Britain's Deadliest Arctic Expedition
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Imagine for a second how you would retrieve a dead seal from the Arctic Ocean. It's probably not something you've asked yourself before, but it is worth it. You'll see why. You might find yourself in this situation. You could perhaps use a rope or a gaff, a piece of stick with a hook at the end. It might be useful to have a boat. Or if you're Captain Robert Bartlett, you could simply hurl yourself face first across a sheet of wafer-thin sea ice. clamp your front teeth around the seal's flipper and hope that your companion is then strong enough to haul you back across the ice with your dinner safely in your mouth. So believe it or not, that is the strategy that Bartlett and his Inuit guide, Kartaktovik, went with.
And astonishingly, that was by no means the strangest or hardest part of their journey. We're back in spring of 1914, and these two men are attempting to cross 700 miles of treacherous frozen ocean and rugged coastline. They're travelling from Wrangel Island towards a friendly port in Siberia. Behind them, they had left an expedition in catastrophe. Ahead lay frozen wastes, a bit of open water, blizzards, temperatures approaching 60 below zero. Now, you have heard me on this podcast before talk about the greatest high latitude journeys of all time, the greatest Arctic and Antarctic journeys of all time. Fortunately, I do apologize. I have another one for you. I don't know where this fits in the league table, but my God, it's up there.
This is a journey that starts with an epic struggle against Arctic sea ice, crevasses, shifting flows, stretches of slush filled water that forces men to crawl on their bellies. Their dogs, understandably, regarded the whole enterprise as a really terrible idea, and at one point the dogs broke free and attempted to return to Wrangel Island, forcing Bartlett to spend hours pursuing them with a tin of food, pretending it was dinner time. And then there were the seals. Kartakovic would shoot them for food, but then their slippery corpses would disappear beneath broken ice. So Bartlett devised this ingenious retrieval system. He would slide across the ice, he would seize the seals with his mouth, and then Kotakovic would hold onto his feet to stop him plunging into the freezing water.
The seal meat, once they did recover it, froze almost instantly. The men had to thaw it in their underwear and they ate it raw. This was an astonishing feat of endurance and ingenuity. And it is just one of the extraordinary episodes in the story of Vilhelmur Stefansson's Canadian Arctic Expedition. It's an expedition that set out in 1913 in search of new lands and knowledge in the name of expanding the British Empire.
How did Captain Robert Bartlett and his Inuit guide retrieve seals on the Arctic ice?
It instead became a desperate saga of survival, isolation and rescue. Today we're going to dig into that story with the help of one of the best in the business, Giles Milton, author of Empire at the Edge of the World, Endurance and Madness in the High Arctic. It is a remarkable tale of endurance, mutiny, feuds, geopolitics, ambition, treachery. In the furthest flung corners of the world, there's even, we think, a murder. This is a story that I'd never heard of, and I'm incredibly embarrassed to admit it. but once heard, you'll never forget it. Let's get into it.
Charles, great to have you back on the podcast. Great to be invited on. Thank you for having me. It's been great. I'm very, very glad you got this new book out. It's a fascinating one. Tell me, who on earth is Vilhalmir? So he is Viljalmar
Stefansson. Viljalmar, okay.
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