The Ice Master

Dates Covered: 1913 - 1914
ISBN: 0786865296
HH Rating:

Our Take

How many ways can expansive sheets of ice make noise? For Jennifer Niven, in her new book The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk, they variously evoke drums, thunder, gunfire, a cannonade, or a chorus. Her ice is harsh, grating, jarring, creaking, cracking, grinding, trembling, shivering, bone-chilling, churning, and goes thrum-thrum-thrum. It is a great deafening crescendo, a deafening symphony, and an explosion of thunderclouds overhead. And that's just on pages 115-116! Her thesaurus must be dog-eared and limp. Meantime, the crew on board at the time sensibly called such episodes "disturbances" and left it at that.

Ice, you should pardon the expression, has been a hot topic over the past few years. For example, much attention has been given to Sir Ernest Shackleton's heroic tale of Antarctic rescue of 1914. At least six books have been published, a TV special aired, and a variety of museum exhibits about his adventures. While Shackleton's crew was entirely saved, the voyage of the Karluk, a boat exploring the Arctic Ocean in 1913, turned out disastrously. Most of the crew died, but not before the boat drifted around for months encased in an ice floe. A variety of astonishing documents have survived, and Niven tackled the story. There's a lot of ice involved.

The alleged leader of the expedition, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, was an Arctic explorer of some renown and quite convinced that a continent lay under the northern ice shelf (it doesn't). In what starts off sounding like a story plucked from this very website, he stupidly outfits a 29-year-old wooden tub with shoddy equipment, shortages of warm clothing and food; grumpy, inexperienced scientists; a surly crew, vicious dogs, and a pet cat. Stefansson wrangled with the Canadian government for control over the expedition, and Niven gamely offers descriptions of the characters as though we're reading bios at the beginning of a bad movie script:

"Mamen possessed all the idealism and impatience of youth, tempered with a penetrating insight and sensitivity."

"He had a great determination, a firm, tenacious spirit, and was regarded a gracious young man who didn't give up easily and liked getting his own way."

"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."

Despite these plodding descriptions, it quickly becomes clear that this trip is going no place good. The captain of the vessel, Robert Bartlett, fired several of sailors because he thought they were inadequately experienced. Shortly after a late, hasty departure, things immediately started going wrong, like breakdowns, encasements in ice, etc. Perhaps someone should have told Stefansson that wooden boats can't crush floes very well.

He figures it out quick, and flees with a "hunting" party back to Canada while the rest of his crew remains mired in the ice for over a year. They begin interminable exercises of moving supplies, moving camp, separating, coming back together, separating again. The crew and the scientists grow irritated at each other and split into different factions; some are accused of stealing food and other malicious crimes. In a sternly brave maneuver, Captain Bartlett heads off across the ice into remote Siberia, thence to Canada, to get help, an exercise which takes seven months in entirety. In his absence, more bickering, suffering, sickness, and the occasional toe amputation ensue.

Niven paints a portrait of what the crew's suffering through a monotonous wasteland might be like by making large sections of the book closely resemble a monotonous wasteland. She appears to have had remarkable success in obtaining access to primary source materials: that the most extensively quoted diary in the book comes from a man who died in the Arctic is damn near a journalistic coup. She decides to use these materials as a supplement in describing conditions of the entire stay, and, considering the interest that a yearlong stay in a dark frozen tundra might generate, she might have done well to change her focus.

One of her most authoritative sources, William McKinlay, managed to live through the endeavor and make it to the ripe old age of 95, dying in 1983. McKinlay himself was in the throes of writing a book about his experience when he died, and a major aim of his work was to refute Stefansson's claims that the expedition was anything but poorly and selfishly-designed. Stefansson, perhaps divining his own foul luck and lackluster performance, had signed away his entire crew's notebooks and journals to the Canadian government before the ship ever left port. He later laid claim to any and all writings produced by crewmembers, living or dead, following the expedition, and later released edited bits from individual members that made him look smart instead of a deceptive fool.

As such, Niven might have better spent her pages examining Stefansson's movements after ditching his ship, and what allegations plagued him later in life. Such revelations are given cursory treatment at the end of the book, and do not receive nearly so much attention as the marooned crew's various transits over ice floes, frozen mountains, and failed seal-hunting expeditions. The public was enraptured with this rescue mission and its members; the New York Times covered it on the front page for weeks despite the difficulties of receiving accurate information from outposts in remote Alaska. Stefansson himself was later able to conduct several other expeditions, having mostly slipped out of being responsible for this disaster. He would also write a book called "The Friendly Arctic", wherein he claimed that any reasonable person would have no trouble whatsoever surviving out there. He appears to have ripped out key pages from the diary of a late crewman before returning the documents to the man's family. The last remaining survivor called him a "consummate liar and cheat" in 1977.

These outrages and betrayals by the expedition leader aren't revealed until the last ten pages or so. Niven had command of some astonishing resources: there are pages of photographs from the mission while it unfolded in the book. Not only did crewmembers manage to find enough light in a place dark six months of the year to take pictures, they also lugged the cameras back and forth enough to fully document the mission. The pictures tell a far better story than the 100-odd pages of endless marching. And, in 1999, Niven actually manages to purchase personal affects of some of the crew and one member's actual jawbone on eBay. She returned the things to man's family. Her heart's in the right place, but given the fantastic array of materials she had on hand, she could have given the story a much better treatment. In particular, Stefansson should have been dealt with a little more harshly, and she could have skipped some of that listless wandering about. The story is a gripping one: Niven just spent a bit too much time on the wrong parts.

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