The Impossible Rescue

by Martin W. Sandler

  At one point in his struggle with the ice, Captain Tuttle became so concerned with his situation that he ordered the Bear’s records and other valuables thrown out on the floes in case the ship went down.

  For the next full week, Captain Tuttle tried everything he could to free his ship, including setting explosives in hope of blasting a passage through the ice. But nothing worked. His frustration heightened when he became aware that farther out at sea, the ice had broken up, finally releasing all the long-imprisoned whaleships. How ironic, he thought. The ships and crew members he had come to rescue were ready to sail home, and he was still trapped.

  Finally, things began to change. On August 14, the wind shifted and the ice surrounding the Bear began to break up. Confident that the ship was finally about to free itself, he sent word for Jarvis, Call, and the whalemen to make their way to the Bear. Two days later, with the vessel now filled with humanity from bow to stern, more progress was made. “The pack,” Bertholf wrote, “had by this time loosened sufficiently to allow the Bear to move back and forward a little, so steam was made on all her boilers, and she began to force her way through, but it took all the forenoon, backing and filling under a full head of steam, to get clear. About noon on the 16th, after a final rush at the barrier of ice, the Bear forced through, and we sent up a rousing cheer as we found ourselves in open water once more.”

  The Bear finally breaks free of the ice. Years later, writing of the ship’s ordeal in leaving Point Barrow, Brower would declare that “that, I think, was the closest shave the old cutter ever had.”

  On August 23, Tuttle put into Cape Prince of Wales for refueling. As soon as he had docked, Tom Lopp came aboard for a visit, where he was warmly greeted by Jarvis, Call, and Bertholf. It was a poignant moment. All four men had been instrumental in the remarkable rescue. Yet, they all realized that this was the only time in the entire adventure that all four had been in the same place at the same time.

  On September 13, 1898, almost ten months after its feverish departure the previous December, the Bear arrived back in Seattle. But not to the type of homecoming one might have expected. When word of the whalemen’s desperate plight was first made known, the front pages of the nation’s newspapers had been filled with pleas for the whalers’ rescue, as impossible a task as it seemed to be. These pleas continued to dominate the papers’ news coverage for days, and in some cases, for weeks. Now the miracle had taken place. The whalemen had been saved. It was an incredible story, but amazingly, there were no headlines. There were no front-page stories. Those newspapers that did report what had happened relegated their accounts to the back pages of the paper.

  There was a reason. During the long months that the rescue efforts were taking place, an event of worldwide magnitude had fully captured the nation’s attention. The United States had gone to war with Spain. Every day, the country’s newspapers were filled with accounts of the Spanish-American War — stories of the exploits of Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, accounts of Admiral George Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay. America’s appetite for news of the war and its heroes was insatiable. There was little room for anything else.

  Fortunately, however, there were those who were aware of and fully appreciative of what had taken place in the Arctic. Among them was President William McKinley, the man who had launched the great adventure in the North. In a special message to the United States Congress, McKinley paid tribute to those who had risked and endured so much. “The hardships and perils encountered by the members of the overland expedition in their great journey through the almost uninhabited region, a barrier waste of ice and snow, facing death itself every day for . . . months, over a route never before traveled by white men,” the president proclaimed, “all make another glorious page in the history of American seamen.”

  In his final report of the rescue, Captain Francis Tuttle would state, “With a herd of over 400 reindeer to drive and care for, they pushed their way through what at times seemed impassible obstacles, across frozen seas, and over snow-clad mountains, with tireless energy until Point Barrow was reached and the object of the expedition successfully accomplished.”

  Dr. Sheldon Jackson, the man who had been most instrumental in introducing reindeer into Alaska, was particularly awestruck by what the members of the Overland Relief Expedition had accomplished. And he was dismayed by the way the press had practically ignored the achievement. “Had not the events of the . . . war distracted the attention of the nation,” he wrote, “this wonderful trip of 2,000 miles overland, north of the arctic circle in midwinter, would have filled the columns of the newspapers on this continent and in Europe. Because [it occurred] at a time when other events claimed the attention of the public, it is no less deserving of its reward.”

  Eventually, Lieutenant David Jarvis, Lieutenant Ellsworth Bertholf, and Dr. Samuel Call would be awarded Congressional Gold Medals, one of the highest honors the United States could bestow. Together with others, not the least of which were the indigenous people of the North, they had lived an unforgettable story.

  CHARLIE ARTISARLOOK

  Charlie Artisarlook’s accomplishments both before and during the rescue of the stranded whalers were instrumental in proving to doubters that those who were native to the frozen North were fully capable of owning and managing their own reindeer herds. Tragically, less than two years after returning home from delivering the herd to Point Barrow, Charlie Artisarlook died in a measles epidemic.

  THE BEAR

  From the time that it brought the rescued whalemen back to Seattle until well into the 1900s, the Bear continued to patrol Alaskan waters, providing aid to mariners and to people living along the coast. When it was put into dry dock in the late 1920s, it appeared that the ship’s days at sea were finally over. But destiny still had many new adventures in store for the Bear. Purchased by famed explorer Admiral Richard Byrd, the Bear carried Byrd and his party on two historic trips to Antarctica, first in 1933–34 and then in 1939–41. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, the Bear was again pressed into service patrolling the waters off Greenland and Iceland.

  Soon after the war ended in 1945, the ship was dry-docked once again, this time in Halifax, Nova Scotia. But in 1963, she was purchased by a businessman from Philadelphia who intended to turn her into a floating restaurant. Almost as if in protest of such a degrading ending to such a proud and heroic past, the Bear’s old seams opened up while she was being towed to Philadelphia and the eighty-nine-year-old vessel sank in three hundred feet of water. Despite a lengthy underwater search headed by the man who had discovered the remains of the famous Civil War ironclad vessel the Monitor, the Bear was never found. “She still lies in that watery grave,” former dean of the Coast Guard Academy David Sandell has stated, “perhaps a fitting place for one with so grand a seagoing history.”

  ELLSWORTH BERTHOLF

  Ellsworth Bertholf did not have to wait long after returning from the rescue of the whalers at Point Barrow to embark on another adventure. In the winter of 1901, the United States Department of the Interior asked him to travel to Siberia to purchase a breed of reindeer that was larger and hardier than the deer that had been previously brought to northern Alaska.

  Seven years after this accomplishment, Bertholf realized one of his fondest dreams when he was appointed captain of the Bear. The man who, previous to his participation in the Overland Relief Expedition, had never been in the Arctic then spent three years patrolling the Bering Sea and other Arctic waters. In 1911, Bertholf received an even greater promotion when he was appointed by President William Howard Taft to serve as captain-commandant of the entire Revenue Cutter Service.

  Even greater glory lay ahead. On January 28, 1915, the Revenue Cutter Service and the United States Life-Saving Service were combined into a new military entity. President Woodrow Wilson not only accepted Bertholf’s suggestion that the new service be called the United States Coast Guard but also appointed Bertholf its first commandant. It was here that Bertholf mad
e some of his most important contributions of all. The Coast Guard was formed as World War I was being waged. The new commandant not only steered the brand-new service through the trials of the world’s first global war but also earned the title of “the savior of the Coast Guard” by successfully overcoming the efforts of members of Congress and certain military leaders to have the Coast Guard absorbed by either the Navy or the Marine Corps.

  Ellsworth Bertholf retired in 1919 but remained active as the first vice-president of the American Bureau of Shipping. He died in New York City in 1921.

  CHARLES BROWER

  After a lengthy period of negotiations with government authorities, Charles Brower was finally paid what was due to him for helping to sustain the stranded whalemen at Point Barrow.

  After this unpleasant experience, Brower returned to Point Barrow, where he would become the most famous citizen of the frozen Arctic wilderness. Fondly known both as “the northernmost white man” and “king of the Arctic,” Brower spent the rest of his long life at Point Barrow, where he played host to such notables as Roald Amundsen, the first man to sail completely through the Northwest Passage, and to hundreds of whaling captains and crews, whom he described as “men the like of whom the world has never known.”

  Along with continuing his successful whaling operations, Brower would serve as United States Commissioner to Alaska and Alaskan postmaster. Brower married a native woman named Asinnataq, with whom he raised a large family. Several of his children became leading citizens of Alaska and, like their father, great champions of native Alaskans.

  In the early 1940s, displaying a flair for writing that few who knew him realized he had, Brower wrote a book titled Fifty Years Below Zero: A Lifetime of Adventure in the Far North, which became a best seller. Ending his book with what was nothing short of an anthem to his love of the Arctic, Brower wrote, “It’s the long winter nights that bring the past to life. Nights when the North Pole sends a gale howling around Barrow and I sit snugly working on my specimens, or writing, or carving a bit of ivory. Or perhaps saying to myself, as we used to in the old days, ‘But just wait till next spring!’

  “For on such a night familiar echoes come easily to the ear of memory; ghostly sounds which, nevertheless, will always typify the Arctic to me. I hear them plainly as I work — the rhythmic beat of the [Eskimo’s] drum, wind-swept shouts of a triumphant crew, or, mingling with the boom of ice, the dying swis-s-sh of a bowhead whale.”

  DR. SAMUEL CALL

  In 1899, a year after returning from Point Barrow, Dr. Samuel Call resigned from the Revenue Cutter Service and set up a private medical practice in Nome, Alaska. Thanks to a gold rush, the once tiny settlement of Nome had turned into a town, and was soon to be a city of twenty thousand people. Because of unsanitary conditions and disease, it was also a community in desperate need of medical help. Call remained in Nome for almost four years, not only maintaining his private practice but also serving as the community’s health officer.

  While in Nome, Call also undertook another incredible journey. It came about when a Catholic priest named Father Jacquet became insane and needed to be taken for help to a mission at the Alaskan settlement of Holy Cross, a round-trip trek of more than 1,200 miles. Volunteering to deliver the priest on what he regarded as an errand of mercy, Call told a reporter before leaving that it was potentially an even more dangerous journey than that of the Overland Relief Expedition.

  In 1903, after leaving Nome, Call rejoined the Cutter Service and served first on the ship Thetis and later on the McCulloch. His extraordinary adventures, however, had taken their toll, and in 1908 he was forced to retire. A year later, at the age of fifty, he died in Hollister, California.

  DAVID JARVIS

  Lieutenant David Jarvis had barely been back in Seattle when he was appointed to succeed the retiring Francis Tuttle as captain of the Bear. And within weeks he was back in the Arctic, taking the Bear north on its regular trip.

  Throughout the entire period that the whalers had been stranded at Point Barrow, another momentous happening was taking place in the frozen North. Gold had been discovered in the northern portion of the Seward Peninsula, and, as had been the case in the historic Gold Rush of 1849, tens of thousands of people had dropped everything and, by any means possible, made their way to Alaska, seeking to get rich. Very few found gold. Most found themselves caught in a hostile environment in real danger of perishing from the elements or from disease.

  When Jarvis reached Cape Prince of Wales, he learned that some five hundred of the would-be miners had wintered near Kotzebue Sound, where they hoped to find gold. He was told that many of these people were in desperate condition. When he steamed on to where they were encamped, he found the situation even worse than he feared. As many as one hundred had died of starvation, disease, or drowning. After relieving as much of the distress as possible by leaving medicine, food, and other supplies, Jarvis transported more than eighty of the most ill or weakened people to the safety of St. Michael. He then headed the Bear back to the encampment, where he took aboard many of the healthier gold seekers who now wished to be taken back home.

  Jarvis’s continued heroic actions captured the attention of President William McKinley’s successor, President Theodore Roosevelt, and in 1900, Roosevelt appointed him customs collector of Alaska. Five years later, the president asked Jarvis to become governor of the Alaskan territory. But by this time, Jarvis had plans of his own. He had spent most of his life serving his country, the whalers, and the native people of the North. Now he felt it was time to build a personal fortune by taking advantage of the many commercial opportunities he saw developing in Alaska.

  With the same energy he had brought to his Revenue Cutter Service career, Jarvis became involved at a high level in private salmon canning, fisheries, and mining operations in Alaska and in financial investment dealings in Seattle. All of these activities, however, involved politics and, in many cases, shady dealings. By 1910, Jarvis and many of his business associates found themselves caught up in scandal, accused of bribery and other forms of corruption.

  For a man who had become accustomed to honor and acclaim, it was too much. On June 23, 1911, David Jarvis committed suicide by shooting himself in a room at the Seattle Athletic Club. Lying in the room was an envelope on the back of which he had written, “tired and worn out.” He was only fifty-eight years old.

  Jarvis’s tragic, self-imposed ending, however, could not diminish all that he had accomplished. In 1903, a 5,000-foot-high mountain, located in Wrangell–St. Elias National Park in eastern Alaska, was named for him. In 1972, the United States Coast Guard’s newest and most advanced 378-foot-high ice-breaking vessel was named the USCGC Jarvis. And to this day, one of the Coast Guard’s most prestigious honors is the Jarvis Award, given for “inspirational leadership.”

  TOM LOPP

  In what amounted to a gross injustice, Tom Lopp never received from the government the honor or the recognition that was due him for the vital role that he played in the Overland Relief Expedition. Unlike Jarvis, Call, or Bertholf, he received no medal for bravery. But that did not deter him from becoming a pivotal figure in Alaskan history.

  For almost thirty-five years after returning home from his harrowing journey to Point Barrow, Lopp unselfishly devoted himself to promoting the raising of reindeer as a way for the indigenous people to improve their economic life and to providing increased educational opportunities for the natives. Displaying extraordinary passion for these causes, Lopp served as chief of the Alaskan division of the United States Bureau of Education, superintendent of reindeer for the northern district of Alaska, and as reindeer expert for the Hudson’s Bay Company.

  More than any other individual, Lopp was responsible for improving conditions in the coastal villages of Alaska. Among many other contributions to the welfare of the people who lived there, he was responsible for the establishment of sixty-six native schools and five hospitals. A leading champion of native rights, he created the Eskimo Bu
lletin, the first newspaper devoted to issues concerning the indigenous people.

  It was not until he died, in 1939, that Tom Lopp finally received the recognition he deserved. Among the tributes he received was that from a United States Coast Guard lieutenant commander who wrote, “Scrupulously honest, untiring in his efforts, far-sighted, and guided by his love for his fellow man, he has unselfishly blazed the most difficult trails, has overcome conditions seemingly [i]nsurmountable, and will go down in Alaskan history as her Lincoln.” Lopp Lagoon, an eighteen-mile-long bay near where Lopp established the first reindeer station outside of Siberia, is named for him.

  NED MCILHENNY

  When Ned McIlhenny finally departed from Point Barrow, he brought back with him a staggering eleven tons of bird eggs, animal skins, skeletons, and artifacts, which were delivered to the University of Pennsylvania’s Natural History Museum.

  Immediately after returning to Louisiana, McIlhenny took over the reins of the family’s Tabasco sauce company. Displaying the same energy he had devoted to his Arctic exploits, he expanded the business, applied new marketing techniques, and made Tabasco a household word. In the process he won a court battle that resulted in the company gaining the sole right to the Tabasco trademark.

  But, successful as he was at growing the family business, he found that he had developed a new passion — conservation. Even before he had left for Point Barrow, he had become alarmed at how one of his favorite creatures, the beautiful snowy egret, which had once lived near his home by the thousands, was becoming extinct. “This great reduction,” he wrote, was “not due to natural causes, but to the persecution of [the egrets] by man, who has killed them for both sport and profit.” McIlhenny particularly blamed what he called “plume hunters,” who killed as many of the egrets as they could for their long feathers, which women of the day loved to wear in their hats. The women themselves did not escape McIlhenny’s wrath, and he condemned them for their “barbaric love of adornment, which 1,800 years of Christian civilization had failed to eradicate.”