The Karluk — the leader left, the ship was crushed, and eleven of twenty-five died

Summary

In 1913 the brigantine Karluk, flagship of Vilhjalmur Stefansson's Canadian Arctic Expedition, was beset in the ice of the Beaufort Sea while trying to reach a rendezvous at Herschel Island. The ship drifted helplessly for months and was crushed and sunk on 10–11 January 1914. Of the twenty-five people aboard, eleven died; fourteen survived. The survivors lived because the ship's captain, the Newfoundland ice master Robert Bartlett, organized the abandoned party on the ice, marched most of it to Wrangel Island, and then walked some 700 miles across the frozen Chukchi Sea and Siberian coast with the Inuit hunter Kataktovik to summon rescue.

The disaster began with a decision by the expedition's leader. Soon after the Karluk was beset in September 1913, Stefansson left the ship with a small party, stating he was going to hunt caribou, and did not return; the drifting ice carried the Karluk away, and Stefansson devoted himself to the expedition's continental work, leaving the ship's company under Bartlett. Whether his departure was a genuine hunt overtaken by the drift or an abandonment of a vessel he judged doomed has been argued ever since. Either way, the twenty-five people left aboard a ship he had chosen — an old, underpowered whaler poorly suited to heavy pack ice — were on their own.

The deaths came in clusters. Two parties that struck out independently across the ice after the sinking vanished or perished; later searches found remains of one group on Herald Island. Three more died on or near Wrangel Island, two of illness traced to spoiled rations and one in violent and never-explained circumstances. Bartlett's trek brought help, and on 7 September 1914 the survivors were taken off Wrangel Island, including the Inuit family — the hunter Kuraluk, the seamstress Kiruk, and their two small daughters — whose hunting and skin-work were central to keeping the party alive.

Timeline

A doomed ship and a leader who left

The Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913 was an ambitious, government-backed venture with both scientific and territorial aims, led by the anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a confident advocate of the idea that the Arctic was a "friendly" place where a prepared traveller could live off the land. Its flagship did not match those ambitions. The Karluk was an old brigantine built for whaling, lightly powered and not designed to resist the crushing pressure of heavy multi-year pack ice — a poor choice for the waters she was sent into, and one that several aboard recognized as the season turned.

The ship was beset in August 1913, well short of the rendezvous at Herschel Island, and began a long northward and westward drift locked in the floe. In September, with the Karluk immobilized, Stefansson announced he was leaving with a small party to hunt caribou on the nearby coast. The ice then shifted and carried the ship away from him. Stefansson never rejoined her; he turned to the expedition's overland program and the exploration that would occupy him for years, leaving the ship's company — twenty-five people including scientists, sailors, the Inuit hunting family, and the ship's cat — under the command of Captain Bartlett. The question of whether the hunting trip was sincere or a calculated departure from a vessel he expected to lose has shadowed his reputation ever since.

Bartlett, by contrast, behaved throughout as if everyone's survival was his responsibility, which under maritime custom it was. Anticipating that the ice would eventually destroy the ship, he had supplies, fuel and equipment moved out onto the floe in advance, establishing a cache he called Shipwreck Camp. When the hull finally gave way on 10–11 January 1914 and the Karluk went down, the party was not left empty-handed on the ice; it had a base, a plan, and a commander who intended to get as many as possible to land.

The ice, the island, and the long walk for help

The retreat across the ice was lethal in stages. Some members of the party, doubting Bartlett's plan or impatient with the slow, dangerous hauling, chose to strike out on their own. Two such groups left separately and were never seen alive again; the remains of one party were later found on Herald Island, and the other simply vanished into the floe, presumed drowned or crushed. The main body under Bartlett crossed roughly 80 miles of chaotic pack — ridges of broken ice reportedly tens of feet high, leads of open water, and constant risk of the floe breaking up beneath them — to reach Wrangel Island in March 1914.

Wrangel Island was land, but it was not safety. It was uninhabited, far from any shipping, and the survivors faced months of waiting with dwindling supplies. Recognizing that no one would reach them by accident, Bartlett made the decisive choice of the whole ordeal: rather than wait, he set out on 18 March with the Inuit hunter Kataktovik to cross the frozen Chukchi Sea to the Siberian mainland and then travel on toward Alaska to raise the alarm. The two men covered some 700 miles by dog sledge and on foot, sheltered and aided along the Siberian coast by Chukchi villagers, and eventually reached help — a feat of ice travel that ranks among the great rescue journeys of the polar age and that depended entirely on Kataktovik's skill and on the hospitality of the Indigenous people they met.

On Wrangel Island the waiting party kept itself alive largely through the work of the Inuit family aboard — the hunter Kuraluk, who shot seals and other game, and his wife Kiruk, who made and repaired the skin clothing on which survival in the cold depended. Even so, three more died before help arrived: two men of an illness later traced to spoiled, fat-deficient pemmican that left them with fatal kidney failure, and a third in violent circumstances that could never be resolved as accident, suicide or murder. When the schooner King & Winge reached the island on 7 September 1914 and transferred the survivors to the revenue cutter Bear, fourteen of the original twenty-five came off alive — including Kuraluk, Kiruk, and their two young daughters, the smaller of whom would live into the twenty-first century as the last survivor of the voyage.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Fourteen of the twenty-five aboard the Karluk survived; eleven did not. The dead included the members of the two parties that struck out across the ice and were lost, and the three who died on Wrangel Island. The official inquiry into the Canadian Arctic Expedition examined the loss but left Stefansson free to continue, and the wider expedition went on to produce substantial scientific and geographic results over the following years — overshadowed, for the public, by the fate of its flagship.

Bartlett was decorated for his conduct and remained a celebrated figure in polar circles for the rest of his career. The survivor William Laird McKinlay spent decades unable to forgive Stefansson and eventually published his own account, which did much to fix the modern, more critical reading of the leadership. The youngest survivor, Kuraluk and Kiruk's daughter Mugpi — later Ruth Makpii Ipalook — lived until 2008, the last living link to the voyage. The disaster endures as a study in contrasts: the leader who left and the captain who stayed, and the Indigenous travellers and hunters whose skill, long uncredited, was the difference between fourteen survivors and none.

Lessons

References

• Last voyage of the Karluk WIKIPEDIA
• The Karluk Disaster NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR HERITAGE
• The Karluk Disaster — The Wrangel Island Saga DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
• Charting Disaster: Arctic Museum Discovers Century-Old Record of Ship's Sinking BOWDOIN COLLEGE