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

by Buddy Levy

An adventure is a sign of incompetence. —Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Peary would need for the operation. The skin of his toes had sloughed off almost entirely, the necrotic flesh black and blistered. The doctor amputated eight of his toes. Before long, Peary was up and hobbling around on crutches, eager to start exploring again. Through the whole ordeal, he’d never uttered a word of complaint. Bartlett, deeply impressed by Peary’s toughness, asked him how he managed to stand the pain. Peary just looked up and said stoically, “One can get used to anything, Bartlett.”

Bartlett, prone to outbursts of profanity, huffed and railed at the ship and ordered quick repairs, though he knew more extensive work would be required once they reached Nome. He worried that if it was already struggling in open water, it would be no match for where they were headed, remarking that “she had neither the strength to sustain ice pressure nor the engine power to force her way through loose ice.”

On August 1, Bartlett spotted iceblink on the horizon ahead. He knew what it meant, and he was both surprised and concerned to see it so soon. He squinted to make sure, but there was no mistake. There it was, a rupturing skein of white light as if torn from the underbelly of the clouds, the glare reflecting off an ice field that must lay just beyond.

But something about shooting the bear bothered him. In his log, he wrote of the event: “To the average man this would have been a good omen. But to a superstitious Newfoundlander the bear was a beacon toward future disaster. I am more than ever a believer in signs.”

For the Scotsman William McKinlay, who was witnessing the wonders of a living, moving ice pack for the first time, there was an awesome, dangerous beauty. He scribbled furiously in his journal: I was fascinated by the scene. The ice was much broken up and rough, with scarcely a level patch of any great extent. The multitude of hummocks of varying size and height had weathered throughout the summer so that their surfaces were clear of snow and all their edges had been smoothed and rounded. Their shapes were infinite in variety and they gleamed and glistened in every conceivable shade of blue. It was like being in some gigantic sculptor’s yard, stacked as far as the eye could see with glistening marble blocks cut in a million fantastic shapes.

That evening he felt minuscule and vulnerable, writing in his journal, “The ice tonight was being crushed everywhere badly, being reduced in most places to a powder. It is a fascinating sight to watch the square miles of ice slowly moving together, while the noise of the breaking and raftering, almost terrifying one with the roar.”

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.”

Watching nervously as they moved away from the shoreline, Hadley offered his opinion: “It may be safe,” he said. “But I don’t think so.”

“The snow formed a blanket on the ice and later on its melting and freezing cemented the ice snugly about the ship so that she was made almost an integral part of the floe itself.” They were beset.

Out on the ice, the conditions always dictated one’s direction, and very little was certain. Bartlett laughed out loud, then jotted his thoughts in his own log: “You can make all the plans you want in the Far North … using all the words in the dictionary. But the finer plan you have the worse it will go to smash when wind and ice and drifting snow take charge.”

By the first of October, a week since their floe had fractured free and begun to drift on its own, he noted that the crashing, rupturing floes were encroaching all around the ship, the “seething masses of ice battling for supremacy” creating so much noise in its shearing that it drowned out the sound of the wailing winds. McKinlay found the noise at times deafening, at times wondrously musical, describing “thunderous rumbles … coming from all directions; rending, crashing, tearing noises; grating, screeching; toning down to drumming, booming, murmuring, gurgling, twanging—all the sounds of a gigantic orchestra.”

He stayed a long time, the last one still on deck—and yet he had a sense, a feeling, that he was not alone. The awareness was so powerful he could not put it into his own words but jotted down something he remembered from H. G. Wells—a similar experience deep in the night, in fleeting, lonely moments: “I experience a sort of communion of myself with something great that is not myself.” The same sense consumed McKinlay for so long that when he finally looked away, he realized that he’d forgotten to put his fur gloves back on when he quit sketching, and he hurried below to find the fingers on both his hands pearl white to the knuckles. He was able to thaw them out near the stove, but they burned with excruciating pain as blood flowed back into them and they returned to life.

One late night McKinlay confided in the group that right before Stefansson had departed, he saw the expedition leader reading De Long’s logs and charts from the Jeannette. “He saw that most ships, 99 percent out of 100, in the ice north of Bering Strait are facing certain death, and for fear of losing his life he left the ship.” Hearing this, Beuchat—his face visibly flushed—blurted out, “We are lost. We don’t know where we are. Everything is hopeless.”

Bartlett went below to check. He sloshed through ankle-deep water and listened to the sounds of the ship bearing up against the pressing ice: “The poor old Karluk,” he jotted in his log, “began to suffer worse than ever. She creaked and groaned and, once or twice actually sobbed as the water oozed through her seams. There is nothing more human than a ship in ice pressure.”

He scanned and scanned, turning his face and shoulders from the wind, his eyes watering as he tried to cipher the dimensions of the blue-black forms. “There were two immensely big patches,” he said, “stretching northwest to southeast. They were about ten miles long and one mile wide.” When he told Bartlett about them and suggested, with excitement, that they might be land, islands maybe, the captain just spat off the rail and said, “Pressure ridges.”

He realized that tonight was a full moon and recalled from Captain De Long’s Jeannette logs that violent ice disturbances coincided with the full moon, so he turned back and skied for the ship as fast as he could.

Bartlett pulled down his hood and tried to bite back tears. He’d been shipwrecked twice before—both times on Newfoundland’s southern coast—but this time felt different. The Karluk had been their home for seven months. And just behind him, marooned on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean, stood twenty-two men, one woman, two children, twenty-four dogs, six puppies, and a cat. Bartlett took a last look at the glassy surface where the Karluk had been. It was already beginning to freeze over at the edges.

They could not leave until the sun returned on January 25, at the earliest. And because their floe was still drifting, there was the possibility that—given what Bartlett knew about the drift of the polar ice pack—they’d skirt beyond Wrangel Island and “slide westward and circle the Pole until, some years hence, we would possibly emerge down through the Greenland Sea.” That had happened to Nansen’s Fram twenty years before. “But by that time,” Bartlett committed to his log with a resigned frankness, “we should all be frozen stiff.”

Mamen felt pride in being given the responsibility, but privately, he was racked with doubts and fears. That night he was restless and awoke from fitful dreams, then thought longingly of home, as he recorded in his diary: “My thoughts wandered back to the Fatherland and my home with all its beloved ones, and to our coming journey to save our lives.… I hope that with the help of God everything will come out all right, but if not, that we may have a quiet and peaceful death, without much pain or agony.”

They’d managed to salvage a few books from the Karluk’s extensive library and had varied reading to pass around in the evenings: Jane Eyre, Villette, and Wuthering Heights, plus a handful of more recent novels. Bartlett read passages of his beloved Rubáiyát, turning the brittle pages slowly and carefully in the smoky lamplight. His treasured volume, which was so worn that he’d repaired numerous well-read pages with surgeon’s tape, had been with him on his early sea voyages to South America and Europe during his apprenticeship, and on both his Arctic expeditions with Peary. He seemed always to be reading it, and when someone asked him what it was that he enjoyed so much about the book, he mused, after consideration, “Perhaps it is because there is something in its philosophy which appeals to my own feeling about life and death. For all my experience and observation leads me to the conclusion that we are to die at the time appointed and not before; this, I suppose, is what is known as fatalism.”

The frequent storms—including the one that had split Kuraluk’s igloo in half—“had caused the moving ice to smash against and slide over the still ice, and the pressure of the ‘irresistible force meeting the immovable body’ had thrown the ice into fantastic, mountainous formations as weird as that astounding picture of Chaos before the Creation that used to ornament the first volume of Ridpath’s History of the World.”

In their frenzy, three dogs broke loose and ran circles around the bear, snarling and gnashing their teeth as the beast lashed its claws at them, raking across the back of one, ripping off a hunk of fur and flesh. Hadley crept on his hands and knees and, with the bear’s head now craning across the sled near him, seized the rifle again and rolled and got up, shouldered the rifle and fired. The bear loped off, hit, and Hadley chambered another round and fired. “When the bullet hit him,” remembered Chafe, “he jumped in the air, and, turning a complete somersault, landed dead fifteen feet from where he jumped.” The bear scoured a deep depression where he landed in the snow-covered ice.

Though he understood that the animals were deadly, and that he and the others were vulnerable and exposed, as he beheld the beautiful creature lying in the snow, its downy white fur matted with blood, a sadness overcame him. “I knew that our lives might depend on being able to kill them, but they were such magnificent animals. I hoped that we would never kill one except for self-protection or food.”

Bartlett hardly slept, consumed by what he’d need to do next. It would fall on him and at least one other—perhaps two, depending on everyone’s condition—to continue to Siberia, and then to Alaska for help. Wrangel Island might sustain them for a time, but who knew how much game was there? Bartlett understood that in these northern waters, the window for a rescue ship was narrow—six weeks at most, during late summer. After that, the ice would close in again, trapping everyone on the island for another year at least. These thoughts raced through Bartlett’s mind as he lay shivering on the ice floor of his igloo.

Although he was bone-weary from the grueling seventeen days it had taken to get here, he struggled to sleep, thinking about the Karluk survivors on Wrangel Island. “I thought about them all the time,” the captain wrote in his diary. “And I worried about them; I wondered how the storms which had so delayed our progress across Long Strait had affected Munro’s chances of retrieving the supplies … from Shipwreck Camp and getting safely back to the main party, and how the men would find life on the island as the weeks went by and they separated according to my instructions for the hunting which would sooner or later have to be their main dependence.”

He was dynamic, opinionated, vain, and brilliant, and had been finishing a postgraduate course at Yale when he received Stefansson’s offer to come along as the expedition’s geologist. It was to be the adventure of a lifetime. Now he lay lifeless on the windswept southern coast of Wrangel Island, dead at just thirty-three.

Then Baron Kleist explained, as best he could, and Bartlett was fascinated by what he learned: “This was not really a woman but a man who had, so to speak, turned himself into a woman. It was, it seemed, a custom among these Siberians to do this and a man who thus transformed himself acted like a woman, dressed like a woman, talked like a woman and was looked upon by the other Chukchi as a woman.”*

He assessed his condition: “My boots and stockings and legs were soaked through, well above my knees. The soles of my boots were worn into huge holes. Where the holes were the skin was gone, and my feet were raw and bleeding.” He was too tired to do anything about his feet, so he lay there as he was, soaking wet, freezing cold, bleeding, and despondent.

The trip from Shore Camp down to Cape Waring had also been tough on Clam. His feet seemed little changed—at least so far requiring no further surgery—but his body was grossly enlarged from the swelling sickness, his limbs and torso engorged to nearly twice their normal size. For days after their arrival, they had to keep Clam propped up in a sitting position, “For when he lay down he would choke and his eyes would roll right around so that you could see the whites of them only,” Chafe wrote in his diary. Clam was in such bad shape that Chafe, Breddy, and Williamson—sharing a tent with him—expected him to die at any moment. But he hung on.

Both McKinlay and Hadley had become obsessed with the state of the sea, the behavior of the pack. Hadley returned from hunting empty-handed every day, and on his way back, he would scan the ice, the water, and the horizon for any sign of a ship. One day in early August, he reported that he thought he’d seen smoke from a steamship very far off the island, and there was a momentary buzz of excitement at camp, but most thought he’d probably imagined it, or just wanted it to be true. McKinlay quipped, “It may be that the wish is father to the thought.”

But the lack of food and the dull, unvaried days wore on everyone. The days were growing shorter, too, and the nights colder. In the afternoons, after yet another day of unsuccessful hunting, everyone would retire to the tents to rest, and wait, and think. “Think, think, think!” McKinlay recorded in his diary, “That is all we can do these days. All day long, and in our waking moments at night. The strain becomes more acute as the days pass.… We pray that it may end soon.”

Captain Jochimsen and Olaf Swenson and Burt McConnell had watched carefully for many minutes as the ship’s whistle sounded, but for a long time no one appeared, and they feared the worst. Then, after the third or fourth whistle blast, a man had crawled from the tent. “I shall never forget his actions,” wrote McConnell. “He did not show any signs of joy.… The poor creature simply rose and stood rigidly beside the tent, gazing at us as if dazed.”

Not long after finishing, Munro looked up from his empty plates and bowl. “Mr. Swenson, I want to ask a great favor of you,” he said. “For several months I have been dreaming of eating a whole can of condensed milk with a spoon.” Swenson called for the cook, who rushed three cans and three spoons from the galley, and Munro, Maurer, and Templeman consumed the sweet, thick milk one spoonful at a time, as if they were eating ice cream.

“Sleep was impossible,” wrote McKinlay of the first night aboard the King and Winge. “We lay on beds of skins spread on the deck. We got up again and drank coffee in the galley, where the coffee pot was kept continuously bubbling on the stove for our special benefit. We smoked and smoked. We lay down again, got up again.… My head was not my own.”

For now, in this moment, he was simply alive: Just think of it all of you—I am alive. And more than alive, I am living. None of you know what life is, nor will you ever know until you come as near losing it as we were. The escapes I had. Think of it again: I am alive, and not lying on the pitiless Arctic floes or buried beneath the unfriendly soil of Wrangel Island. Think again, and know that of six scientists aboard the Karluk, I alone remain … Think of it all and thank God that your son and brother has won through and will soon be among you to tell you a story the world has never heard … I tell you, it’s a tale in a million!

When The Friendly Arctic came out, Bartlett wrote to McKinlay about his reaction: “I was so damned mad that I went over to the Harvard Club where Stefansson was staying; fortunately for me he was not in. Had we met I believe that I could have killed him.” Bartlett held Stefansson in such low regard that he even threatened to start a petition to have him expelled from the prestigious Explorers Club, though he never formally followed up on it. Later, he heard that Stefansson had been spreading rumors that Bartlett should be sent to jail for losing the Karluk. Livid, Bartlett confided to McKinlay: “My day will come if I ever get him alone. I will beat him to within an inch of his life.”

It is fair to say that Bartlett’s only true love was the sea. He never married—in fact, there is no record of any significant romantic relationship. He just never seemed entirely content on land, always bored and restless, always planning for his next adventure. He had become, like many who ventured to the frozen north, a pagophile—a creature most suited to life on sea ice. “It’s all right when you’re out exploring,” he said in his 1928 memoir. “You get used to rotten meat, frozen fingers, lice, and dirt. The hard times come when you get back.”

Despite everything Vilhjalmur Stefansson achieved, he remains inextricably linked to Captain Bob Bartlett and the doomed Karluk, the ship that brought them together, defined their characters, and now rests somewhere at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.