The Ice Master (9 page)

Everyone received strict orders to remain on board; the ice conditions were too precarious and Bartlett would not risk leaving anyone behind. Everything that had been stored on the ice—provisions, equipment, dogs—was now brought back onto the ship.

It was a dreary time, and the spirits of the men plummeted. Mamen had been busy making preparations to go ashore as Stefansson had ordered, until Bartlett informed him that he, Malloch, and McKinlay would have to postpone their trip indefinitely until the ship stopped drifting.

O
N SEPTEMBER 26,
the
Karluk
began drifting east at nine miles a day, and hope returned. East was good. East was where they wanted to be. But on the twenty-eighth, she once again changed direction and began heading west. None of them—Bartlett, McKinlay, Malloch, Mamen—could determine their location, and there was much speculation as to their whereabouts. Murray took a depth sounding, and it was clear that, wherever they were, they were entering deeper water.

On September 29, the rugged Malloch managed to make his first observation since the storm began. The snow, the mist, and the northern lights had all made it impossible to get a reading on their position. But now he was able to determine that the
Karluk
was just ten miles from land.

Everyone on board was sewing in earnest now. McKinlay darned socks while the grumbling Mackay sewed pockets onto his pajama coat. Bartlett was mending a jacket, and Malloch was sewing strips of material onto his sheepskin trousers, something he had been doing for the past eight days. He bent over the pants, stretching his long legs in front of him, his handsome profile intent on his project, broad shoulders braced against the wall. He whistled while he worked, or sang at the top of his lungs. The odd dichotomy of it all—this overtly masculine man humbled by such work—made a funny picture and amused his cabin mates.

Beuchat, meanwhile, rested in bed for hours, shivering from the cold, and Mamen, at Bartlett's request, prepared to lead a small expedition in search of Stefansson. “All hope of
¹⁰
the hunting party being able to pick us up has now been abandoned,” wrote McKinlay. So they would go in search of Stefansson, taking him provisions. They planned to leave as soon as the wind died down.

Mamen was still eager to prove himself and was thrilled to have something useful to do with his time. He was also deeply honored by Bartlett's faith in him to find their leader. Bartlett's good opinion meant the world to him, and he wrote with great pride, “He knows what
¹¹
I am worth when it comes to showing courage and smartness in critical situations, otherwise he would not have given me the leadership of the coming relief expedition.”

O
N THE LAST DAY
of the month, the temperature dropped to eight degrees Fahrenheit and the snow began to fall once more. The men were at last allowed out on the ice, and everyone took advantage of the opportunity to escape from their shipboard prison. Mamen stood in awe and watched the sunset at 4:30 that afternoon. He had never seen anything like it. “There is nothing
¹²
so lovely and singularly beautiful as seeing the sun setting up in the cold north.”

One thing was apparent. There was now absolutely no chance of Stefansson and his party making it back to the ship. At that very moment, in fact, they were miles away in Amauliktok, just off the mainland of Alaska, unaware that the
Karluk
had vanished.

B
ARTLETT, THIS TIME,
did not confide in Mamen. Instead, he kept his suspicions to himself.

Stefansson had not gone on any hunting party. Bartlett knew it in his gut. Stefansson had abandoned ship. He had been anxious to be on his way, to continue his grand expedition. He could not sit still any longer. Whatever his motives, McConnell, Wilkins, Jenness, Jimmy, and Jerry were probably unaware. As far as any of them knew, they were on a hunting trip, and it didn't seem to occur to any of them that a secretary, a photographer, and an anthropologist made a strange hunting party. If it truly was a hunting trip, why was Hadley, the great trapper, not included? Or Chafe, the expert marksman? Why did Kuraluk, the best by far of the Eskimo hunters, remain on the
Karluk
while two other lesser hunters went in his place? If Stefansson were planning a simple hunting trip, surely he would have taken Kuraluk, who could have stood to be separated from his family for that short period of time. But if his intentions were indeed to be gone longer, better to take the two single Eskimos, knowing as he did the native tradition of families staying together when hired.

“A nice mess
¹³
,” Bartlett later wrote. “Stefansson, the leader, ashore and his whole blooming expedition floating around here in the ice out of sight of land. It certainly would have been embarrassing for Stefansson if the Premier of Canada had met him on the beach about that time and said, ‘Sir, where's your expedition?' The only thing Stefansson could have answered would have been to have waved his arm out over the polar pack and said nonchalantly: ‘They're out there waiting for me, sir,' which we were. We were waiting for him all right. We were stuck so hard and fast in that ice forty feet thick that all the motor trucks in Canada couldn't have pulled us out.”

They had been abandoned. Because the ship could not be of use anymore, the staff and crew were not of use anymore, so they were left in the ice to fend for themselves. The men, woman, and children aboard the
Karluk
were no longer Stefansson's concern. They belonged to Bartlett now. But he would say nothing to anyone. Let them think their leader hadn't deserted them. Let them think Stefansson had meant to come back.

A
T NIGHT,
the scientists gathered in the saloon and entertained themselves with ghost stories about the ships that had been frozen and trapped in that same region. There were so many that had drifted into the ice pack, before being carried helplessly away, never to be heard from again. In 1845, Sir John Franklin, with his two ships and 129 men, vanished without a trace. In 1881, George Washington De Long and his thirteen men on the ship
Jeannette
disappeared.

And there was another particularly eerie one. Seventy-five men, years ago, had reportedly escaped from their ship, only to become lost in the ice and the water. It was as if they had vanished into the air, leaving no trace of life behind. These stories made the blood freeze in their veins, and it was difficult to tell if Dr. Mackay was serious or not when he announced one evening that he, for one, had reconciled himself to leaving his bones out there on the ice, “never to see
¹⁴
home again.”

October 1913

. . . we were drifting
¹
, drifting,—we knew not to what haven, in the silent, icy fastness of the North.

—E
RNEST
F. C
HAFE, MESS ROOM BOY

M
amen spent a couple of hours each day up in the barrel, or crow's nest, keeping watch with Bartlett. It was a chance to be of use, to bond with the captain, and to escape the confinements of his cabin.

On October 3, Mamen and Bartlett could just make out land in the distance—Point Barrow, Alaska, five or so miles away. They were drifting swiftly to the west-northwest in gale force winds—still held captive in their ice floe—and the water was nine fathoms deep.

Mamen almost never got any time alone. The men in the Cabin DeLuxe had started calling themselves the “Four-Leaved Clover,” an affectionate term, but one that, at times, implied too much togetherness, which was exactly the case. Mamen got a kick out of the good-natured Malloch, thought well of the more serious McKinlay, and, for all his irritation with the man, liked Beuchat. Still, it was close quarters. Either McKinlay was in there, reading and worrying, or Beuchat was complaining about something or other, or Malloch was singing at the top of his lungs, so loud that no one could think. But sometimes—on rare occasions—they would leave and Mamen would sneak into the cabin, hole up in his bunk, and enjoy some peace and quiet.

He spent a lot of time thinking of his friends and family back home, especially Ellen. Mostly, however, he studied. He read books by Amundsen and Nansen and some of the other explorers. The
Karluk
had an extensive polar library, everything from Robert Peary to Frederick Cook to Adolphus Greely—books on the Antarctic and the Arctic; reports of the steamer
Corwin
and the United States revenue cutter
Bear;
narratives of journeys to the Northwest Passage, the Bering Sea, the heart of the polar ice pack.

The Norwegian Amundsen, of course, was Mamen's favorite, the man he wanted to become. For months now, he'd been scouring Amundsen's books, making mental notes on the expedition he wanted to lead himself one day. He thought of almost nothing else and lay in bed at night, studying and planning. He would spend the next three or four years with the
Karluk,
and afterward would return home to prepare for his own expedition. He and Ellen would marry, of course, but then he would have to leave her again, to pursue his dreams of exploration. “My dearest wish
²
if I get safely out of this trip,” he scrawled in his journal, “is to go home to Norway, scrape together enough money to enable me to get a small ship, and . . . sail under the beautiful Norwegian flag.”

Tonight was one of those nights Mamen always wished for, when Beuchat and Malloch and McKinlay weren't around. But tonight he did not study. His Amundsen books sat stacked nearby, closed and momentarily forgotten. Tonight he was reading something much more pressing—the ship and ice journals of George Washington De Long, who headed for the North Pole in July 1879 and never returned. De Long's diaries dated from 1879–1881 and were written in two volumes and eight hundred pages—not a quick read, nor an easy one, but compelling.

They had died out there—De Long and all thirteen of his men. In September of 1879, their ship the
Jeannette
became trapped in ice just east of Wrangel Island, an uninhabited scrap of land lying northeast of Siberia. She drifted for twenty-one months before going down, and De Long and his crew had set out across the ice toward Siberia in hopes of reaching civilization and safety, only they never made it. They died of cold and starvation before reaching land.

Years later, wreckage from their expedition was found off the coast of Greenland. De Long kept a journal to the very end, writing until the last days of his life. His final words were haunting. A man died almost daily, and De Long's last three entries read: “
October 28th, Friday
³
.—One hundred and thirty-eighth day. Iversen died during early morning.
October 29th, Saturday
.—One hundred and thirty-ninth day. Dressler died during night.
October30th, Sunday
.—One hundred and fortieth day. Boyd and Görtz died during night. Mr. Collins dying.”

The journal stopped after that, and one could only guess what happened to him.

Mamen was transfixed by the journals, as horrific as they were. So, too, were McKinlay, Malloch, Mackay, Murray, and Beuchat. And for one good reason. The
Karluk
was following the same wayward drift as the
Jeannette
.

Dr. Mackay and Murray were the first to observe the similarities, and they led the long, increasingly obsessive late-night discussions about the comparable journeys of the two ships. Along with Beuchat and sometimes Malloch, they gathered almost nightly to pore over De Long's notes and charts. Whenever possible, Mamen avoided the conferences. They had a way of continuing for hours at a time, and Mamen had no patience with that. While the others were talking, he would sneak off to his bunk to get a little peace and quiet and some privacy. But secretly, when alone, he himself pored over the diaries of De Long, as worried as the others. Somehow it was easier for him to deal with the prospect of disaster on his own, by himself.

D
AYS LATER,
on October 7, Beuchat strode into the Cabin DeLuxe, eyes rolling, white as a ghost. “We are lost
⁴
,” he groaned, “we don't know where we are—everything is hopeless.” And then he launched into a woeful monologue regarding Stefansson's mishandling of the expedition and of his absence.

Mamen looked at Beuchat over the leaves of Amundsen's book on the South Pole. The Frenchman was always so dramatic. Everyone knew he had no business being on this expedition—or any expedition for that matter. He was too weak-hearted, too squeamish, too spoiled. He wasn't able to do a thing for himself, and nice as he was—the perfect gentleman—he worried and complained all the time. He was impressionable, too, and Dr. Mackay and Murray had obviously been working on him.

Mamen couldn't help himself. He burst out laughing. They would probably get into another argument, but he didn't care.

McKinlay was next, wandering into the room, flustered and upset. McKinlay also avoided the late-night gatherings regarding the
Jeannette,
preferring, like Mamen, to study De Long in the privacy of his own bunk. McKinlay seldom vocalized his fears, but now he stood in the doorway of the Cabin DeLuxe, staring furiously at Mamen and Beuchat. “Stefansson,” he said firmly, “read De Long's
⁵
book about the voyage of the ‘
Jeannette
' a couple of days before he left the ‘
Karluk
'
;
he saw there that most ships, 99 percent of 100, in the ice north of Bering Strait are facing certain death, and for fear of losing his life he left the ship.”

There it was, spoken aloud. The words no one dared speak. Everyone had wondered about Stefansson's departure. All of the scientists hosted their own theories on the matter. But no one had named it until now.

There were rumors that the plans of the expedition were not what the men had been “led to believe
⁶
,” according to McKinlay, and “that someone had been acting under false pretenses.” Each day of their journey was a revelation for the men of the
Karluk
as they realized more clearly—and with increasing alarm—just how unprepared the expedition had been when they departed Esquimalt. Aside from the lack of proper fur clothing, there were no suitable tents or stoves, and much of the equipment was secondhand or in disrepair. Stefansson, they felt, would most certainly have to undergo an official enquiry when the expedition returned to civilization.

Stefansson surely knew the odds against the ship escaping from the ice this late in the season. He knew, as well as Bartlett, that there was no hope of breaking free until spring. If he stayed with the ship, he gave up all prospect of continuing on his great quest. But the very idea was incomprehensible. What kind of leader abandoned his men?

It was nothing Mamen hadn't lambasted Stefansson for in his own journal. But blaming Stefansson wouldn't help matters, nor would giving voice to suspicions that could never actually be proven. Mamen was disgusted with his comrades and their lack of restraint. Nothing good would ever come from talk like this, and it made him feel uneasy and unsettled.

“The Canadian Arctic
⁷
Expedition will be a great fiasco, I see it now,” he wrote in his diary. “It is not only the leader of the expedition who is to blame, but most of the members. I have never seen a bigger crowd of cowards in my life, they fear both for their lives and their limbs. Why should such people go to the Arctic, they should know what they risk, and when they see danger or dangers confronting them, they blame the leader and curse him up and down.”

D
R.
M
ACKAY
, for one, was planning to take charge of the situation. He and Murray, and to some extent Beuchat, did nothing to hide the fact that they were planning to abandon the ship and take themselves ashore. They charted the
Jeannette
's route and compared it with the route of the
Karluk
. There had been no happy ending to De Long's expedition, and the doctor and Murray did not plan to entrust their own fates to a captain in whom they had no confidence—and they had no confidence in Bartlett. While the captain's long and celebrated reputation with Peary spoke for itself, Mackay and Murray thought much more of their own experience with Shackleton. They believed Bartlett to be simple, unimaginative, and impassive. They also felt he was showing a grave lack of concern for their situation, and it was maddening that he didn't seem to be doing anything to get them out of the ice. They felt far superior to him intellectually and in terms of their own polar experience. If anything, that one expedition with Shackleton had given them a sense of too much power and confidence—false confidence, but confidence nonetheless. Bartlett was no leader, as far as they could see. Shackleton was a leader, and having served under him, they considered themselves leaders by association.

Mackay, Murray, and Beuchat never mentioned their plans to McKinlay, but they invited Mamen to come with them. He was enraged at the suggestion of mutiny and he let them know it. His place was with the ship and with his captain. Afterward, he sought out Bartlett and told him that “as long as
⁸
there are provisions . . . and a deck on
Karluk
, I stay on board, unless I get orders to go.”

Mackay confronted Bartlett with their plans to leave the ship. Bartlett, in his typically gruff way, dismissed the doctor. He did not want to waste his time with this kind of talk. Mackay demanded that Bartlett bring the ship's company together and lay his agenda before them. The doctor and the other scientists were unaware of Stefansson's instructions about what they were to do while wintering in the ice and were unaware of Bartlett's plans for getting them out of there and to safety. As far as they could see, he was doing nothing. They believed he had gotten them into the whole mess to begin with by following the open leads in the ice and steering the ship away from land. In their eyes, Bartlett was the reason they were now stuck in the ice pack, and it was his responsibility to get them out. Dr. Mackay and Murray also demanded that the captain inform them of his plan for the winter.

Bartlett, as usual, said nothing. He knew what the doctor was planning. He'd heard every word through the adjoining wall of their cabins. Mackay wanted Bartlett to hear everything, to know how disliked he was, and night after night, Bartlett had to listen to it. Generally not the most placid and even-tempered of men, the captain refrained from battle. He would not engage in a showdown with these men, would not give them the satisfaction or disrupt his ship. He had his crew to think of. He was in a precarious situation, left in charge of twenty-one men, one woman, and two children. Shouldered with a responsibility he never asked for or expected, he did not feel he could let himself respond to threats.

As far as Bartlett was concerned, there was nothing to discuss with these men, so there was no good reason to call a formal meeting. He was still hopeful that the ship would break free and, if not, that she would be prepared to last the winter held fast in the ice floe.

He did inform Mackay that anyone who required anything had only to ask for it, and if it was on the ship, the request would be taken care of. Afterwards, most of the staff felt satisfied with this, and for the time being at least, things seemed to smooth over.

Still, the worries remained, and everyone seemed suddenly aware of danger, discord, and trouble ahead, even if, for the moment, they stopped talking about it. To his journal, Mamen confided, “One stares death
⁹
in the eyes every minute of the day. It is not only starvation but there are dangers lurking around you all the time, so you must keep the eyes wide open if you love your life.”

W
HENEVER
B
ARTLETT SAID IT WAS SAFE,
Mamen strapped on his skis and led the ski patrol out onto the ice surrounding the ship. When he could, Bartlett took a skiing lesson; Malloch and the doctor were also regular students. The captain and Malloch were both enthusiastic, if still a bit clumsy. Dr. Mackay, who always insisted on doing things his own way—even on skis—excelled in running and jumping.

They were usually the only living creatures out on the ice. It was an eerie world—vast, barren, and utterly still. White sky blended into the icescape, until you couldn't tell where one ended and one began. There was no sign of life but the ship and her men, the dogs, and the little black cat. Otherwise, the world was deafeningly silent and lifeless.

“I remember now
¹⁰
how quiet the world appeared to be,” wrote Fred Maurer. “The only noises were those made by the voices of men and the howling of the dogs; our engines were silent; the ice around us gave no sign of opening up, and there day after day and night after night we lay in helpless imprisonment.”

On October 9 there was a near catastrophe when Bartlett and Mamen were out on their skis with Hadley's dog Molly. The ice broke about fifty yards ahead of the ship, forming a large lead, which grew rapidly into a dark chasm of water. The skiers barely had a chance to leap across the water before it widened, but poor Molly wasn't able to make the jump; and before either Bartlett or Mamen could go back for her, she was stranded on the other side.