The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  On the twenty-eighth, the day they expected Mamen and the Eskimos to return, Chafe and Clam had reported smooth ice on the trail, stretching across the horizon. There was no open water in sight, which was splendid news. Mess room boy Chafe and seaman Clam, eager to stretch their legs and gain more experience in ice travel, had been out almost every day on the trail and, for the most part, had reported fine ice conditions. The darkness was abating and Mamen now had about eight hours of decent light each day for travel. What, then, was keeping them?

  McKinlay knew by the offshore wind that there was a strong probability of Mamen running into open water. There was also a prominent water sky visible to the south, which further backed up the prediction. And as if to prove him right, Chafe and Dr. Mackay returned one day after a hike to report several leads of water, some over a hundred yards wide, a mile or so to the south of them.

  Over the next several days, Chafe and Clam went out together regularly, marking the trail every two or three miles with flags. Both young men felt more confident in their abilities now, and it felt good to be useful. They also carried supplies (mostly food and oil) on these short treks, to cache along the trail at spots one, two, three, and four days’ travel from camp. Each time, they reported the ice conditions as fine and much improved.

  Clam’s ear had become badly nipped by the cold, blistering and swelling to twice its normal size. True to his name, he said nothing and did not complain. They were all becoming quickly accustomed to frostbite, although some of them were less careful than others. Malloch was the worst. Now that he had been released from the scouting party, his characteristic affability had returned to a certain degree, and with it his usual thoughtlessness. One day the geologist strode about the camp in a pair of bearskin breeches with his trousers rolled up because his legs were too warm. There were three inches of bare leg showing between the top of his boots and the bottom of his pants. “You are going56 to freeze your legs, Malloch,” Hadley told him, “if you don’t wrap them up.”

  But Malloch laughed it off, saying that was the way Bartlett had said they dressed in Greenland. Hadley just shook his head, once again amazed by the ignorance of all these Arctic greenhorns, and said, “Go to it, old man.”

  The result was a nasty nip on the leg, which laid Malloch up for several days.

  They had postponed setting up the flare to guide Mamen home until the twenty-ninth. That morning, Chafe, Clam, Breddy, and Hadley set out by sled for the first camp made by Mamen’s party on the trail. They found it seven miles from Shipwreck Camp and placed a flag there to help lead Mamen home. During the day, a huge bonfire was built out of a whaleboat, thirteen sacks of coal, a couple of cases of engine oil, and ten tins of gasoline. This created an enormous, winding smoke pillar, which billowed into the sky, easily seen at least fifteen miles away. Dusk closed in at 3:00 P.M., at which point they rolled a cask of alcohol down the trail and stood it up on one end before setting it ablaze. They also burned the canoe and three cases of gasoline. The flames were still raging as they lay down to sleep. As Hadley noted, it was a wonder they didn’t blow themselves to eternity. “I reminded the57 Captain of how he had burnt all the hair off his face last winter when he put a package of Eastman’s flash papers in the cabin stoves, and I advised him to look out that nothing worse happened.”

  When Mamen had not arrived by the morning of the thirtieth, Clam, Chafe, and Maurer followed the trail again, this time going as far as the second camp, just four miles beyond the first. They could not understand this slow progress and could not find any sign of open water or anything else that might have slowed Mamen’s party down.

  One thing was clear, though—they now knew that, for whatever reason, it was too early to expect Mamen’s return.

  Despite their worry, life continued. The men kept on with their sewing, huddled close over candlelight, since most of their lamps were broken. The dim light was hard on the eyes, as well as depressing. They also mended the holes in their snow houses where the walls had melted away from the heat of the stoves. While the members of the other house took the roof off and rebuilt their walls, the occupants of McKinlay’s house were not so eager to go to work. Thanks to Dr. Mackay, Murray, and Beuchat, there was a decided lack of communal spirit, and as a result each man looked after his own corner of the room, propping up the roof and walls as best he could.

  The only activity that seemed to interest Mackay and Beuchat was to practice hauling a sled loaded with pemmican cases. These tins of pemmican were about fourteen inches long, five inches wide, and three inches thick. Each tin held six pounds and was marked so that one knew how to take out a pound exactly, which was the standard daily ration for a man in the Arctic, along with tea and a pound of biscuit. The men would open a tin on one side and empty the contents, and then they would open the other side and flatten the tin into a sheet. Bartlett had learned from Peary to mark trails with these flattened pemmican tins. When displayed against an ice ridge, the red or blue sheets of tin were visible for as many as two miles against all of that whiteness. They could be used as an indication of open water or a dangerous fault, or simply to mark the trail. Bartlett had instructed Mamen to mark his own trail this way.

  The captain had made it perfectly clear that he had no intention of manhauling anything on the trip to Wrangel Island, yet Mackay and Beuchat were diligently practicing up and down, back and forth. McKinlay watched his comrades warily, trying to ignore the gnawing worry and suspicion in the pit of his stomach.

  Bartlett had presented his men with a rough outline of his plans. Following Mamen’s return, he would send four sleds with eleven men and all the dogs to the island. When the entire party got to shore, eight of them would remain there (providing there was game enough to sustain them) while the rest of the party crossed the Bering Strait and made for Saint Lawrence Bay to wire for help. If there was no game on the island, they would all go to Siberia.

  After months of complaining and plotting and talking about setting out on their own, Dr. Mackay and Murray took Bartlett aside on the morning of January 31 and told him what he had expected to hear long ago—they were leaving. As far as they were concerned, it was much too risky to remain any longer on the ice. They had no desire to wait for Bartlett to lead the team to Wrangel, and then to risk getting left behind on the island while he chose someone else to accompany him on the trek to Siberia. They had to know that after their harsh treatment of him, their chances of being picked to go were almost nonexistent.

  Although the news of their departure didn’t come as a shock to Bartlett—or to anyone else who had been made to endure their grumbling—it was still hard to believe that the three of them were finally making good on their threats. And it was hard to grasp fully the impact of what they were proposing. It meant, after all, the first complete division of the party. To give it its real name, mutiny.

  They presented Bartlett with a list of requested supplies—fifty days’ worth—and told him of their plan to reach the island and then, possibly, to continue on to the Siberian coast. Otherwise, they would remain on the island and wait to be picked up by any ships that might arrive there that summer. Beuchat would go with them, which was no surprise, but so would sailor Stanley Morris, which came as a shock to everyone.

  There had never been any word about Morris joining them, but he rather sheepishly approached his captain and requested permission to go. Bartlett gave it grudgingly, more willing to let Mackay and the others go than he was to let this decent, sweet-tempered young man leave his own company. While Bartlett was now responsible for the scientists, they were still Stefansson’s men. Stefansson had hired them, and they were working for him. But the sailors, stokers, stewards, and officers were Bartlett’s, and young Morris was one of the most promising members of the crew.

  Morris was also very persuasive and eager, not to mention blindly trusting and completely awed by the Antarctic reputation of Dr. Mackay and Murray. True, they had mastered the rugged Antarctic plateau, but the sea ice of the Arctic w
as completely different. Continually cracking, splitting, shifting, and moving, the surface of the sea ice was rough and uneven, with magnificent hills and ridges piling up from the pressure. Ever changing, forever in motion, the Arctic pack was unpredictable and could easily turn deadly.

  Stanley Morris had wanted to be an explorer since childhood, ever since he was old enough to understand that he was named for the great Henry Morton Stanley, who was sent to find Dr. Livingstone in the wilds of Ujiji, Africa. Now he was in the presence of two bona fide and proven polar heroes, Dr. Mackay and Murray. For some time, he had known something about their plans to leave the ship. He believed in their experience and their authoritative boasting. He also looked up to them as fellow Brits who shared familiar attitudes and methods, while Bartlett was more American in his way of thinking. Morris suddenly saw Dr. Mackay and Murray as men of action while the captain, for some reason, was choosing to wait. Land was visible, after all, and now they were beginning to drift away from it. Better to leave with these brilliant scientists who had proven themselves at the bottom of the world with Shackleton, than to stay here a moment longer on the ice.

  Bartlett put up no fight with Mackay over leaving, knowing he would not be able to dissuade him, but he tried to change Morris’s mind. The boy would not listen, though. The captain had to resign himself then and told himself that at least Morris could be of use to Mackay and the others because he was so much younger and very handy. Consequently, Morris was granted permission to leave with the scientists.

  Bartlett asked that Mackay put his request into writing, stating that they were leaving the main party of their own free will, thus relieving him of all responsibility. After he received their letter, he would issue them fifty days’ supplies of provisions and equipment. The captain then passed their request on to McKinlay, because he was in charge of the stores. He also offered Mackay’s party their proportional share of dogs, as soon as Mamen returned with them, but Mackay declined the offer. They would haul the sled themselves.

  There was one last thing. Mackay told Bartlett that if he and the others decided to remain on Wrangel Island and wait for a ship, they would then “throw themselves on58 the main party for additional support.” A bold statement, considering all they had put everyone through and the now very decisive rift they were forcing upon the party.

  Bartlett would have none of it. As soon as he distributed the requested provisions, and as soon as he saw them on their way out of Shipwreck Camp, his responsibility for them was over. That also went for Seaman Morris, who likely had no idea what he was getting into. As hard as it would be for Morris, should Dr. Mackay’s party end up on Wrangel Island, their fifty days’ supply gone, he would not be able to come to the captain for help. If he chose to leave now, Bartlett’s responsibility for Morris was over as well.

  It was difficult to tell what kind of impact Mackay’s departure would have on the rest of the men. In some ways, it would be a relief to be rid of them, but in other ways, it felt like the beginning of the end. It was true that the Karluk’s company as a whole had not always been united in spirit or friendship, but how could anything good come out of such a final and irreparable division?

  Somehow it all would have seemed easier to deal with if Mamen would only return. The last day of the month, ten days gone, and still no sign of him.

  And then Malloch made a strange and unnerving remark to the captain. His usually sunny face was grave as he told Bartlett that he did not expect to see Mamen again. When asked why, Malloch merely said that if Mamen had managed to reach the shore, he didn’t think he was ever coming back.

  They brushed it off, but Bartlett, McKinlay, and the rest of the members of Shipwreck Camp were nagged by worry. “We are at59 a loss to account for this lack of progress,” wrote McKinlay, “as the going seemed smooth, & there were no signs of their having been held up by open water. The only explanation we can think of is that they overslept after the exertions of the first day & had only a very short spell of daylight on the second day.”

  Bartlett put on a positive face for his men and speculated that Mamen and Sandy probably reached land on the thirtieth, and therefore he would not expect Mamen back for a couple of days. Give them until February 2 or 3, and no doubt they would be stumbling, worn and weary, back into camp.

  They fanned the flames of the alcohol flare and vowed to keep some sort of fire burning until Mamen and the Eskimos were safely home.

  ON JANUARY 29, Mamen, Sandy, and the other members of their party stood rooted in place, not believing their eyes. Mamen had gone over it again and again in his mind, but he still could not figure out what had gone wrong or where they had gotten off track.

  They had traveled well that morning, but the afternoon had brought rough new ice, piled into looming ridges and hills, the jagged, slippery surfaces of which must be crossed somehow. They made twelve miles in spite of it all. But then, suddenly, Mamen knew something was wrong. There was the island—but not the island. The mountain peaks weren’t where they should have been, and the island was much smaller than they had expected. This piece of land, indeed, seemed barely more than a slab of rock jutting out of the ice and water. There were no trees. There was no expanse of land. There was only a sheer, ragged mountain peak.

  “I have come60 to the conclusion,” Mamen wrote in his diary on January 29, “that it is not Wrangel Island that we are coming to, but Herald Island. It is a shock to us and to all in the camp.. . .”

  It was clearly Herald Island. They were close enough to see that now. Herald Island, without any flat coastal stretch on the southeast side, was comprised of only mountainous ridges and cliffs. It was thirty-eight miles from Wrangel Island and, according to the Pilot Book, just four miles long.

  From what Mamen knew of the place, Herald Island wasn’t fit for any living creature. It was harsh, desolate, and lifeless, and virtually inaccessible. But even a useless, barren scrap of earth seemed better than a block of ice. And in Mamen’s condition, and with Golightly’s frozen feet, he knew they had little chance of making Wrangel.

  It wasn’t clear to them what went wrong—whether they had mischarted it to begin with, whether the island they had seen from Shipwreck Camp was actually Herald instead, or whether they somehow got off course in the fog and the snow and the zigzagging across the ice.

  Whatever had happened, Mamen and Sandy, Barker, Brady, Golightly, Kuraluk, and Kataktovik were stunned. Unable to go on, they set up camp for the night, but the ice crashed and creaked around them so that no one could sleep. Then, at 10:30 P.M., the ice cracked violently outside their snow house and Sandy, Barker, and the two sailors, frightened out of their minds, raced outside, carrying their belongings, loading them onto the sleds, ready to start away immediately.

  Without warning, the ice began to crush. Packs crashed into packs, grating, churning, threatening to smash Mamen and the others flat. The great ice shelves vomited out of the water suddenly, their edges jagged and razor-sharp, crashing on top of nearby floes with resounding explosions. The men could have been crushed at any moment. The dogs barked and howled, terrified. One of the sleds turned over, tumbling half their supplies into the water. The men held on to each other and tried to make their way to a safer plateau, but they were surrounded by the grinding ice and water.

  Suddenly, the ice broke up and they were separated from each other, floating on individual shards while the chasms of water widened between them. Even the Eskimos were afraid, shouting to Mamen in Inuit. But somehow they all drifted back together, only to find that now a wide, open field of water lay between them and the island. Mamen didn’t know how they’d make it across, short of swimming. There was ice again, closer to land, but it was rougher and looser. The leads of water were wider there. Sometimes there was no ice at all.

  The ice quieted suddenly then, and they regained a shaky sense of calm. Sandy and the crewmen set up a tent for Mamen, who rested his lame knee while the other men walked up and down the remainder of the night to ward off th
e chill. They kept the good stove going and filled themselves with hot tea to keep warm.

  They started out again in the morning, south to west, climbing over the immense pressure ridges with their loaded sleds. It was no easy task, but suddenly these ice mountains were springing up everywhere across the horizon; they had no choice but to pick their way up and across them. “It is remarkable61 that our sleighs stand it,” remarked Mamen.

  In the afternoon, they ran into thirty feet of open water and were forced to stop after traveling only three and a half miles. Discouraged and exhausted, they once again set up camp as the ice continued to groan and shift around them.

  After another sleepless and uneasy night, they awoke on January 31 to see the ice opening up and drifting away from land. The leads of water were growing and they were forced to move camp nearby to a large ice floe, where they felt they would be safer. With the day stretching before them, Mamen tried out his legs for the first time since he had hurt himself. Although he was still suffering and couldn’t yet straighten his knee, he made a brave effort to “hop along the62 best I can, and hope it will get better.”

  He also came to a decision. It was time to head back to Shipwreck Camp. He would leave Sandy and the boys as close to Herald Island as he could, and then he and the Eskimos would return as planned, taking with them provisions for fifteen days: three boxes of Hudson’s Bay pemmican, 200 biscuits, 150 pounds of dog pemmican, tea, sugar, a Primus stove, an ice pick, the two sleds, a gallon of gasoline, and all of the dogs.