Transcriber’s Note

Hyphenations have been standardised.

[Page 27]—changed way to away

[Page 160]—changed paces to places

[Page 252] and [Page 309]—Nordenskïold and
Nordenskiöld, have been left spelt as is.

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE KARLUK

THE KARLUK IN THE ICE-PACK

“The snow formed a blanket on the ice and later on its melting and freezing cemented the ice snugly about the ship.” [See page 26]

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE KARLUK

Flagship of Vilhjalmar Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913-16

AS RELATED BY HER MASTER, ROBERT A. BARTLETT, AND HERE SET DOWN BY RALPH T. HALE

Illustrated from charts and photographs

BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1916
By SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)

Printers
S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U.S.A.

TO
MRS. WILLIAM BARTLETT

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE KARLUK

THE DRIFT OF THE KARLUK

CHAPTER I

THE EXPEDITION AND ITS OBJECTS

We did not all come back.

Fifteen months after the Karluk, flagship of Vilhjalmar Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition, steamed out of the navy yard at Esquimault, British Columbia, the United States revenue cutter, Bear, that perennial Good Samaritan of the Arctic, which thirty years before had been one of the ships to rescue the survivors of the Greely Expedition from Cape Sabine, brought nine of us back again to Esquimault—nine white men out of the twenty, who, with two Eskimo men, an Eskimo woman and her two little girls—and a black cat—comprised the ship’s company when she began her westward drift along the northern coast of Alaska on the twenty-third of September, 1913. Years of sealing in the waters about Newfoundland and of Arctic voyaging and ice-travel with Peary had given me a variety of experience to fall back upon by way of comparison; the events of those fifteen months, I must say, justified the prophecy that I made in a letter to a Boston friend, just before we left Esquimault: “This will have the North Pole trip ‘beaten to a frazzle.’”

It did; and there were two main reasons why.

One was that the Karluk, though an old-time whaler, was not built, as the Roosevelt was, especially for withstanding ice-pressure; very few ships are. Dr. Nansen’s ship, the Fram, was built for the purpose and has had a glorious record in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. The Karluk, a brigantine of 247 tons, 126 feet long, 23 feet in beam, drawing 16-1/2 feet when loaded, was built in Oregon originally to be a tender for the salmon-fisheries of the Aleutian Islands. Her duty had been to go around among the stations and pick up fish for the larger ships. The word karluk, in fact, is Aleut for fish. When later in her career she was put into the whaling service her bow and sides were sheathed with two-inch Australian ironwood but she had neither the strength to sustain ice-pressure nor the engine-power to force her way through loose ice. She had had, however, an honorable career in the now virtually departed industry of Arctic whaling, and was personally and pleasantly known to Stefansson, who had travelled on her from place to place along the Alaskan coast on several occasions during his expeditions of 1906-7 and 1908-12.

The other reason was that the winter of 1913-14 was unprecedented in the annals of northern Alaska. It came on unusually early, as we were presently to learn, and for severity of storm and cold had not its equal on record.

The National Geographic Society had originally planned to finance our expedition, and it was only at the urgent request of the Canadian premier, the Right Hon. R. L. Borden, that the Society relinquished its direction of the enterprise. The Canadian Government felt that since the country to be explored was Canadian territory it was only fitting that the expedition fly its flag and be financed from its treasury.

When I returned from the seal-fisheries to Brigus, my old home in Newfoundland, in the spring of 1918, I found awaiting me a telegram from Stefansson, asking me to join his expedition and take charge of the Karluk. I went at once to New York, then to Ottawa for a day with the government authorities and direct from there to Victoria, B. C. It was the middle of May and there was work to be done to get the ship ready to sail in June.

It was an elaborate expedition, one of the largest and most completely equipped, I believe, that have ever gone into the Arctic. It differed, too, in one other respect than that of size, from previous Arctic expeditions, in that its main objects were essentially practical,—in fact, one might say, commercial. It was in two divisions. The northern party, under Stefansson himself, was primarily to investigate the theory so ably advanced by Dr. R. A. Harris of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey that new land—perhaps a new continent—was to be found north of Beaufort Sea, which is that part of the Arctic Ocean immediately to the north of Alaska. “The main work of the party aboard the Karluk”—to quote Stefansson—“was to be the exploration of the region lying west of the Parry Islands and especially that portion lying west and northwest from Prince Patrick Island. The Karluk was to sail north approximately along the 141st meridian until her progress was interfered with either by ice or by the discovery of land. If land were discovered a base was to be established upon it, but if the obstruction turned out to be ice an effort was to be made to follow the edge eastward with the view of making a base for the first year’s work near the southwest corner of Prince Patrick Island, or, failing that, on the west coast of Banks Island.” The Karluk was to go first to Herschel Island, the old rendezvous of the Arctic whaling fleet and the northernmost station of the Canadian Mounted Police. If she should be beset in the ice and forced to drift, it was expected that certain theories about the direction of Arctic currents would be tested, and there would also be opportunity for dredging and sounding.

THE KARLUK IN HER WHALING DAYS

Both of these main objects were accomplished: Stefansson ultimately found new land and the Karluk engaged in an Arctic drift, but neither result was attained in quite the way which was planned when we were getting the ship ready in May and June, 1913. We returned—some of us—rather earlier than we had expected, for we were prepared to be away until September, 1916, and contrary to one of the theories of Arctic currents we did not drift across the Pole to the Greenland shore. Before we started some of the newspaper accounts of the expedition said that the ship might be crushed in the ice; the newspapers are more often correct than they are supposed to be.

Travelling to Herschel Island on the Mary Sachs and the Alaska, small schooners equipped with gasolene engines, the southern party, under Dr. R. M. Anderson, who had been Stefansson’s only white companion on his previous expeditions, was to map the islands already discovered east of the mouth of the Mackenzie River; to make a collection of the Arctic flora and fauna; to survey the channels among the islands, in the hope of establishing trade-routes; to make a geological survey of the coast from Cape Parry to Kent Peninsula and of Victoria Island north and east of Prince Albert Sound, with the primary object of investigating copper-bearing formations; and to study still further the blond Eskimo who had been discovered by Stefansson in 1910.

Peary’s attainment of the North Pole in 1909, the goal of three centuries of struggle, enabled the world to give attention to problems unrelated to polar discovery and afforded men an opportunity to realize not only that a million square miles in the Arctic still remained marked on the maps as “unexplored territory,” but also that a great deal remained to be done in regions which already had technically been “discovered.” Stefansson himself had already proved this. The shores of Dolphin and Union Straits, for instance, had been mapped by Dr. John Richardson as far back as 1826, yet Stefansson, when he found the blond Eskimo there in 1910, was the first white man on record who had ever visited that tribe in all its history. After his return from that remarkable expedition, I had made his acquaintance at a dinner in New York, some time previous to the planning of the expedition of 1913-16, and admired him for his scientific achievements and for his skill and daring in living so long off the country in his many months of exploration in the territory east of the Mackenzie River.

The scientific staff gathered for the expedition was large and well-equipped. Besides Stefansson, anthropologist, and Dr. Anderson, zoologist, it included twelve men who were all specialists. The Canadian Geological Survey detailed four men to our party: George Malloch, an expert on coal deposits and stratiography, who had been a graduate student at Yale; J. J. O’Neill, a mining geologist, whose specialty was copper; and Kenneth Chipman and J. R. Cox, skillful topographers. For studying ocean currents and tides and the treasures that might be brought up from the bottom of the sea we had James Murray of Glasgow, oceanographer, who had worked for many years with the late Sir John Murray, one of the world’s greatest authorities on the ocean. Murray had been with Sir Ernest Shackleton on his Antartic expedition and afterwards had been biologist of the boundary survey of Colombia, South America. To study the fish of the Arctic Ocean we had Fritz Johansen, who had been marine zoologist with Mylius Erichsen in East Greenland and had done scientific work for the Department of Agriculture at Washington. As forester we had Bjärne Mamen, from Christiania, Norway, who had been on a trip to Spitsbergen and had done work in the timber-lands of British Columbia. As the study of the Eskimo was one of the most interesting objects of the expeditions we quite naturally had two anthropologists besides Stefansson, one, Dr. Henri Beuchat of Paris, the other, Dr. D. Jenness, an Oxford Rhodes Scholar, from New Zealand. The magnetician was William Laird McKinlay, a graduate of the University of Glasgow, who had been studying in the Canadian Meteorological Observatory in Toronto. The photographer was George H. Wilkins, a New Zealander, who had been a photographer in the Balkan War and possessed mechanical ability. He had a motion-picture apparatus as well as other cameras. In medical charge of the expedition was Dr. Alister Forbes Mackay, who had served in the British navy after his graduation from the University of Edinburgh, and, like Murray, had accompanied Shackleton into the Antarctic. Five of these twelve men, as shall be related, were to lay down their lives in the cause of science during the coming year.

The crew consisted of the following: R. A. Bartlett, master; Alexander Anderson, first officer; Charles Barker, second officer; John Munro, chief engineer; Robert J. Williamson, second engineer; Robert Templeman, steward; Ernest F. Chafe, messroom boy; John Brady, S. Stanley Morris, A. King and H. Williams, able seamen; and F. W. Maurer and G. Breddy, firemen. Six of these men—good men and true—were starting on their last voyage. One other member of the crew was added in Alaska,—John Hadley, who signed on as carpenter.

Photograph copyrighted, 1914, by Lomen Bros., Alaska

VILHJALMAR STEFANSSON

By June 16 we had the Karluk outfitted and were ready to leave our berth at the Esquimault Navy Yard. Official photographs were taken and a luncheon was given in Victoria at which Sir Richard McBride, the Premier of British Columbia, on behalf of the people of the province, presented Stefansson with a silver plate, suitably engraved. Stefansson replied and Dr. Anderson and I were also called upon. Later the mayor and aldermen of Victoria visited the Karluk and presented us with a set of flags to use when new lands were found.

CHAPTER II

THE VOYAGE BEGINS

On June 17, cheered on our way by the good wishes of the people among whom we had spent a pleasant month, we left Esquimault for Nome. The trip north was a memorable one for me, for I had never been up the Alaskan coast before and enjoyed the beautiful scenery. We reached Nome July 7 and remained there until the thirteenth, taking on supplies that had come up on the mail-boat Victoria from Seattle and transferring supplies from the Karluk to the dock for the two other ships of our little fleet.

Wilkins Malloch Beuchat O’Neill Cox McKinlay

Mamen McConnell Jenness

Chipman

Mackay Bartlett Stefansson Anderson Murray Johansen

THE LEADERS AND THE SCIENTIFIC STAFF BEFORE THE DEPARTURE FROM NOME

On July 13, with a farewell salute from the Bear, which happened to be in port at the time, we left Nome for Port Clarence, which we reached the next day. All hands immediately set to work getting things in readiness for our voyage into the Arctic Ocean. We blew down the boiler, overhauled the engines, took on fresh water and rearranged our stores and equipment, so that we might know where everything was to be found. The weather was very variable, usually good but very windy at times, with occasional showers. Some of the scientific staff went ashore and cut grass for use in our boots later on; when a man is wearing the deerskin boots so essential in Arctic work, it is necessary for him to line the bottom with dry grass to act as a cushion for his feet as he walks over the rough sea ice and also to absorb the perspiration, for otherwise his feet would be in constant danger of freezing.

By July 27 we were at last ready to start. Some further repairs were still to be made on the Alaska so she remained behind but at three o’clock in the morning we weighed anchor and, accompanied by the Mary Sachs, proceeded to sea. Besides the officers and crew we had on board the Karluk, Stefansson and his secretary, Burt McConnell, with Murray, Mamen, Malloch, Jenness, Beuchat, McKinlay and Dr. Mackay. We had also a white dog-driver who left us at Point Barrow.

As we were steaming along in the forenoon, about a mile and a half offshore, abreast of Tin City, I saw a rowboat coming towards us, making signals to attract our attention. We altered our course to meet her and when she came alongside we found that she had brought us a message for Stefansson, which had been telephoned from Teller to Tin City. It proved to be from an aviator named Fowler who was then at Teller with his aeroplane; he asked permission to bring his machine on board the Karluk, accompany us for a while and later on fly from the ship to the shore. The Karluk’s deck was already pretty well crowded with dogs, sledges, sacks of coal and other gear, and Stefansson finally decided that it would be impossible to grant the request.

About two o’clock in the afternoon we had Cape Prince of Wales a-beam on the starboard side and shaped our course to round the shoal off the cape. There was a strong westerly wind blowing. By this time the Mary Sachs was hull down astern, so we put about and went back to see if everything was all right with her. When we left Port Clarence we had put Wilkins on board the Sachs to run her engine, on account of the temporary disability of her own engineer and now, as we came near enough to exchange words, we found that the engineer was feeling well enough to perform his duties, so we lowered a boat and transferred Wilkins to the Karluk again.

With the Sachs keeping in shore we proceeded on our way. The wind began to blow harder and veered to the northwest, bringing in a dense fog and a rising sea and making it necessary to put the ship on the starboard tack, reaching towards the Siberian coast. We continued on this course the rest of the day and until well after midnight; then the wind veered round to the west again and the sea moderated, but the fog continued. At 2 A. M. on the twenty-eighth our steering-gear gave out but fortunately we soon had it repaired. At eight o’clock we reefed her and headed towards the American shore. The fog still hung low and thick but there were occasional gleams of sunshine. We were now steaming through Bering Strait, across the Arctic Circle, and had twenty-four hours of daylight.

Finally, at four o’clock on the morning of July 30, the fog began to lift and by eleven it was fine and clear again, with a strong north-northeast wind. The Sachs was nowhere to be seen; in fact the Karluk did not see her again. We were now close to Cape Thompson, steaming towards Point Hope. At ten o’clock in the evening we dropped anchor off Point Hope, near the Eskimo village. The Eskimo in their skin-boats and whaleboats came out to meet us, to trade dogs, boats, furs and sealskins. About midnight we moved nearer to the land, and early in the morning Stefansson went ashore to continue the trading and make arrangements for the services of Panyurak and Asatshak, two Eskimo boys eighteen or twenty years old, who also went by the names of Jerry and Jimmy and were good dog-drivers and hunters. Stefansson had lived so many years with the Eskimo of Alaska and the Mackenzie River region, that he knew them personally, men, women and children, from Point Barrow east along the northern coast, as well as I knew the Eskimo of Whale Sound on the Greenland coast, that little tribe of Arctic Highlanders, numbering only about two hundred and forty, from whom we chose the Eskimo that accompanied us on the Roosevelt to Cape Sheridan and played so important a part in the attainment of the North Pole. Later in the morning of the thirty-first, we weighed anchor and steamed around to the north side of Point Hope, where we did more trading, and then proceeded on our way up the coast. By noon we had Cape Lisburne a-beam and shaped our course for Icy Cape, to go about ten miles outside of Blossom Shoals, a dangerous reef off Blossom Point, which has always been dreaded by mariners. Our scientists were busily engaged in writing letters, to be mailed at Point Barrow and taken back on the Bear which calls there once a year, usually in August.

Thus far our progress all along had been satisfactory. Early on the morning of August 1, however, we began to note indications of the presence of ice on our weather side. The water began to get smoother, and when we tested its temperature by hauling up a bucketful at intervals, as the day wore on, we found it dropping steadily, until it reached thirty-nine degrees; the water changed color, too, becoming dirtier. Finally in the afternoon we could see the ice plainly on our port bow. We had seen the “ice-blink” for some time before; now the ice itself hove in sight about two miles away, with some larger pieces scattered here and there among the floes. I learned afterwards that up to a few days before we should have had clear water all the way to Point Barrow. The ice curved in towards the shore, so that we had to change our course; we had been steaming parallel with the land but now we had to head towards shore or else run the danger of being caught in the ice. About midnight our progress was still further barred and we had to turn around and steam back to windward for a mile or so to keep in the open water, for the strong north wind was driving the ice towards the land. The next day the wind changed and blew off the land; this started the ice off shore and we were able to move eastward, but soon the offshore breeze died down and we had to turn back again. Finally in the afternoon we made another attempt, with some success; we were gradually nearing Point Barrow.

CHAPTER III

WE MEET THE ICE AND GET A POLAR BEAR

While we were steaming along off Point Belcher, about seventy-five miles to the southwest of Point Barrow, I was in the crow’s nest, which on the Karluk was situated at the foretopgallant-mast, conning the ship through the broken ice, when through my binoculars I saw a polar bear about three miles away on the level floe. This was a welcome sight, for the meat would be an addition to our current food supply and the hide useful in several ways. There was no wind, so the bear did not scent us. At first we could not go towards him because the ice was too closely packed,—in fact at times we had to steam away from him to follow the open lanes of water—but finally we managed to get headed in the right direction. When we got within a few hundred yards of him he spied us and promptly went into the water. That was just what I wanted; if he had stayed on the ice he would probably have started to run and as he could run much faster than the ship could steam he would probably have got away from us.

With the bear in the water I now worked the ship to keep between him and the ice and as polar bears, though they are good swimmers, do not often dive, I knew that with ordinary luck we should get him. Shouting to the mate to keep an eye on him I ran down the rope-ladder from the barrel and rushed forward to the forecastle-head with a Winchester in my hand. Some of the other members of the expedition, too, hearing the word bear, grabbed their rifles and blazed away at him. Every one was pretty much excited and for a few moments the bear seemed possessed of a charmed life. At last my second shot hit him in the back and my third in the head. This finished him; he keeled over and floated. We lowered a boat, towed the bear to the side and hoisted him on board; then the Eskimo skinned him. He was old and, as he had on his summer coat, his hair was sparse and yellow and of no great value. The Eskimo cut up the meat for dog food; we should have used it ourselves if we had not just obtained a large supply of fresh meat at Nome and Port Clarence.

The skin of this old bear had something of a history. The Eskimo stretched it on a frame and hung it up in the rigging for the wind and sun to cure it. I had a pair of trousers made from the softest part of the skin, which later I gave to Malloch. From the remainder I had a sleeping-robe made which I used on the ice from the time the ship sank until I reached the coast of Siberia. There I traded it for a deerskin which I afterwards gave to a native at East Cape. The skin of the polar bear makes the best sleeping-robe for Arctic use and the skin of a young bear is also the best for trousers, because it will wear the longest and, furthermore, the hair will not fall out, in spite of the brushing and pounding you have to give it to get rid of the snow that will cling to it after the day’s march.

Some time after we got this bear, I saw another one from the crow’s nest. We were going away from him, however, and getting along pretty well, so I hardly felt it wise to stop for him. Occasionally we saw walrus asleep on the ice.

August 3 the wind again veered to the southwest, pushing the ice on shore and jamming the ship in it so that we were unable to make any progress. We were about four miles off the Seahorse Islands. Here we found a current running to the eastward parallel with the shore and we began to drift with this current in an easterly direction which was the way we wanted to go. By eleven o’clock we had reached a point about two miles from shore and twenty-five miles southwest of Point Barrow.

The early presence of ice on this coast convinced us that all was not to be plain sailing on our voyage to Herschel Island and that it behooved us to save every hour possible. With this in mind, Stefansson now decided to go ashore and make his way to Point Barrow on foot. He would need at least a day there to obtain furs for our use and he could have his work all done by the time we reached there. Accordingly, at eleven o’clock, he took the doctor and a couple of Eskimo, with a dog sledge, and went ashore over the ice, the Eskimo and the dog-sledge returning late in the afternoon. It was summer and there was no snow or ice on the land so by walking all night in the continuous August daylight, Stefansson and the doctor reached Point Barrow in the morning.

By the sixth, usually drifting only a few miles a day but occasionally getting clear of the ice for a while to go ahead under our own power, we had reached a point about a mile from shore off Cape Smythe, which is only a few miles from Point Barrow. At midnight Stefansson returned from Point Barrow, bringing with him some new members of the expedition: an Eskimo family of five, consisting of Kerdrillo or Kuralluk, a man about thirty-five years old, his wife Keruk, about twenty-eight, and their children, a girl of seven who went by the name of Helen and a baby called Mugpi not much over a year old; an Eskimo named Kataktovick, between eighteen and twenty years old, who was already a widower, with a baby girl whom he had left with his mother; and John Hadley, a man between fifty-five and sixty years old, who for a long time had been in charge of the whaling station at Cape Smythe owned by Mr. Charles Brower, the proprietor of the store at Point Barrow. Mr. Hadley had resigned his position to go east to Banks Land and establish a trading-station of his own, chiefly to get foxskins by barter with the Eskimo. As we were on our way to Herschel Island, now was Mr. Hadley’s chance to get to his destination, for at Herschel Island he could be transferred to the Mary Sachs or the Alaska, when they reached there, and so go east in the direction of Banks Land with the southern party in the sequel Mr. Hadley, who, as I have already mentioned was put on the ship’s articles as carpenter, proved a very valuable addition to the party, but he did not get to Banks Land.

While we were at Cape Smythe, the white dog-driver who had accompanied us from Port Clarence asked for his discharge and went on shore. We sent our mail ashore to be taken to Point Barrow. As a result of our trading with the Eskimo here we obtained altogether three skin-boats, two kayaks and a number of sealskins for boot-soles. The Eskimo Kerdrillo brought his three dogs to add to our own.

There is a wide difference between the skin-boat and the kayak. The former is shaped not unlike an ordinary rowboat and is large enough to hold from ten to twenty persons. Over the framework are stretched sealskins, sewed together with deer sinew, which makes the boat water-tight. The skin-boat will stand a lot of wear and tear. The kayak, on the other hand, is small, pointed at both ends and completely covered over except for an opening in the middle, where the single occupant sits. The kayak is used for hunting and as it is small and light can be easily placed on a sledge and drawn over the ice.

During the early morning of August 7 the ice began to move us eastward around Point Barrow, where we met a current from the southeast and began to drift towards the northwest, until by the next day we were ten miles from land. We were still unable to use our engines and the ice was closely packed, though it had been smashed and pounded by its constant impact against the grounded floe along the shore. While we were still jammed in the ice we took the opportunity of filling up our tanks from a big floe not far away on which there was a lake of fresh water where the sun and the rain had melted the ice.

Early on the ninth we got clear of the ice at last and steamed eastward along the shore, free for the first time for many days. The ice was closely packed outside of us but near shore there was open water and we had little difficulty in making our way along. Navigation was precarious on account of shallow water, but we used the hand lead-line constantly. On the tenth while rounding a point of ice we got aground for two hours, but the use of the anchors and engines enabled us to back off into deep water again. The bottom was soft with the silt carried down the rivers in the spring freshets and the ship sustained no damage. We now made pretty steady progress to the eastward, though the ice constantly threatened our path, and by the eleventh had reached Cross Island, about half way from Point Barrow to Herschel Island.

CHAPTER IV

WE ARE FROZEN IN

It was clear by this time that there would be no chance this year to reach new lands to the north by direct voyaging and that we should be lucky if we succeeded in winning our way through to Herschel Island before the ice closed in for the winter. By the afternoon of the eleventh we managed to get as far east as Lion Reef. Here we tied on to a grounded floe to hold our gain and take advantage of our next chance to go east. Between Lion Reef and the mainland a few miles away ran a current which set the ice moving smartly in all directions, but unfortunately we drew too much water to venture into those shallow lanes.

I took the opportunity afforded by our pause to examine the stem of the ship and found that by contact with the ice two of the brass stem-plates were gone and several bolts loosened in those that remained.

Whenever we were stationary in the ice, Murray, the oceanographer, would use his dredge. He had been doing this in fact all along the coast, ever since we were off Blossom Shoals. At this time he used a dredge which he had brought with him; later on he used dredges made by our engineers.

The dredge consisted of a rectangular frame, two feet by three, made of four iron rods two inches wide by half an inch thick, welded together at the corners, with a bag about two feet deep securely fastened to this framework. The bag was made of cotton twine in a two-and-a-half inch mesh; it narrowed towards the bottom. Sometimes cheese-cloth was placed inside the bag to catch the animalculæ. A rope was fastened to the middle of one side of the framework so that, when lowered to the bottom of the sea, the framework would maintain an upright position, with the bag extended out behind it.

When Murray got ready to use the dredge he would get over the rail of the ship, which was only four feet above the surface of the ice, go to the edge of a lead and find out the depth of the water by the hand lead-line; then he would lower the dredge, put the rope on his back and walk along the edge of the lead, dragging the dredge behind him. He could handle it alone up to a depth of twenty fathoms; beyond that he had to have help, which we all of us gladly gave. I do not believe that dredging was ever done in that part of the Arctic before. Before we got through we had brought up a good many specimens which were entirely unknown to Murray, and others, such as coral, which we had hardly expected to find in that neighborhood.

While we were tied up off Lion Reef, I sent out a boat to make soundings; the report was so promising that we started on our way again, on the morning of August 12, steaming through the loose ice and keeping as near shore as possible. The ice moved according to the direction and velocity of the wind, to which its irregularities afforded plenty of sail-like surfaces. The wind had been northwest, keeping the ice packed towards shore; it now veered round to the southwest and loosened the ice to the northeast, outside of the reef. We steamed along through the open water and because the ice near the shore was closely packed, we were driven farther off shore than I liked. We had to follow the open lanes, however, and go where they led.

About eight P. M. we were stopped by a large, unbroken sheet of ice. This was very similar to the ice which I have seen in Melville Bay on the west Greenland coast; it was part of the past season’s ice. Seldom over a foot thick, it was honeycombed with water-holes; the Roosevelt could have ploughed her way through it but the Karluk was powerless to do so.

We were now half way across Camden Bay, about fifteen miles west of Manning Point, about where Collinson, in the Enterprise, had spent the winter of 1853-4. We had come about 225 miles from Point Barrow, considerably more than half the distance to Herschel Island. It seemed at the moment as if we should be able to get through for the rest of the way. As events proved, however, this was our farthest east, for the next day, August 13, the open water closed up astern, the ice came together all around us and held the ship fast. There was scarcely any wind and consequently no movement of the ice.

The next day conditions remained the same. We tried to force our way towards the land but failed and could do nothing but wait. For several days there came no appreciable change either in weather or in our position until on the eighteenth we had a heavy snowstorm all day, which was just what was needed to make assurance doubly sure; the snow formed a blanket on the ice and later on its melting and freezing cemented the ice snugly about the ship so that she was made almost an integral part of the floe itself. The weather was perfectly calm but so dull and hazy that for several days we could not see the shore. Finally on the twenty-first we had a fine, clear day and about thirty miles south of where we lay, could see the snow-capped summits of the Romanzoff and Franklin Mountains, the northernmost range of the Rockies, the backbone of the continent.

There was very little alteration in the ship’s position until August 26 when, with a light north wind, the ice moved a few miles to the westward, carrying us with it. The next day we had a heavy snowstorm with wind from the east and we moved still farther west; the next day we drifted westward again, and the next and the next, and for a good many days, sometimes a knot an hour, sometimes faster, parallel to the land but six or seven miles away from it. At times we could see lanes of open water, but they were always too far away for us to reach with our imprisoned vessel. Yet nearer the land the water was open and, so far as we could tell from where we were, no ship would have experienced much difficulty in making her way along there in either direction. If we had used all our dynamite we could have broken a pathway for about a quarter of a mile but no farther and, as the open water was much farther away than that, there was obviously no use in trying the experiment.

Meanwhile, by August 22, Stefansson had decided to send Beuchat and Jenness ashore, to make their way eastward and join the southern party in the event of our not getting any nearer Herschel Island. In fact, besides the two anthropologists, McKinlay and Wilkins, also, could properly be regarded as passengers aboard the Karluk; their apparatus, however, was too heavy for safe transportation to the shore over the ice as it then was, loose and shifting.

All hands busied themselves in getting Beuchat and Jenness ready for their journey. On account of the precarious nature of the young ice, however, which was making in the leads towards the land and between the older floes but was not yet altogether dependable, the start was not made until the twenty-ninth. They got away about eleven A. M. with one sledge and seven dogs and a supporting party consisting of Wilkins, McConnell and the doctor and three Eskimo, two of whom were to return to the ship with the sledge and dogs and the supporting party. On the sledge they carried a skin-boat in which Beuchat and Jenness might proceed to Herschel Island, where they would find plenty of food, whether the Mary Sachs and the Alaska succeeded in reaching there or not. The whole project went awry, however, because the party had gone scarcely a mile and a half from the ship when the skin-boat was damaged, as the sledge bumped along over the rough surface of the ice, and when Stefansson went out to investigate he ordered the whole party back to the ship again.

CHAPTER V

OUR WESTWARD DRIFT BEGINS

The problem of laying in an adequate supply of fresh meat for the winter, for our dogs and ourselves, was now beginning to be a serious one. Long before this we had expected to be at Herschel Island but now with a fairly steady drift in the opposite direction it was evident that we should hardly be able to go the rest of the way before the ice broke up the next summer. This meant a whole year’s delay in carrying out the purposes of the expedition, all on account of the unexpectedly early setting in of winter, and it meant, too, the unforeseen question of a winter’s supply of fresh meat for the thirty-one human beings—twenty-four white men and seven Eskimo—now on board the Karluk. Without fresh meat there was always danger of scurvy, that blight of so many earlier Arctic explorers, which later expeditions—notably those under Peary—had been able to avoid by systematic killing of whatever game the country afforded for food.

Our four Eskimo men made daily trips to the open leads to shoot seal; they were only moderately successful, for the seal seemed to be rather scarce. Occasionally, too, we got a taste of duck-shooting as the birds came flying along the open water on their way south for the winter.

On Thursday, September 11, Wilkins, Mamen and I went out to an open lead after ducks. We took with us one of the three Peterborough canoes which we were bringing along to be transferred to the southern party at Herschel Island for use in navigating the small streams east of the Mackenzie. Dragging the canoe on a sledge to the edge of the lead, we made tea and had a little lunch, and then paddled up the lead in search of ducks. As we went along, we saw several seal and shot one which sank before we could get it.

Soon we saw the birds flying along the landward edge of the ice. We crossed over and I climbed out of the canoe into a kind of natural “blind” formed of the raftered ice, while Mamen and Wilkins paddled along towards the bottom of the lead. They met a good deal of newly formed ice, less than a quarter of an inch in thickness, which they had to smash with their paddles as they went along. There were plenty of birds near the bottom of the lead but the smashing of the ice disturbed them so that Mamen and Wilkins had to turn back and paddle over in my direction, picking out of the water as they came along a few ducks that I had shot from my blind.

The wind had changed; the ice began to close up and thin ice began to form in the smaller leads, so we had to paddle pretty fast to get out into the open lead without being caught. It was a beautiful sunshiny day and the surface of the water was so clear and smooth that, although the ship was fully two miles away from us in the ice, her rigging was reflected in our lead. We were getting sunsets now, with the gradual shortening of the daylight; the sunset was red and brilliant on this particular day, giving the white ice the lovely appearance of rose-colored quartz. We hauled out the canoe, lashed it to the sledge and left it there for another day’s shooting. Returning to the ship we found that other members of the party, too, had brought in some ducks so that among us we had about fifty birds, a good day’s work.

It was on such journeys as this that I first learned the use of the ski. Mamen was from Norway and had been a famous ski-jumper in that land of winter sports; he had won many prizes for his skill. I knew that Nansen, on his Journey from the Fram to his farthest north and back to Franz Josef Land, had used ski and so had Amundsen on his journey to the South Pole, but with Peary we had always used snowshoes and I had never had a pair of ski on my feet. Mamen now persuaded me to try skiing and a rare sport I found it. Not far from the ship we had a ski-jump, made by filling in an ice-rafter about thirty feet high with blocks of ice; we covered it with snow and then over all splashed water which froze and made the surface very slippery. We would climb up the back of the jump on the soft snow by side-stepping on our ski and then coast down the front. Mamen showed me how to do the telemark swing.

We would walk out to the water-holes on ski, with a shotgun apiece, in search of ducks. For several days we had no luck because many of the water-holes where the birds were in the habit of resting in their flight were frozen over. Finally on the fifteenth we went out again and did somewhat better. When we shot any birds, however, the young ice that formed in the leads made it difficult to get them. We would then break off a piece of ice large enough and thick enough to hold us and, standing on it as on a raft, push along with our ski-poles and work around to pick up the birds. The ice we pushed through was perhaps a quarter of an inch thick, and we would break it ahead as we went along.

Salt water does not freeze so easily as fresh water, on account of the salt, but when it does freeze the ice is much tougher and less brittle than fresh-water ice. A man breaking through fresh-water ice fractures a considerable surface; in the case of salt-water ice the hole he makes is just large enough to let him through. Salt-water ice bends and buckles but will still bear you when fresh-water ice of equal thickness will break at once. Sometimes we would find the ice too heavy to push through and once when this happened and we had to go back and get a boat into the water we found that during our absence the gulls had eaten the duck we had shot.

All this time, of course, we kept up the regular ship’s routine. The darkness was coming earlier in the afternoon as the weeks went by and by September 17 we had to light the lamp for our six o’clock supper. Already, on the fourteenth, we had put the stove up in the cabin. The days were usually cloudy and the engine-room and the galley-stove did not supply quite enough heat to warm the cabin, though in our skiing trips we found it still comfortable in rubber-boots, sweaters and overalls.

CHAPTER VI

STEFANSSON’S DEPARTURE

For several days the ship had remained stationary,—that is, the ice had shown no signs of movement, and the weather had been generally calm. The Eskimo were becoming more successful in shooting seal for our fresh meat supply, which we kept in a kind of natural refrigerator that we had made by scooping out a hole in the ice not far from the ship. With the ship now apparently securely fixed for the winter, however, Stefansson came to the conclusion that it would be a good thing for some one to go ashore and get game.

He talked the matter over with me at some length on September 18. Kerdrillo was the only one of the Eskimo who had had any experience at deer-hunting and he knew a good deal about the country to the back of us. In fact he was more familiar with land hunting than with ice-travel. I had shot plenty of caribou in Grant Land and Ellesmere Land, as well as in Newfoundland and elsewhere, and volunteered to go, but Stefansson was the only one on board who not only knew how to hunt caribou but also was fully acquainted with the country. He had shot caribou in 1908 and 1909 along the shore from Cape Halkett to Flaxman Island and was not only familiar with all the fishing and trapping places of the Eskimo, not to be easily found by a newcomer to the region, but also knew every Eskimo there personally and might be able to buy fish and meat from them. He might even get some of the Eskimo families to join the expedition, the men as hunters and the women as seamstresses to make fur clothing for the ship’s company to wear during the winter which was now upon us. He had heard at Point Barrow that the carcasses of two whales had come ashore at Harrison Bay; these would make good food for our dogs. He decided, therefore, that the task logically devolved upon him. Plans were accordingly made for him to go ashore on the twentieth. We were off the mouth of the Colville River at this time, having drifted half way back to Point Barrow since reaching our farthest east the middle of August.

On the morning of the twentieth I was up early and got things together for the shore party which, besides Stefansson, consisted of Jenness, McConnell and Wilkins, the two Point Hope Eskimo, Jimmy and Jerry, with two sledges and twelve dogs. For supplies they took two Burberry tents, a stove with piping, two axes, a dozen candles, four gallons of alcohol, a box of dog-biscuit, six tins of compressed tea-tablets, ten pounds of sugar, a supply of matches, three sleeping-bags, sheepskin sleeping-robes, two pieces of canvas for tents, four slabs of bacon, ten pounds of lard, one hundred and twenty pounds of fish, twenty pounds of rice, a box of tinned beef, five pounds of salt, a case of Underwood man-pemmican (we had two kinds of pemmican, one for men, the other for dogs, equally palatable and nourishing) fifteen pounds of chocolate, a box of ship’s biscuits or “pilot bread,” a Mannlicher rifle and a shotgun, with ammunition, six seal-floats and a camp cooking-set.

We all had luncheon together as usual. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the trip that was about to take place. Stefansson expected to be back in about ten days and there seemed no reason to suppose that the ship would not remain where she was until the next summer brought a genuine smashing-up of the ice and freed her. We all went out on the ice, however, to see the shore party off and Wilkins took some moving pictures.

Stefansson

STEFANSSON AND HIS PARTY LEAVING THE KARLUK

Before he started, Stefansson left me the following formal letter of instruction:

C. G. S. Karluk, Sept. 20, 1913.

Dear Captain Bartlett:

On the trip for which I am leaving the Karluk to-day, I expect to make land on the largest second from the west of the Jones Islands (Thetis Island). If the ice is strong enough I expect to cross thence to near Beechey Point to hunt caribou; if feasible I may go on to the mouth of the Itkuilik River, known to the Eskimo as Itkilhkpe, to see if fish can be purchased there from the natives. 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 she goes east, the beacons should be erected on accessible islands; if west they should be at Cape Halkett, Pitt Point, or Point Simpson, to facilitate the finding of the ship in fog or a blizzard by our party coming from shore or by hunters who are overtaken by thick weather while away from the ship. It will be well to have established four lines of beacons, running in the four cardinal directions from the ship to as great a distance as practicable. There should be some arrangement by which these beacons indicate in what direction the ship is from each of them. And some of them should have the distance of the ship marked upon them. These beacons need not be large, but should not be over 100 yards apart to be of use in thick weather. Flags or other fluttering things should not be used, for bears might be scared away by them. On days when an on-shore wind is blowing it might be desirable that Dr. Mackay run lines of soundings out in various directions from the ship. 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, Malloch locating the stations for McKinlay so as to save unnecessary duplications of instruments.

Except for some especial reason, the Eskimo woman Keruk should be kept sewing boots of the winter sea-ice type—deer legs, using ugsug soles.

It is likely that we shall be back to the ship in ten days, if no accident happens.

V. Stefansson.

Stefansson and his party got away at half past one in the afternoon on September 20. The next day we began preparations for the departure of Mamen and Malloch, to carry out Stefansson’s instructions, making a tent on the sewing-machine and getting started on the fur clothing, of which we had not made any up to this time. This was “tobacco day,” which at this time came once a month, when the allowance of a pound per man was given out, but which later on we changed to come around every twenty-two days.

As the ship was stationary in the ice I suggested to Murray that this would be a good time to rig up a tidal gauge; he took kindly to the suggestion and made preparations to carry it out. The day before, McKinlay had added to our equipment an anemometer for measuring the velocity of the wind, putting it up aloft on the edge of the crow’s nest, where the wind blew, if anywhere; the wires ran down the mast and along the deck to McKinlay’s room where he had the indicator.

CHAPTER VII

DRIVEN BY THE STORM

All day long on both September 21 and 22, it was dull and cloudy and the barometer was falling steadily, so I was not surprised at daylight September 23 to find the wind blowing from the east forty miles an hour. McKinlay’s anemometer was seeing active service at once. I noticed that the Eskimo seemed very uneasy and made frequent visits to the dredge-hole, where we were in the habit of using the hand lead-line to detect movements of the ice; whenever the ice moved we could feel the lead coming with us. After breakfast I began to visit the dredge-hole myself more often than usual. At quarter of ten I was there and felt no drift but at ten, while I had the line in my hand, the lead started to go. Kerdrillo and Kataktovick were near me; handing them the line I asked them what they thought; they instantly replied that we were moving. Immediately I had everything that we had placed on the ice taken aboard again, including the sledge and the canoe which we had used in our duck-shooting, for it seemed likely that the ice would eventually break up. Towards afternoon it began to snow and soon a blizzard was in full blast.

On the twenty-fourth the storm moderated and the sun came out for a short time. The temperature was mild and there was a good deal of water to be seen to the northeast. The Eskimo resumed their hunting and killed three seal. The rate of drift was about two miles an hour; this increased somewhat in the afternoon, when the wind freshened. Sometimes the ship would appear to be in a vast floating island of ice, with water on every hand but too far away for us to reach even if we could have made our way through the solid mass in which we were frozen.

The next day, September 25, the gale, which had sprung up again, continued with unabated violence and the air was filled with snow. The season was wearing on towards the time of unbroken darkness and there were several hours now in the twenty-four when it was intensely dark. The nights were moonless and starless, for the air was filled with blinding snow.

All about us we could hear the ice tearing and grinding. The water through which we were drifting was comparatively shallow and there was danger not only from the great fragments of the floe, which turned up and toppled over and over, but also, and chiefly, from the heavier floes which occurred here and there and had protruding edges, submerged and hidden, like the long, underwater arm that ripped the side out of the Titanic. 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. At any moment, too, the ice-floe might smash up and release her to the peril of being crushed by the impact of the floating fragments. We all slept with our clothes on—when we slept at all—and kept the boats loaded with supplies, ready to be lowered at an instant’s notice.

The drift of the Karluk was a much worse experience than the voyage of the Roosevelt through Kennedy Channel from Kane Basin into the Arctic Ocean. The waters traversed by the Roosevelt were, of course, narrower than Beaufort Sea and they were filled with floating icebergs and floe-ice, but there we had continuous daylight and could see what we were doing and, also, knew definitely where we were headed, whereas in the Karluk we might drift in the ice even to destruction, unable to do anything to save the ship. The Roosevelt, to be sure, as I have said, was built for pushing through the broken ice but I very much doubt whether, even she, once frozen in like the Karluk, would have been able to extricate herself, and how much less effective was the Karluk with her weaker construction and less powerful engines. As long as the ice remained frozen solidly about the ship, our chief danger was from the heavy grounded floes; if it broke up, then the fragments were more likely to be fatal to the Karluk than they would be to a ship built like the Roosevelt.

We were not far from land. In fact from the crow’s nest during the day I caught a glimpse of what I took to be Cape Halkett. The next day the storm subsided, conditions improved somewhat, though our drift continued, and by the chart we were not far now from Point Barrow. The hunters were able to go out and the Eskimo brought in three seal.

When we started our drift we had brought the dogs aboard to avoid losing any, because the dogs, of course, were essential to our safety if anything should happen to the ship; we now put them back again on the ice. When aboard ship they were chained in all parts of the deck, wherever we could find room for them, with a leeway of about two feet for each. They had to be kept separate in this way so that they could not get at each other, for when a fight started it was liable to be a fight to a finish. There were about forty of them all told and when they were on board they all barked constantly day and night.

I do not consider the Alaskan dog the equal of the dogs we had with us on the North Pole trips with Peary. I don’t know whether contact with civilization has caused them to deteriorate or not. It has certainly had that effect on the Eskimo who, since the coming of the whalers and traders, have not had to depend for their living on the country but go to Point Barrow and the other stations and buy whatever they need, exchanging pelts from the animals they shoot or trap. The dogs that Stefansson took with him on his shore journey on September 20 were obtained from one of the best dog-drivers in Nome. The best of the remaining dogs were none of them so good as the worst of the dogs we had on the North Pole trips. They required more food, could not stand fatigue so well, though they were heavier than the North Greenland dogs, and they were trained for land, not for ice, travel.

When I came to use them later on, I found that they were terrified by the groaning and crushing of the ice and, when they were going over new ice that buckled, they would become frightened and instead of separating would all huddle together for mutual protection; perhaps they were not to be blamed for this, for though it is all right if you are used to it, the shifting ice can furnish the uninitiated with an unlimited number of surprises. In such times of danger they would not respond either to the voice or to the whip of the driver.

Driving Eskimo dogs is a hard job at best, for they seem possessed of the spirit of Satan, himself, even the best of them. The North Greenland Eskimo harness their dogs to the sledge fan-wise, each dog having traces that fasten directly to the sledge itself, whereas the Alaskan Eskimo harness the dogs to a long rope, at intervals on either side. With both methods the dogs get the harness tangled again and again and then, out of the range of the whip, they will sit down and blink at the driver in a way calculated to make him feel like committing cruelty to animals. They will all of them chew the harness and free themselves if you give them half a chance.

We fed the dogs on the Karluk on dried salmon which we obtained at Nome, together with rice and oatmeal and Indian meal, all cooked together. As long as we had steam on the main boiler we cooked the dog-food by letting the steam blow through a hose leading into a pork barrel filled with the ingredients. We always served the dogs with hot food—and it was quite good enough for a man to eat—and after the boiler was blown down we cooked it every night in the galley stove. Mr. Hadley looked after feeding the dogs, and no better man could have been found, for he understood not only how to feed them but also how important it was to have them well cared for. Whenever possible we kept the dogs on the ice, for the freedom was good for them. Even then, to prevent their fighting, we often had to chain them up to raftered ice.

It is a mistake to think that Arctic weather is characterized by unvarying cold; on the contrary it offers radical differences in temperature from day to day, and the seasons differ greatly from year to year. We were experiencing an extraordinarily early and severe winter and yet for the next few days now the weather was frequently mild and springlike, with temperatures above the freezing-point. This does not mean that there was any sudden thaw; the snow fell at intervals and the sky was overcast but the wind was not bitterly cold as it became later on in our drifting.

We busied ourselves, as we had from the beginning of the drift, in making preparations to leave the ship, an event which under the circumstances was probable at any moment. The Eskimo woman, Keruk, began making fur clothing for us. We put all the Jaeger underwear in large canvas bags placed where they could be reached conveniently at once. The whaleboats we provisioned each for eight persons for twenty days and we put supplies for a couple of months on deck ready to be thrown overboard. We fixed up the forward hold as a carpenter’s shop for Mr. Hadley and he started in to make a Peary sledge.

This was the kind of sledge that I had been accustomed to use on the ice on my various trips with Peary. He invented it himself, evolving it from the experience of his years of Arctic work and, in several important particulars, it was a marked improvement over the Eskimo sledge. We did not have the material to make an exact duplicate but we did the best we could.

The Peary sledge is thirteen feet long over all, with runners made each of a single piece of hickory or ash, three inches wide by an inch-and-a-half thick, bent up by steaming at each tip and shod the whole length with a steel shoe, like the tire of a wheel. The bow has a long, low rake and the stern turns up to make steering with the upstanders true as the runners slide along. The filling-in pieces are of oak, fastened with sealskin lashing, and the bed of the sledge is made of boards of soft wood, lashed to the filling-in pieces. In loading the Peary sledge we always put the bulk of the weight in the middle and left each end light; with its long rake fore and aft the sledge will swing as on a pivot, so that when you get into a position where you cannot go ahead you can back the sledge or turn it around and even go stern first if necessary, without lifting it. When, for instance, you come suddenly to a crack in the ice, when travelling with the Peary sledge, you can turn it around or steer it aside. Being constructed with lashings instead of bolts, it is flexible and adapted to the rough going over the sea ice, while in getting through young ice, on account of its turned-up rear end it can be easily dragged back on to firm ice with a rope.

CHAPTER VIII

WE DRIFT AWAY FROM THE LAND

The last day of September we got another glimpse of the land, seeing distinctly the low shore of Cooper Island, with its Eskimo houses. We were still to the eastward of Point Barrow, drifting slowly along in the pack. Mamen, the doctor and I went out to a ski-jump we had built and in trying a higher jump than usual I heeled over and, instead of landing on my ski, came down with a hard bump on my side. I didn’t let the doctor know how badly I was hurt because I didn’t want any one to know that I could be such a duffer but I was unable to lift my hand to comb my hair for several weeks.

October came in with a snowstorm and a strong northeast wind which drove us fast before it. On the morning of the first there came a crack in the ice about a foot wide, running east and west, two miles from the ship. It was too far away for us to dynamite our way to it even if it had been a likely lead for navigation and besides when you dynamite ice you must have open water for the broken fragments to overflow into or they will choke up around you and you are worse off than before. The heavy wind did not allow this crack to remain open more than a few hours.

HAULING THE DREDGE

“The dredging and soundings were both carried on through a hole in the ice, which we had made at the stern of the ship.” [See page 49]

On the second and again on the third we caught glimpses of the land. On the third the same gale that destroyed part of the town of Nome sent us bowling along to the northwest. Occasionally we saw open water but it was always far away. The weather on the fourth and fifth was delightful, with the temperature up in the forties, and on the fifth we had a beautiful sunset. Mamen, Malloch and I went ski-jumping in the bright sunshine and had a wonderful afternoon of it.

We were now fast drifting to the northwest, off Point Barrow, getting outside the twenty-fathom curve. The farther north we drifted the deeper the water was becoming and the more varied in yield, for we kept up the dredging and now we began to get flora and fauna characteristic of the deep sea, instead of the specimens peculiar to the waters near shore. Our soundings were kept up constantly and showed that we were sliding off the continental shelf, so to speak, into the ocean depths. The dredging and soundings were both carried on through a hole in the ice, which we had made at the stern of the ship. Here we had an igloo—a snow-house—for protection.

Peary had given me the first stimulus to seek information in the Arctic; he had been the first to make me feel the fascination of all this sounding and dredging, mapping out the bed of the ocean, outlining the continental shelf. These things and the search for new land in latitudes where man has never set foot before are what appeal to me. Call it love of adventure if you will; it seems to me the life that ought to appeal to any man with red blood in his veins, for as long as there is a square mile of the old earth’s surface that is unexplored, man will want to seek out that spot and find out all about it and bring back word of what he finds. Some people call the search for the North Pole a sporting event; to me it represents the unconquerable aspiration of mankind to attain an ideal. Our Karluk drift and its possibilities interested me keenly, for we were on the way to a vast region where man had never been; we were learning things about ocean currents and the influence of the winds and almost daily were bringing up strange specimens from the bottom of the sea. And I felt sure that come what might we would get back in safety to civilization.

For several days we continued our offshore drift without change, bearing sometimes due north, sometimes easterly and then again northwesterly until by the ninth we were about thirty-five miles from Point Barrow and drifting fast, too fast, in fact, to use the dredge. The depth of the water had by now increased to almost a hundred fathoms.

The afternoon of the ninth Mamen and I were out on our ski, when there came a sudden crack in the ice between us and the ship. Fortunately I was on the watch for just such an event and as soon as I saw the black streak of the open water on the white surface of the ice about a hundred yards away from the high rafter which formed our ski-jump, we started for the lead at top speed. The crack was about ten feet wide at first; the wind was blowing, the snow was falling fast and night was closing in. We had a dog with us and she ran along ahead of us to the lead. The edges of the ice at one point were only about three feet apart and after a wait of five or ten minutes we managed to bridge the gap and get across just in time, but the dog got on another section of ice which broke away and floated off with her.

When I got back to the ship I threw off my heavy ski shoes and went up into the crow’s nest. It was stormy and I could not see very far. The crack in the ice was about half a mile away and, as I could see, was closing up. When it closed I feared we should be in for trouble, for the ice was three or four feet thick, and if it should break up all the way down to the ship and get us mixed up in the floating fragments, it might crush the ship in an instant. So I set everybody at work on the jump. For some time we had been placing supplies overboard on a heavy floe not far from the ship and there we already had supplies for several months in case of emergency. When the crack closed up, the ice about 150 yards astern split at right angles into a lane of open water a couple of feet wide.

The thermometer was about zero and there was much condensation in the air, indicating the proximity of a good deal of open water. We had steam up and I decided that if conditions remained the same when daylight came the next morning, so that we could see what we were doing, I would try to get the ship out into the open water and back to the land. I stayed up all night but the next morning I found that all the leads had closed up and through the clear, frosty air no open water was visible in any direction. This proved to be the nearest the open water came to us in all our drift.

MAKING SOUNDINGS

“We got the Lucas sounding-machine together, and installed it on the ice at the edge of the dredge hole. With this machine on October 11 we got 1,000 fathoms.”

The temperature now went down to fifteen below zero and our soundings by the Kelvin sounding-machine gave us no bottom at 270 fathoms. We bent on a reel of 350 fathoms more and got no bottom at 500 fathoms. Then we got the Lucas sounding-machine together and installed it on the ice at the edge of the dredge hole. With this machine, on October 11 we got 1000 fathoms.

The dog that had floated off the day before came back; this made me happy, because dogs were valuable to us and this particular dog, whose name was Molly, was going to have a litter of pups. All the dogs were now put back on the ice again, for the leads had all closed up and the danger appeared to be over for the present.

Our Eskimo seamstress, Keruk, was working industriously and by now had completed her fifteenth pair of winter deerskin boots. These are made from the leg and foot of reindeer that have been killed during the later fall or winter when they have their winter coats on, cut up into four or five strips which are all sewed together to form leggins, the hairy part inside; the sole is made from the skin of the ugsug, or bearded seal. Keruk worked on fur clothing also. She did the cutting and much of the sewing; some of the men knew how to sew and they helped, too.

We continued our general drift to the north-west until October 22, when for a few days the wind shifted and sent us south and east before we took up our westward drift again. We were then about twenty-five miles south of where Keenan Land should have been, according to the map of the Arctic Region prepared by Gilbert H. Grosvenor, director and editor of the National Geographic Society, for Peary’s book “The North Pole,” a copy of which we had in the ship’s library. We were near enough to have seen Keenan Land with a telescope from the masthead, on a fine clear day, but though we kept a constant lookout for it from the crow’s nest, we saw no signs of it whatever.

All this time we continued to get a good many seal. Most of these were shot by the Eskimo, whose skill at hunting of this kind far exceeded that of any other members of the party. We needed the flesh for fresh meat for ourselves and fed the skins and blubber to the dogs. The seal is the one indispensable animal of the Arctic. Its flesh is by no means disagreeable, though it has a general flavor of fish, which constitutes the seal’s chief food.

We continued our preparations for an extended stay in the ice. The ship was now some two feet lighter than she had been the middle of August when first frozen in; we had burned a good deal of coal and had removed coal, biscuit, beef, pemmican and numerous other things from the deck and also from the hold, sledging them to the heavy floe of which I have already spoken. This floe was about half an acre in size and about thirty feet thick, of blue ice, amply able to stand a good deal of knocking about before breaking up. We now cut the ship out of the ice which was fast to her sides, so that she would ride up to her proper level before freezing in again.

Whether we were to continue in the ice or get clear, it was well to have a good supply of emergency stores safe on the ice, because with any ship at sea there is always the danger of fire. When we got the Roosevelt to Cape Sheridan in 1905 and again in 1908 we unloaded her at once and put the supplies on land, building a house of the unopened biscuit boxes, so that if the ship should chance to get afire and burn up completely we should simply have had to walk back to Etah with our supplies and wait for our relief ship. This experience I now applied to our situation on the Karluk. We had various coal-stoves on board, one in the saloon, one in the scientists’ room, one in my room, with fires in the galley and Mr. Hadley’s carpenter’s shop and of course in the engine-room, while the Eskimo had blubber stoves of soapstone in the quarters we had built for them on deck. Besides all these stoves we had numerous lamps. To guard against the danger from fire we had chemical fire extinguishers and about fifty blocks of snow, distributed wherever there was room for them about the ship, and in the galley a hundred-gallon tank with a fire kept going constantly under it to keep the water from freezing. We had a fire-fighting corps, every man of which knew what he must do in case of fire. If fire broke out, the ship’s bell would be rung and everybody would seize a block of snow or the fire extinguisher or the buckets near the water-tank, as his duty required, and help extinguish the fire.

Our supplies on the big floe we left at first where we put them. Later on as we got opportunity we built a regular house, with walls composed of boxes and bags of coal, cases of biscuit, barrels and other large articles, with lumber, of which we had put two thousand feet over on the ice, for flooring, scantling for roof and an extra suit of the ship’s sails to cover all. We banked it all around with snow for warmth. There was a kind of vestibule of snowbanks and a canvas door so weighted that it would fly to of itself. Later still, in addition to this box-house, we built a large snow igloo.

On the fourteenth for the first time we discontinued the regular nautical routine of watch and watch and instead had a night watchman and a day watchman, all taking turns at the work.

THE SUPPLIES ON THE BIG FLOE

“Our supplies on the big floe we left at first where we put them. Later on as we got opportunity we built a regular house, with walls composed of boxes and bags of coal, cases of biscuit, barrels and other large articles.”

We had a new dredge by this time, a larger and better one, made by Chief Engineer Munro, with a long line, for we were getting soundings of 1200 fathoms. We brought up a brittle starfish on the sixteenth and a spherical-shaped creature unknown to Murray, two or three inches in diameter. Murray had a laboratory which we built on deck for his specimens, and it became a good deal of a museum before it finally went down with the ship.

We got fur clothing enough made by the middle of the month for each man to have an outfit and I had all the skins we had left collected and put in canvas bags. The sailors were busy putting our pemmican in 48-pound packages, sewed up in canvas which later we used for dog harness; canvas is one thing the dogs will not ordinarily chew.

On the twentieth we saw bear tracks near the ship. There had been cracks in the ice and ribbons of open water at some distance from the ship and the Eskimo had continued their seal hunting with considerable success. The dogs, curiously enough, though tethered at various points around on the ice, were not aware of the bear’s presence.

Wherever there are seal you will find bear because the bear hunt the seal and live on them. When I was hunting with Paul Rainey and Harry Whitney in 1910 in Lancaster Sound, that historic entrance to the islands and waters west of Baffin Land, I saw a bear creeping along the ice very stealthily. So intent was he that he did not know I was there and I watched him steal up on a seal asleep on the ice. He got nearer and nearer and finally made a spring and landed on his prey. The seal never woke up.

Sometimes the ice would be closed up and our Eskimo would get no seal, or the weather would be bad and the sky overcast, but when the ice parted and the water-lanes opened, if the air was fine, the seal would sometimes swim over to the edge of the floe, put their flippers up and crawl out of the water. Then they would lie out on the ice and sun themselves. After a time, as the sun disappeared and the raw wind came up, they would become cold from staying on the ice and then they would slide back into the water. I have seen seal off the Newfoundland coast that were so sunburned after lying for many days on the ice, blockaded in the bays by the on-shore winds, that they actually cried out with pain when they finally went into the water, and came back on to the ice again at once.

CHAPTER IX

IN WINTER QUARTERS

We made another change in our routine October 28, going on to a schedule of two meals a day, breakfast at nine o’clock and dinner at half-past four. Tea could be obtained at one o’clock and at night, before going to bed, any one could have tea or coffee or chocolate. From six o’clock at night to six the next morning whoever was assigned for that night to be watchman was on his rounds, looking after the fires and lights and keeping the water from freezing in the water-tank. All lights except the watchman’s lantern were out at mid-night. At six o’clock he would wake the cook, who slept in a room off the galley, and after waiting to have his breakfast would turn in, a day watchman taking his place from 6 A. M. to 6 P. M.

For breakfast we always had oatmeal porridge, with condensed milk. This was followed by various things, for we tried to make the menu interesting. We would have eggs, ham, bacon, codfish, sausages, and of course coffee. For dinner we would have canned oysters or clams, shredded codfish from Newfoundland, potatoes (desiccated and frozen, to be thawed out as we wanted to use them), carrots, parsnips, spinach, pickles, asparagus, beans, corn, tomatoes. We always had fresh meat at least once a day, seal meat or, when we got any, later on, bear meat. For dessert we had ice-cream, in all flavors, or sherbet, pies, puddings, fancy cakes, and earlier had had watermelon and cantaloupe. At all times we had a great variety of canned fruits. In fact we were well supplied with about everything obtainable.

About this time we began putting the clock back to get the benefit of all the daylight. The men did not have to get up until breakfast-time but at ten o’clock they had to be ready for the day’s work. This consisted of sewing canvas, making clothing, sewing pemmican up in canvas, shifting boxes and putting things over on the big floe, shovelling snow, filling up the locker with coal, bringing in fresh-water ice for melting in the tank, doing various odd jobs around the ship and fixing up the dredge-hole.

We had plenty of soap and razors and plenty of underclothing, so we kept clean. We made it a rule to shave at least three times a week and to bathe at least once. Even the Eskimo bathed like the rest of us. When Kataktovick joined us he said, “I like my bath.” In Nome and St. Michael’s the Eskimo have a bath-house where they can bathe by paying twenty-five cents and they patronize it freely. We had several bath-tubs on the Karluk.

On the twenty-seventh, too, we blew down the boiler, drew the water off, disconnected the engines and blew all the water out of the pipes.

At eight o’clock on the evening of the twenty-eighth we were gathered in the saloon, some of us reading, some playing chess, others playing cards, when we were alarmed by a loud report coming from the direction of the bow. In an instant, with practically no interval, we heard another report, from the port quarter. The watchman came in and said there was a crack in the ice at the stem of the ship. I went out and with our lantern we could see what had happened. The ice had cracked at the bow and again about fifty yards away on the port quarter and the ice had opened up for about two feet running in a westerly direction on the port bow. The dogs were separated from the ship by the crack. We made haste to get them on board, together with skin-boats, sledges and sounding-machines, for we were afraid the ice might break up all around the ship. I stayed up all night and had every one standing by for trouble, but again nothing happened, and next morning with a high wind blowing the drifting snow along the surface of the ice and a temperature of twenty-four degrees below zero, we found that the cracks had closed up again. Twice during the day the ice opened again but closed up at once. These cracks were only an inch or two in width.

November began with a renewed violence of the gale and we drifted to the northwest. For the first time we pumped out the hold with a hand-pump in the engine-room. As long as we had steam up we did the pumping with steam from the boiler but now that the boiler was blown down we pumped by hand on deck, but that was a difficult job on account of the cold, so by having a stove in the engine-room which kept the temperature above freezing we found that we could handle the pump to better advantage there.

We built an observatory for Malloch by covering in the bridge with boards and sails with an opening at the top. Malloch had his transit here and was untiring in his efforts to get our position. He relieved me of much of the labor of taking the observations and was a great help throughout. In the afternoon of this first of November we had clear weather for a short time and were treated to a remarkable display of the aurora, one of the few that we had in all our months of drifting and ice travel. During the gale that kept up all day we dragged our dredge and parted the line, so that we had to put on a new dredge. The next day we got specimens of several species, including a number of different kinds of starfish. Our soundings showed that we were drifting in comparatively shallow waters shoaling to 105 fathoms on the first and to 36 on the second. Mr. Hadley and I busied ourselves scraping deerskins, a necessary preliminary to their use in making clothing; the scraping is done to break the vellum, to loosen them up, for when they are hard they do not keep you so warm.

November 4 we found another new animal in the dredge. The soundings now gave us only 28 fathoms. The wind fluctuated in violence all day long, finally settling down to a good-sized gale, with drifting snow. On the seventh open water appeared about two miles from the ship. The Eskimo went out and shot ten seal. I was with them and we saw many more seal out in the water but they were too far away for us.

November 10 was an unusually beautiful day. There was a fresh south wind and the temperature went up to twenty-three degrees above zero; it was almost like a spring day. About three miles from the ship the Eskimo shot six seal. They also got the first bear of our drift, a young one three or four years old, about six feet long, with a good coat. They had been on the lookout for bear, on account of the amount of seal meat they had left on the ice. I intended to give the skin of this bear to the Boston City Club for its new club-house but we needed it and had to use it for trousers and mittens. Everybody was still wearing American clothes at this time, with deerskin boots.

We had the deck covered with snow about two feet deep to make the ship warm; when the top of the snow became dirty we took off a few inches and replaced it with clean snow. The outside of the ship was banked up and we built a kind of runway from the deck to the ice with walls made of blocks of snow. This made our passage between the ship and the ice easy.

November 11 the sun left us for good; we were now to be without it throughout the twenty-four hours for seventy-one days.

The young Eskimo widower, Kataktovick, came to me the next day and asked me for a fountain pen, to write letters to his Eskimo friends, I presume. Some weeks before he had asked me for a book to read; after a fortnight he brought it back, said that he had read it and asked for some magazines. We had a good many and the pictures were interesting so I let him have them gladly. On this particular day he came into my cabin and saw me writing with a fountain pen. Kataktovick did not ask outright for the pen but simply said that he wanted something to write with. I offered him a pencil but he shook his head and said that was not what he wanted. Then I asked him if the pen was what he wanted. He said it was. I gave him one, as we had a large quantity of fountain pens, and as I gave it to him I thought to myself: “What would Peary say?” To live in the open as they have been accustomed to live is in his judgment the Eskimo’s normal existence and not to become dependent on the white man’s methods of life. We had a large supply of blank-books on board, in which our scientists jotted down notes and calculations to be afterwards transcribed on the typewriter, and I gave Kataktovick some of these blank-books from time to time.

The next day we had another wonderful display of the aurora, with brilliant moonlight, which had been lighting up the scene for several days. For a while in the afternoon, as we drifted steadily along, we saw a little of the sun’s upper limb. Our latitude was too far north for us to see the real sun at this time of year; it was the distorted sun that we saw, like the mirage which one sees in a desert.

I remember that when I was a boy in the Methodist Academy in Brigus, the town where I was born in Newfoundland, the Anglo-American Telegraph superintendent at St. John’s once told us that when he was a young man at Cape Race a certain ship from Europe was expected at a given time but failed to appear. Finally they apparently saw her heading in towards shore, and they launched a boat and went out to meet her. When they reached the spot where she was supposed to be she was not there and did not turn up until some ten hours later. Her apparent presence was simply a peculiarity of the sea-horizon, a refraction or distortion.

The Eskimo reported fox tracks a few miles from the ship and I gave them a dozen fox traps. The Arctic fox is of a clear white color, his pelt often whiter than that of the polar bear, which sometimes verges on the yellow. The Eskimo set the traps at various points on the ice, fastened securely so that the foxes would not carry them away, and on the seventeenth they caught one very small fox. Mr. Hadley finished the second Peary sledge. We lost the dredge again on the seventeenth and had to replace it with another one, which brought up some more specimens new to Murray. The temperature was only nine below zero but it was as cold as it is along the Atlantic seaboard in winter because just now there was much open water about us, though it was a good many miles away. On our North Pole trips we had much lower temperatures than we were now having but felt the cold less because it remained at the same level for weeks and was free from dampness because there were not so many open leads.

On the nineteenth we lost the lead and tube of the Kelvin sounding-machine; the wire kinked and broke, so we had to attach another lead and brass tube. It was a typical Cape Sheridan day, a magnificent morning with hardly any wind and a temperature of nineteen below zero.

Soot had accumulated in the funnel of my cabin stove, so that the fire would not burn, and I determined on the twentieth to adopt heroic measures to get the soot out. The method which I finally hit upon was effective but disturbing. I decided to pour a lot of flashlight powder in the stove, as this would give a quick puff and blow out the soot. I was pouring the powder in, when I inadvertently poured too fast and got too much in. Flash! The door of the stove came off and sailed past my head; if it had hit me it would have killed me. As it was the stove lost its bearings and landed with a tremendous crash against the side of the room, but no particular damage was done—except to the soot.

Murray got a little octopus in the dredge. He had been getting stones, small pebbles at first and then larger ones, almost perfectly round and very smooth. Now, however, he began to get specimens of previously unknown animal life again—eleven different kinds in one day. He was faithful and untiring in his dredging and his work, at which we all helped, was not the kind that had the apparent zest of hunting or exploration in it, but called for patient investigation and, always, hard labor. It was a great pity that we were unable to save the things his dredging brought up.

On the twenty-second my thoughts turned towards Boston and Cambridge, for I knew that this was the day of the Harvard-Yale football game, which I had attended so many times. I wondered who would win and as the afternoon wore on I thought of what must be taking place on Soldiers’ Field and of the life and activity in the hotels of Boston the night after the game.

I looked back and remembered some of the things that had happened when I had seen games in the past and wondered when I should see another. I recalled how I went down to New Haven the day before the game in 1910 and went into the country to the Yale headquarters and talked to the team on our North Pole trip of the previous year to take their minds off their troubles. And I remembered, too, how George Borup took the news of the 1908 game when we got our mail for the first time in over a year on our way home in the Roosevelt from the North Pole trip in the late summer of 1909. He and MacMillan occupied the same cabin and were eagerly looking over their letters when suddenly Borup began to cry out in tones of anguish, “Oh, dear! Oh, isn’t that terrible! Oh, I can’t believe it’s true!” until MacMillan was sure that he had learned of the death of some near relative. Finally when he felt that he must ask he ventured to inquire the cause of Borup’s mourning and to hope that he had not heard bad news. “Why, just think!” replied Borup. “Harvard beat Yale last fall, 4 to 0!” Now, on November 22, 1913, when the sky cleared to the south and we were treated to a red glow in that direction to light up the darkness I wondered if anything happening in the vicinity of Cambridge was having its effect on the meteorological conditions.

We had reached nearly to Lat. 73 N. on November 15. This proved to be our farthest north. After that for a month the winds drove us south and southwest and then for the rest of our drift more nearly due west again. We now had a little relief from the incessant sixty-mile gale which had been making it intensely cold for a number of days and on the twenty-fourth the red glow continuing gave us the effect of a little twilight which enabled Malloch to read the transit in his observatory without the aid of a lantern. The temperature was twenty below zero, but the air was so clear and clean that one could go about out of doors with American clothes on without discomfort. Just before midnight, however, the thermometer began to climb and the barometer to drop, denoting the approach of a storm, and all day long on the twenty-fifth it was a miserable time to be out. We had our work to do, however, and the Eskimo finished banking up the starboard side of the ship with snow to make things as warm and comfortable as possible.

November 27 was Thanksgiving Day in the States but as we were a Canadian expedition we made no observance of the day. My thoughts took another backward glance to the Thanksgiving Days I had spent in Belmont and Winchester and elsewhere, with my good friends of Boston.

The day began early with me because I was awakened from a sound sleep, almost choking to death from the sulphurous fumes of the mess-room stove which I found on getting out of my cabin was smoking badly. Chafe, the mess-room steward, was making heroic efforts to get the fire going to take the fumes off. I told him to take hold of the stove with me and carry it out on deck, which we managed to do.

CHAPTER X

THE ARCTIC NIGHT

The first few days of December were cold and stormy, with very high winds. I made up my mind that we were in the place where all the bad weather was manufactured, to be passed along to Medicine Hat and thence distributed to Chicago and Boston and points south. We got a little twilight from ten to two on pleasant days, so that the men could see to work out of doors. The health of the party throughout our drift was excellent. Every one had plenty of vigorous, outdoor exercise and slept soundly, though the incessant howling of the wind was not always conducive to a feeling of carefree contentment.

There was considerable pressure early in the month at a point about a mile from the ship, which tossed the ice into rafters, but we did not feel it on board. On the tenth a ribbon of water about a foot wide showed in the ice about two hundred yards from the ship, opening and closing off and on for several days. The temperature was getting pretty cold now, down in the minus thirties, yet the air was clear much of the time and we were not uncomfortable out of doors, even in American clothes. Mr. Hadley finished the third Peary sledge on the eleventh. On the same day I had the Eskimo build a large snow igloo on the floe where we had our box-house of supplies, to furnish additional shelter for ourselves and the dogs. We began making wooden boxes for the protection of our Primus stoves in case we had to take to the ice. The Primus stove is an ingenious device for heating tea or whatever else you have that needs heating; it uses kerosene oil, ignited by means of alcohol, works somewhat like a plumber’s torch and has long been used by men engaged in Arctic work. It is not so efficient as the special alcohol stove invented by Peary for his expeditions but as a general rule it does good work. On our trip to Wrangell Island, we used gasoline in these stoves, although warned by the directions in big red letters not to do so. In spite of the directions the gasoline worked well and did not need to be ignited by alcohol.

On the sixteenth I had the Eskimo dig out the seal meat which we had kept in the “ice-houses” near the ship and put it on deck, so that we could have it handy in case the ice broke up around the ship. Furthermore, I wanted to see how much we had accumulated. I found that we had forty-one seal, about 1600 pounds, enough to last twenty-five people sixty-seven days. Not every one on board liked seal meat but all could eat it. I had Mamen at work these days making up a list of things required in case I went on another Arctic drift some time. Murray lost his dredge again on the eighteenth when it caught on the ice and parted the line; the chief engineer started work at once on another.

December 21 was the Arctic midnight, the day of days in the Arctic, the day that we all looked forward to, for now the sun was coming towards us every day, and every day the daylight would lengthen. We were not, of course, getting real daylight but at midday we got a kind of twilight that was good enough to get about by, out of doors. Mr. Hadley and I experimented with the acetylene lights but found that outside of the ship they would not work because the water froze.

On the twenty-second much of the twilight time was used in clearing away the huge banks of snow that had drifted about the ship. The chess tournament was decided on that day. The men had been playing it for a good while and now the winner of the most games received the first prize, a box of fifty cigars, and the next man the second prize, a box of twenty-five cigars. Mamen took the first prize and the mate, Mr. Anderson, the second.

The dogs, which we had been keeping all together in the box-house, broke their chains on the twenty-third, and some of them got into a fight; our best dog, Jack, was so badly bitten that he could not walk. I took him on board and down into the carpenter’s shop where Mr. Hadley sewed up his wounds with surgical needle and silk cord. Poor Jack was in bad shape and at first refused all food. He received constant attention from Mr. Hadley but could not bear a harness until the latter part of February. The fight in which he was hurt warned us that we must not keep too many dogs together, so I had the Eskimo build several snow kennels in a large snow-bank near the ship. They sprinkled ashes on the floor of the kennels and chained up the nine most quarrelsome dogs, each in his separate kennel.

With the approach of Christmas all hands began to make plans for the proper celebration of that good old holiday. The spirits of the whole party were excellent; now that they were in the neighborhood of the place where Santa Claus came from they seemed determined to observe the day in a manner worthy of the jolly old saint.

At six o’clock on Christmas morning the second engineer and McKinlay started in decorating the cabin with the flags of the International Code and a fine lot of colored ribbon which Mr. Hadley had brought with him from Point Barrow for the trading he had hoped to do in Banks Land. Later in the morning I went around and distributed presents to the Eskimo. I gave each of the Eskimo men a hunting-knife and a watch and the Eskimo woman a cotton dress, stockings and underwear, talcum powder, soap, a looking-glass, a comb and brush and some ribbon, with a cotton dress for each of the little girls.

At eleven o’clock the first event on our typewritten programme began—the sports. This was the list:

D. G. S. Karluk. Xmas Day, 1913

The events of the sports programme arranged for the day will take place in the following order:

• 1. 100 yards sprint
• 2. Long jump (standing)
• 3. Long jump (running)
• 4. Sack race
• 5. High jump

Interval for refreshments

• 6. Three-legged race
• 7. Putting the weight
• 8. 50-yard burst
• 9. Hop, step and leap
• 10. Tug of war
• 11. Obstacle race
• 12. Wrestling

Proceedings will commence at 11 A. M. (Karluk time); dogs and bookmakers not allowed on the field.

The doctor was umpire and wore a paper rosette. I was the official starter and fired a pistol in the regulation manner.

Mamen won the running long jump and would have won all the other jumps and races if he had entered them. The obstacle race was funny to watch and greatly enjoyed. The contestants started on the ice on the starboard side about amidships. From here they had to go to, and under, the jib-boom from which hung loops of rope; they had to pass through these loops and then under some sledges turned bottom up. Then they had to keep on around the ship to a kind of track which we had dug in a snow-bank running at right angles to the ship; the track was just wide enough for a man to put both feet in and they had to go up the track and down again. This was no easy task and it was a cause for hilarious mirth to watch them trying to pass each other in the narrow path. Then they had to go to the dredge igloo where life-belts had been placed, each marked with its owner’s name. Each man had to find his own life-belt and put it on just as he would wear it if he were called upon to use it. It was pitch dark in the igloo; a man would rush in, pick up a life-belt and rush out again on to the ice to look at the belt in the twilight and see if it were his. It often took a man several trips to find his own. Then they made the final dash to the starting-point and the first man home with his life-belt on, as if for regular use, won the race. Williamson, the second engineer, was the winner.

The Eskimo entered all the sports and even Keruk took part in most of them. I pulled in the tug of war, to make both sides even, and I am proud to say that my side won. We did not have the wrestling-match because it got too dark to see.

It was a fine day and the men wore American clothes and sweaters. For several days before Christmas we had had a severe storm with a high wind which blew the tops of the ice ridges bare of snow and gave the scene the appearance of a ploughed field. On Christmas Eve, however, the wind subsided so that all day long on Christmas Day we had good weather, clear, crisp air, with a temperature of twenty below zero.

Dinner as usual was at half past four. I confess that I felt homesick and thought of other Christmas dinners. It was my fourth Christmas in the Arctic; in 1898 I had been with Peary at Cape D’Urville on the Windward and in 1905 and 1908 at Cape Sheridan with the Roosevelt, but our situation now had far more elements of uncertainty in it than we had felt on those occasions and in addition this time it was I who had the responsibility for the lives and fortunes of every man, woman and child in the party.

We sat down at 4:30 P. M. to a menu laid out and typewritten by McKinlay:

“Such a bustle ensued”
Mixed Pickles Sweet Pickles
Oyster Soup
Lobster
Bear Steak
Ox Tongue
Potatoes Green Peas
Asparagus and Cream Sauce
Mince Pie Plum Pudding
Mixed Nuts
Tea Cake
Strawberries
“God Bless You, Merry Gentlemen;
May Nothing You Dismay!”

Murray produced a cake which had been given in Victoria to cut for this particular occasion and which he had kept carefully secreted. Dinner, which was a great credit to Bob, the cook, was followed by cigars and cigarettes and a concert on the Victrola which had been presented to the ship by Sir Richard McBride. We had records that played both classical and popular music, vocal and instrumental, and we kept this up with singing, to a late hour. Malloch wrote a Christmas letter of many pages to his father, a letter which, alas, was destined never to be delivered.

On Friday the twenty-sixth a crack in the ice made from the waist of the ship towards the stern, running for about a hundred yards off the starboard bow. The crack did not open, but for the first time in our drift we felt a slight tremor on the ship. In about an hour we felt another slight tremor. I followed the crack for a hundred yards and then lost it. There was a fresh north-northeast wind which moderated as the day wore on but it looked as if we were in for some more bad weather, though the barometer was steady, and next day we began to get things ready to leave the ship at once, in case we should have to get out in a hurry. Everything was where we could lay our hands on it at once.

Our soundings had been giving us depths of about twenty-five fathoms, which did not tally with our charts. It seemed likely that our chronometer was a trifle slow and that we were somewhat to the westward of our apparent position. We had a clear view of the sky with a very pronounced twilight glow to the south.

On the twenty-eighth we altered the ship’s time again to get the benefit of the increasing twilight. Molly gave birth to a litter of nine pups, which, if she had not eaten most of them, would have been useful members of the party, had our drift continued for another year so that they could have grown large enough to use. The prizes won on Christmas Day were now distributed: safety razors and extra blades, shaving-soap, hair-clippers, goggles, pipes, sweaters, shirts, and various other things.

As soon as it was light on the twenty-ninth I kept a sharp eye out for land; south by west, by the compass, I could see a blue cloud raised up on the horizon. According to the soundings we should have been nearer Wrangell Island than Herald Island; I was inclined to think that it was Herald Island, although working out our position with our chronometer readings gave us Herald Island sixty miles to the south. Afterwards I found out that our observations at this time were correct but that the soundings were not right on the chart. What deceived us more than anything else was the big mirage; Herald Island looked large and distorted for many days. Later in the day I went aloft to see if I could make out which island it really was but on account of the imperfect light I found it impossible to tell.

Some time during the night the ice cracked about a hundred yards from the ship and made an open ribbon of water ten inches wide; during the next day the young ice was cracking a good deal all around us. There was no lateral movement of the ice.

The next day was the last day of 1913. Our time was six hours and thirty-six minutes later than Boston and New York time and as the day wore on and it got to be 5:24 P. M. I realized that it was midnight on Tremont Street and Broadway and I thought of the friends who would now be seeing the old year out and the new year in. I wondered what they thought had become of us on the Karluk, and whether the news of our unforeseen drift had yet reached them from Stefansson. I could picture the carefree throngs in the hotels waiting for the lights to go out for the moment of midnight and greeting 1914 with a cheer and a song.

We had our own New Year’s celebration, though it was only a coincidence that it came on this particular day, for we had planned a football game on the ice when the weather should be good and the wind fairly light; New Year’s Day happened to be the first good day for it.

The ball was made of seal-gut, cut into sections and sewed up, with surgeon’s plaster over the seams. We blew it up with a pipe stem and plugged up the hole. To protect the ball we had a sealskin casing made to fit it; the result was a fairly good ball, constructed on the same principle as any college football.

It was Scotland vs. All-Nations; the game was association football, played on a field of regulation size laid out on young ice about a foot and a half in thickness. At each end of the field were goal posts with the usual cross-bar.

Fireman Breddy was captain of All-Nations and Mr. Munro of Scotland. The Eskimo, though not well-versed in the game, played well. Keruk, clad as usual in dress and bloomers, was goal-tender for All-Nations. Some of the players wore skin-boots, others ordinary American shoes. I had forgotten a good deal about the association game but I refreshed my memory from the encyclopedia in the ship’s library and armed with a mouth-organ in lieu of a whistle took my place as referee, umpire and time-keeper. I soon found, however, that the cold would make it too dangerous for me to use the “whistle,” for it would freeze to my lips and take the skin off, so I had to give my signals for play by word of mouth.

The teams lined up at 11:30. Breddy won the toss and took the western end of the field. All-Nations scored the first goal and the play ranged furiously up and down the field until the first thirty-minute period was over. Then at noon we had an intermission and served coffee. At half-past twelve the teams lined up again, with changed goals. During the second half Scotland played well but when the game ended the score stood: All-Nations, 8; Scotland, 3. Another game was planned for the following Sunday.

CHAPTER XI

THE SINKING OF THE KARLUK

During the night of New Year’s Day we could hear, when we were below, a rumbling noise not unlike that which one often hears singing along the telegraph wires on a country road. The sound was inaudible from the deck. It was clear that there was tremendous pressure somewhere, though there were no visible indications of it in the vicinity of the ship. We were practically stationary. Apparently the great field of ice in which we had been zigzagging for so many months had finally brought up on the shore of Wrangell Island and was comparatively at rest, while the running ice outside this great field was still in active motion and tended to force the ice constantly in the direction of the island.

On Saturday, with a fresh north wind, in spite of which ship and ice still remained stationary, the rumbling noise could again be heard in the interior of the ship.

On Sunday the fourth there was an increasing easterly wind which sent us slowly westward. Evidently we could make no movement towards the south on account of the pressure but when the wind blew us towards the west and north we could go along without undue danger. The football game was played as planned on this day until the second engineer strained a muscle in his leg kicking the ball along the ice, and the game had to stop.

The easterly gale continued for several days, sometimes with hard snowstorms, sometimes with clearer skies. The barometer was low; the temperature rose to sixteen degrees above zero. I had the engineers at work making tins of one-gallon capacity to hold kerosene for our sledges if we should have to use them. All of our oil was in five-gallon tins which were unhandy for sledging use. They also made tea-boilers out of gasoline tins, to be used with the Primus stoves; these held about a gallon of tea and were very handy. I had five with me on my subsequent sledge trip. Besides these jobs the engineers trimmed down our pickaxes so that they would weigh not over two-and-a-half or three pounds. They put them in the portable forge in the engine-room, heated the iron and beat it down, and put on the steel tips afterwards. These pickaxes were regulation miners’ picks.

On the seventh and eighth the variable weather continued with occasional twilight of considerable intensity; the low barometer and high thermometer still prevailed. Our observations on the seventh, the last we were to take on shipboard, gave us our position as Lat. 72.11 N., Long. 174.36 W. The temperature dropped on the ninth; the sky, which was clear in the morning, became overcast by afternoon and the wind shifted from southeast to southwest. We were getting nearer the land and the ice was raftering in places with the pressure, so that I felt sure that something was going to happen before long. We continued our preparations for putting emergency supplies in condition to be handled quickly, putting tea tablets in tins made by the engineers, and twenty-two calibre cartridges in similar tins. Mannlicher cartridges we put up in packages of thin canvas, fifty to a package.

At five o’clock on the morning of the tenth I was awakened by a loud report like a rifle-shot. Then there came a tremor all through the ship. I was soon on deck. The watchman, who for that night was Brady, had already been overboard on the ice and I met him coming up the ice gangway to tell me what he had found. There was a small crack right at the stem of the ship, he said. I went there with him at once and found that the crack ran irregularly but in general northwesterly for about two hundred yards. At first it was very slight, although it was a clean and unmistakable break; in the course of half an hour, however, it grew to a foot in width and as the day wore on widened still more until it was two feet wide on an average.

By 10 A. M. there was a narrow lane of water off both bow and stern. The ship was now entirely free on the starboard side but still frozen fast in her ice-cradle on the port side; her head was pointed southwest. On account of the way in which the ice had split the ship was held in a kind of pocket; the wind, which was light and from the north in the earlier part of the day, hauled to the northwest towards afternoon and increased to a gale, with blinding snowdrift, and the sheet of ice on the starboard side began to move astern, only a little at a time. The ship felt no pressure, only slight shocks, and her hull was still untouched, for the open ends of the pocket fended off the moving ice, especially at the stern. It was clear to me, however, that as soon as the moving ice should grind or break off the points of these natural fenders there was a strong probability that the moving ice-sheet would draw nearer to the starboard side of the ship and, not unlike the jaws of a nut-cracker, squeeze her against the sheet in which she was frozen on the port side, particularly as the wind was attaining a velocity of forty-five miles an hour.

Everything indicated, therefore, that the time was near at hand when we should have to leave the ship. We must have things ready. I gave orders to get the snow off the deck and the skylights and the outer walls of the cabin, to lighten her. Some of the men were sent over to the box-house to remove the few dogs that were still tethered there and set them free on the ice, and to get the house ready in case we had to move in to it. They cleaned it up, put fresh boards on the floor and laid a fire in the stove, ready for lighting.

The men worked with good spirit and seemed unperturbed. I sent them about their daily tasks, as usual, so far as possible, and the preparation of the box-house was in the nature of an emergency drill. For if the points of the ice should continue unbroken the ship would still be saved; we had seen plenty of cracks before in our drift that had remained open some time and then closed up again, though of course no previous break had come so near the ship. It was hard to see what was going on around us for the sky was overcast and the darkness was the kind which, as the time-honored phrase goes, you could cut with a knife, while the stinging snowdrift, whirling and eddying through the air, under the impetus of the screaming gale, added to the uncertainty as to what was about to happen from moment to moment.

At about half past seven in the evening I chanced to be standing near the engine-room door. The lamps were lighted. The labors of the day were over and now, after dinner, the men were playing cards or reading or sewing, as usual. All at once I heard a splitting, crashing sound below. I went down into the engine-room and found the chief engineer there. We could hear water rushing into the hold and by lantern-light could see it pouring in at different places for a distance of ten feet along the port side. As I had feared, the ice astern had broken or worn off and the sheet moving along the starboard side had swung in against the ship, heeling her over three or four feet to port; a point of ice on the port side had pierced the planking and timbers of the engine-room for ten feet or more, ripping off all the pump fixtures and putting the pump out of commission. It was obvious that it would be useless to attempt to rig a temporary pump; the break was beyond repair.

I went on deck again and gave the order, “All hands abandon ship.” We had all the fires except that in the galley extinguished at once and all the lamps, using hurricane lanterns to see our way around. There was no confusion. The men worked with a will, putting the emergency supplies overboard on the ice, some ten thousand pounds of pemmican, furs, clothing, rifles and cartridges. The Eskimo woman, with her children, I sent to the box-house to start the fire in the stove and keep the place warm. The steward was kept in the galley so that the men could have coffee and hot food.

By 10.45 P. M. there was eleven feet of water in the engine-room. At this stage the pressure of the ice on both sides kept the ship from going down. We were less than an hour getting the supplies off the ship on to the ice; we could have saved everything on board but no attempt was made to save luxuries or souvenirs or personal belongings above the essentials, for it did not seem advisable to burden the sledges on our prospective journey over the ice with loads of material that would have to occupy space needed for indispensables.

When I was satisfied with the amount of supplies on the ice I started the men sledging the stuff over to the big floe. Here, as I have said, in addition to the box-house, we had a large snow igloo which had been completed some time before. It had been smashed in by the wind, but the men now repaired it and made it ready for occupancy. They did a good job with their evening’s work and I told them so, and said that they could turn in at the box-house and igloo and go to sleep whenever they got their sledging done. At half-past two in the morning they were ready and turned in; to the box-house were assigned McKinlay, Mamen, Beuchat, Murray, Dr. Mackay, Williams, King, Chafe, Kataktovick and Kerdrillo and his family, and to the snow igloo Munro, Williamson, Breddy, Hadley, Templeman, Maurer, Brady, Anderson, Barker, Malloch and myself.

After every one else had left the ship I remained on board to await the end. For a time the chief engineer and Hadley stayed with me. There was a big fire in the galley and we moved the Victrola in there to while away the time. After the first sharp crash and the closing in of the ice the pressure was not heavy and all through the morning of the eleventh and well into the afternoon, the ship remained in about the same position as when she was first struck. No more water was coming in; the ice was holding her up. I would play a few records—we had a hundred and fifty or so altogether—and then I would go outside and walk around the deck, watching for any change in the ship’s position. It cleared off towards noon and there was a little twilight but the snow was still blowing. As I played the records I threw them into the stove. At last I found Chopin’s Funeral March, played it over and laid it aside. I ate when I was hungry and had plenty of coffee and tea. My companions had gone over to the floe and turned in early in the morning. It was quite comfortable in the galley, for I could keep the fire going with coal from the galley locker. At times I would take a look into the engine-room, being careful not to get too far from an exit; the water was nearly up to the deck.

At 3.15 P. M. the ice opened and the ship began to get lower in the water. Then the ice closed up again for a while and supported her by the bowsprit and both quarters. About half past three she began to settle in earnest and as the minutes went by the decks were nearly a-wash. Putting Chopin’s Funeral March on the Victrola, I started the machine and when the water came running along the deck and poured down the hatches, I stood up on the rail and as she took a header with the rail level with the ice I stepped off. It was at 4 P. M. on January 11, 1914, with the blue Canadian Government ensign at her main-topmast-head, blowing out straight and cutting the water as it disappeared, and the Victrola in the galley sending out the strains of Chopin’s Funeral March, that the Karluk sank, going down by the head in thirty-eight fathoms of water. As she took the final plunge, I bared my head and said, “Adios, Karluk!” It was light enough to see and the rest of the party came out of the camp to watch the end. As she went down the yards lodged on the ice and broke off; in such a narrow lane of water did she disappear. It is always a tragic moment when a ship sinks, the ship that has been your home for months; it is not unlike losing some good and faithful friend. Twice before I had been shipwrecked, on both occasions on the southern coast of Newfoundland, so the sensation was not altogether new to me, but it was none the less poignant. Yet I could feel no despair in our present situation, for we had comfortable quarters on a floe which was practically indestructible and plenty of food and fuel, so that with patience, perseverance, courage and good fortune we should be able to win our way back to safety in due time.

PAGES FROM CAPTAIN BARTLETT’S DIARY

“Sunday, Jan’y 11th. 3.15 p. m. ship began to settle till bowsprit and quarter caught on ice. 4 p. m. ship disappeared sinking in 38 fathoms water.”

CHAPTER XII

OUR HOME AT SHIPWRECK CAMP

The point where the Karluk went down was hard by the place where the Jeannette of the De Long expedition was frozen in the ice and began her westward drift to a point off Henrietta Island, where she was crushed, in much the same manner as the Karluk, by the opening and closing of the ice, and sank June 12, 1881.

As I study the map of the polar regions and see how we drifted from a point near the 145th meridian to a point near the 175th meridian, west longitude, and how the Jeannette drifted from a point near the 175th meridian, west longitude, to a point near the 155th meridian, east longitude, and then how the Fram drifted from a point near the 140th meridian, east longitude, to a point near the 10th meridian, east longitude, and realize that the sum of these three drifts embraces more than half the distance around the continental periphery, I can not help coming to the conclusion that the idea of casks and wreckage drifting across the Pole from the waters of Alaska and Siberia to the Greenland Sea opposite is a mistaken one. Wreckage from the Jeannette drifted ashore on the southern coast of Greenland in 1884, and this gave Dr. Nansen the idea on which he based his expedition in the Fram, that a ship allowed to freeze in the ice north of the New Siberian Islands, near the point where the Jeannette sank, would be carried by the currents in a drift across the Pole. Nansen himself left the Fram in the course of her drift and made a journey over the ice in an attempt to reach the Pole, getting to 86° 34 N., and after his departure the Fram, in her drift, reached almost as high a latitude as he attained on foot, without, however, giving evidence of the accuracy of the theory of a drift across the Pole. I believe, that the drift follows the general outline of the land, from east to west around the periphery of the Arctic Ocean, and that a craft, built in general like the Roosevelt but not so large, with a ship’s company of eight who should be crew and scientific staff in one, could follow this drift from beginning to end, and would, in a period of three or four years, cover the greater part of the circuit of the Arctic Ocean.

Such an expedition would add much to our scientific knowledge of the Arctic regions, working out the ocean currents, exploring the floor of the sea, obtaining accurate soundings for plotting positions on the chart, outlining the continental shelf, gathering information about the air currents for the use of students of aviation, collecting valuable meteorological data, continuous for the period of the drift, for the use of weather bureaus, and perhaps making possible the finding of new lands in the vast unexplored region north of Siberia. England and Norway have turned their attention to the Antarctic and it is America’s place to undertake the task of completing our knowledge of the Arctic, so far advanced through centuries of Anglo-Saxon endeavor. As Nansen said, in stating his plans for his expedition in the Fram: “People, perhaps, still exist who believe that it is of no importance to explore the unknown polar regions. This, of course, shows ignorance. It is hardly necessary to mention here of what scientific importance it is that these regions should be thoroughly explored. The history of the human race is a continual struggle from darkness towards light. It is, therefore, to no purpose to discuss the use of knowledge; man wants to know, and when he ceases to do so, he is no longer man.”

As soon as the Karluk sank, I turned in at the igloo to have a good sleep, for I had been awake since five o’clock on the morning of the tenth, and it was now late in the afternoon of the eleventh.

It was nearly noon of the next day before I awoke. The sky was clear overhead but the fresh northwest wind kept the snow spinning over the ice and there was still only a brief twilight in the middle of the day. As soon as they could see their way around in this half light, I had all hands at work picking up the odds and ends scattered about on the ice and had a tent erected to house the supplies sledged from the ship on the previous night.

In this tent, into which no one was allowed to go but McKinlay, who acted as a kind of stock-clerk, and myself, were placed the following supplies which will show how well equipped we were with the essentials for life in the Arctic:

• 70 suits Jaeger underwear
• 6 sweaters
• 8 dozen wool shirts
• 200 pairs stockings
• 3 bolts of gaberdine
• 6 fleece suits
• 4 Burberry hunting suits
• 2 large sacks of deer legs
• 2 large sacks of waterskin boots (sealskin boots for shedding water)
• 100 pairs of mukluks
• 100 fawn skins
• 1 dozen hair-seal skins
• 2 ugsug skins
• 20 reindeer skins
• 6 large winter reindeer skins
• 50 Jaeger blankets
• 20 mattresses

On the floe itself and arranged to be easily accessible were:

• 4056 pounds of Underwood pemmican
• 5222 pounds of Hudson’s Bay pemmican
• 3 drums of coal oil
• 15 cases of coal oil
• 2 boxes of tea
• 200 tins of milk
• 250 pounds of sugar
• 2 boxes of chocolate
• 2 boxes of butter
• 1 box of cocoa
• Candles and matches

Besides these supplies in the tent and on the floe we had, of course, the coal, clothing, and equipment which we had been placing on the ice through the previous months, consisting, besides ammunition, pemmican, milk, clothing, tea, coffee, sugar, and butter, of these things:

• 250 sacks of coal
• 33 cases of gasoline
• 1 case of codfish
• 3 large cases of cod steak
• 5 drums of alcohol
• 4 cases of desiccated eggs
• 114 cases of pilot bread, each case containing 48 pounds in small tins
• 5 barrels of beef
• 9 sledges, each capable of carrying 600 or 700 pounds
• 2000 feet of lumber
• 3 coal stoves
• 2 wood stoves
• 90 feet of stove-pipe
• 1 extra suit of sails
• 2 Peterborough canoes

The snow igloo was fifteen feet long and twelve feet wide, with rafters and a canvas roof. The box-house was twenty-five feet long by eighteen feet wide, well banked up all around with snow. We partitioned off one end of the box-house to make the galley and put a big stove in it so that the cook could have a place by himself. We also built another house for the Eskimo. McKinlay afterwards drew a plan of Shipwreck Camp, as we called it, which will show how our dwelling-places and supplies were arranged.

So here we were, like the Swiss Family Robinson, well equipped for comfortable living, waiting until the return of the sun should give us daylight enough for ice travel, which was altogether too exacting and dangerous to attempt in the dark. I did not consider it wise to use up the energy of men and dogs when they were still unaccustomed to travelling over the sea-ice and before there was light enough to make their work effective.

The place where the ship had gone down was frozen over. The ice had simply opened for a while and then closed up again, and young ice had formed in the opening.

Plan of Shipwreck Camp

10th January to 1914.

On the thirteenth we began sewing and kept it up day in and day out. We had done a good deal of sewing on shipboard, but I told the men that we must have plenty of fur clothing and skin-boots and that we had better do all the sewing we could. We also made tents and covers of light canvas for our sledges. We should of course be unable to do any sewing when we once got under way for the land. We had lanterns and lamps for light in the various houses.

Fur clothing is so heavy that it has to be sewed by hand but much of the other work was done on sewing-machines of which we had saved two, one for the box-house and the other for the snow igloo. Keruk used one sewing-machine and Mr. Munro the other. He was skilful at this as at a good many other useful things. He had formerly been a junior officer on the British warship Rainbow, which was afterwards transferred to the Canadian service; his term of enlistment expired at the time of the transfer and Captain Hose of the Rainbow, commandant of the Esquimault Navy Yard, recommended him to me for chief engineer of the Karluk.

On the fourteenth it was fine and clear with a temperature of thirty-eight degrees below zero. The wind was west; our soundings through a hole cut in the ice gave us thirty-four fathoms. In the noon twilight we could see land in a southwesterly direction. The men worked all day long making footbags to use when sleeping; it would be a great relief to take off the deerskin boots and put on these footbags, which had fur inside and Burberry cloth outside. I had with me a coonskin coat which I had bought a few years before in Boston. I now cut this up and divided it among the men, as far as it would go, to be made into these footbags. In addition I told each man that he must have at least four pair of deerskin or sheepskin stockings and three pair of deerskin boots. We used scissors and knives to cut the skins into suitable pieces for making boots and clothing. The Eskimos used a crescent-shaped implement called the hudlow, not unlike a mince-meat chopper; they could use it very deftly and cut out clothing exceedingly well with it. The skins had to be softened, as I have mentioned before, by breaking the vellum; this was done by scraping it with a piece of iron like a chisel. Some Eskimo women soften the vellum by chewing it.

We conducted our lives according to a regular routine similar to that which we had followed on shipboard during the last few months of our drift. We kept our records of wind and weather, of soundings and of temperature, which remained in the minus thirties for a good many days. We did not bother with latitude as we had the land in view some sixty to eighty miles away, not distinctly visible but plain enough on a clear day when the light was fairly good. The light of course came from the south and the land, being in that direction, was set off by the twilight glow, and the sun was getting nearer and nearer to the horizon as the days went by. We saved a chronometer from the ship but it got somewhat banged about in the transfer from the ship to the camp, so that we could not depend upon it. I had a watch which I have carried for a number of years and which I was careful never to allow to run down.

Each house had a watchman, every man taking his turn. It was his duty to keep the fires going. At 6 A. M. the watchman would call the cook; our meal hours were the same as those which we had observed during the past few months on the ship.

Lights were out at 10 P. M. and all hands turned in. We had a stove in the centre of the room in each house and around the stove on three sides, built out from the walls, were the bed-platforms, which came close to the stove and were on a somewhat higher level. Here we slept warmly and comfortably on the mattresses we had saved from the ship.

There was plenty to occupy our minds. In addition to our sewing and other daily tasks, there was time for games of chess and cards and frequently of an evening we would gather around the fire and have a “sing.” Sometimes, too, we would dance; I remember one night catching hold of some one and taking a turn or two on the floor when we tipped over the stove. It took some lively work to get it set up again.

CAPTAIN BARTLETT’S COPY OF THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

“My own constant companion, which I have never tired of reading,
was the ‘Rubáiyát’ of Omar Khayyam.
This book I have carried with me everywhere.”

The Karluk had a good library and we saved a number of books which enabled some of us to catch up a little on our reading. We read such books as “Wuthering Heights,” “Villette,” and “Jane Eyre,” besides more recent novels. My own constant companion, which I have never tired of reading, was the “Rubáiyát” of Omar Khayyam. I have a leather-bound copy of this which was given me by Charles Arthur Moore, Jr., who, with Harry Whitney and a number of other Yale friends of his, was with me on a hunting trip in Hudson’s Bay on the sealer Algerine in 1901. This book I have carried with me everywhere since then, until now, if it had not been repaired in various places by surgeon’s plaster, I believe it would fall to pieces. I have had it with me on voyages to South America and other foreign parts on sailing vessels when I was serving my years of apprenticeship to get my British master’s certificate in 1905; on both of my trips with Peary as captain of the Roosevelt; on my trip to Europe with Peary after the attainment of the North Pole; on a hunting trip in the Arctic on the Boeothic in the summer of 1910, when we brought home the musk-oxen and the polar bear, Silver King, to the Bronx Park Zoo in New York; on various sealing trips; and now the self-same copy was with me on the Karluk and afterwards on my journey to bring about the rescue of our ship’s company. I have read it over and over again and never seem to tire of it. Perhaps it is because there is something in its philosophy which appeals to my own feeling about life and death. For all my experience and observation leads me to the conclusion that we are to die at the time appointed and not before; this is, I suppose, what is known as fatalism.

On the night of the fourteenth the dogs had a fight and one of them was killed. We could ill afford to lose him, for dogs were at a premium with us, now.

On the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth the weather was threatening; the sky was overcast and the wind from the north and northeast, with temperatures not far from forty below zero. The sewing continued busily. On the sixteenth we overhauled our Primus stoves, of which we had two of the Swedish and eight of the Lovett pattern. We also reckoned the amount of oil necessary for them and found that an imperial gallon, which would fill a stove three and a half times, would make tea twice a day for fourteen days. The imperial or English gallon is larger than the American gallon; ten gallons English would mean a little more than twelve gallons American, according to our measurements, for we had bought the oil in Nome according to the American measure and now in transferring it to our handy containers we used the English measure. I have known this difference between English and American gallons to make a good deal of trouble for skippers buying supplies in foreign ports.

CHAPTER XIII

WE BEGIN OUR SLEDGING

On January seventeenth I decided that before long I would send a party of four men to the land to look out for game, see whether any driftwood was to be found on Wrangell Island, report on ice conditions and blaze a trail over the ice. This expedition would make an end to the men’s enforced inactivity and the natural uneasiness of some of them, which I was unwilling to prolong if I could avoid doing so, and would, besides, be valuable in determining our subsequent movements. I did not like to take the whole party to the island without previously transporting supplies that would be sure to last them for at least four months. Furthermore, the men had been living for a long time on shipboard and were not inured to the cold or yet in condition to withstand the privations they would have to undergo. None of them had had any experience in travelling over the Arctic ice during the brief and meagre light and in the low temperatures which would be our portion for another month, and the sledging of supplies towards the island would afford them the necessary practice. Travelling over the sea-ice at any time is altogether different from land travelling. On the sea-ice you have to spend a great deal of time looking about for good places to make the road for the sledging of supplies, for the ice is continually cracking and shifting and piling up in fantastic ridges from the pressure when the fissures close up, especially as near the land as we were, and its surface is so much rougher than the crystal levels of the lakes and ponds on which the landsman goes skating that there can hardly be said to be any comparison.

THE ICE-PACK

“On the sea-ice you have to spend a great deal of time looking about for good places to make the road for the sledging of supplies, for the ice is continually cracking and shifting and piling up.”

For the past week or so, I had noticed that our drift was slow, and I felt that as the daylight lengthened we should have ample time, long before we could drift away from the land, to sledge enough supplies ashore to last the party until the birds returned and the ice broke up. If we could start the men in small parties to relay supplies to the island we could get a shore camp established where the men could dry out their foot-gear for their journey back over the ice to Shipwreck Camp for more supplies, especially if we should find plenty of driftwood on Wrangell Island, as I hoped and expected; we had fuel enough at the camp to last a year. The men could erect permanent snow igloos along the way, for relay stations, and once the road to the island was made, there would be little difficulty in keeping it open and by continuing the relays any faults that might come in the trail could be easily repaired. In these preliminary journeys, as I have said, the men would get accustomed to ice travel and finally the whole party, with its supplies, would be safe ashore. We were of course handicapped by lack of sufficient dogs, and in ice travel and in fact in any polar work, dogs are the prime requisites for success; man-power for hauling the sledge-loads of supplies puts a double burden on the men.

Those assigned for the first shoregoing party were First Mate Anderson, Second Mate Barker and Sailors King and Brady. They were to go to the island with three sledges and eighteen dogs, with Mamen and the two Eskimo men, as a supporting party, to come back with the dogs and two of the sledges after they had landed the mate’s party on the island.

The eighteenth was another bad day, with a strong northeast gale and blinding snowdrift. Some of the men were at work loading the three sledges for the mate’s party. Of the others, those that could be spared I sent out with pickaxes to make a trail towards the land, so that the shoregoing party might have a good start, but the weather was so bad that they had to return to camp after they had gone two or three miles. They reported seeing bear tracks on the ice and seal in open leads which they came to. We had plenty of seal meat so no attempt was made to do any shooting at this time.

Mr. Anderson, McKinlay and myself checked over the three sledge-loads on the nineteenth and found everything in readiness for the journey which was to begin the next morning. The next day, however, the bad weather continued. The watchman called me at 4 A. M. and I found a southwest gale blowing, with a thick snowstorm, so, as there was no change in the weather, the mate’s party did not leave. In the afternoon the storm subsided and by midnight the sky was clear and the air calm and cold.

The next day, Wednesday the twenty-first, conditions were more favorable and the party started. In addition to oral instructions about ice conditions and about returning to camp in case he met with open water, I gave the mate the following written orders:

Shipwreck Camp, Arctic Ocean,
January 20, 1914.
My dear Mr. Anderson:

You will leave to-morrow morning with Mamen, three sledges, 18 dogs, Mr. Barker, Sailors King and Brady and the two Eskimo. The sledges are loaded with pemmican, biscuit and oil. You will find list of articles attached to this. When you reach Berry Point, Wrangell Island, you will be in charge of supplies. Kindly pay special attention to the uses of them. The rations are: 1 lb. pemmican, 1 lb. biscuits, with tea, per day. One gallon of oil will last you ten days. Mamen will leave one sledge and the tent, taking back with him enough supplies to carry him to Shipwreck. Whilst on the island you will endeavor to find game. Be sure and bring it to your camp. Also collect all the driftwood you can find.

Very sincerely,

R. A. Bartlett.

The list of things carried on the sledge may serve to show what the Arctic traveller needs. Shelter, fuel and food, these are the three essentials for ice travel as they are for the journey of life itself. This is the way the mate’s party was equipped when it set out from Shipwreck Camp on January 21, 1914; there were enough supplies to last them for three months: