The last voyage of the Karluk

by Bob Bartlett; Ralph T. Hale

I enjoyed here the best night’s sleep I had had since I had left Shipwreck Camp, nearly two months before. In the morning the old woman presented me with a fine pair of deerskin mittens. I gave her a gill-net. To the boy I gave a pocket compass and divided a yard or two of ribbon between the girls. We got away shortly after day-light. Our treatment at the kind hands of this Chukch family will always remain in my memory.

The old man seemed to realize that we had great need for getting along as fast as we could and he volunteered to give us a lift to the next aranga nine or ten miles away. He said nothing about going until he harnessed up his dogs just as we were starting. It was a great help and enabled us to get along so well that we covered the distance by nine o’clock. At this next aranga we met four Russian prospectors who were on their way from East Cape to Cape North, near which are gold mines. They were well-equipped travellers. Each had a sledge with a team of twelve fine dogs. They treated us to black bread, butter, tea, sugar and sardines. One of them could speak a little English; he wrote his name for me on a piece of paper which, I am sorry to say, I lost.

We had two snow-knives with us and when we now said goodby to the old native who had been so kind to us, I gave him one of these, with a couple of steel drills which we used for making holes for the sledge-shoes, and a skein of fish-line.

Travelling all day long, we came some time after the sun went down to a place where there were three arangas. The Russian miners had told us about them and had said they thought we should be able to reach them by nightfall. Two of the arangas were close together and the third was off by itself. The people here were less hospitably inclined than those whom we had met before and, though they did not actually tell us to keep away, they did not volunteer any invitation to enter. It was dark and we had come a long distance, so I did not feel like spending an hour building an igloo for shelter for the night; I went up to one of the arangas, therefore, and when a young man came out I made signs that we should like to stop there. When we finally got inside I understood why the people were not especially glad to see us. They had evidently had hard luck and had very little food, even for themselves. While Kataktovick was outside feeding the dogs, I got the Primus stove going, made some tea and passed it around, with pemmican.

There was a young woman here, with a baby two or three months old who was evidently sick; he was what would be described, I believe, as “fussy.” His mother would get him quiet and then he would cry out and to my great surprise she would get very angry and shake him violently; then she would repent and would croon to him, only to repeat the shaking when the poor little fellow cried out again. In all my long experience with Eskimo I had never before seen a woman even speak a cross word to her child.

Perhaps she could not get along with her mother-in-law and took it out on her baby. At all events the mother-in-law, who was very old, was a tough customer. Quite unknowingly I sat down in her place and fell asleep. Some time after midnight I was awakened by a smart slap on the cheek. I was too drowsy to pay much attention to this but presently was brought up broad awake by having the old woman step on my face. I found her snorting and grunting; the young mother was still crooning and talking to the baby. I had all my clothes on, so I shook Kataktovick and we went outdoors.

The light was just showing along the eastern horizon. We made a little snow shelter, had some tea and pemmican and started on our way about two o’clock in the morning. We travelled hard all day. There was a strong northwest gale and the air was filled with drifting snow so that we could not see very far ahead. When we came to Cape Onman we were disappointed to find no arangas there; only the framework was left and we found out later that the people had moved to Koliuchin Island. We kept along the trail, which to our surprise took us away from the land and out on to the ice on the broad entrance to Koliuchin Bay, and presently we came to Koliuchin Island, a high formation, like a warship bottom up.

Here we found ten or a dozen arangas and visible signs of prosperity. A young man came out on our approach and said, “Me speek ’em plenty English. Me know Nome. Me know trader well. Me spend long time East Cape. You come in aranga. Me speak ’em plenty. You get plenty eat here.”

We went in. It was a well-appointed Siberian home, occupied jointly by two young men and their families. The men were deer men, with fine herds of reindeer twelve or fourteen days’ journey into the interior. We had some tea and some frozen deer meat. Then the women cooked us some seal meat, which was excellent. The older man’s wife made flapjacks out of flour and they tasted good.

These people had evidently heard about us and they knew our desire to get to East Cape, for after we had finished eating, the native who had first greeted us said, “I bring you East Cape; how much?”