Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk

by Buddy Levy

982 Erik the Red explores Greenland and becomes its first permanent settler. 1497 John Cabot explores the Grand Banks fishing grounds off Labrador and Newfoundland and claims the territory for England. 1594–97 Willem Barents searches for the Northeast Passage, wintering over at Novaya Zemlya in 1596–97. 1610–11 Henry Hudson searches for the Northwest Passage, wintering at Hudson Bay. His crew mutinies, setting Hudson adrift along with his son and seven men. They are never seen again. 1670 Hudson’s Bay Company is founded. 1778 Captain James Cook attempts a maritime route through the Arctic to the Pacific Ocean, crossing the Chukchi Sea. The voyage is blocked by sea ice near Icy Cape, Alaska. 1829–33 Captain John Ross explores the Canadian Arctic and becomes the first European to reach the north magnetic pole. 1845–48 Sir John Franklin and Captain Francis Crozier sail HMS Terror and HMS Erebus into the Arctic, searching for the Northwest Passage. The ships are trapped in ice, and 129 expedition members are lost. After many decades and some forty expeditions searching for the lost ships, in 2014 and 2016 the two ships are found, solving a 170-year-old mystery. 1878 Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld successfully completes the first confirmed navigation of the Northeast Passage in SS Vega. 1879 Lieutenant Commander George Washington De Long, in USS Jeannette, attempts to reach the North Pole. His ship is trapped in ice near Wrangel and Herald Islands in Chukchi Sea and beset for two wint...

karluk is an Aleutian word for “fish.”

It was true, he explained, that new ice or “young ice” had brine trapped in the crystals and was too salty to drink. But as ice ages, the brine leaches out of it, and older, multiyear ice was absolutely fresh and drinkable.

There were two prevailing philosophies for ice navigation: the Atlantic theory and the Alaska or Beaufort Sea theory. The bolder Atlantic theory held that the farther away from land you stayed, the better your chance of finding more open, scattered ice. The downside was that if you were iced in, you were much farther from land. The more cautious Beaufort Sea approach was to hug the coast, staying along the shore if you could, “and if you don’t get there this year you may have another chance the next.”

There is nothing more human than a ship in ice pressure.”

Bartlett had learned his lesson during the night in the tent, so with Kataktovik and McKinlay, they started building an igloo. The process involved first finding a relatively level spot and preferably on heavy, sturdy ice that appeared unlikely to fracture, though this proved impossible to predict, and often there wasn’t much time at the end of the day in the dying light. They had to work fast. Using long-bladed snow knives as well as handsaws, they cut large blocks of snow and stacked them in a square shape for the lower walls, tapering them in smaller sizes up to the roof. The blocks would vary in size, between a foot and a half to two feet thick, determined by the snow’s texture and whether the blocks would break apart.