.
I nodded, grunted, thinking I was far from ready but had no alternative. The plane raced down the strip, lifted effortlessly, banked out to sea and left Point Hope behind, taking me away from my dream. We climbed rapidly under a cloudless sky. Below us the Kukpuk River taunted the Chukchi Sea. North, where the horizon greeted the heavens, I could see a gleam of white. The polar ice pack—so near and yet so far—blinked at me.
“I saw you once, about a week or so ago,” the pilot told me. “You’re easy to see from the air.”
I nodded, not feeling talkative, thinking only that my dream was over. Wondering if I could put it all together again for another attempt the next summer.
“Too bad you weren’t down there today,” the voice broke in again. “Looks like a perfect time to be on the sea.”
Members of the Overland Relief Expedition arrive within sight of the trapped whalers in the spring of 1898.
Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington
The USRCS Bear in the ice with the whaler Jeannette in the distance.
Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington
In the early summer of 1898, as the ice began to break up, the whaler Rosario was wrecked.
Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington
He was right. That day, the first clear day for so long, would have been a perfect day for Audacity and for me. We could have raced the next storm halfway to Barrow. Typically, it wasn’t to last. Alaska’s weather simply played with me, teasing me with what might have been. By the time we reached Kotzebue, clouds were gathering to the north and west. The following day the next storm lashed the coast from Barrow to Nome.
Kotzebue’s waterfront looked just the way it had during my previous visit. Wind and rain assaulted the town. The Chukchi Sea drove in through Kotzebue Sound and ripped into the coast. There was no reason to linger. Once my crate had been handed over to a cargo company, I made arrangements for my own flights.
The storm continued for a few more days. By then I had gone on to Anchorage. A day later I was home in Vancouver, with Penny.
My quest to navigate the Northwest Passage alone had failed. There was no changing that fact. Although I was bitterly disappointed, I looked at the adventure from other, more personal, philosophical angles. The frustration of finding clean fuel, the battles with constant storms, and the final struggle to survive had taught me much about my own strengths and weaknesses.
On one side of the coin, I had shown that I was capable and confident in emergencies. I could work efficiently and effectively under stress. I could analyze a difficult situation and use it to my advantage. My high level of fitness and physical strength complemented my mental abilities.
On the flip side, a long-standing tendency to allow my nerves to take charge had precipitated me into impatience. My inclination to be impetuous had almost got me killed. I have never been good at standing around waiting for something to happen. I almost always have to go out and do something constructive. In the Alaskan Arctic I learned a valuable lesson: Be patient—nature has its own timetable.
I was proud of my achievements. Operating with extremely limited funding, I had taken a small boat through the notorious Bering Strait; crossed, re-crossed and crossed again the Arctic Circle at sea; voyaged 1,300 kilometres off difficult coastlines; weathered unrelenting storms. Finally, I had won a hard-fought battle with the Arctic Ocean. I returned home in defeat, yet I was possibly more content and infinitely more alive than I had been for a long time.
Although it is great for the ego, pride doesn’t pay the bills. I worked through the fall, winter and spring to pay off my expedition debts. I lectured at conventions and conferences in various parts of Canada. Wherever work took me, I found ways to get on local radio or television, doing anything to give a little more promotion to those who had supported me.
Much as I wanted to go back, I knew I would not return to Alaska unless I could generate more corporate interest. Unfortunately, no one showed any great interest in offering further help. The next summer, ice stayed close in all season, restricting most vessels. If I had made another attempt, starting from Point Hope, my chances of continuing beyond Point Barrow would have been slim. The dream was over.
Today, many years after my Alaskan coastal voyage, the words to a traditional sea shanty hang on the wall above my desk. Said to have been written by an American sailor serving with the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service in Arctic waters sometime between 1880 and 1890, the song is a constant reminder of my adventure.
Full many a sailor points with pride
To cruises o’er the ocean wide;
But they cannot compare with me,
For I have sailed the Being Sea.
While though you’ve weathered fiercest gale
And every ocean you have sailed;
You cannot a salty sailor be
Until you’ve sailed the Bering Sea.
———