The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  “It was as 32certain as anything could be that both parties had long since perished,” said Bartlett, “but it was very hard for me to give them up, men with whom I had spent so many months, men with the future still before them.”

  The Bear turned about, just as the King and Winge had been forced to turn around, and headed south toward home. On deck, they stood together, side by side—the first and second engineers, the mess room boy, the cook, the fireman, the seaman, the passenger, the Eskimos, and the scientist—and said good-bye to the Arctic.

  ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1914, amid its coverage of the first major battles of World War I, the New York Times devoted an entire page to the news of the rescue. The men of the Karluk had been presumed dead long ago. Almost everyone, it seemed, had given up hope, quick to write it off as yet another Arctic tragedy. Even with the obvious prominence given to coverage of the war, international press attention was riveted on the rescue of the survivors of the twenty-five people who had sailed out of British Columbia on June 17, 1913, in search of an undiscovered Arctic continent.

  When they reached Nome on September 13, Bartlett wanted to protect his men from the throng of people who had gathered to welcome them home. The banks were crowded with well-wishers, newspapermen, camera teams, and everyone else who had heard of their arrival. The whole of Nome seemed to have turned out to catch a glimpse of the men of the lost ship Karluk and their captain who had led them to safety.

  Because of their weakened immune systems, Bartlett didn’t want to risk their going ashore after months of surviving on Wrangel Island; he feared they would catch the latest germ and be stricken with an illness from which they might not be strong enough to recover. Chafe and Clam were both under the doctor’s care for frostbite, and Templeman was slowly being nursed back to health. Some of the other men—McKinlay, among them—were still suffering from swollen legs and feet, for which the doctor had prescribed powders and ointments that would treat the men both internally and externally. McKinlay, Munro, and Hadley also were being troubled by badly swollen throats.

  They were learning to wear shoes again, after all those months of wearing mukluks, and it was a painful and awkward adjustment. Bartlett would let them leave the ship in a few days, as soon as they had the chance to gain some strength back. In the meantime, he allowed Japhet Linderberg, photographer Ralph Lomen, the editor of the Nome Daily Nugget, and other Nome dignitaries to board the ship and shake the hands of the twelve survivors. Bartlett appointed McKinlay spokesman of the group, so it fell to him to tell their story. “We were questioned,33” wrote McKinlay, “we were photographed a thousand & one times, we were offered the freedom of the town, we were invited to this, that, & the other thing; in short, we were made lions of.”

  In June of 1913, a similar fuss had been made over the celebrated men of the Canadian Arctic Expedition as they embarked on their journey. Then, they were heroes because of all they promised and aspired to. Now, they were heroes for simply having survived.

  From the moment the castaways had set foot on the King and Winge, Burt McConnell had been pressing them for an interview, anxious to write the story for the press. McConnell was already trying to take credit for a rescue that he had nothing to do with, and to sell the story of it to one of the newspapers with which Stefansson had a contract. Bartlett refused to let any of his men speak with McConnell, who quickly grew miffed. There were official reports to be made first, and private words for faraway loved ones. Besides, in Bartlett’s opinion, Burt McConnell only wanted to exploit these men for his own personal gain. McConnell followed them aboard the Bear, eager to telegraph the news of the rescue to Stefansson’s newspapers. But Bartlett beat him to it, sending his wire out the night before. McConnell was livid, but Bartlett didn’t care. The story belonged to his men, not to Stefansson, and certainly not to Stefansson’s former secretary.

  WHILE THE BEAR LAY IN THE HARBOR at Nome, the fields of Europe exploded in battle. While the men of the Karluk had struggled to stay alive in the middle of the Arctic Ocean up at the top of the globe, the rest of the world had gone to war.

  Somewhere, Dr. Mackay, Murray, Beuchat, and Morris were lying, frozen or dead, lost forever. And Sandy. His letter to Bartlett on February 1 was the last his comrades had ever heard of him. He and Barker and Brady and Golightly were never seen again. They were four young sailors simply trying to follow orders, just like the rest of the men whom Stefansson chose for his grand expedition and then left behind.

  But McKinlay was among the living.

  “I do not 34know how or where to begin; indeed I know nothing just now,” began his letter home to his family. “My mind is so full and active that the result of its working is precisely the same as if it were empty. I am not going to tell you my story now, for you could only get scraps of it, and that would spoil things when I get home. You see I wish to have you all sit round me with staring eyes and mouths like to devour me, listening to my tale—how we lived, the feeds we had, and—more tragic!—those we did not have, the escapes I had, and so on, and so forth. I tell you, it’s a tale in a million! The one thing I wish this letter to do for me is to show you I am alive, and how much I am alive.”

  He had joined the expedition with only a few weeks of meteorological training and a cursory knowledge of how to categorize Antarctic specimens. He did not know what the world held for him now. Perhaps he would go back to his job at Shawlands Academy, teaching mathematics and science, or perhaps he would join his native Scotsmen in the battle of World War I. The only thing he knew for certain was that the worst was over.

  He continued his letter home in a firm, clear hand. “Just think of 35it 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. 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 as I do that your son and brother has won through and will soon be among you to tell you a story the world has never heard.”

  The Wake

  McKinlay was unconscious by the time the Bear reached Unalaska. Bartlett and the others had to carry him to the Jesse Lee Home Hospital. He had started feeling ill on October 1, 1914, and a day or so later his face and neck were badly swollen into blistering red patches. He had a high fever and headaches and he couldn’t move. But the doctors knew instantly what it was—erysipelas, an acute, inflammatory skin disease, caused by a bacteria.

  For three days, he slept. When he awoke, McKinlay looked into the eyes of a little Aleutian boy, who was sitting cross-legged in the chair beside his bed.

  “Do you have 1Jesus in Scotland?” the boy said.

  McKinlay was disoriented and confused. He couldn’t remember being taken to this hospital and he did not recognize this boy.

  “Do you have Jesus in Scotland?” he repeated, staring at McKinlay, frank and open, waiting.

  “Yes,” he finally answered. His voice was weak and sounded strange. But he could speak. “We have Jesus in Scotland.”

  After returning home in 1914, McKinlay spent the first months recuperating. His feet would continue to give him problems throughout the rest of his life from the frostbite he had endured, and he lost all but one of his teeth as a result of the starvation diet he had lived on in the Arctic. When he was stronger, he joined his countrymen at war, as a lieutenant in the Gordon Highlanders, eager to do his part and hoping, more than anything, that it would wipe out the memories of his Arctic nightmare. He served until 1917 when he was wounded and discharged. The memories of the Arctic were still as vivid and painful as ever. War had done nothing to change that.

  Back at home, McKinlay fell in love, married, and returned to teaching. In the fall of 1917, he received a surprise visit from George Wilkins, the Karluk’s photographer, inviting him to join an Antarctic expedition he was organizing. It was tempting. For all the
hell he had suffered, there was something about the polar regions that still beckoned. There were times he still felt the chill of the ice, the bite of the wind.

  But McKinlay was married now and had a new life—or rather—had resumed the old one. Besides, the war had left him with a lame knee. He would be of no use to anyone down there, so he declined.

  Eventually, McKinlay would lose touch with his colleagues from Wrangel Island. “I had no 2contact with any of the survivors other than Bob Bartlett,” wrote McKinlay years later. “After our sojourn on Wrangel Island, I had nothing in common with any of them.” After all they had shared, they had remained strangers then, and they were still strangers now. Nevertheless, McKinlay did exchange letters with a few and heard news of them through the newspapers or through the letters Mrs. Rudolph Anderson wrote to him. Most of the men had retired to quiet lives, out of the public eye.

  For a while, McKinlay received an occasional letter from John Munro, who had returned to Canada in late 1919, serving for a while with the Department of Marine and Fisheries. The last news McKinlay had heard of the former chief engineer of the Karluk was that he had married and settled in California.

  Seaman Hugh Williams, better known as Clam, had been released from the hospital in Victoria, British Columbia, on January 17, 1915. After enduring further operations on his frostbitten foot, and after his foot had recovered, he returned to sea during the war. His ship was torpedoed, but he survived. He then went home to his native Wales, marrying and having three children. He died in 1937. McKinlay remembered him as one of the few “grand fellows3” in the crew, with a “wonderfully attractive smile, even when things were at their grimmest.”

  Kuraluk, Auntie, and the children returned to Point Barrow. All of the men had spoken with great admiration for Kuraluk and Auntie, especially. “There is not 4a man alive from that ill-fated expedition,” Chafe wrote afterward, “who does not today remember that faithful Eskimo woman with gratitude. We looked upon her as a mother.”

  For the rest of her life, Helen would tell her younger sister Mugpi how lucky she was that she couldn’t remember much about their time in the Arctic. Mugpi grew up hearing the stories, though, and she did take away memories of riding on her father’s shoulders as they hunted for eggs, and of the little black cat Nigeraurak. She is now, in the year 2000, eighty-nine years old and living in Point Barrow, the last living survivor of the Karluk. Mugpi is in good health, her memory is clear, and she still has a scar on her chin from the day when Nigeraurak scratched her.

  John Hadley stayed for some time with Kuraluk and his family, after they all returned from Canada. He then resumed his travels, leaving his dog Molly with the family for a year while he was away. He came back to collect her and took her with him to San Francisco, where he died in 1918 during the great influenza epidemic. Four years later Stefansson, in his book The Friendly Arctic, printed an apparently doctored narrative, which he claimed belonged to Hadley. The narrative differed greatly in language and content from the crude diary Hadley had actually kept on Wrangel Island and was considered by many to be another one of Stefansson’s fabrications.

  In later years, McKinlay exchanged a handful of polite but frosty letters with second engineer Robert Williamson, who had gone on to a respectable career in the military and served with the Royal Navy and Royal Canadian Navy in World War I and World War II. But he was plagued throughout his life by the accusations in Hadley’s diary, suggesting he had murdered George Breddy. In 1959, Stefansson sent him a transcription of the diary, and asked his opinion of the charges. Williamson replied: “I want to 5get into my mind if possible the reason of J. Hadley’s silly stupid charges against me, but no, I cannot: It reads like a fairy tale; cheap heroics.. . . Hadley’s account of the death of Breddy is another one of his hallucinations & absolutely untrue.”

  Williamson always remembered the bitter cold of Wrangel Island, but seldom spoke about the people or the time spent there. “Please do not 6think I am bitter,” he wrote to Stefansson at the end of his life. “That is the main reason why I have not written a book of our trip. It does one no good raking up the past, especially when most of the men are dead. Therefore I do not care to say or write about our life on Wrangel Island or our trek across the ice from Shipwreck Camp.” He died in Victoria at the age of ninety-seven in 1975.

  Chafe had written to McKinlay in 1915, after he was released from the hospital in Victoria, British Columbia. He had been there for months, recovering from an operation on his foot, having had most of it amputated. He was given a discharge and three months’ bonus pay and then sent home. Chafe had heard that Stefansson had helped Fred Maurer go out on the lecture circuit and wrote to McKinlay to ask for advice on how he could get in on it, too. Years later, he wrote his own account of the Karluk story, which seemed, in large part, to have been borrowed nearly word for word from Maurer’s four articles for The World Magazine in 1915.

  Before he returned home to Scotland in 1915, McKinlay stopped in Ottawa to visit the parents of George Malloch. They had asked that he come to see them, to tell them anything he could about the last days of their son’s life. It was, he remembered, “a sad occasion,7 but George Malloch’s parents appeared to derive some degree of comfort from having a personal account of their son’s experiences, and I was glad I had gone.”

  No trace of Dr. Mackay’s party was ever found, except for a black sailor’s scarf, which his former shipmates had discovered buried in an ice floe, and which they presumed belonged to sailor Stanley Morris. Their colleagues concluded that the four men must have been crushed by the violent, raftering ice. The families of the four men were of great support to each other as they tried to deal with their loss. For years afterward, they clung to the hope that the men would reappear, alive and well, or that, at least, their bodies would be found, to offer a sense of closure. Dr. Mackay’s mother wrote to the father of Stanley Morris: “I very much 8fear all the four are lost. I am . . . little able to bear this misery.”

  James Murray’s oceanographic studies had been the first to be carried out in the Amerasia Basin, but all of his work was lost when the Karluk went down. The Royal Society of Edinburgh started a fund to aid Murray’s widow, but the Canadian government offered little relief. The Canadian government stopped the salaries of Murray, Beuchat, and Dr. Mackay in 1914, with no explanation to the families. The men were never officially declared dead by the government. Finally, at the prompting of Mrs. Rudolph Anderson, McKinlay wrote to Mrs. James Murray, Mrs. Henri Beuchat, and the mother of Alister Forbes Mackay to let them know their loved ones were gone. The families still maintained the hope that the men had survived, but on July 5, 1921, Mackay, at last, was declared legally dead.

  Robert Templeman emigrated to Australia, and no one ever heard from him again. Before disappearing, he smuggled Mamen’s small personal notebook past the Canadian government authorities and returned it to the Mamen family as he had promised Mamen he would. In it were Mamen’s last letters to his mother and his fiancée.

  In the last letter he wrote home, Mamen had willed his official diary to his father. Bartlett turned the diary over to Stefansson upon his return to Canada, and Stefansson eventually sent it to the Mamen family in Norway, to be translated from Norwegian into English for the Canadian government. When the family received the journal, they noticed that the entries for March 14–April 1 were missing. Mamen wrote honestly and freely throughout his diary and was quite damning of Stefansson, who happened to read Norwegian. The Mamen brothers 9were certain that Stefansson had removed the missing entries from the journal. When the brothers asked the Canadian government for a fee of one hundred dollars to translate it, Stefansson accused them of holding the diary for ransom and tried to have them arrested.

  In the end, Mamen’s mother asked that her son’s journal never be published in full, to honor his memory and to protect him from Stefansson editing and using the material for his own purposes, just as he did with material by Fred Maurer and John Hadley, after their deaths
. “I will do10 my share in seeing that Captain Bartlett shall be exonerated from Stefansson’s accusations,” wrote Mamen’s mother. “Bjarne wrote only good about Captain Bartlett.”

  One of Mamen’s brothers ventured to Wrangel Island in 1926 to visit his brother’s grave. He needed to see the icy, windswept shores where his brother lay. Mamen’s fiancée, Ellen, remained close to the Mamen family in the years following his death. “Ellen has had11 a great deal to bear—poor little one,” wrote Valborg Mamen, Mamen’s mother. “She is a good and honest little woman whom I love very much. Yes, life is not easy. To most people it is not a dance on roses, I believe, but there is nothing to do but to take it patiently and everything will be endured.. . .”

  Given the bond they shared, it is almost certain that McKinlay confided to Bartlett his suspicions about the death of George Breddy. After reporting to the authorities in Ottawa, McKinlay never talked about it again. It might have been a suicide, although McKinlay didn’t believe it. But the story that McKinlay and the rest of them told and stuck to was that Breddy had died of an “accidental shooting.”

  Although McKinlay had given his official statement regarding the death in October of 1914, he was asked by the Supreme Court of British Columbia to make an official declaration in November 1923 before a notary public, mayor, or chief magistrate of any city, regarding the death of George Breddy. In it, McKinlay stated: “The said death 12was caused by the accidental discharge of the deceased’s revolver while he was engaged in cleaning it.”