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.
In 1879 the U.S. Navy lieutenant George Washington De Long took the steam barque USS Jeannette north through the Bering Strait, chasing a theory that a warm Pacific current would open a navigable route to an ice-free sea at the top of the world. The theory was false. About 20 of the 33 men aboard died, including De Long himself. The ship was beset in the pack ice in September 1879, drifted helplessly for nearly two years, and was finally crushed and sunk north of Siberia on 13 June 1881. The survivors then hauled three boats and sledges south across the ice toward the Siberian mainland, were scattered by a gale off the Lena Delta, and died in ones and twos of cold and starvation in one of the most desolate corners of the Arctic.
The expedition was financed by James Gordon Bennett Jr., the proprietor of the New York Herald, the same press baron who had sent Stanley to find Livingstone. Its scientific premise came from the German geographer August Petermann, who held that the warm Kuro Siwo current flowed north through the Bering Strait and dissolved the polar ice into an “open polar sea.” Unknown to De Long, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey had already concluded the current had no such effect. The Jeannette sailed into the pack on the strength of a hypothesis that the available science had already refuted.
What the disaster produced, against the men’s intentions, was knowledge. De Long kept his journal almost to his death, and it was recovered from the snow of the Lena Delta the following spring, fixing the record of the party’s final weeks. And in 1884 wreckage from the Jeannette was found frozen into an ice floe off southwestern Greenland — on the far side of the Arctic — proving that a current carried ice clear across the polar sea from Siberia. That single observation inspired Fridtjof Nansen to design the Fram and deliberately freeze a ship into the same drift, turning the Jeannette‘s destruction into the foundation of a more successful method of polar travel.
The Brusilov expedition was a Russian attempt, begun in 1912, to sail the Northeast Passage — the Northern Sea Route across the top of Russia from the Atlantic to the Pacific — aboard the schooner Svyataya Anna (St. Anna) under Lieutenant Georgy Brusilov. It failed catastrophically. The ship sailed too late in the season, was beset by ice in the Kara Sea off the Yamal Peninsula in October 1912, and was never freed. Locked in the pack, she drifted helplessly northward for nearly two years, carried far beyond her intended route to about 83° North, near Franz Josef Land. Of the roughly twenty-four people aboard, only two survived: the navigator Valerian Albanov and the sailor Alexander Konrad, who walked out across the ice in 1914. Brusilov, the ship, and everyone who stayed with her vanished and were never seen again. Around twenty-two people died.
The expedition was undone before it began by poor planning and a late start, and then by the long, grinding entrapment that followed. Through 1913 the Kara Sea did not release the ship; by 1914 she had drifted into latitudes far from any shipping, and scurvy had taken hold among captain and crew. Judging the ship doomed to drift indefinitely, the navigator Valerian Albanov asked to be relieved of his duties and to leave on foot. Brusilov agreed, and in April 1914 Albanov set out across the moving pack toward Franz Josef Land with thirteen other men, hauling improvised sledges and kayaks.
The march was a ninety-day ordeal across some of the most treacherous terrain on earth — shifting floes, open leads, pressure ridges, and a sea ice that drifted them backward even as they walked forward. The party fractured and died by stages; some turned back, others were lost. Only Albanov and Konrad reached land, at Cape Flora on Northbrook Island, where by chance they were rescued by the Svyatoy Foka, the ship of the separate, also-stricken Sedov expedition, in 1914. Albanov carried out the ship’s logbook and his own diary, the only substantial records of the expedition to survive, later published as In the Land of White Death. The Svyataya Anna and all who remained aboard, including Brusilov and the 22-year-old nurse Yerminia Zhdanko, were never found. A century later, in 2010, searchers on Franz Josef Land recovered remains and artifacts thought to belong to the lost escape party, the first physical trace of the expedition’s fate.