LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| The Karluk in the Ice-pack | [ Frontispiece] |
| The Drift of the Karluk | [Page 1] |
| The Karluk in her whaling days | [4] |
| Vilhjalmar Stefansson | [8] |
| The leaders and the scientific staff before the departure from Nome | [10] |
| Steffansson and his party leaving the Karluk | [36] |
| Hauling the dredge | [48] |
| Making soundings | [52] |
| The supplies on the big floe | [56] |
| Pages from Captain Bartlett’s diary | [92] |
| Plan of Shipwreck Camp | [98] |
| Captain Bartlett’s copy of the “Rubáiyát” of Omar Khayyam | [102] |
| The ice-pack | [106] |
| Letter from the doctor’s party to Captain Bartlett | [128] |
| Mugpi | [142] |
| Shipwreck Camp | [144] |
| Another view of Shipwreck Camp | [148] |
| Map of Wrangell Island | [162] |
| Five of the men of the Karluk on Wrangell Island | [180] |
| Captain Bartlett’s chart of the Alaskan coast | [204] |
| Captain Bartlett’s chart of the Siberian coast | [214] |
| The news of Captain Bartlett’s arrival at St. Michael’s reaches Nome | [282] |
| The camp at Rodgers Harbor, Wrangell Island | [306] |
| The rescue of the party at Waring Point, Wrangell Island | [314] |
| Making the Kayak on Wrangell Island | [320] |
| The Karluk survivors on board the Bear | [324] |
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.