Goodbye, Stefansson.1 We did not then know that those of us who were left on your luckless ship were not to see you again.
—FRED MAURER, FIREMAN
Stefansson was growing more and more restless. Here and there, a lead would open in the ice around them, but the Karluk was held fast by the mile-and-a-half-wide floe that now entrapped her; the crew was helpless, unable to do anything but watch the open water and sit there. The ice was thickening, deepening, the whiteness stretching far across and extending far beneath the ocean’s encrusted surface.
Stefansson hated being held prisoner by the ice. He could never sit still and he seldom slept. He worried that someone would beat him to his mysterious, undiscovered continent.
Meanwhile, Bartlett began rationing their coal oil and kerosene, which were already running low, because their full supply was stowed aboard the Mary Sachs. He called “lights out” now at midnight, to conserve fuel. The days were growing shorter and darker, and the lamp in the saloon was lit for the first time, signifying the advent of winter.
The captain also began to tighten the rationing of food, and the Eskimos went hunting for seal nearly every day, using the rifles Stefansson had issued them. Officers, scientists, and crewmen sometimes joined them, but Kuraluk was by far the best hunter and secured most of the seals himself. Seal hunting was by no means an exciting sport, and the Eskimos were the only ones who seemed to have the patience it required.
Kuraluk would settle behind a hummock of ice or take his kayak out into the open water and wait. He would sit, still as a statue, for eight hours at a time until a seal appeared out of a nearby watering hole. If the seal saw him, it was over. He had to be ready to shoot at any moment, even though his fingers were stiff and sore from the cold and lack of movement. But the seals were slippery creatures and surprisingly quick, and if he wasn’t fast enough they would disappear before he could take another shot.
Sometimes hours passed without sighting anything, and sometimes the creatures were too far away to shoot. Seals were exceptionally curious, so whenever Kuraluk or the other Eskimos spied one in the distance, beyond range, they would let out a low whistle and watch as the inquisitive animal disappeared into the water and resurfaced just a few yards from them. Then came the shot, and if they were lucky, the seal was easy to retrieve. More often than not, the wounded animal slipped through their hands and the patient hunters came home empty-handed. At other times, Kuraluk and the others felt lucky enough to capture even one or two after a long day’s work.
McKinlay, try as he might, could not seem to land even one seal. He was clumsy when it came to sports or hunting, and became the butt of jokes when he sat for twenty minutes on the ice one day and missed a seal that leapt up in front of him, simply because he was wiping his nose with his handkerchief. “Down went my2 ‘hankie,’ up went my rifle, but with a dive the seal was gone.. . .”
Soon Templeman was replacing the salt meat they were accustomed to with seal meat at every meal. McKinlay, like most of the others, had never tasted seal, and Templeman, never having cooked it before, wasn’t quite sure how to prepare it. It had a strong smell and a strong taste; but the liver and seal kidney pie were delicacies, and Templeman began serving the dishes once a week.
TO PASS THE TIME, the men of the Karluk hunted, read, skated, slept, posed for Wilkins’s camera, and watched the ice. They gave an orchestral concert one night, with Sandy on violin, Wilkins and McConnell on the harmonica, Hadley on mandolin, and Second Engineer Williamson playing the comb. Under Mamen’s tutelage, they practiced their skiing and had a good laugh at Dr. Mackay, who insisted on wearing short pants, which became filled with snow every time he fell off his skis. Beuchat and Jenness studied the Eskimo language with Stefansson while Jimmy and Jerry shared traditional Eskimo folktales with everyone. Mackay, Chafe, Sandy, Munro, and Jenness engaged in a target-shooting competition with a pound of tobacco as the prize. But many of the staff members stayed in bed until dinnertime.
Despite their efforts to stay busy, it was a dreary, aimless existence. Templeman received a black eye from sailor John Brady; fireman Breddy received a scalding on the back of his head in an engine room accident; and Kataktovik suffered from a painful bout of venereal disease. Mamen, meanwhile, cursed his fellow scientists, thinking them the laziest men he had ever met. His knee was much better now and he was using every opportunity to exercise, to study, to write letters to Ellen that he hoped he would be able to send. He was also learning to use the sextant at Stefansson’s request. Mamen might be asked to leave the ship soon and head for land, Stefansson told him, and he would need to know how to work the instrument.
THE SNOW CONTINUED TO FALL, the temperature plunged, the cabins dripped with water from evaporation, and the men held no hope whatsoever of being released from the ice. On September 10, there was an aching in Mamen’s bones that meant a storm was coming. He often suffered from rheumatic pains in his arms and legs, which was the most accurate way he had ever found of predicting bad weather. “Soon,” he wrote,3 “we will be enveloped in the darkness of the winter, so infinitely long.”
At Bartlett’s request, Murray had continued charting the ship’s drift, and now it appeared that she was in the vicinity of Thetis Island, 140 miles or so east of Barrow, but still a good deal west of the desired goal, Herschel Island. They could just spot Thetis to the west.
On September 17, Stefansson sent Dr. Mackay and Jenness out on the ice to search for land to the south. Mamen saw them from the ship, obviously lost and wandering off in a northwesterly direction. He started after them, and when he was close enough, he shouted to them, asking in what direction they were headed.
“Due south4,” they replied.
“You must have5 a screw loose,” he yelled and raced to catch up with them and set them on course. They returned after traveling six or eight miles, not having seen any sign of land.
Stefansson dispatched Mamen and the doctor again to look for land on September 19. Murray had estimated they were eighteen miles offshore of Beechey Point, sixteen miles east of Oliktok Point, on Alaska’s northern coast. Mamen and Mackay walked for twelve miles in a westerly direction, and once again returned having seen nothing.
After supper that night, Stefansson sent for Mamen, Malloch, and McKinlay and met with them in his cabin. They were to leave the Karluk, he told them, and go ashore where they would be better able to conduct their work. Malloch and Mamen could expect to be on land for at least six weeks, mapping the coast, while McKinlay would make magnetic observations.
But Stefansson had even bigger plans. He was leaving the ship himself. He summoned Bartlett, Wilkins, Jenness, and McConnell to his cabin and told them of his news. He asked for the assistant steward, Chafe, to be present as well, since he would be in charge of outfitting the party. Stefansson would take Wilkins, Jenness, and McConnell with him. No one was more surprised about Stefansson’s plans than Bartlett. It was a hunting trip, said Stefansson. They would also take Jimmy and Jerry, the first two Eskimo hunters he had hired. They would head southwest toward Thetis Island where they would hunt caribou up the Colville River to supplement their fresh meat supply.
Stefansson left the ship immediately after dinner on September 20. It seemed odd, noted McKinlay, to leave so late in the day. But Stefansson was anxious to be on his way. He took with him a bounty of food supplies and ammunition, guns, two sledges, and a dozen of the very best dogs, handpicked by himself and Hadley. They loaded the sleds with tents, candles, an alcohol stove, sugar, tea, matches, sleeping bags, skins, biscuits, rice, bacon, and pemmican. To each man traveling with him, Stefansson issued winter boots, socks, deerskin shirts, compasses, rifles, knives, and watches. As planned, his secretary Burt McConnell, anthropologist Diamond Jenness, photographer George Wilkins, and the hunters, Jimmy and Jerry, accompanied him.
Most of the crew and staff climbed down onto the ice to see the team off. Getting them ready to go had been quite a feat. As Mamen observed, it was like “Jerusalem’s destruction; they6 didn’t know what they had or what they should have.” But, at last, they were equipped. Stefansson shook hands with all of the remaining scientists and crew and then was off across the ice, without a look back. He strode ahead, breaking the trail for the first sled while Jenness broke trail for the second, and Jimmy and Jerry drove the sleds.
Stefansson was only going hunting. He had said so himself. He would be back in a week or so. He would bring fresh meat for the winter. Bartlett knew that caribou were nearly extinct in the area. Stefansson himself had told them so, but he seemed to have forgotten that fact.
Before leaving, Stefansson had presented Bartlett with a letter that included detailed instructions for the men and the ship, should he be unable to return, and stated: “If the ice7 is strong enough I expect to cross thence to near Beechy Point to hunt caribou.. . . Should the Karluk during our absence be driven from her present position it will be well for you so soon as she has come to a stop again, and as soon as it appears safe to send a party ashore, to erect one or more beacons, giving information of the ship’s location. If it becomes practicable, send off Malloch and Mamen for surveying purposes. McKinlay should accompany them for the purpose of establishing magnetic stations in connection with Malloch’s survey. . .. Except for some especial reason, the Eskimo woman Kiruk should be kept sewing boots of the winter sea-ice type. . .. It is likely that we shall be back to the ship in ten days, if no accident happens.”
Once Stefansson and his party disappeared over the snow and ice, into the vast, white landscape, the twenty-two men, one woman, and two children who had been left behind were helpless to do anything but wait for their return.
“Away 20 miles8 in the distance we see him and his party like small black specks against the everlasting white of the Alaskan hills,” wrote Maurer. “They pass over the first ridge and out of sight. Goodbye, Stefansson.”
TWO DAYS AFTER STEFANSSON and his group left the ship, a blizzard struck. It was the first big storm of the season, with winds reaching sixty miles an hour. The ship rolled and rocked, agonizing against the grip of the vise that held her. The men were trapped below. The gale was ferocious, wild, and terrifying.
Arctic weather varied from day to day, with dramatic differences in temperature. But now, winter had arrived early and with great hostility, and the wind, raw and cold, seemed to cut through the ship. The ice had begun raftering and crushing around them, forming enormous pressure ridges—twenty, forty, sixty feet tall—which threatened to impound the vessel. The Karluk sat in the midst of it all, still trapped in the same expanse of ice that had imprisoned her in Camden Bay, one hundred and fifty miles or so to the east of where she rested now. For weeks, they had drifted, but lately the floe sat still and unmoved, locked in the surrounding ice.
On September 23, McKinlay was in his cabin, talking to Mamen and Malloch. Suddenly, he had the unmistakable sense that the Karluk was moving again. The three scientists rushed up to the deck, but the winds forced them back inside. By this time, more of the men had gathered, each voicing the same sensation. Bartlett confirmed it. The ship was under way.
The gale had gathered such force that their ice floe had broken free. As the winds picked up, the ice carried the Karluk, and all of her passengers, westward, thirty miles a day, far away from Herschel Island toward the heart of the Arctic Ocean. The wind was swift and strong, the sky overcast and dark. They knew that if this continued Stefansson would have no chance of returning to the ship, since he would not be able to reach them. Nor did it then seem likely that they would have any chance of setting out to reach him and the rest of the original expedition.
FOR NEARLY A WEEK, they drifted sixty miles a day. The floe that carried them remained intact while all around them the ice was breaking up and the water was opening. The blizzard extinguished the stars, and day and night the men could not escape the thundering of the grinding, shattering ice. For now, the floe that held the Karluk protected her; but it could break apart at any moment, and she would be left to defend herself against churning, toppling floes of ice, and the jagged edges that lay hidden below the surface of the water “like the long9, underwater arm that ripped the side out of the Titanic,” wrote Bartlett. “Every moment the Karluk was in danger of being tossed up on one of these heavy floes and left stranded, to break up like a ship wrecked on a beach, or of being flung against the ice bodily like a ship thrown by wind and waves against a cliff.”
The men slept fully dressed and with their eyes open. Beuchat, meanwhile, seemed to have gone “plumb crazy,” according to Mamen. He stayed bundled in two heavy shirts, a skin vest, and a sheepskin coat and sat inside all the time, shivering. Whatever measures he took, he couldn’t seem to get warm, and he was terrified of freezing in the unaccustomed cold.
Kuraluk’s wife Kiruk began sewing fur clothing for the company. They piled the deck with provisions, and the underwear was placed in canvas bags where they could reach it at a moment’s notice. The umiaks, which could be lowered to the ice if the time came to abandon ship, were filled with supplies, each with enough for eight people for twenty days. It was, wrote Bartlett, the worst experience he had been through in his long career at sea—worse than anything he had endured on the voyage of the Roosevelt with Peary. With the Roosevelt, at least, they had been blessed with a vessel that was built for breaking the ice and, too, they had had endless daylight. Now Bartlett had neither of these. He had winter, he had the encroaching polar darkness, and he had the Karluk.
Everyone received strict orders to remain on board; the ice conditions were too precarious and Bartlett would not risk leaving anyone behind. Everything that had been stored on the ice—provisions, equipment, dogs—was now brought back onto the ship.
It was a dreary time, and the spirits of the men plummeted. Mamen had been busy making preparations to go ashore as Stefansson had ordered, until Bartlett informed him that he, Malloch, and McKinlay would have to postpone their trip indefinitely until the ship stopped drifting.
ON SEPTEMBER 26, the Karluk began drifting east at nine miles a day, and hope returned. East was good. East was where they wanted to be. But on the twenty-eighth, she once again changed direction and began heading west. None of them—Bartlett, McKinlay, Malloch, Mamen—could determine their location, and there was much speculation as to their whereabouts. Murray took a depth sounding, and it was clear that, wherever they were, they were entering deeper water.
On September 29, the rugged Malloch managed to make his first observation since the storm began. The snow, the mist, and the northern lights had all made it impossible to get a reading on their position. But now he was able to determine that the Karluk was just ten miles from land.
Everyone on board was sewing in earnest now. McKinlay darned socks while the grumbling Mackay sewed pockets onto his pajama coat. Bartlett was mending a jacket, and Malloch was sewing strips of material onto his sheepskin trousers, something he had been doing for the past eight days. He bent over the pants, stretching his long legs in front of him, his handsome profile intent on his project, broad shoulders braced against the wall. He whistled while he worked, or sang at the top of his lungs. The odd dichotomy of it all—this overtly masculine man humbled by such work—made a funny picture and amused his cabin mates.
Beuchat, meanwhile, rested in bed for hours, shivering from the cold, and Mamen, at Bartlett’s request, prepared to lead a small expedition in search of Stefansson. “All hope of10 the hunting party being able to pick us up has now been abandoned,” wrote McKinlay. So they would go in search of Stefansson, taking him provisions. They planned to leave as soon as the wind died down.
Mamen was still eager to prove himself and was thrilled to have something useful to do with his time. He was also deeply honored by Bartlett’s faith in him to find their leader. Bartlett’s good opinion meant the world to him, and he wrote with great pride, “He knows what11 I am worth when it comes to showing courage and smartness in critical situations, otherwise he would not have given me the leadership of the coming relief expedition.”
ON THE LAST DAY of the month, the temperature dropped to eight degrees Fahrenheit and the snow began to fall once more. The men were at last allowed out on the ice, and everyone took advantage of the opportunity to escape from their shipboard prison. Mamen stood in awe and watched the sunset at 4:30 that afternoon. He had never seen anything like it. “There is nothing12 so lovely and singularly beautiful as seeing the sun setting up in the cold north.”
One thing was apparent. There was now absolutely no chance of Stefansson and his party making it back to the ship. At that very moment, in fact, they were miles away in Amauliktok, just off the mainland of Alaska, unaware that the Karluk had vanished.
BARTLETT, THIS TIME, did not confide in Mamen. Instead, he kept his suspicions to himself.
Stefansson had not gone on any hunting party. Bartlett knew it in his gut. Stefansson had abandoned ship. He had been anxious to be on his way, to continue his grand expedition. He could not sit still any longer. Whatever his motives, McConnell, Wilkins, Jenness, Jimmy, and Jerry were probably unaware. As far as any of them knew, they were on a hunting trip, and it didn’t seem to occur to any of them that a secretary, a photographer, and an anthropologist made a strange hunting party. If it truly was a hunting trip, why was Hadley, the great trapper, not included? Or Chafe, the expert marksman? Why did Kuraluk, the best by far of the Eskimo hunters, remain on the Karluk while two other lesser hunters went in his place? If Stefansson were planning a simple hunting trip, surely he would have taken Kuraluk, who could have stood to be separated from his family for that short period of time. But if his intentions were indeed to be gone longer, better to take the two single Eskimos, knowing as he did the native tradition of families staying together when hired.
“A nice mess13,” Bartlett later wrote. “Stefansson, the leader, ashore and his whole blooming expedition floating around here in the ice out of sight of land. It certainly would have been embarrassing for Stefansson if the Premier of Canada had met him on the beach about that time and said, ‘Sir, where’s your expedition?’ The only thing Stefansson could have answered would have been to have waved his arm out over the polar pack and said nonchalantly: ‘They’re out there waiting for me, sir,’ which we were. We were waiting for him all right. We were stuck so hard and fast in that ice forty feet thick that all the motor trucks in Canada couldn’t have pulled us out.”
They had been abandoned. Because the ship could not be of use anymore, the staff and crew were not of use anymore, so they were left in the ice to fend for themselves. The men, woman, and children aboard the Karluk were no longer Stefansson’s concern. They belonged to Bartlett now. But he would say nothing to anyone. Let them think their leader hadn’t deserted them. Let them think Stefansson had meant to come back.
AT NIGHT, the scientists gathered in the saloon and entertained themselves with ghost stories about the ships that had been frozen and trapped in that same region. There were so many that had drifted into the ice pack, before being carried helplessly away, never to be heard from again. In 1845, Sir John Franklin, with his two ships and 129 men, vanished without a trace. In 1881, George Washington De Long and his thirteen men on the ship Jeannette disappeared.
And there was another particularly eerie one. Seventy-five men, years ago, had reportedly escaped from their ship, only to become lost in the ice and the water. It was as if they had vanished into the air, leaving no trace of life behind. These stories made the blood freeze in their veins, and it was difficult to tell if Dr. Mackay was serious or not when he announced one evening that he, for one, had reconciled himself to leaving his bones out there on the ice, “never to see14 home again.”