The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  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 d
ichotomy 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.”

  October 1913

  . . . we were drifting1, drifting,—we knew not to what haven, in the silent, icy fastness of the North.

  —ERNEST F. CHAFE, MESS ROOM BOY

  Mamen spent a couple of hours each day up in the barrel, or crow’s nest, keeping watch with Bartlett. It was a chance to be of use, to bond with the captain, and to escape the confinements of his cabin.

  On October 3, Mamen and Bartlett could just make out land in the distance—Point Barrow, Alaska, five or so miles away. They were drifting swiftly to the west-northwest in gale force winds—still held captive in their ice floe—and the water was nine fathoms deep.

  Mamen almost never got any time alone. The men in the Cabin DeLuxe had started calling themselves the “Four-Leaved Clover,” an affectionate term, but one that, at times, implied too much togetherness, which was exactly the case. Mamen got a kick out of the good-natured Malloch, thought well of the more serious McKinlay, and, for all his irritation with the man, liked Beuchat. Still, it was close quarters. Either McKinlay was in there, reading and worrying, or Beuchat was complaining about something or other, or Malloch was singing at the top of his lungs, so loud that no one could think. But sometimes—on rare occasions—they would leave and Mamen would sneak into the cabin, hole up in his bunk, and enjoy some peace and quiet.

  He spent a lot of time thinking of his friends and family back home, especially Ellen. Mostly, however, he studied. He read books by Amundsen and Nansen and some of the other explorers. The Karluk had an extensive polar library, everything from Robert Peary to Frederick Cook to Adolphus Greely—books on the Antarctic and the Arctic; reports of the steamer Corwin and the United States revenue cutter Bear; narratives of journeys to the Northwest Passage, the Bering Sea, the heart of the polar ice pack.

  The Norwegian Amundsen, of course, was Mamen’s favorite, the man he wanted to become. For months now, he’d been scouring Amundsen’s books, making mental notes on the expedition he wanted to lead himself one day. He thought of almost nothing else and lay in bed at night, studying and planning. He would spend the next three or four years with the Karluk, and afterward would return home to prepare for his own expedition. He and Ellen would marry, of course, but then he would have to leave her again, to pursue his dreams of exploration. “My dearest wish2 if I get safely out of this trip,” he scrawled in his journal, “is to go home to Norway, scrape together enough money to enable me to get a small ship, and . . . sail under the beautiful Norwegian flag.”

  Tonight was one of those nights Mamen always wished for, when Beuchat and Malloch and McKinlay weren’t around. But tonight he did not study. His Amundsen books sat stacked nearby, closed and momentarily forgotten. Tonight he was reading something much more pressing—the ship and ice journals of George Washington De Long, who headed for the North Pole in July 1879 and never returned. De Long’s diaries dated from 1879–1881 and were written in two volumes and eight hundred pages—not a quick read, nor an easy one, but compelling.

  They had died out there—De Long and all thirteen of his men. In September of 1879, their ship the Jeannette became trapped in ice just east of Wrangel Island, an uninhabited scrap of land lying northeast of Siberia. She drifted for twenty-one months before going down, and De Long and his crew had set out across the ice toward Siberia in hopes of reaching civilization and safety, only they never made it. They died of cold and starvation before reaching land.

  Years later, wreckage from t
heir expedition was found off the coast of Greenland. De Long kept a journal to the very end, writing until the last days of his life. His final words were haunting. A man died almost daily, and De Long’s last three entries read: “October 28th, Friday3.—One hundred and thirty-eighth day. Iversen died during early morning. October 29th, Saturday.—One hundred and thirty-ninth day. Dressler died during night. October30th, Sunday.—One hundred and fortieth day. Boyd and Görtz died during night. Mr. Collins dying.”

  The journal stopped after that, and one could only guess what happened to him.

  Mamen was transfixed by the journals, as horrific as they were. So, too, were McKinlay, Malloch, Mackay, Murray, and Beuchat. And for one good reason. The Karluk was following the same wayward drift as the Jeannette.

  Dr. Mackay and Murray were the first to observe the similarities, and they led the long, increasingly obsessive late-night discussions about the comparable journeys of the two ships. Along with Beuchat and sometimes Malloch, they gathered almost nightly to pore over De Long’s notes and charts. Whenever possible, Mamen avoided the conferences. They had a way of continuing for hours at a time, and Mamen had no patience with that. While the others were talking, he would sneak off to his bunk to get a little peace and quiet and some privacy. But secretly, when alone, he himself pored over the diaries of De Long, as worried as the others. Somehow it was easier for him to deal with the prospect of disaster on his own, by himself.

  DAYS LATER, on October 7, Beuchat strode into the Cabin DeLuxe, eyes rolling, white as a ghost. “We are lost4,” he groaned, “we don’t know where we are—everything is hopeless.” And then he launched into a woeful monologue regarding Stefansson’s mishandling of the expedition and of his absence.

  Mamen looked at Beuchat over the leaves of Amundsen’s book on the South Pole. The Frenchman was always so dramatic. Everyone knew he had no business being on this expedition—or any expedition for that matter. He was too weak-hearted, too squeamish, too spoiled. He wasn’t able to do a thing for himself, and nice as he was—the perfect gentleman—he worried and complained all the time. He was impressionable, too, and Dr. Mackay and Murray had obviously been working on him.