The Ice Master (13 page)

“It is a pain
¹⁵
utterly unlike anything I have ever experienced,” he wrote that night, his fingers still tender and stiff, “beating toothache all to sticks. I cannot imagine any more exquisite torture than to freeze a man's fingers and toes just so far as they are restorable and then to thaw them out.”

Earlier, McKinlay was strolling the deck when, around noon, a glow appeared in the south. He stood there, admiring it, when he noticed, “just tipping the
¹⁶
horizon, the upper limb of the sun.”

According to the
Nautical Almanac,
the sun was already two days below them, so the only possible explanation for it could have been refraction. But refraction or not, it was light. With great excitement, McKinlay shouted to the others to come look. The men rushed from the saloon, the fo'c'sle, and the engine room to gain one last glimpse of the brilliant star.

They stood there together and bade the sun farewell and thanked it for its warmth. Shoulder to shoulder, crewmen, officers, scientists, Eskimos, and captain, they watched in a deep, awed hush, chilled, their breath escaping in thin, diaphanous clouds. Yet they were strangely warmed. Then, with great sadness, they saw the radiant fireball dip below the earth for the last time, leaving them in the cold darkness.

“Now he is
¹⁷
gone!” McKinlay said afterward. “When we will see him again, who can say? For our position is such that we may see him—at the earliest—in two months' time; it may be thrice, it may be—well, one wonders what position we will be in when he does return. But as we watched him go, I had other thoughts. We would miss him, but we would buoy ourselves up with the knowledge that he still shines on our friends at home and with the hope that he will shine for us again.”

O
N NOVEMBER 15,
the ship was buffeted again by screaming gale winds that grabbed hold of her until she trembled from the force of it. It was the most violent storm they had seen, and “it blew and
¹⁸
still is blowing so hard that we feel the wind indoors,” wrote Mamen, “it penetrates everything, nothing can keep it out, we all shiver and freeze although we are inside . . ..”

McKinlay was out on the ice when the storm hit, and the ship, only a few yards away, was already invisible in a blanket of drifting snow. Even though there was no sign of open water, Bartlett ordered everyone to remain aboard because of the fury of the blizzard.

The men passed the time as best they could, but they felt their confinement. Mamen, to the delight of his colleagues, spent the day writing out forestry tables, desperate for distraction.
Do you intend
¹⁹
to begin a forest station in the Arctic?
they asked him. And he was reminded that he was silly to spend so much time and effort on work that would never be of any use nor ever be seen by the Canadian government. But Mamen was stubborn and did not listen to them. He intended to make his time out here count.

The mess room light burned all day now because of the darkness. The sun was truly gone, and the moon had disappeared, too, into the blackened and clouded depths of the wild gale. Somehow, this made things even more unbearable.

The loss of the sun, the endless waiting, the fear, the quiet, the vacuum of that world—all preyed on the minds of these men. “So long as
²⁰
the sun was with us to measure the night and day, it was not so bad,” Chafe wrote, “but when the orb disappeared, a sort of sickening sensation of loneliness came over us.”

O
NE AFTERNOON,
they saw—or thought they saw—smoke in the northwest, a cloud just above the horizon that seemed like the smoke from a steamer funnel. The winds still blew but the snow had cleared. Their hearts leaped at the faintest glimmer of hope that there was another ship nearby. Half an hour later, they saw another spout of smoke, just west of the first one. And later still another stream appeared to the south-southwest, remaining for quite a while in the sky. There was no ship. It was the most curious phenomenon, and something the men were at a loss to explain.

Were they beginning to hallucinate? Their world now filled with eerie sights and sounds, some of them explicable, some less easy to understand. “There is a
²¹
peculiar weirdness in those silent stretches of the ice pack,” wrote Chafe. “No sound is heard except the boom or roar of ice breaking and grinding by its own great weight.”

Spirits hit an all-time low. Only the gramophone seemed capable of invoking anything resembling cheer, except to Dr. Mackay, who was quite vocal in his condemnation of it. The doctor had come to view the thing in general—and all of the noise it emitted—as a serious abomination. Even Harry Lauder seemed to have lost his charm.

One night—perhaps to placate him, perhaps to quiet him down—Mamen pilfered the handle of the machine and smuggled it to Mackay, who, in an effort to silence the offending beast once and for all, stashed it in his bunk. The staff and officers, as usual, wanted a concert that night. They had come to depend on this evening ritual; it was vitally important to most of them. Williamson tried to wind up the gramophone, but, of course, the doctor had the handle and refused to return it. Not to be outdone, Williamson and McKinlay appealed to the crewmen in their quarters in the fo'c'sle and asked to borrow their gramophone. They set up the borrowed contraption in the saloon and soon were enjoying their favorite music at an even greater volume, as this Victrola played much louder than their own.

It was minutes before Mackay appeared, having done the impossible and dragged himself out of bed. He volunteered the handle, ready to admit defeat—anything to stop the racket. But no such luck. It was with great pleasure that McKinlay and Williamson replaced the handle, wound the machine, and began spinning a record as the crewmen's gramophone continued to blare its own tunes. The result was a thunderous concert of dueling gramophones. Mackay was more annoyed than ever, and completely unamused.

Everyone else was in high spirits over the prank, until the gasoline lamp burned out so that no one could see an inch in front of his own nose. Desperate for light, they lit the dreaded coal oil lamp, which cast a mournful gloom and discharged fumes that caused their heads to ache. One by one, the men retired to their bunks, disheartened and depressed once again. It was amazing the effect that the feeble light of one rotten oil lamp could have. A few stragglers remained, attempting to read or play chess, but at midnight the lamp gave out and plunged them back into darkness.

They depended on artificial lighting, from morning till night, but their supply of coal oil was running dangerously low and Bartlett gave orders for rationing. During the day, lamps were lit only when absolutely necessary. The gasoline lamp in the saloon was still failing, and they were terrified of it dying altogether. Every day, McKinlay took it apart and tried to fix it, but to no avail. It now gave out only a faint light. When it went, it would be like the sun leaving all over again, and the men did not think they were strong enough to deal with this.

Midday brought “a faint, twilight
²²
glow in the South,” wrote a somber McKinlay, “telling us that there is still a sun shining somewhere in the world, but that is all.”

O
N
N
OVEMBER 21,
the
Karluk
and the floe that held her began drifting west rapidly, approaching the coast of Siberia. The gale continued to blow through the ship. Mamen, Malloch, McKinlay, and Beuchat felt the gusts of cold air all night as the temperature in the Cabin DeLuxe dipped below freezing. They had no choice but to sleep in their clothes, which was both awkward and uncomfortable. And even with that, it was impossible to get warm. There were two degrees of frost on McKinlay's bunk, and everything that was freezable in the Cabin DeLuxe was frozen and frozen hard. When the men awakened, the room looked like a glittering ice palace. Ice covered everything, and long, jagged icicles shone from the ceiling.

Outside, the rigging shook, the wind shrieked, and the ship trembled from bow to stern. Now the
Karluk
rapidly approached Wrangel Island, following an almost identical path to the
Jeannette,
a fact that did not go unnoticed by the scientific staff and Bartlett.

Some men had already pronounced the
Karluk
dead. Almost all agreed that she would not survive the winter. The scientists held a somber meeting on November 24 to discuss the future. It was more of a wake, actually, complete with mourning over the soon-to-be-departed ship. Still the optimist, McKinlay found himself amused by his colleagues. Everyone was all too aware of the
Karluk
's deficiencies, but there seemed to be no sense in “meeting trouble halfway
²³
. Certainly we are in a bad predicament, being as far from Pt. Barrow as from Wrangel Island, while in two months we have drifted 300 miles westward. Should we go much farther West, the chances of breaking free are remote, but then—well, one can never count on the behaviour of the ice, nor can we say where our drift may land us.”

As the Eskimos continued to pile snow blocks against the sides of the ship to give added protection against the severe cold, Captain Bartlett rustled up a small alcohol stove, and once they got it going, it turned the frigid Cabin DeLuxe into a dry and warm little home.

By afternoon, the cabin had become so dry and warm that they had to clear the ice off a porthole and open it to let the cool air in. At some point, Malloch announced that he could no longer sleep there, and he was taking himself off to the wheelhouse instead. Because it was full of emergency equipment, he ended up in the chart house, bundled stubbornly in his skins and his sleeping bag. The next morning—and all the mornings afterward—he would sit over his breakfast, pinched and blue with cold, rubbing his eyes and yawning, and refusing to admit that he hadn't slept well. For all of his affability, Malloch was excessively proud and vain and hated to admit defeat, especially after he had made such a fuss. Afterward, he would retire to the saloon, where he could be found catching up on his sleep. He still made his daily observations from the bridge, but most of his days were spent propped up in a chair, his handsome head nodding about as he dozed.

McKinlay, meanwhile, sat down with the saloon lamp, determined to fix it once and for all. He couldn't face another day of the feeble and gloomy light of the oil lamp. He was, at last, successful. Now it burned all night, as bright to him as the sun.

A
T MIDNIGHT
on November 29, the wind once again hit like a hurricane. The snow blew so fiercely that no one could go outside. The men erupted at each other in frustration and anger. They were edgy, solemn, and quiet, each person in his own way carrying the weight of this frozen world upon his shoulders.

“It is not
²⁴
for themselves they are anxious but for their beloved ones at home,” wrote Mamen. “They sleep with open eyes and ears. It is neither sleep nor rest one gets when one has to be on guard against the powers of nature. ”

B
ARTLETT LAY IN BED
at night, neither sleeping nor resting, and worried about the winter. His patience was thin, his spirits were low, and the uncertainty of their situation was taxing his nerves. It would be better if only he could sleep, but at night he agonized, and through the walls he had to endure the increasing grumblings of Dr. Mackay, Murray, and Beuchat as they gathered in the saloon after hours. While everyone else slept, they continued to plot and plan to leave the ship and head for land.

Bartlett had vowed never to confide in anyone about his worries, but when he and Mamen stood up in the barrel—the wind and the snow whipping their clothes and hair, beating their faces with an icy hand—he suddenly found himself talking about the
Karluk
. It was a relief to speak frankly at last.

Neither captain nor topographer believed that the ship was strong enough to withstand the ice. They both knew that it was inevitable—the
Karluk
would go down, and they would have to save themselves and get out of there somehow.

“Everything that can
²⁵
be done will be done to save her,” Bartlett told Mamen firmly, “but whether we shall succeed or not, who knows.”

Their talk inevitably turned to Stefansson and his departure from the ship. It was a long discourse and an enlightening one. As always, hovering over them was the specter of the
Jeannette
.

“I have gone
²⁶
to bed lately with a kind of feeling that I shall never wake up again,” wrote Mamen, “and when the morning comes and everything is all right, I feel highly surprised to be among the living, it is not exactly a pleasant feeling, but I am now so accustomed to it that it causes me no anxiety. If I must die, let me die like a man and not as a dog. We are all affected. . . as to whether
Karluk
is so strong that she will stand all the pressing or whether she will follow
Jeannette
and go to the bottom.”

In 1880, after a year on the ice, his ship still drifting aimlessly, a weary George Washington De Long had written with a foreboding that the men, Kiruk, and maybe even the two children of the
Karluk
now understood: “There can be
²⁷
no greater wear and tear on a man's mind and patience than this life in the pack. The absolute monotony; the unchanging round of hours; the awakening to the same things and the same conditions that one saw just before losing one's self in sleep; the same faces; the same dogs; the same ice; the same conviction that tomorrow will be exactly the same as to-day, if not more disagreeable; the absolute impotence to do anything, to go anywhere, or to change one's situation an iota. Each day our chances of liberation seem to grow fainter and fainter. Alas, alas! the North Pole and the Northwest Passage are as far from our realization as they were the day the ship left England; and my pleasant hope, to add something to the history of Arctic discovery and exploration, has been as ruthlessly shattered and as thoroughly killed as my greatest enemy could desire. I frequently think that instead of recording the idle words that express our progress from day to day I might better keep these pages unwritten, leaving a blank properly to represent the utter blank of this Arctic expedition.”