The last voyage of the Karluk

by Bob Bartlett; Ralph T. Hale

On the twenty-second I sent Chafe and Williams out to begin marking the landward trail with empty pemmican tins. Pemmican has been the staple article of food for polar expeditions for many years and contains, in small compass, the essentials adequate to support life. It is put up by various packing-houses, expressly for such needs as ours. I have lived for a hundred and twenty days on pemmican, biscuit and tea and found it amply sufficient. We had two kinds of pemmican; one, for ourselves, consisting of beef, raisins, sugar and suet, all cooked together and pressed, was packed in blue tins; the other, for the dogs, without the raisins and sugar, in red tins.

I remember once, after a talk which I was giving on the North Pole trip, a lady came up to me and inquired what pemmican was, which I had mentioned several times. I explained what it was made of and what it was used for. She thought for a moment and then said, “Well, what I don’t understand is how you shoot them.”

Pemmican tins hold six pounds, marked so that you can tell how to take out exactly a pound, which, with tea and a pound of biscuit, is the standard daily ration per man. These tins are about fourteen inches in length, five in width and three in thickness. We would open a tin on one side and use up the contents; then we would open out the other side and flatten them all down to make a sheet. Plastered against an ice pinnacle to mark the trail or indicate a fault or the proximity of open water, these red or blue sheets of tin were visible against their white background for a mile and a half or two miles. This was one of the many things which I learned on my expeditions with Peary. Mamen had instructions to blaze his trail in this way so that he could find his way back. Marking the trail from the camp landward would now give the men training in ice travel.

We had something resembling the typical “January thaw” of the New England winter on the twenty-third. The air seemed to have a touch of springtime in it and there was open water about two miles to the south of us.

The next day we improved the time in overhauling the house that we had built out of boxes for the Eskimo, to make it more comfortable. Later on I was in the supply tent when I heard a confused noise in the galley. I waited a moment and then heard a tremendous racket of dishes rattling down and equipment being upset. I hurried out of the tent and into the galley. The canvas roof of the galley was on fire and parts of the rafters near the funnel. It was a pitch roof and around the funnel, where it passed through a hole in the roof, were a couple of tin collars and some asbestos. The cook had the stove pretty hot and as the canvas was dry and got overheated it had suddenly burst into flame. He was waving his arms around and trying to put the fire out with water and as he was very much in earnest about it he naturally did not always look to see where he was going and bumped violently into whatever happened to be in his way; hence the noise I had heard. A block of snow soon had the fire out.

McKinlay found a box of cocoa the same day and played a joke on us. When we were getting the emergency supplies overboard after the ship was struck I had given instructions that no tobacco should be saved, for I knew we could not afford to burden ourselves with a great supply of it on our sledge journeys later on and so we might as well get used to going without it as soon as possible. Some of the men happened to have some with them when they left the ship, however, and we smoked that while it lasted but it was already getting to be a scarce article. A good many odds and ends were continually turning up under the snow, however, and some of the men had an idea that if they looked for tobacco they might find some. So McKinlay set out to investigate.

In due time he returned, saying nothing but looking as if he knew something. We waited for him to hand over the tobacco or tell us where it was and at last we became so aroused that we made him guide us to the spot where he had been looking. He brought us to a place where a box was covered up in the snow, dug it up and handed it over, while we imagined the good smoke we were to have at last. It was a box of cocoa. McKinlay had the time of his life about it and we all laughed with him, though the joke was on us; I felt it incumbent on me, however, to show the joker that he couldn’t trifle with our feelings with impunity, so I chased him laughing over the ice and scrubbed his face in a snow-bank.

As a consolation prize I hunted through the supply tent for a little tobacco which I knew was there among the dunnage; I finally found it, divided it into small pieces and distributed it in that way to the whole party.

The chief engineer found some more treasure—two coffee percolators which were buried in the snow. When the cook tried to make coffee in them, however, he found that they wouldn’t percolate.

Late in the day Chafe and Williams returned and reported no changes to mark in the trail, so far as they went.