The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk and the Miraculous Rescue of her Survivors [Hardcover]

Jennifer Niven (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2000

In 1913 an expedition party sailed out of British Columbia in search of an undiscovered Arctic continent. Filled with hope and excitement, the twenty-five people on board had no hint of the tragedy that lay ahead. Imprisoned in ice, abandoned by their expedition leader, and blown off course by polar storms, the Karluks crew was eventually forced to abandon ship on the ice-pack somewhere in the remote, treacherous Arctic. While the captain set off on foot on a 700-mile trek to search for help, the castaways left behind had no choice but to wait, and to struggle against hypothermia, snowblindness, and death from mysterious disease, starvation, or exposure to the brutal Arctic winter. Finally, after being stranded for nearly twelve months at the top of the world, eight men, one woman, and two children were rescued. Until now, their amazing story has never been fully told. Bringing together first-hand diary accounts, original documents, news reports, and interviews with a variety of sourcesincluding descendants of expedition members and the one living survivorThe Ice Master is a true story that rivals the most dramatic fiction. It is a tale of adventure and exploration, of cowardice and heroism, of brutality and hardship, of betrayal and redemption. It is a story about unlikely heroes and unexpected villainshuman beings reduced to their primal needs by the infinite power and mystery of nature.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Eighty-five years after a famous but ill-equipped Canadian Arctic expedition of 1913 had sacrificed 16 lives, some artifacts appeared on an Internet auction site. They had originated at a "ghost camp," discovered in 1924, where four of the expedition's 28 men, one woman, and two children had perished. Jennifer Niven has completed the unfulfilled mission of survivor William McKinlay to produce a "more honest and revealing account" of the wreck of the Karluk and its aftermath.

The explorers became split into several dispersed groups living "in the shadow of death." Their simultaneously grim and gruesome experiences are interwoven in this minutely detailed and atmospheric retelling, created by combining and comparing firsthand accounts and other sources. The characters are vividly re-created, from the expedition's self-interested leader, whom McKinlay called "a consummate liar and cheat," to the heroic ship's master, who struggled over 700 miles to organize a rescue. Supplemented by haunting and fascinating photographs, The Ice Master makes for harrowing and compulsive reading. This is a momentous story of the Arctic; of adventure, misadventure, and the heights of human endurance. But it is also a story of human failings and the waste of young lives, as poignant now as it was when it was big news in 1914. --Karen Tiley, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

The 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition was perhaps the worst-planned arctic exploration in history. The captain declared the ship unfit for the voyage upon seeing it, and the crew consisted of young sailors who had no arctic experience, and scientists who would be better off teaching in a classroom than searching for an undiscovered arctic continent. Niven's first book, unlike the voyage, is well-researchedDand it's thorough. Screenwriter Niven captivates with her reconstruction of the doomed crew's efforts to survive the harshness of the polar winter, disease, hunger and their own clashing personalities. She expertly captures the feelings of the crew about their situation and about each other, and meticulously recounts the daily activities of the 25 crew members (11 survived), during their long stay as castaways on a small arctic Island. The story does read slowly at points, especially near the beginning of the book. The pace picks up as the book progresses, with the most exciting part being the heroic account of the captain's 700-mile trek from the crew's camp to Siberia in search of a ship that he could use to rescue his men.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Theia; 1st Br. ed. edition (November 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786865296
• ISBN-13: 978-0786865291
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (63 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #821,574 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jennifer Niven's first book, The Ice Master, was released in November 2000 and named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year by Entertainment Weekly. A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writer, Jennifer has ten different publishers in ten separate countries, and the book has been translated into eight languages, including German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Danish, and Icelandic.

Jennifer and The Ice Master have appeared in Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, Talk, Glamour, The New Yorker, Outside, The New York Times Book Review, The London Daily Mail, The London Times, and Writer's Digest, among others. Dateline NBC, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel have featured The Ice Master and Jennifer in hour-long documentaries, she and the book have appeared frequently on the BBC, and the book has been the subject of numerous German, Canadian, and British television documentaries. The Ice Master has been nominated for awards by the American Library Association and Book Sense, and received Italy's esteemed Gambrinus Giuseppe Mazzotti Prize for 2002.

Jennifer's second book, Ada Blackjack -- an inspiring true story of the woman the press called "the female Robinson Crusoe" -- was released in November 2003, was a Book Sense Top Ten Pick, has been optioned for the movies, was recently translated into Chinese, French, and Estonian.

Jennifer's third book and first novel, Velva Jean Learns to Drive (based on the Emmy Award-winning film of the same name), was released July 2009 by Penguin/Plume. Her fourth book, a memoir -- The Aqua-Net Diaries: Big Hair, Big Dreams, Small Town -- was published in February 2010 by Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, and was optioned by Warner Brothers as a television series. Jennifer recently finished work on her fifth book, Velva Jean Learns to Fly, which will be released by Penguin/Plume in September 2011.

She is currently at work on books six and seven, the third and fourth volumes of the Velva Jean series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars courage and cowardice on the ice, December 18, 2000

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk and the Miraculous Rescue of her Survivors (Hardcover)

A season in the Arctic is a great test of character. One may know a man better after six months with him beyond the Arctic circle than after a lifetime of acquaintance in cities. There is something--I know not what to call it--in those frozen spaces, that brings a man face to face with himself and with his companions; if he is a man, the man comes out; and, if he is a cur, the cur shows as quickly. -Admiral Peary

One's first impulse is to dismiss this book as just another quickie attempt to cash in on the Endurance craze, but the story of the Karluk and its crew is quite amazing in its own right and first time author Jennifer Niven does a terrific job telling it. One year before Ernest Shackleton and Endurance set out for Antarctica, Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, working under the auspices of the Canadian government, assembled an expedition intended to prove that a continent lay beneath the Arctic ice. On June 17, 1913, the H.M.C.S. Karluk, captained by Robert Abram Bartlett, set sail from British Columbia with a complement of 25, including Stefansson, sailors, scientists, and Eskimos (including a mother and two young daughters), plus sled dogs and a cat. Within the six weeks the ship was frozen fast in the ice north of Alaska and Stefansson, taking three men and several sleds with dogs, had abandoned the rest of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, setting out for the mainland to continue his exploration.

For the next five months, the Karluk drifted westward with the ice floe, before finally being crushed and sunk on January 11, 1914, just east of Wrangel Island, which lies north of Siberia. With the crew facing the predictable difficulties caused by brutal weather, a diet of pemmican, seal, and the like, snow blindness, etc, and no reason to believe that anyone even knew they were still alive, let alone where they were, Bartlett and Kataktovik, one of the Eskimo guides, set out across the shifting ice for Siberia to get help. Meanwhile, with the departure of Bartlett, the remaining crew splintered into rival camps and added to the struggle with the elements was an atavistic struggle against each other, ending in betrayal, thievery and maybe even murder.

The story of who survives and how and of the feats that survival requires, makes for compelling reading. Stefansson is the main villain of the story, his inadequacy as a leader beginning with his purchase of the Karluk at a bargain price, even though it was clearly not suited to ice breaking, and ending with his doctoring reports of the expedition to cast aspersions on Bartlett while portraying himself in a favorable light. Bartlett on the other hand, the Ice Master of the title, emerges as a truly heroic figure. There are plenty of other heroes and villains--one of the more interesting of the former is Seaman Hugh "Clam" Williams, whose nickname is more than justified when he stoically sits through having his frostbitten toe cut off with a pair of shears--and myriad instances of courage and cowardice.

The reader can't help being torn between questioning the common sense of the men who followed the obviously incompetent Stefansson and admiration for the fortitude that many of them displayed in the face of disaster. And just as you're coming to grips with this quandary, the author provides a helpful endnote where she reveals that various survivors fought in WWI, returned to Arctic exploration and one even joined a colonization party that Stefansson later sent to Wrangel Island, with predictably tragic results. It all makes for thrilling reading, side by side with alternately troubling and uplifting glimpses of the deeds of which humans are capable when they are pushed to their limits.

GRADE : A

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An astounding debut!, November 15, 2000

By 

"bobbie-jo" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk and the Miraculous Rescue of her Survivors (Hardcover)

Jennifer Niven's spellbinding account of the tragic sinking of the Karluk and her stranded crew will keep you captivated ... if not huddled in a blanket and reaching for a steaming cup of hot chocolate!

While the true story itself is nearly impossible to comprehend in our modern age of satellite communications and radar systems, Ms. Niven's riveting narration brings the bleak, bitter, isolated world of the early 1900s naval explorer to life once again in this thrilling nonfiction account of the doomed Canadian Arctic Expedition. The twenty-odd men, one woman and two children who find themselves facing the ultimate test of survival in nature's starkest of settings, as far removed from civilization as can be imagined, will truly amaze, humble and inspire you.

Ms. Niven's obvious love of her subject matter, as well as her years of painstaking research, have resulted in a most thought-provoking and highly-emotional work which captures the essence of the human spirit.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Impressive Story of the Will to Survive, November 12, 2000

By 

Clint Hunter - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk and the Miraculous Rescue of her Survivors (Hardcover)

On June 17, 1913, the Canadian Arctic Expedition contingent headed by Vilhajalmur Stefansson on board the ship "Karluk" embarked on its mission to find an unknown continent thought to lie somewhere in the unexplored region between Alaska and the North Pole. In mid-August the "Karluk" amid increasingly worsening weather conditions became trapped in the Arctic ice floe and drifted helplessly with the winds and currents. Eventually Stefansson decided to leave the ship and with part of the crew and Eskimo guides work his way toward land. Under the command of Captain Robert Bartlett, the "Karluk" and her remaining crew continued to drift north and west until becomming hopelessly ice bound near Wangel Island north of Siberia. Here the ship was destroyed and sunk by the crush of ice leaving Bartlett and his crew stranded in the frozen wilderness. While the crew struggled for existence at their base camps, Bartlett, the Ice Master, undertook an incredible 700 mile trek through the icy wilderness of Siberia to seek rescue. Jennifer Niven has used diaries, letters, and interviews with survivors and descendants to construct the remarkable details of the crew's fight to live and Bartlett's amazing journey.

The events depicted in this book are all the more remarkable because they are true. The ability to cope with suffering, the perseverance in the face of overwhelming hardship, the manifestations of human strengths and weaknesses under pressure, and the overpowering will to live shown by Bartlett and his crew are almost beyond belief.

The story ebbs and flows with the fate of the men. Like their unwanted repetitious and monotonous existence, the narration sometimes tends to become somewhat tedous. However, those who like true stories of exploration, adventure and survival will savor this book.