The last voyage of the Karluk

by Bob Bartlett; Ralph T. Hale

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.