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CHAPTER II III The Fatal Drift of the Karluk

For me at least Captain Jack Hadley is the first big figure in the story of Wrangell Island. Baron Wrangell, who first searched for it as a continent (1821-24), did not find it or any other land. Kellett, who found it (1849), did not land on it nor did he know it was an island. De Long, whose voyage proved it to be an island (1879-81), saw it only from a distance. Hooper, Muir and Nelson, who first landed (1881), stayed only six hours. Berry and his men came a few days later and remained three weeks. From them we have an approximate map of the island but the information about it in other respects is neither comprehensive nor detailed. Bartlett in 1914 remained only a few days and the applicable part of his book "The Last Voyage of the Karluk," is only a few pages with little but personal information of how the landing was made and why he had to leave his men there while he proceeded to the mainland of Siberia. John Munro was in command of the party on the island after Bartlett left but he has given us no published account of what happened during the following seven months. [ McKinlay and Maurer both published newspaper articles and it is possible that other members of the party may have printed fugitive pieces that have not come to my attention. The only story that approaches completeness in narrative, discussion of motives and methods, and in information about the climate and country, is a handwritten Manuscript by Jack Hadley now in the archives of the Department of the Naval Service at Ottawa.

Jack Hadley was in himself no less pleasantly unusual than his career was romantic. Of English parentage on both sides, he was born in Canterbury, and he told his various escapades as a choir boy in the Cathedral with greater relish than any of the other stories of his adventurous life. He was born with had a love for music and with a voice beyond the ordinary. Apart from

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the Cathedral choir he had no training, but he had listened to operas in big cities and to native songs in every corner of the earth, and whatever he heard he could reproduce, modified by his peculiar temperament and talents. He could play a variety of wind and string instruments and carried an assortment of them with him wherever he went.

And he went nearly everywhere. Besides sailing every sea, he had been a tramp in Australia and, I think, in Africa. He had run away from ships in tropical islands both of the East and West Indies. He had been an officer in the navy of Chile and had “fought” as lieutenant on a Chinese ship in the ChineseJapanese War. When the United States sent its first revenue cutter to arctic Herschel Island in the arctic just west of the mackenzie River in 1889 to determine whether that central rendezvous of the new whalemen's paradise was American or Canadian territory, Hadley was a minor officer on the ship. The island turned out to be well east of what had previously been agreed upon as the international boundary. The Government of the United States, therefore, lacked the power to regulate the rather turbulent whalerEskimo metropolis, and Hadley sailed west beyond Point Barrow.

The Arctic pleased Hadley beyond every country. The next twentyfive years he made occasional forays to San Francisco or England but wintered in the Arctic more than twenty times, always whaling or trapping except for a brief connection with the arctic coal mines near Cape Lisburne. No man whose namd is found in reference books under the heading of "Polar Explorer" ever spent half that much time beyond either of the polar circles. Franklin died during his second winter and so did Scott. Shackleton spent three polar winters, Bartlett four, Nansen four. Amundsen has eight winters to his credit and so has Sverdrup. Peary spent nine winters in the Arctic. I have ten polar winters behind me now, but my record was only half that when Hadley joined our expedition in 1914.

Hadley's experience besides being more extensive than that of any

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so-called explorer was also in a way more varied, for he had been there as a trader, whaler, naval officer, coal miner and (the last four years) as an explorer. He had travelled on foot and by sledge and in every variety of sea conveyance - skin-boat, wooden whaleboat, sail ship and steamer. He had hunted and trapped on the arctic lands; he had travelled on the landfast sea ice and to some extent on the moving pack. On one occasion he and his party had been given up for dead when a terrific gale broke the ice on which they were whaling west of Point Barrow and carried them they knew not where, for they had no instruments of precision. When they sighted land after several weeks of struggle, it was four hundred miles from Point Barrow and about equally far from where they had supposed themselves to be.

As related in "My Life With the Eskimo", I first met Hadley at Cape Smythe, near Point Barrow, in 1908, and liked and admired him from the first. When the three ships of my expedition sailed past Cape Smythe in 1913, he was there and wanted to ioin both because we had always been good friends and because he was beginning to consider the north tip of Alaska a little tame. I wanted to give him one of the chief positions of responsibility in the expedition but, since it had been organized before I knew he would join it, I found no berth for him at once, and without official rating, he was sharing my cabin on board the Karluk as my friend and travelling companion when an accident (see Chapter VI, "the

Friendly Arctic”) separated five other men and myself from-the Karluk, which drifted off held fast in the shiftipg ice while we watched from shore helpless. The ship was now under my official next in command, Captain Robert A. Bartlett, and Hadley remained without formal status as the sole occupant of my cabin during a

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The Karluk's thousand miles of ice-fettered drifting between August September, 1913, and the end of that year. He did not, therefore, belong to the official machinery of the expedition when the Karluk broke and sank.

I did not hear of that wreck until a year and a half later, and I did not learn the full story until still another year had passed and Hadley had joined us again after the adventures of shipwreck, the long march over shifting floes to Wrangell Island, the seven months on the Island, and the voyage to Victoria, B.C., after the party had been picked up in Wrangell Island by Swenson, Jochimsen and McConnell of the King and Winge.

Hadley had a pungent and inimitable way of speaking, only a faint flavor of which remains in what he wrote. I had every form of interest in the story as he told it, sometimes in casual fragments and sometimes in long chapters, when we were together between 1915 and 1918. I knew the ship that sank with many of my hopes and with many a book and memento treasured from childhood. I knew the dogs that died pathetically in the first few days, and the men who died soon thereafter partly because those dogs had not survived to help them. I knew the other dogs that helped the seventeen people to reach Wrangell Island and that took the Captain and his one companion from there to Siberia. I knew the men who died later on Wrangell Island and the men who lived through. Some that died and some that lived were dear friends, and the responsibility for it all was mine in greater or less degree.

During the expedition there had always been at least three theories aboard the Karluk as to almost anything that we did or failed to do. James Murray and Forbes Mackay, veterans of the Antarctic, had views from Shackleton's expeditions which prevailed with them and confused those whom they tried to convert. Bartlett had his

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had his opinions gained under the leadership of Peary and from association with the Greenland Eskimos, who differ in many of their ideas and methods from those of Alaska. Hadley and I had ideas developed in the western Arctic, partly from association with the local Eskimos, some of themvery free in expressing their opinions. The scientific staff and crew were divided and perplexed by these three sets of views.

As Hadley told me the story during long winter evenings, we talked much of what should have been done and might have been done with condemnation, approval or regret. When he wrote the story at my request he naturally filled it with long discussions of what himself and others had argued as to whether this or that were safe or wise. It has long been the custom to publish certain historical documents only after the men concerned with them are dead. Some time Hadley’s manuscript will doubtless be published as he wrote it. It will then be far more enlightening than the fragments of it which we can now publish. Even so, I feel that Hadley should be allowed to tell at least part of the story in his own words, editorial discretion imposing silences and softening phrases here and there.

As we have said, Captain Hadley’s handwritten document as preserved in the Government archives at Ottawa is the fullest and most explicit story of the vicissitudes of the Karluk on her long drift. If a critical history ever comes . to be written, the Hadley story can be checked and supplemented by the copy of Captain Bartlett's log which is also in the same archives and has been published in the Report of the Department of the Naval Service for the Fiscal Year ended March 31, 1915. While this log is too fragmentary to form a connected story, it is of great value when used together with Hadley's narrative or else together with Captain Bartlett s own popular account as published in under the name of "The Last Voyage of the Karluk.” My own version of how the Karluk was first beset by the ice and how my small hunting party and I were separated from it by accident has also been published in "The Friendly Arctic," Chapters V and VI, and some