The Ice Master (10 page)

Bartlett hurried back to the ship, hoping to seize this chance to put the
Karluk
back under her own power and pilot her through the passageway of water. It was the opportunity he had been searching for, ever since they had been carried away from land and leader in September. He would blast a way out of there if he had to.

There was only one problem—it was too dark. He would have to wait or risk driving her into the surrounding ice floes.

Bartlett's hopes were high the next morning as he climbed to the barrel to get a view of the extent of the open water. But the ship was shrouded in fog and it was impossible to see anything. The water closed up and the
Karluk
remained frozen in.

It wasn't the last time during the month that Bartlett was hopeful of breaking free of the ice. Time and again, a pathway opened and escape seemed promising. “We are still
¹¹
lying in the same ice floe as almost two months ago, but it has now begun to get frail; it won't take long, I think, before it breaks,” wrote Mamen. But time and again, the hopes of the men were dashed.
Karluk,
it seemed, was undeniably trapped.

The ice was misleading. It was easy to feel safe when the ice was still and settled and the men were tucked safely inside the ship. Their frozen home gave them a false sense of security. The scenery, too, was unspeakably beautiful, and it was hard to believe that something so lovely could at the same time be so deadly. The sky was bright as a mirror at times, and there was only ice and snow “and a few
¹²
openings and small water channels that shine and glitter” as far as the eye could see, observed Mamen.

The nighttime icescape was especially enchanting. Nearly every night, the sky came alive with a brilliant display of the aurora borealis. Even the jaded and cynical Mackay and Murray said the aurora—especially the vibrant colors—outshone anything they had ever witnessed in the Antarctic.

T
HE ICE WAS BREAKING UP.
Floes shattered against floes in a terrifying inferno, causing cannonlike explosions as the ice threatened to crush the
Karluk
. For the first time, the men were afraid. “Opposing floes which
¹³
had come together were being shattered one against another, piling higher & higher,” wrote McKinlay. “Huge ice-blocks larger than houses were being tossed about like pebbles! What stupendous forces must have been at work with millions of tons of ice on either side trying to make way in opposite directions! As we watched this terrifying work of Nature, we noticed that the area of contention was creeping slowly but surely towards us, & we fell to wondering, with a shudder, what would be our lot.. . . To the East, West & South, are seething masses of ice battling for supremacy, grinding, crushing, groaning, roaring ice . . ..”

A special watch was kept because of ice conditions, and the men made preparations for a hasty departure from the ship by laying out provisions and equipment on the deck. Bartlett gave strict orders not to leave the ship. He made it clear that anyone who left was taking his life in his own hands and Bartlett would not be held accountable.

For the first time, the men began to have an inkling of what they were up against. The ship, their haven for the past two months, now suddenly seemed vulnerable. “So we are
¹⁴
rapidly approaching the great, open, bottomless ocean,” wrote Mamen in his journal.
“
It is indeed difficult to tell how long we will have a roof over our heads. If it continues this way it may be water rather than a roof, and that perhaps forever. . ..”

S
OMETIME IN MID
-O
CTOBER,
Beuchat went in search of Mamen. Fearful of their situation, his conscience troubling him, stabbed by doubts thanks to all the talk from Mackay and Murray about Bartlett's ineptitude, Beuchat poured out his thoughts to the young topographer.

Murray and Mackay proposed to leave the ship and set out for land. They thought they could do better than the captain; they didn't have any faith in him and believed they could reach land on their own. If they stayed with the ship much longer, they might be lost. The Antarctic experience of both men spoke for them, especially Dr. Mackay, who had been a hero there. It was easy to be swayed by such talk from such confident and highly respected men. True, Bartlett had led Peary to the Pole, but that was a different time of year, a different ship, a different region. Mackay didn't want to wait any longer. He and Murray both felt now was the time to leave the ship and make their way to land. As far as either one could see, they were waiting for nothing. The ship was imprisoned, with no chance of being freed until spring, if she wasn't crushed long before that. There was no hope of continuing their work and fulfilling their duties, no hope of the
Karluk
sailing again under her own power.

Mamen told Beuchat it was lunacy to leave the
Karluk
. It was the wrong time of year, for one thing, with the days growing shorter and the weather growing colder and worsening day by day. The middle of January would be more reasonable—with the sun returning—but even then Mamen didn't believe in leaving the ship prematurely. “You must consider
¹⁵
,” Mamen told Beuchat, “that there are not only a few on board but 25 men all told, and if the crew sees that somebody leaves the ship, they will immediately assume that danger is threatening, and all will sneak away in the same manner! And with 29 dogs for 25 men this is no joke, and the distance is both long and full of danger.”

T
HE WATER GREW DEEPER
as the
Karluk
drifted slowly but steadily northward. By October 26, they reached 1,115 fathoms. At the beginning of the month, they had stood in a depth of nine.

Mamen needed to be working for his own peace of mind, so he and Malloch and McKinlay kept an eye on the temperature, studied the drift, charted the wind and weather conditions, and made latitudinal and longitudinal observations. They also worked in teams helping the crew and the Eskimos break ice to pack all around the ship. It was Bartlett's idea to form a cushion against the lateral pressure of the ice that trapped her. His hope was that this would keep the men warmer and well insulated while also helping the ship rise above the water so as to avoid being crushed. They cut the ice one meter round the
Karluk,
to help her rise, and banked her with snow blocks eighteen inches thick, reaching to the level of the poop deck.

Every day, Murray's dredge was lowered, and every day it was raised to examine the catch of Arctic sea life. When the dredge produced no results, Murray was crushed, but when he was successful his spirits improved dramatically. After a good catch, Murray would disappear into his cramped, makeshift laboratory, where he huddled in the cold, smoking furiously, gray hair falling in his eyes as he studied the specimens under his microscope. When he couldn't identify them, he still cataloged his findings, keeping meticulous notes in painstaking detail. Even his less educated comrades seemed to understand the significance of his work. If some of these creatures had indeed been seen by the human eye before, they were still unfamiliar. And Murray realized that he could have very well been the first to view—or, at the very least, to identify—some of these animals.

Malloch set up a theodolite on the ice so that every night when the weather was clear enough he could take sightings and keep track of the ship's position. He was also teaching himself how to make igloos. His colleagues discovered him out on the ice one day, making a shabby and badly constructed snow house. He was cheerful and determined as ever, having decided that he should know how to make an igloo, just in case the worst happened and they were forced to leave the ship.

Kataktovik, meanwhile, was teaching Beuchat, McKinlay, and Dr. Mackay to speak the Eskimo language. Every evening for half an hour, they would gather in his quarters in the lab for their lessons.

Beuchat was a brilliant linguist, and in his opinion it was the most difficult language of all to learn. Speaking Eskimo, for instance, was so much different from actually thinking Eskimo. And even with a wide grasp of the Eskimo dialect, it was hard to communicate with native speakers because so many Eskimo words, once translated into English and then back to Eskimo, became nonsense. “Dried apples
¹⁶
” in English became “situk” in Eskimo, which meant “resembling an ear.” “Salvation” in English became “pulling from a hole in the ice” in Eskimo. And the Twenty-third Psalm translated rather delightfully and alarmingly into: “The Lord is my great keeper; he does not want me. He shoots me down on the beach, & pushes me into the water.”

In the evening, some of the men gathered in the saloon to play bridge and chess. Murray taught Mamen to play the latter. The young Norwegian had never played before but picked up the game quickly and began playing every night. In this temporary sanctum from the cold, the scientists and officers sat around the stove and lit their pipes and cigarettes from their treasured rations of tobacco and listened to the tunes of the phonograph. It was a cozy little retreat—a necessary one—and one all of the men came to count on in those long, bleak, darkening days.

In addition to their designated duties, the men—both staff and crew—were still hard at work sewing winter clothes. Stefansson had left them sorely ill-equipped for braving the cold, and Kiruk alone would not be able to outfit them; one woman would never be able to create an entire winter wardrobe for twenty-five people, and besides, her time was better spent making the winter boots. Under Kiruk's keen supervision, each man was given skins, cloth, and some blanketing to make an extra pair of socks and skin shirts. The crewmen were more experienced than their scientific counterparts in the field of embroidery. “Theirs may not
¹⁷
be so very beautiful but I will guarantee that they will be solid; sailors know how to sew so it will last,” observed Mamen.

At every sign of open water, Bartlett sent men out to hunt. The shortage of fresh meat aboard ship was a concern, and he knew all too well—and had seen firsthand—the devastating and sometimes fatal effects of a meat-free diet. So he sent Kuraluk and Kataktovik out looking for seal and for polar bear. The grizzled Hadley accompanied them, bound and determined to beat the “dirty Indians,” as he called them, and bring back more game. Despite the fact that he had loved and married an Eskimo woman, the old man professed that he couldn't stand most Eskimos, made no pretense about his supposed deep-seated hatred of them, and was certainly not about to be out-hunted by a couple of them.

More often than not, the hunters came back empty-handed. Polar bears were often sighted in the distance, but the ice was usually too dangerous for the hunters to pursue them. Seals were easier to catch, but it was just as easy to lose one to the water, after they were killed. They sank like lead weights, straight to the bottom, and all the men had to show for their efforts was a waste of ammunition.

Miraculously, Hadley's dog Molly, the one who had been stranded when the ice broke on October 9, had returned to the ship by now, having wandered back one afternoon. Even the other dogs seemed happy to see her. The dogs themselves had been living loose on the ice for a couple of weeks, fighting with each other to the point of serious injury. They had a horrible way of ganging up on one member of the team, who was usually defended by his team partner, until both were brutally attacked by the rest of the pack. Mamen dubbed them “the lions” because they were so fierce.

One of the hounds, Bob, was fatally injured in a fight. He slunk away on the ice, accompanied by Mosse, his brother, and refused to come aboard. The dogs wouldn't let anyone near them and wouldn't take any nourishment. Several days later, Bob and Mosse returned to the ship, and the men took them aboard and made a bed for Bob on some dry bags. Mosse stayed with him. “It is awful
¹⁸
not to be able to spend a bullet on him and thus end his life quickly,” wrote Mamen, “instead of letting him lie in agony. It hurts me more than I can describe to see him lying there groaning and puffing, his body shivering incessantly.”

When Bob died, Mosse still refused to leave him. He stayed by his side the rest of the night, wailing and howling. Inside their cabins, the men were chilled by his grieving cries, which reverberated, eerie and piercing, in the dead air.

A
S WINTER CLOSED IN,
Bartlett ordered a new routine aboard the
Karluk,
with chief engineer Munro, second engineer Williamson, and firemen Maurer and Breddy working all day at drawing the fires and closing down the engine room to take the faulty engine apart and repair it once and for all: blowing down the boilers, as they called it. Munro and Williamson also installed a new tank for melting ice in the galley. Munro could be quite a diligent worker while Bartlett was watching. He said all the right things, worked with enthusiasm, and took charge of what needed to be done. As soon as Bartlett turned away, however, the work all fell to Williamson, and Munro refused to lift a finger. This was, as Mamen put it, because Munro “doesn't know anything
¹⁹
; neither has he any idea of an engineer's work.”

There was a new watch regime for the crew, who now worked only from 7:00
A.M.
until 6:00
P.M.
, with their nights free. One man was placed on night watch until 6:00
A.M.
, the duty changing weekly; in exchange for the night's work, the designated crewman had his days free. There was also a new schedule for meals because rationing was now essential. Breakfast was served at 9:30
A.M.
, with coffee and hardtack at noon; dinner at 4:30
P.M.
; and cocoa, tea or “a mouthful of
²⁰
coffee or rather chicory,” according to Mamen, at 9:00 at night. “It is rather long between the meals,” he lamented, “but when one has got accustomed to it I believe it will be the best.” Templeman thinned the milk and held back the sugar at each feeding, in order to save his stores, and the food continued to be prepared in the usual slovenly way. Dishes were only partially washed, the stove was wiped down with a dirty cloth, and every now and then one of Templeman's cigarette butts found its way into the soup.