The Last Voyage of the Karluk: A Survivor's Memoir of Arctic Disaster
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About this ebook
An astonishing narrative of disaster and perseverance, The Last Voyage of the Karluk will thrill readers of adventure classics like Into Thin Air and The Climb. In 1913, explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson hired William McKinlay to join the crew of the Karluk, the leading ship of his new Arctic expedition. Stefansson's mission was to chart the waters north of Alaska; yet the Karluk's crew was untrained, the ship was ill-suited to the icy conditions, and almost at once the Karluk was crushed-at which point Stefansson abandoned his crew to continue his journey on another ship. This is the only firsthand account of what followed: a nightmare struggle in which half the crew perished, one was mysteriously shot, and the rest were near death by the time of their rescue twelve months later.
Written some sixty years after the fact, and drawing extensively on his own daily log, McKinlay's narrative of this doomed expedition is rendered with remarkable clarity of recollection, and with a combination of horror and a level of self-possession that, to modern eyes, may seem incredible. Like most of his companions, McKinlay was inexperienced, without a day's training in the skills essential to survival in the Arctic. Yet he and many of his fellow crewmen, with the help of an Eskimo family accustomed to such conditions, survived a year under the harshest of conditions, enduring 80-mile-per-hour gales and temperatures well below zero with only the barest of provisions and almost no hope of contact with civilization.
Nearly a century later, this remains one of the most compelling survival stories ever written-an extraordinary testament to man's overpowering will to live.
William Laird McKinlay
William Laird McKinlay returned from the Arctic to serve as an officer on the Western Front during World War I, and spent much of his life thereafter as a school headmaster in Scotland. His account of the Karluk disaster was first published in 1976, when he was eighty-eight years old.
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Reviews for The Last Voyage of the Karluk
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Am branching out into Arctic history and this is an amazing account of survival/death of the crew after being abandoned by their leader, Stefansson (1913-18 Artic expedition). Don't let anyone tell you the Arctic is "friendly". Don't let anyone tell you Shackleton wasn't a good leader. Puts paid to thoughts that the North Pole is a soft option compared to the South.
Book preview
The Last Voyage of the Karluk - William Laird McKinlay
1
The Telegram
The telegram arrived at ten-past seven. It was Wednesday, 23 April 1913, and I had finished my evening meal and was settling down with my pipe and the evening paper when the doorbell rang. That telegram remained one of my mother’s most treasured possessions until Hitler’s bombers destroyed her home in Clydebank. I cannot remember its exact wording, but I still recall vividly the thrill I felt when I read it. Was I willing to join an Arctic expedition for four years? No salary, but all expenses paid. It was signed ‘Stefansson’.
I was flabbergasted. Me! William Laird McKinlay, aged twenty-four, teacher of mathematics and science in Shawlands Academy, Glasgow, invited to be an explorer in the frozen wastes of the Arctic Circle! Me! Only five feet four, ‘Wee Mac’ to my friends (and to the boys at school behind my back) being asked to join the ranks of boyhood heroes like Nansen, Peary, Amundsen, Captain Scott! Reports were still coming in of the deaths of Scott’s party on their way back from the South Pole after being beaten to the post by Amundsen.
The telegram might have been somebody’s idea of a joke, like some present-day schoolboy sending his teacher a fake invitation to join the latest expedition to the moon, except that Arctic expeditions were almost a kind of international sport at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century; and since there seemed to be very little in the way of land left to be discovered, scientists were in great demand to bring back technical information about the nature of things above and below the vast ice caps surrounding the Poles. As a Bachelor of Science and winner of a Scholarship in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University, I had got to know Dr W.S. Bruce, the Scottish explorer, and for two years I had been helping him to collate observations made in the Scottish Antarctic Expedition of 1902–4. Dr Bruce knew my qualifications to do magnetic and meteorological work, and he knew I would jump at the chance of joining an exploration team.
I rushed to a telephone and contacted Dr Bruce at home in Edinburgh, only to be told that he was in London, helping a Mr Stefansson select oceanographical equipment and scientific staff for an Arctic expedition. ‘Stefansson’ was the signature on my telegram, and as I waited to be put through to Dr Bruce’s London hotel, I vaguely recalled newspaper stories about a Canadian anthropologist called Stefansson who claimed to have found a race of ‘Blond Eskimos’ during exploration of the Arctic coast of north-west Canada. Dr Bruce confirmed that on his recommendation, this was the man who was inviting me to join his latest expedition.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson was planning to explore far into the frozen north, between the northernmost shores of Canada and the North Pole. It was to be a vast scientific project, financed by the Canadian Government, involving anthropological study of the Eskimos, geological surveys (with a particular view to finding copper), sounding of uncharted Arctic waters, as well as a look-out for new islands to be discovered for Britain. I would be magnetician and meteorologist in the team if I wanted to go.
‘Yes!’ I shouted down the line.
Could I leave at once to make final arrangements in London?
Yes, again.
An hour later I was on the night train to London. It is only now that I fully realize the shock all this must have been to my mother: to have me snatched from home at a moment’s notice, her William, who was so small and weakly at birth that the doctor gave him a year to live; Wee Mac, suddenly whisked away to be an explorer in the frozen Arctic! Dr Bruce had said I should be prepared to be away from three to four years. Nobody mentioned the very real possibility that I would never come back at all. And I have no recollection of any protest from my parents, any raising of doubts, or any sign of dismay. My mother just packed my overnight bag and promised to explain my absence to the headmaster of the school. I would be back on Friday morning to straighten things out with the School Board and collect the rest of my luggage before sailing from Glasgow on Saturday.
I slept very little on the journey to London. Sitting upright in a third-class compartment as the Royal Scot rushed southwards, I went over and over in my mind everything I remembered having heard or read about Arctic exploration, trying to visualize the adventures that lay ahead, shoving to the back of my mind, with youthful abandon, the reports of death and disaster that were so much a part of Arctic history. Exploration of the vast north and south polar regions was on the threshold of being revolutionized by the use of the wireless and the aeroplane. Soon, any expedition snowed-in or trapped in the Arctic ice, and short of supplies, would be able to radio its position and have supplies dropped from the air, or have rescue speeded-up by air search and airlift. But in 1913 Arctic exploration was an extremely hazardous business, little advanced in technique since Leif Eriksson had sailed his Viking ship westwards from Greenland to the shores of North America a thousand years before. Only the steam turbine had been added to help ships through the Arctic pack-ice, and when the ice really closed in, a ship with an engine was every bit as helpless as any of the sailing vessels that had been trapped, crushed and sunk without trace in attempts to circumnavigate the globe at its northernmost