Last Voyage of the Karluk

In August 1913, the whaler Karluk sailed into the Arctic with twenty-five men and high ambitions for Vilhjalmur Stefansson's grand expedition. Within weeks, she was frozen fast in the worsening ice of the Beaufort Sea. What followed was a five-month nightmare of drift, as the crippled ship and her trapped crew were carried helplessly across nearly a thousand miles of frozen ocean. When the ice finally crushed the Karluk in January 1914, the survivors were left stranded on a shifting white plain, hundreds of miles from civilization. Through brutal cold, starvation, and mutiny, twelve men clung to life on the remote shores of Wrangell Island until rescue came eight months later. Captain Robert Bartlett tells this story with the stark precision of a man who was there, who watched men die, who made impossible decisions at the edge of survival. It is expedition literature stripped to its bones: how far can the human body and spirit be pushed before they break.