The Last Voyage of the Karluk Author:Bob Bartlett, Ralph T. Hale Fifteen months after the Karluk, flagship of Vilhjalmar Stefansson's Canadian Arctic — Expedition, steamed out of the navy yard at Esquimault, British Columbia, the United States — revenue cutter, Bear, that perennial Good Samaritan of the Arctic, which thirty years before had been one of the ships to rescue the survivors of the Greely Expedition ... more »from Cape Sabine, brought nine of us back again to Esquimault--nine white men out of the twenty, who, with two Eskimo men, an Eskimo woman and her two little girls--and a black cat --comprised the ship's company when she began her westward drift along the northern coast of Alaska on the twenty-third of September, 1913.
Years of sealing in the waters about Newfoundland and of Arctic voyaging and ice-travel with Peary had given me a variety of experience to fall back upon by way of comparison; the
events of those fifteen months, I must say, justified the prophecy that I made in a letter to a Boston friend, just before we left Esquimault: "This will have the North Pole trip 'beaten to a
frazzle.'"
We did not all come back.
The Karluk, a brigantine of 247 tons, 126 feet long, 23 feet in beam, drawing 16 1/2 feet when loaded, was built in Oregon originally to be a tender for the salmon-fisheries of the Aleutian Islands. The word karluk, in fact, is Aleut for fish.
The expedition was to be in two divisions. The northern party, under Stefansson himself, was primarily to investigate the theory so ably advanced by Dr. R. A. Harris of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey that new land--perhaps a new continent--was to be found north of Beaufort Sea, which is that part of the Arctic Ocean immediately to the north of Alaska. "The main work of the party aboard the Karluk"--to quote Stefansson--"was to be the
exploration of the region lying west of the Parry Islands and especially that portion lying west and northwest from Prince Patrick Island. The Karluk was to sail north approximately along the 141st meridian until her progress was interfered with either by ice or by the
discovery of land. If land were discovered a base was to be established upon it, but if the
obstruction turned out to be ice an effort was to be made to follow the edge eastward with the view of making a base for the first year's work near the southwest corner of Prince Patrick Island, or, failing that, on the west coast of Banks Island." The Karluk was to go first
to Herschel Island, the old rendezvous of the Arctic whaling fleet and the northernmost station of the Canadian Mounted Police. If she should be beset in the ice and forced to drift, it was expected that certain theories about the direction of Arctic currents would be tested.
A large part of this book is the telling of Capt. Bartlett's trip across hundreds of miles of ice pack, with an Eskimo, to reach Siberia. There to get help to get back to Alaska in order to rescue the remainder of his people left stranded on Wrangle Island.
Shooting the ocasional seal or bear to suppliment a diminishing food supply in -50 to -60 degree weather plus the dangers of cracking shifting ice makes for a truly amazing story of