The last voyage of the Karluk

by Bob Bartlett; Ralph T. Hale

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.