The last voyage of the Karluk, flagship of the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–1916, ended with the loss of the ship in the Arctic seas, and the subsequent deaths of nearly half her complement of 25.
In August 1913, Karluk, a brigantine formerly used as a whaler, became trapped in the ice while sailing to a rendezvous point at Herschel Island. After a long drift across the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, in January 1914 the ship was crushed and sank. In the ensuing months, the crew and expedition staff struggled to survive, first on the ice and later on the shores of Wrangel Island. In all, eleven men died before being rescued.
The Canadian Arctic Expedition was organised under the leadership of Canadian anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and had both scientific and geographic purposes. Shortly after Karluk was trapped, Stefansson left the ship with a small party, claiming that he intended to hunt for caribou. The ice then carried Karluk westwards. Upon reaching land Stefansson devoted himself to the expedition's scientific objectives, leaving the crew and staff on board the ship to their own devices under the charge of its captain, Robert Bartlett. Karluk sank 11 January 1914. After the sinking, Bartlett organised a march across the ice to Wrangel Island, away. Conditions were difficult and dangerous; two four-man parties were lost before the island was reached.
From the island, Bartlett and an Inuk companion, Kataktovik, set out across the frozen sea for the Siberian coast, in search of help. Assisted by local populations, the pair eventually reached Alaska, but sea ice conditions prevented any immediate rescue mission. On Wrangel Island, the stranded party survived by hunting game, but were short of food and troubled by internal dissent. Before their eventual rescue in September 1914, three more of the party had died, two of illness and one in violent circumstances; 14 were rescued.
Historians have divided views on Stefansson's decision to leave the ship. Some of the voyage's survivors were critical of his seeming indifference to their ordeal and the loss of their comrades. He escaped official censure, and was publicly honoured for his later work on the expedition despite the Canadian government's reservations about its overall management. Although Bartlett was criticised by an admiralty commission for taking Karluk into the ice, he was hailed as a hero by the public and by his former Karluk shipmates.
Canadian Arctic Expedition
Background
The Canadian Arctic Expedition was the brainchild of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a US-based, Canadian-born anthropologist of Icelandic extraction who had spent most of the years between 1906 and 1912 studying Inuit life in the remote Arctic Canada. His fieldwork had resulted in the first detailed information on the life and culture of the Copper Inuit, the so-called "blond Eskimos". Stefansson had returned home with plans for another expedition to continue his Arctic studies, and obtained promises of financial backing totalling US$45,000 (around US$750,000 in 2010) from the National Geographic Society (NGS) in Washington and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. However, he wanted to extend his plans to include geographical exploration in the Beaufort Sea, then a blank space on the world's maps.Henighan, pp. 57–58 For these expanded aims he needed more money, and approached the Canadian government for assistance.Niven, pp. 12–14
The area known as the "High Arctic" was subject to claims of sovereignty not only from Canada, but also from Norway and the United States. The Canadian government was concerned that an American-financed expedition would give the United States a legal claim to any new land discovered in the Beaufort Sea, so when the Canadian prime minister Robert Borden met Stefansson in Ottawa in February 1913 he offered to assume financial responsibility for the entire expedition. Borden's government was hopeful that the expedition would strengthen Canada's claim to sovereignty over the Arctic islands. The American sponsors agreed to withdraw, subject to an NGS condition that the Society could reclaim its rights to the expedition if Stefansson failed to depart by June 1913. This created a narrow deadline and hurried preparations for the journey north, although Stefansson maintained in his 1921 account that "forethought appeared to have anticipated every eventuality".Stefansson, p. 27
Objectives and strategy The Canadian government's financial involvement represented a shift in the expedition's emphasis, towards geographical exploration rather than the original purpose of ethnological and scientific studies.Pálsson, p. 130 In a letter to the Canadian Victoria Daily Times, Stefansson set out these separate aims. The main object was to explore the "area of a million or so square miles that is represented by white patches on our map, lying between Alaska and the North Pole". The expedition also aimed to be the most comprehensive scientific study of the Arctic ever attempted. While a Northern Party searched for new lands, a mainly land-based Southern Party under zoologist Rudolph Anderson would carry out surveys and anthropological studies in the islands off the northern Canadian coast.Bartlett, pp. 4–6
The Northern Party's ship, Karluk, would proceed north from the Canadian coast until it either found land or was stopped by ice. It would explore any land it encountered; otherwise it would follow the ice edge eastward and attempt to winter at either Banks Island or Prince Patrick Island. If the ship was trapped in the ice and forced to drift, the party would study the direction of Arctic currents and carry out oceanographic research. Meanwhile, Rudolph Anderson's party was expected to continue with the anthropological studies of the "blond Eskimo", to collect varieties of Arctic flora and fauna, to carry out geological research, and to seek open-water channels in the hope of establishing new trade routes.
Organisation and personnel
Stefansson's plan was to take the expedition to the old whaling station at Herschel Island off the Canadian Arctic coast, where the final composition of the Northern and Southern Parties would be decided and where equipment and supplies would be divided among the different strands of the venture. The haste to meet the NGS deadline led to concerns among the expedition's members about the adequacy of the provision of food, clothing and equipment.Leslie, pp. 297–298 Stefansson, who was largely absent in the hectic weeks immediately before sailing and who revealed few of his plans to his team, dismissed such concerns as "impertinent and disloyal". There were disputes between Stefansson and the scientists over the chain of command; the Canadian Geological Survey, which had provided four scientists to the expedition, wanted these men to report to them rather than to Stefansson. Southern Party leader Rudolph Anderson threatened to resign over Stefansson's claim to the publication rights of all private expedition journals.Henighan, pp. 60–61Pálsson, p. 132
The scientific team, made up of some of the most distinguished men in their fields, included representatives from the United States, Denmark, Norway and France, as well as from Britain and its Empire.McKinlay, pp. 10–13 Only two, however, had previous polar experience: Alistair Forbes Mackay, the expedition's medical officer, had visited Antarctica with Sir Ernest Shackleton's Nimrod expedition in 1907–09, and had been one of the party of three to discover the location of the South Magnetic Pole.Riffenburgh, p. 244 Another Nimrod veteran, the 46-year-old James Murray, was Stefansson's oceanographer. Among the younger scientists were William Laird McKinlay, a 24-year-old science teacher from Glasgow who was recommended by the British explorer William Speirs Bruce, and Bjarne Mamen, a 20-year-old skiing champion from Christiania, Norway, who was taken on as a forester, despite lacking scientific experience.
Stefansson had wanted American whaling skipper Christian Theodore Pedersen to captain Karluk, the ship designated for the Northern Party. When Pedersen withdrew, the captaincy was offered to 36-year-old Newfoundland-born Robert Bartlett, an experienced polar navigator who had commanded Robert Peary's ship, , on Peary's 1906 and 1909 polar expeditions.Fleming, pp. 354–61 Bartlett did not have time, however, to select Karluk's crew, which was hurriedly assembled from around the Royal Navy Dockyard at Esquimalt in British Columbia. McKinlay later wrote of the crew that "one was a confirmed drug addict ... another suffered from venereal disease; and in spite of orders that no liquor was to be carried, at least two smuggled supplies on board". McKinlay worried that this crew might lack the qualities and character necessary in the arduous months ahead, concerns shared by Bartlett, whose first act on arrival in Esquimalt was to fire the first officer for incompetence. In his place he appointed the 22-year-old Alexander "Sandy" Anderson.Niven, pp. 20–21
Ships
Karluk had been chosen by Pedersen and bought by Stefansson for the bargain price of US$10,000.Niven, pp. 8–9 Stefansson was advised by Pedersen that, of four ships that were available, Karluk was "the soundest and best adapted for our purpose",Stefansson, pp. x, 47 but Bartlett had deep reservations about her fitness for prolonged Arctic service. The ship, a 29-year-old brigantine, was in length with a beam of . She had been built for the Aleutian fishing industry (karluk is the Aleut word for "fish") and later converted for whaling, when her bows and sides had been sheathed with Australian ironwood. Despite 14 arctic whaling voyages, including six overwinterings, (search ship "Karluk") she had not been built to withstand sustained ice pressure, and lacked the engine power to force a passage through the ice. She did not match the expectations of Bartlett, or of many of the more experienced crew.
The ship spent most of April and May 1913 undergoing repairs and refitting at the dockyard in Esquimalt. When Bartlett arrived in early June he immediately ordered further repair work. In addition to Karluk, Stefansson had purchased sight unseen a small gasoline-driven schooner, Alaska, to act as a supply ship for the Southern Party. He later added a second schooner, Mary Sachs, when the hold space in Alaska proved inadequate.Jenness, pp. 8–9 In the confusion surrounding the expedition's departure, McKinlay notes, no attempt was made to align men or equipment to their appropriate ships. Thus anthropologists Henri Beuchat and Diamond Jenness, both designated for the Southern Party, found themselves sailing with Karluk, while their equipment was on board Alaska. McKinlay himself, aboard Karluk as magnetic observer, discovered that most of his equipment was with Alaska. Stefansson insisted that all would be sorted out when the ships reached their Herschel Island rendezvous. "Heaven help us all if we failed to reach Herschel Island", McKinlay wrote.McKinlay, pp. 18–19
Towards Herschel Island