The Ice Master (3 page)

In an early and ambitious statement, Stefansson boasted that he would hire only British subjects for his expedition. But in the end, the scientific staff would be an international one, some of the most distinguished men in their respective fields, gathered from New Zealand, Norway, Australia, France, Canada, Denmark, the United States, and Scotland. Of these, there were only two scientists of international renown who had polar experience.

Edinburgh native James Murray was a distinguished oceanographer and had served as biologist under Ernest Shackleton. He was a stout, dignified man of forty-six, robust and graying, with a well-trimmed mustache and a crisp way of speaking. He was authoritative, brilliant, and highly respected. He was also, as one of his colleagues observed, “exceedingly over-confident
⁹
,” due to his experience with the Shackleton expedition.

Upon signing on with Stefansson, Murray, in turn, put his leader in touch with a comrade from the Shackleton expedition, Alister Forbes Mackay. The hiring of Mackay was actually a favor to Shackleton, who was concerned about the doctor's reckless behavior and overindulgence in alcohol. Stefansson agreed to engage Dr. Mackay as surgeon to get him away from “the evil influences
¹⁰
of civilization.”

At thirty-five, Dr. Mackay was a legend, a veteran of Antarctica, having traveled with Shackleton on his famed
Nimrod
expedition of 1908-1909 and having made a name for himself on the seventh continent by being one of the first three men to locate the South Magnetic Pole, as well as a member of the first party to scale Mount Erebus, the world's southernmost volcano. In recognition of all he had accomplished on that expedition, he had been awarded the Polar Medal. They had even named an Antarctic glacier for him—Cape Mackay.

A darkly intense man, Dr. Mackay was, at times, impatient, surly, wry, and forthright. He had a mouth that wilted into a perpetual frown and the years melted away when he broke into one of his rare smiles. One of his colleagues once summed him up as a man who “looked
¹¹
. . . as if he had been having a bad weekend.” And he described himself, in typical dry humor, as “a man of
¹²
. . . striking appearance. His keen, deep-set, hazel eyes peer out from shaggy brows, at times accentuating both a brooding calm and a boyish smile.”

T
HEY SAILED AT SUNSET,
7:30
P.M.
, Tuesday, June 17. The ship was not—nor would it ever be—seaworthy, Bartlett argued, but Stefansson was unconcerned. On the evening of the second day out, the ship ran into driftwood and Bartlett ordered the engines stopped, cursing the ship up and down. On June 23, the steering gear gave out. It would break again and again. And then the engines stopped working.

Aside from Bartlett, the twenty-four men aboard ship were still high from weeks of living as the toast of Victoria, British Columbia. They had been given the keys to the city, had been celebrated and applauded for the great work they were setting out to do. As the culmination of a series of fetes, Stefansson, Bartlett, and Dr. Anderson had been the guests of honor at a special luncheon held at the impressive Empress Hotel. Dozens of dignitaries turned out to celebrate the three noted explorers.

From Esquimalt, the
Karluk
made her way north along the coast of Alaska, cruising through the famed Inside Passage from June 18 through June 23. The mood aboard ship was festive and frivolous as the men settled into shipboard life. While the crew worked, the scientists, for the most part, lay around deck and loafed. “And to think
¹³
,” one of them commented as they sprawled contentedly among the coal sacks, “that we get all this for nothing—the trip to Nome, tobacco, good grub and all the comforts of home. Not only that, but we are getting paid for all the time spent on board.”

On July 2, they had entered the Bering Sea, where they were enveloped in fog and mist. A cautious Bartlett called for half-speed ahead. They were, at least, treated to endless sunlight, as murky as it appeared through the fog. There were only two or three hours of darkness now, and the sun rose every morning around 3:00. In spite of this, the temperature dipped to thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, and the men felt the cold acutely. It grew colder, the farther north they traveled, and they could no longer sit out on deck at night for very long.

On July 8, they dropped anchor off the shore of Nome where the
Karluk
's engine and steering gear were repaired, and she took on water, coal, and provisions. At 4:00 on the morning of July 27, the
Karluk
crossed the Arctic Circle. Bartlett claimed, with a twinkle in his eye, that he could feel the bump. They had passed through the Bering Strait and were now entering the vast Arctic Ocean. They celebrated that night with a bottle of wine. Even the teetotalers—Bartlett, among them—celebrated the momentous event, although they abstained from anything stronger than lime juice.

The next morning had brought a thick fog and an unsettling wind from the northwest. The wind picked up rapidly and soon the
Karluk
was bucking the waves and taking on water. She was in the open, vulnerable and susceptible to each blast of wind and each swell of water. Her nose had dipped dangerously from time to time, and the forecastle deck was drenched. In no time, some of the cabins were badly flooded and most of the men fell terribly ill with seasickness. Many of the scientists retreated to their bunks, where they lay groaning and praying for it to end. Even Stefansson suffered from it, and disappeared into his cabin for some time.

Now, on August 1, a month and a half after her wildly celebrated departure from Esquimalt, the
Karluk
circled the edge of the ice pack, nosing her way sluggishly through the thickening fields of white. This ice was permanent, the enormous, free-floating rafts a fixed part of the Arctic horizon, yet always shifting and drifting. Each September as temperatures began to drop and winds increased, the ice would inevitably merge into a solid, impenetrable force. Toward the end of the season, the ice would grow violent, crashing and raftering, floe against floe, as they crushed everything that lay in their path, sometimes pushing one another into great ridges, which were as insurmountable and as high as mountains.

The
Karluk
could do only seven knots when pressed, under the best of conditions, and now she struggled to hold her own power against the growing pack. When it was obvious there was no way through, Captain Bob turned the ship around and headed south, damning her once more.

T
HE FIRST DAY OF
A
UGUST
was a cold one, and the air had a distinctly different feel to it now—as if winter had already arrived. The snow fell, heavily, steadily, and for the men on deck it was the first taste of Arctic chill. William Laird McKinlay, dressed in his sheepskin corduroy coat and oilskins, spent an hour on the bridge helping to steer. He wore rubber boots, but these were painfully thin and of no use against the cold. He turned inside to his cabin and traded his regular clothes for a suit of fur. At last, he felt warm.

“Snow on the
¹⁴
1st of August!” he wrote with excitement. No one could believe the earliness of the season, but the dawning of an early winter made McKinlay's Arctic experience all the more real and thrilling. This kind of adventure was, after all, what he had come seeking.

He came from Clydebank, Scotland, a slightly impoverished, salt-of-the-earth neighborhood, inhabited by Glasgow's sturdy middle class. In April of 1913, young schoolmaster McKinlay had finished yet another workday, instructing students in mathematics and science at Shawlands Academy. After the daily lessons, he left the sandstone walls of Shawlands for the evening and headed home to number 69 Montrose Street, where he lived with his parents, grandmother, brother, and three sisters.

He was the oldest at twenty-four, a true gentleman by nature, freshly handsome, slight and fair, standing only five feet four inches. But he had
¹⁵
a great determination, a firm, tenacious spirit, and was regarded a gracious young man who didn't give up easily and who liked getting his own way. “Wee Mac” was, as friends would later remark, a small man with an enormous personality.

Before joining the faculty of Shawlands, McKinlay had completed his course work at the University of Glasgow. While there, he
¹⁶
was recommended to the founder of the Scottish Oceanographical Laboratory to help calculate and catalog the sums and figures that had been taken on board the
Scotia
on a 1902–1904 Antarctic expedition.

While no explorer himself, McKinlay was intrigued by polar exploration and avidly followed the exploits and accomplishments of the heroes of the day. Despite the fact that news of fatal shipwrecks and lost exploring parties was disturbingly common and that in 1913, nearly two years after they had reached the South Pole, reports were still coming in about the tragic fate of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his team, the world was swept up in the fervor of exploration.

In 1911, explorer Fridtjof Nansen observed: “Nowhere else have
¹⁷
we won our way more slowly, nowhere else has every new step caused so much trouble, so many privations and sufferings, and certainly nowhere have the resulting discoveries promised fewer material advantages.”

McKinlay, like other boys his age, had read with awe about these true-life adventure stories from his comfortable house in Clydebank. Of course, he knew the dangers of Arctic travel. He knew it hadn't been much improved or advanced since Leif Ericksson sailed his ship from Greenland to North America a thousand years ago. He knew the ice could trap or crush a ship until it sank without a trace. He knew a man could freeze to death or be attacked by a polar bear. He knew there were no radio transmissions or air travel over that part of the world. He knew if a ship was lost, it was lost.

But on an April evening in 1913 his doorbell had rung, announcing the arrival of a telegram. William McKinlay was not in the habit of receiving telegrams. With a curious and disbelieving eye he read:
WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO JOIN AN ARCTIC EXPEDITION FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS?

It was signed Stefansson.

It was not a name he recognized. Indeed, McKinlay had never heard of Stefansson, but on the spur of the moment, without hesitation, he made up his mind. At last, he would be an explorer.

All of McKinlay's friends and family turned out to wish him well before he set sail for Canada from the docks of Glasgow. Just before he boarded, his local minister presented him with a Bible. Inside the flap, “Best wishes” was
¹⁸
written, and the words “Psalms 121.”

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. The Lord is thy keeper: The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

O
N
A
UGUST 2,
the
Karluk
made another pass at the ice pack, but it was hopeless. She was not built for breaking the ice, and she hovered on the edge, in what appeared to be the only remaining open water, before Bartlett turned her again to the southwest.

Everyone gathered on deck to view with great excitement the first sighting of walrus and seals. The walrus were tremendous creatures, and massed together they gave, from a distance, the impression of a large, dirty ice cake.

The men also glimpsed their first polar bear, loping five hundred yards or so away from them on the ice. Bartlett called scientist Bjarne Mamen up to the crow's nest to get a better view of the animal. Together, they stood high above the ship and the ice, watching the magnificent creature as it lumbered along, so beautiful and unsuspecting. Mamen climbed back down to fetch Bartlett's rifle, then crouched in one of the whale boats on deck and aimed the gun.

“Shoot now,” Bartlett
¹⁹
called to him, but his first two shots were misses. The third, however, was a hit, and the bear dropped before rising to its feet and disappearing across the horizon. Mamen caught his breath from the thrill of it. His first polar bear, and although it wasn't a kill, he had at least made a hit.

Mamen was the last of the thirteen scientists hired for the expedition and the youngest. Stefansson was the only one who thought him qualified to be there, but Mamen was desperate to be taken on. Standing six feet two inches, with broad shoulders and a boyish face, the strapping young man was a ski champion in his native Christiania, Norway. The son of Christiania's leading funeral director, Mamen possessed all of the idealism and impatience of youth, tempered with a penetrating insight and sensitivity. But he had very little scientific experience.

He had heard about the expedition while working in the forests of Vancouver, and afterward he would not rest until he was hired. It meant he would be kept away from home for the next four years and also away from his sweetheart. They were recently engaged and Mamen loved her passionately; but he desperately wanted this job, so he fought for it. Unfortunately, his meager experience consisted only of a summer of photo topography on the Danish Spitzbergen Expedition. At the prospect of hiring him, one of Stefansson's colleagues remarked, “He appealed to
²⁰
me as a woeful scrub assistant but not worth burdening a party with. . .. I told Stefansson that his experience was of little value, that he could not do any responsible work and I did not think it worth while to take him.”

Stefansson answered, “Poor boy he wants to go so much that I hate to turn him down.” And that was that.

All but Stefansson were worried that Mamen would be a hindrance to the man he had been hired to assist, thirty-three-year-old George Malloch, who had a reputation as one of the most respected geologists in Canada. Malloch had been finishing a postgraduate course in geology at Yale when he received Stefansson's invitation. A ruggedly handsome man with a long-legged athlete's physique; a broad, striking face; and a sensuous mouth, Malloch was vain and temperamental, charming and good-natured. Before the ship was scheduled to sail, alarmed by the disorganization and poor leadership of Stefansson, Malloch was urged by his superiors to resign from the expedition. He refused, making it clear that, through thick or thin, he was going to stick it out.