The Karluk was the flagship of the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–16. In August 1913, the ship became trapped in the ice while sailing to a rendezvous point at Herschel Island. After a long drift across the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, in January 1914 the ship was crushed and sunk. In the ensuing months, the crew and expedition staff struggled to survive. In all, eleven men died before rescue.
About Last voyage of the Karluk in brief
The Karluk was the flagship of the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–16. In August 1913, the ship became trapped in the ice while sailing to a rendezvous point at Herschel Island. After a long drift across the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, in January 1914 the ship was crushed and sunk. In the ensuing months, the crew and expedition staff struggled to survive, first on the ice and later on the shores of Wrangel Island. In all, eleven men died before rescue. The Canadian government’s financial involvement represented a shift in the expedition’s emphasis towards geographical exploration rather than ethnological and scientific studies. While a Northern Party searched for new lands, a Southern Party under zoologist Rudolph Anderson set out to carry out land-based anthropological and zoological surveys. The expedition also aimed to be the most comprehensive scientific study of the Arctic ever attempted. It was the brainchild of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a US-based, Canadian-born anthropologist of Icelandic extraction who had spent most of the years between 1906 and 1912 studying Inuit life in the remote Arctic Canada. His fieldwork had resulted in the first detailed information on the life and culture of the Copper Inuit, the so-called “blond Eskimos”. The Canadian prime minister Robert Borden met Stefansson in Ottawa in February 1913 and offered to assume financial responsibility for the entire expedition. The American sponsors agreed to withdraw, subject to an NGS condition that the Society could reclaim its rights to the expedition if Stefansson failed to depart by June 1913.
The main object was to explore the “area of a million or so square miles that is represented by white patches on our map, lying between Alaska and the North Pole”. This appeared to have anticipated Stefansson’s account that appeared in 1921. The ship’s captain, Robert Bartlett, was hailed as a hero by the public and by his formerKarluk shipmates. He escaped official censure, and was publicly honoured for his later work on the expedition despite the Canadian government’s reservations about its overall management. Although Bartlett was criticised by an admiralty commission for taking the ship into the ice, he was widely praised for his work. He and an Inuk companion set out across the frozen sea for the Siberian coast, in search of help. Assisted by local populations, the pair eventually reached Alaska, but sea ice conditions prevented any immediate rescue mission. In September 1914, three more of the party had died, two of illness and one in violent circumstances; 14 were rescued. After the sinking, Bartlett organised a march across the ice to WrAngel Island, 80 miles away. Two four-man parties were lost before the island was reached, and two four- man parties werelost before the Island was reached. The captain and his companion eventually reached the island, but were short of food and troubled by internal dissent. The pair helped each other survive by hunting game, but they were also troubled byInternal dissent. Some of the survivors were critical of his seeming indifference to their ordeal and the loss of their comrades.
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