The Ice Master (50 page)

Stefansson's great reputation, though, did not emerge untarnished from the failure of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. The Expedition was originally designated to cost $75,000, but ultimately cost the government half a million dollars, thanks to Stefansson's extravagance and disorganization. It was embarrassing, too, when he claimed Wrangel Island for Canada, basing this solely on the fact that Munro, Maurer, and Templeman had raised the Canadian flag on the island. “Wrangel Island, claimed by the Explorer Stefansson for Canada, is in reality the property of Russia,” reported Harry L. Rogers in the
Washington Times
on May 23, 1922, in an article entitled “State Department Inquiry Refutes Claim of Canada filed by Explorer.”

Stefansson died in 1962 at the age of eighty-two. Long after the expedition, he continued openly and publicly to blame Bartlett for the tragedy of the
Karluk
. Bartlett, in typical dignified fashion, never responded to his criticisms, although in private, to his closest friends, he expressed his opinions of that “blankety blank liar”
¹⁵
in his usual colorful language. Others felt similarly about Stefansson. “I think he
¹⁶
came to believe the myths that were created about him,” one observer wrote to McKinlay. “He was a . . . great Arctic traveller. But he created a mythology of
The Friendly Arctic
and a lot of people died because of it.”

“I want to
¹⁷
destroy the Stefansson Myth,” McKinlay wrote on January 14, 1977, “for the man was a consummate liar and cheat, who did his best to destroy not only the reputation, but also the health and happiness of anyone who dared to differ from him.” He also wrote, “As far as
¹⁸
I am personally concerned, the whole venture was a miserable, disastrous failure which I would have done much to be able to forget. But almost every other person associated with Stefansson in any position of responsibility is unstintingly traduced, and, in every case, unjustly so.”

The Southern Party of the Canadian Arctic Expedition was, at least, a success. Its members had continued to map the geology and topography of the Mackenzie delta, charting hundreds of miles of Arctic coastline. Diamond Jenness spent two years studying the Eskimos, and Fritz Johansen discovered a new species of moth, which he named “Homoglaea murrayi” in tribute to James Murray. The Southern Party ceased their work when they were called home at the end of 1915 because of the war.

After the publication of
The Friendly Arctic,
members of the Southern Party, Dr. Rudolph Anderson, Kenneth Chipman, J. J. O'Neill, and Diamond Jenness, petitioned Charles Stewart, the minister of mines for the Canadian government, asking “that a commissioner
¹⁹
be appointed to investigate the organization, conduct and events of the expedition, and to determine the truth or falsity of charges made by Mr. Stefansson. Mr. Stefansson has made statements which reflect upon the undersigned and are such serious reflections upon their personal honor that they are determined . . . to clear themselves of the unjustifiable charges made against them.” The request for an inquiry was ultimately declined for the reason that “no good could
²⁰
come of such an inquiry and much harm might be done.” In response to Stefansson's charges of mutiny in his book
The Friendly Arctic,
the Canadian government made clear to Stefansson that the men of the Southern Party had simply been following the orders of the Geological Survey under which they were working.

In 1922, Stefansson organized another expedition, an attempt to colonize Wrangel Island. He sent a crew of four men and one Inuit woman, opting at the last minute not to participate himself. All four of the men perished, but the woman survived. Fred Maurer was one of the dead.

McKinlay had heard from Maurer once or twice and had sent him some Scottish shortbread in 1915. Maurer had returned to New Philadelphia, Ohio, taking the
Karluk
's black cat with him. With Stefansson's help, he traveled the lecture circuit, speaking about his time in the Arctic. In 1922, he was married, and only a few days later left for Wrangel Island. His three male colleagues were completely inexperienced in Arctic travel or survival. One of the men grew ill on the island and died after Maurer and the other two had set out for help, heading toward Siberia in an attempt to duplicate Bartlett's brave journey over the ice and through the wilderness. Maurer and his companions were never seen again. Maurer was twenty-nine years old. “By the time he got a chance to go on Stefansson's expedition of 1921 he considered himself sufficiently well grounded in Arctic matters to take up exploration as a career,” wrote the Montreal
Daily Star
on October 24, 1923.

The black cat outlived him, surviving to a grand old age, and producing numerous litters of kittens, all black with white feet and white bibs under their chins, and all named “
Karluk
.” Maurer had made presents of these to various members of the expedition, including McKinlay and Dr. Anderson.

McKinlay and the other
Karluk
survivors were stunned to hear of Maurer's return to Wrangel Island. McKinlay could not imagine what had inspired Fred Maurer to go back. Maurer himself had said that he needed to go to reclaim a part of himself that he had lost there, and to seek validation for the deaths of his friends Bjarne Mamen and George Malloch.

All of the men of the
Karluk
were lost, in one way or another. McKinlay felt this, but he never ceased thanking God for helping him survive. He believed that, more than anything else, it was his faith that sustained him.

Bartlett never married, but remained faithful to his first love—the sea. In 1938, he said of his own ship, the
Effie Morrissey,
“She's all I've
²¹
got. When she stops, so do I.” He led seventeen more excursions into Arctic waters, and never again lost a life. He wrote to McKinlay sometimes, his letters stamped with postmarks from exotic points around the globe. The letters were gruff, colorful, and full of exciting news. McKinlay yearned to write a biography of Bartlett someday to pay tribute to him.

In the years
²²
following the
Karluk
tragedy, the captain had faced an admiralty commission that found him guilty for putting the
Karluk
into the ice, and for allowing Dr. Mackay's party to leave, even though Mackay and the others had given him a letter absolving him of responsibility. In the eyes of the public, however, Bartlett was a hero, no matter what Stefansson or the Government of Canada claimed.

Years after the expedition, McKinlay received a copy of a letter Bartlett had written to a mutual friend, in November 1914: “McKinlay is a
²³
good boy, with a level head upon his shoulders, a true loyal friend, a good shipmate, and a hard worker. I cannot begin to tell you of the pillar of strength he was to me and shall never be able to repay him. Strange, when we wishes [
sic
] each other good-bye, it was as if we both grew up together and our being together just an ordinary event.. . . I can truthfully say he was everything that a fellowman requires of another.”

The letter meant more to McKinlay than he could say. Until the day he died, he never forgot the debt he owed Bartlett. “Speaking of heroes,
²⁴
” McKinlay wrote, “there was for me only one real hero in the whole 1913–18 story—Bob Bartlett. Honest, fearless, reliable, loyal, everything a man should be.”

“When I die,
²⁵
” Bartlett said, “I don't want a monument. I just want some boy to say I taught him how to navigate . . . and how to tell when the ice is safe.” He died in 1946 at age seventy, and in 1948, a monument was built for the “Master Mariner” in Brigus, Newfoundland, just yards away from his grave.

In 1926, the Canadian government created a memorial plaque in honor of the sixteen members of the Northern and Southern Parties of the Canadian Arctic Expedition who lost their lives “for Canada and for science.” The plaque was hung in the entrance of the Dominion Archives building in Ottawa, but disappeared in the 1960s when the archives moved to a different structure. No one knows where the plaque can be found now, and it lies, one imagines, in the far corners of an attic, covered in dust and cobwebs, forgotten, just as the men of the
Karluk
have been forgotten all these years.

McKinlay lived what he considered a rich and fulfilling life, and he felt blessed. He was promoted to headmaster of Shawlands Academy and spent the rest of his days collecting articles and information on Stefansson and the Canadian Arctic Expedition. In 1977, he returned to the Arctic with his daughter Nancy, visiting Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa, and the high Arctic islands. It was an emotional visit for him, and the memories of 1913–1914 came sweeping back. At home in Scotland, his young granddaughters uncovered boxes filled with expedition-related materials hidden in his basement and encouraged him to write his own version of the story. At the age of eighty-eight he wrote his tale, published in 1976 as
Karluk: The Great Untold Story of Arctic Exploration
. In his last years, he was obsessed with his work on a more honest, revealing account of the story. “I owe that
²⁶
to the memory of my dead comrades,” he wrote, “and to Captain Robert Bartlett, who saved my life.”

He would live to be an old man, but McKinlay would never be able to make sense of the enormous loss suffered on this Canadian Arctic Expedition.

“My writing, I
²⁷
must confess, had reawakened all the harrowing feelings which have bedevilled my life for so many years, but I am hoping that, once I have finished, I may find some measure of peace,” he wrote.

The account, in which William McKinlay planned to tell the full truth about what he had experienced in the Arctic, was still unfinished when he died in 1983 at the age of ninety-five.

Epilogue

O
n October 14, 1924, The Victoria
Daily Colonist
carried a report of Captain Louis Lane's gruesome discovery on Herald Island of an Arctic ghost camp, littered with artifacts—knives, pemmican, snow goggles, matches, ammunition—and human remains.

H
ERALD
I
SLAND—

Sandy Anderson, Charles Barker, John Brady, and Edmund Lawrence Golightly had, at last, been found.

There were no records, no diaries, no written account of what had happened to them. But there were clues.

“I am not
¹
sure,” said Captain Lane, “how long they may have been on the island before they died. Perhaps a month or two.. . . The ashes of their fire indicate they were here more than just a few days.” Sandy and his men had made it across the ice and indeed reached land.

From what Lane and his party could determine, the four men did not die of starvation, disease, or an attack by polar bears. “All seem to
²
have perished about the same time. Starvation is an impossible theory because of the great quantity of food still remaining in camp.” Lane's theory was that their vulnerable tent might have been blown away by the violent winds that swept continually through the area, and that the men quickly froze to death in their sleep. “I believe they died suddenly and unexpectedly,” he said. Others, including Vilhjalmur Stefansson, later theorized that the men died of monoxide poisoning inside their airtight tent.

The rifle turned out to belong to Burt McConnell, who had left it aboard the
Karluk
when he departed with Stefansson in September of 1913.

Captain Louis Lane took the human remains of Sandy Anderson's party back to San Francisco. Afterward, the bones were shipped to Ottawa for observation and examination, and then sent back in early 1925 to Messrs. H. Liebes and Company in San Francisco, the shipping company that employed Captain Lane. Initially, there was some question as to which
Karluk
party the bones belonged—Sandy Anderson's or Alister Forbes Mackay's. The relatives of the eight missing men waited for official word as to whether their loved ones had been found. Based on the evidence discovered on the island, the Canadian government ultimately determined that these were the bones and artifacts of the first mate's party. The remains were never sent to the relatives, however, nor did they make it back to San Francisco. Somewhere along the way, the bones of Sandy, Barker, Brady, and Golightly disappeared.

For seventy-five years, no one knew what had happened to the bones or the artifacts discovered on Herald Island. In the summer of 1999, returning from a research trip to Scotland, I came back to an e-mail that read simply: “I found something that might be of interest to you.” It was from a friend in Wales, who had enclosed a link for an auction on the Internet auction site eBay.

“
Arctic Expedition Remains from Stefansson's ill-fated expedition
. . ..”

Seventy-five years after they had been lost, these relics had somehow resurfaced: a rusted pocket watch now missing its hands; a tattered leather belt buckle; a pair of snow goggles, one of the lenses cracked; a long snow knife with a carved ivory handle, the blade blunt and rusted; and a human jawbone. It is, as Captain Louis Lane and his party had observed in 1924, “a firm, capable jaw, cleft as to chin and with fine, regular teeth.”

The remains arrived encased in a wooden box. They are fragile and worn. The jawbone is the most haunting relic of all, a tangible link to a young man's life. There is no way to tell for certain whose jawbone it is, but it seems to be that of
Karluk
first mate Sandy Anderson. It is my intention to take him home to Scotland, to return him to his family and his homeland, just as I have hoped to bring the men of the
Karluk
home by telling their story.