The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  The Karluk could do only seven knots when pressed, under the best of conditions, and now she struggled to hold her own power against the growing pack. When it was obvious there was no way through, Captain Bob turned the ship around and headed south, damning her once more.

  THE FIRST DAY OF AUGUST was a cold one, and the air had a distinctly different feel to it now—as if winter had already arrived. The snow fell, heavily, steadily, and for the men on deck it was the first taste of Arctic chill. William Laird McKinlay, dressed in his sheepskin corduroy coat and oilskins, spent an hour on the bridge helping to steer. He wore rubber boots, but these were painfully thin and of no use against the cold. He turned inside to his cabin and traded his regular clothes for a suit of fur. At last, he felt warm.

  “Snow on the14 1st of August!” he wrote with excitement. No one could believe the earliness of the season, but the dawning of an early winter made McKinlay’s Arctic experience all the more real and thrilling. This kind of adventure was, after all, what he had come seeking.

  He came from Clydebank, Scotland, a slightly impoverished, salt-of-the-earth neighborhood, inhabited by Glasgow’s sturdy middle class. In April of 1913, young schoolmaster McKinlay had finished yet another workday, instructing students in mathematics and science at Shawlands Academy. After the daily lessons, he left the sandstone walls of Shawlands for the evening and headed home to number 69 Montrose Street, where he lived with his parents, grandmother, brother, and three sisters.

  He was the oldest at twenty-four, a true gentleman by nature, freshly handsome, slight and fair, standing only five feet four inches. But he had15 a great determination, a firm, tenacious spirit, and was regarded a gracious young man who didn’t give up easily and who liked getting his own way. “Wee Mac” was, as friends would later remark, a small man with an enormous personality.

  Before joining the faculty of Shawlands, McKinlay had completed his course work at the University of Glasgow. While there, he16 was recommended to the founder of the Scottish Oceanographical Laboratory to help calculate and catalog the sums and figures that had been taken on board the Scotia on a 1902–1904 Antarctic expedition.

  While no explorer himself, McKinlay was intrigued by polar exploration and avidly followed the exploits and accomplishments of the heroes of the day. Despite the fact that news of fatal shipwrecks and lost exploring parties was disturbingly common and that in 1913, nearly two years after they had reached the South Pole, reports were still coming in about the tragic fate of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his team, the world was swept up in the fervor of exploration.

  In 1911, explorer Fridtjof Nansen observed: “Nowhere else have17 we won our way more slowly, nowhere else has every new step caused so much trouble, so many privations and sufferings, and certainly nowhere have the resulting discoveries promised fewer material advantages.”

  McKinlay, like other boys his age, had read with awe about these true-life adventure stories from his comfortable house in Clydebank. Of course, he knew the dangers of Arctic travel. He knew it hadn’t been much improved or advanced since Leif Ericksson sailed his ship from Greenland to North America a thousand years ago. He knew the ice could trap or crush a ship until it sank without a trace. He knew a man could freeze to death or be attacked by a polar bear. He knew there were no radio transmissions or air travel over that part of the world. He knew if a ship was lost, it was lost.

  But on an April evening in 1913 his doorbell had rung, announcing the arrival of a telegram. William McKinlay was not in the habit of receiving telegrams. With a curious and disbelieving eye he read: WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO JOIN AN ARCTIC EXPEDITION FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS?

  It was signed Stefansson.

  It was not a name he recognized. Indeed, McKinlay had never heard of Stefansson, but on the spur of the moment, without hesitation, he made up his mind. At last, he would be an explorer.

  All of McKinlay’s friends and family turned out to wish him well before he set sail for Canada from the docks of Glasgow. Just before he boarded, his local minister presented him with a Bible. Inside the flap, “Best wishes” was18 written, and the words “Psalms 121.”

  I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. The Lord is thy keeper: The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

  ON AUGUST 2, the Karluk made another pass at the ice pack, but it was hopeless. She was not built for breaking the ice, and she hovered on the edge, in what appeared to be the only remaining open water, before Bartlett turned her again to the southwest.

  Everyone gathered on deck to view with great excitement the first sighting of walrus and seals. The walrus were tremendous creatures, and massed together they gave, from a distance, the impression of a large, dirty ice cake.

  The men also glimpsed their first polar bear, loping five hundred yards or so away from them on the ice. Bartlett called scientist Bjarne Mamen up to the crow’s nest to get a better view of the animal. Together, they stood high above the ship and the ice, watching the magnificent creature as it lumbered along, so beautiful and unsuspecting. Mamen climbed back down to fetch Bartlett’s rifle, then crouched in one of the whale boats on deck and aimed the gun.

  “Shoot now,” Bartlett19 called to him, but his first two shots were misses. The third, however, was a hit, and the bear dropped before rising to its feet and disappearing across the horizon. Mamen caught his breath from the thrill of it. His first polar bear, and although it wasn’t a kill, he had at least made a hit.

  Mamen was the last of the thirteen scientists hired for the expedition and the youngest. Stefansson was the only one who thought him qualified to be there, but Mamen was desperate to be taken on. Standing six feet two inches, with broad shoulders and a boyish face, the strapping young man was a ski champion in his native Christiania, Norway. The son of Christiania’s leading funeral director, Mamen possessed all of the idealism and impatience of youth, tempered with a penetrating insight and sensitivity. But he had very little scientific experience.

  He had heard about the expedition while working in the forests of Vancouver, and afterward he would not rest until he was hired. It meant he would be kept away from home for the next four years and also away from his sweetheart. They were recently engaged and Mamen loved her passionately; but he desperately wanted this job, so he fought for it. Unfortunately, his meager experience consisted only of a summer of photo topography on the Danish Spitzbergen Expedition. At the prospect of hiring him, one of Stefansson’s colleagues remarked, “He appealed to20 me as a woeful scrub assistant but not worth burdening a party with. . .. I told Stefansson that his experience was of little value, that he could not do any responsible work and I did not think it worth while to take him.”

  Stefansson answered, “Poor boy he wants to go so much that I hate to turn him down.” And that was that.

  All but Stefansson were worried that Mamen would be a hindrance to the man he had been hired to assist, thirty-three-year-old George Malloch, who had a reputation as one of the most respected geologists in Canada. Malloch had been finishing a postgraduate course in geology at Yale when he received Stefansson’s invitation. A ruggedly handsome man with a long-legged athlete’s physique; a broad, striking face; and a sensuous mouth, Malloch was vain and temperamental, charming and good-natured. Before the ship was scheduled to sail, alarmed by the disorganization and poor leadership of Stefansson, Malloch was urged by his superiors to resign from the expedition. He refused, making it clear that, through thick or thin, he was going to stick it out.

  Malloch was promised at the outset that he would be provided with an experienced geological and topographical assistant. Instead, Stefansson hired Mamen just two days before the Karluk sailed.

  Mamen’s hero was fellow Norwegi
an Roald Amundsen, and he longed to one day lead an expedition of his own, following in his hero’s footsteps. It was the reason he so desperately wanted the job as Stefansson’s assistant topographer. “I hope to21 get so much experience on this trip,” he wrote in his diary, “that I can qualify as leader of a small Norwegian expedition.”

  Stefansson had chosen several other members of his staff quickly and at the last minute, not so much for their experience or qualifications, but because they were eager to go.

  Physically, at least22, Mamen was better qualified than anthropologist M. Henri Beuchat, a sophisticated French gentleman with effeminate manners, who had spent most of his career safely inside the offices of the Revue de Paris, a prominent French magazine, and at the Laboratory of Anthropology of the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Just thirty-four, his retiring, affected manner made him appear much older, and although scholarly and brilliant, he had absolutely no experience in field work.

  Stefansson’s secretary, twenty-four-year-old American Burt McConnell, also lacked practical experience and was the only member of the scientific staff without a college or university degree. A good-looking young man with plenty of ambition, he had hopped around from profession to profession, alternately trying his hand at railroad surveying, cashiering, clerking, and mining, before being hired as Stefansson’s personal secretary, stenographer, publicity agent, and assistant.

  BARTLETT WAS JUST as unhappy with the choice of the crew as he was with the choice of the ship. Selected out of desperation from along the western coast of Canada, one of the crewmen had only a pair of canvas trousers to his name before signing on, two of the sailors were traveling under aliases, two men smuggled liquor aboard even though it was forbidden, and the cook, twenty-year-old Scotsman Robert “Bob” Templeman, was a confirmed drug addict. He made no23 secret of it, carrying around a pocket-sized case that held his vials of drugs and hypodermic syringes. He was a nervous man to begin with, anxious, high-strung, and rail thin, and the drug abuse had added years to him. A pair of narrow, beady eyes darted above the thick mustache that hung from his gaunt face, and he chain-smoked feverishly.

  There hadn’t been time enough to search out the best candidates. Besides, the pay—ten British pounds per month—was meager. So the crew of the Karluk was, for the most part, made up of boys without any real experience or practical trade, attracted by the adventure the expedition promised and whatever money they could get.

  Bartlett worried about their inexperience, their backgrounds, and their character. None, as far as he knew, had ever set foot on Arctic ice or snow. Not one of them had ever been trained in surviving the elements, and Stefansson, in a perpetual rush to accommodate the swift deadline of the Canadian government—disgracefully—had offered no such training.

  One of the first things Bartlett did upon his arrival in Esquimalt was to fire the first officer for incompetence. Finding himself suddenly without a first mate, Bartlett promoted the second officer, in spite of his lack of experience and youth. He was a young Scot admired by staff and crew alike. Indeed, he was one of the only crewmen who seemed to stand apart, head and shoulders above the rest.

  Alexander “Sandy” Anderson had barely earned his second mate’s papers by the time he joined the Karluk. He was a slender young man, just twenty-two years old, with a sweet, boyish face, and a graceful manner, which won him friends easily. He had a beautiful singing voice, played the violin, and had a fondness for floppy, wide-brimmed hats. There wasn’t anyone who didn’t like Sandy.

  His father’s weekly income as a railway signalman was a meager thirty shillings a week, and young Sandy learned at an early age how to be enterprising and resourceful. The youngest of three boys, Sandy did not share his brothers’ interest in formal education, and instead fixed his sights on taking an engineering apprenticeship.

  In 1908, plagued by illness, he was instead led to an “open-air life” to cure his poor health. And so he took to the sea. He wasn’t the only member of his family to have done so. Sandy’s maternal grandfather had sailed on a whaling expedition to the Arctic and died there.

  Apprenticed as a merchant seaman, Sandy later paid for his second mate’s examination out of his own pocket in early 1913. He joined the SS Lord Derby as third mate, but when he arrived in Vancouver to join her company, he discovered she was in dry dock at the Esquimalt Naval Yard, undergoing repairs. Sandy hung about the shipyard, living on the Lord Derby, waiting for her to become seaworthy again. All repairs ceased, however, when the dock workers went on strike, and Sandy found himself stranded in Esquimalt without a ship or a job. He could continue to wait indefinitely for the Lord Derby, he could go ashore and try his luck, he could join the Dollar Line as some of his friends had done, or he could take a job as second mate on the ship Karluk.

  Bartlett knew Sandy was young, but he had to follow maritime protocol by promoting the next in line. “I came here24 as 2nd mate at $80 a month & had only signed on for a couple of days when the skipper & mate had a row & the mate was discharged,” Sandy wrote excitedly. “The old man appointed me chief officer on the spot . . . although I have only a seconds ticket & haven’t had that any time yet. At present . . . the whole responsibility of getting her ready for sea [is] on my head & as we are booked to sail on Tuesday & . . . behind in many ways I have my work cut out.”

  Bartlett had dismissed another member of the crew, this time one of the firemen who was put ashore when he refused to work. They had nicknamed him “the Suffragette” because he had stopped eating and working some weeks prior, and everyone agreed he should not have been hired to begin with. He was replaced by the youngest of the sailors, Fred Maurer.

  Maurer had a quiet intensity about him, which came from his eyes. They were clear blue, penetrating, and piercing. Yet there was kindness in the gaze, and wisdom for such a young man. The rest of his features seemed to be a series of afterthoughts. He was husky and blond, with a firm, rugged jawline and an almost sheepish smile, as if he were perpetually trying to hold himself back and maintain a sense of control.

  Just twenty years old, Maurer was a reserved, conscientious, church-going boy from New Philadelphia, Ohio, with “a thirst for25 excitement, plenty of determination, a saving sense of humor and a few cents in cash.” As a teenager, he had worked as many odd jobs as possible to save enough money to put himself through business college in Akron at the age of sixteen. Unfortunately, he had an intense dislike for school, and two years later, in 1911, Maurer and a boyhood friend headed to California. Arriving in San Francisco, the boys began looking for work and came across an advertisement in a newspaper: GREEN HANDS WANTED26 ON THE BELVEDERE.

  The boys enlisted immediately, Maurer as deckhand, and it was while the expedition was wintering at Herschel Island that Maurer met Vilhjalmur Stefansson. The famed explorer made quite an impression on Maurer as he came aboard the Belvedere and regaled the crewmen with stories of his adventures.

  When Maurer had finished his contract with the whaling ship at the end of 1912 and was once again on land, he stumbled across a newspaper article about Stefansson and his forthcoming Canadian Arctic Expedition. As soon as he returned to Ohio, Maurer lost no time in writing to Stefansson to volunteer his services.

  Maurer’s friends strongly advised him against going to the Arctic. His family, too, did not want him to go. Before he had left Ohio to join this new expedition, before he ventured far away from his loved ones and everything familiar, he decided to ask the fates if he was doing the right thing. “It was heads27, I go; tails, I stay at home. I tossed the coin thrice, and twice the head turned up, and the fates decreed that I should go.”

  A SECOND BEAR was sighted on August 2, half an hour after the first was wounded, and this time each of the scientists was armed with a rifle, firing blindly away. Mamen watched as Bartlett stood at the bow and, in just two shots, brought the bear to its knees. It was a beautiful animal—seven feet, ten inches, from head to tail. The Eskimo hunters Stefansson had hired skinned the creature, a
nd the skins were scraped and hung out on the rigging to dry, to be used later for clothing; the meat would be kept to feed both the men and the forty-some dogs on board, the pick of the finest dog breeder in Alaska.

  That night, the Karluk forced her way into the heavy ice pack and bucked the ice until she was ground to a stop at midnight, surrounded by a solid field of white. There was nothing else to do but fill their tanks with fresh water from the nearby pools that had formed on the surface of the ice, and wait to be freed.

  FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS, the Karluk sat trapped, just twenty-five miles from Point Barrow, Alaska. The staff and crew were restless and impatient to be on their way. No one knew what it meant, whether they would be stuck for the rest of the season, or whether it was only a minor setback. No one was more restless than Stefansson, and on August 3, he headed by dog sled to the Point Barrow trading station, Cape Smythe, where he hoped to hire more Eskimos and purchase more supplies.

  That same day, the staff began amusing themselves by exploring the surrounding ice pack, going for long walks, playing European-style football, or trying their luck on skis. Mamen, who excelled in all sports, particularly skiing, was especially entertained by Beuchat’s antics. The Frenchman was anything but athletic, and, his colleagues soon discovered, was quite clumsy. Beuchat raced about on the slippery ice, tumbling feet over ears, picking himself up and running on. Mamen warned him to be careful, told him he couldn’t walk on ice as he did on the floor of a ship or on the ground, but the dignified anthropologist ignored his advice and promptly landed on his tail between two ice cakes, soaking himself to the bone.