BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS
The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk by Jennifer Niven
The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk is a true life well-documented Arctic Ocean exploration expedition that is fast moving and guaranteed to keep the reader enticed to the very last.
EXCERPTS:
The people of the Karluk be allowed to speak on these pages in their own distinctive and passionate voices. In some places, they speak directly, and all dialogue that appears in quotes in this book comes verbatim from their own diaries or letters, or from interviews with the descendants and survivors. Likewise, any insight into the feelings or thoughts of these people comes from the feelings and thoughts explicitly expressed in their journals and descriptions of the Arctic conditions are either quoted directly or adapted from specific observations from journals and diaries of the men who experienced them.
By 1913, the Northeast and Northwest Passages had long been found, and so had the Bering Strait. The Greenland ice cap had been crossed, and the North Pole was claimed for America by Peary. But the Arctic remained much of a mystery, and the majority of its highest frozen regions were still unexplored.
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, 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.
1911, explorer Fridtjof Nansen observed: “Nowhere else have 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.”
He knew the dangers of Arctic travel. He knew it hadn’t been much improved or advanced since Leif Erickson 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.
BARTLETT WAS JUST as unhappy with the choice of the crew as he was with the choice of the ship. Selected out of desperation from along the western coast of Canada, one of the crewmen had only a pair of canvas trousers to his name before signing on, two of the sailors were traveling under aliases, two men smuggled liquor aboard even though it was forbidden, and the cook, twenty-year-old Scotsman Robert “Bob” Templeman, was a confirmed drug addict. He made no secret of it, carrying around a pocket-sized case that held his vials of drugs and hypodermic syringes. He was a nervous man to begin with, anxious, high-strung, and rail thin, and the drug abuse had added years to him.
Siberia meant “Sleeping Land.” It was wild country and the coldest region in the northern hemisphere, with temperatures falling to minus ninety degrees Fahrenheit in deepest winter. Only in the heart of Antarctica did temperatures ever dip lower than they did in northeastern Siberia. It was Bartlett’s first experience in this place, and he had never known such bitter, destructive cold or such harsh weather, even near the North Pole.
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