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The Ebay Finds... It is January 21, 1914. After the ship goes down, the inhabitants of the Karluk are forced to live on the ice while they struggle to reach even some small scrap of land. On this day, Captain Bartlett sends an advance party toward Wrangel Island. There are four men in the party, led by twenty-one-year-old First Mate Sandy Anderson. They set out for Wrangel Island, but they only make it within five miles of its smaller, more desolate neighbor, Herald Island, before disappearing without a trace. Try as they might in the months to come, their shipmates never found a clue as to where the men were, or what happened to them. In 1924, another Arctic expedition made its way to Herald Island where they discovered the remains of a camp. A silver watch, a pocket compass, snow goggles, hunting knives, a nickel belt buckle. And then someone held up the jawbone of a man. It was smooth and shrunken, bleached by the snow and wind. From what they could tell by the pile of ashes on the ground, the men had probably lived on the island for quite a long time. Afterward, their remains and the artifacts were sent to Canada for identification, and then they disappeared. It's now August of 1999-- 75 years later. Returning from a research trip, I came back to an email that read simply: "I found something that might be of interest to you." It was from a friend in Wales, who had enclosed a link for an auction on the Internet site eBay: "Arctic Expedition Remains from Stefansson's ill-fated expedition" Somehow, they had surfaced, these artifacts from the Karluk . They had made their way from Herald Island in 1914 to my hands in 1999, just as I was reliving the history that Sandy Anderson and his comrades had endured. Now I could actually lay my hands on the past.    
What are the odds of these treasures turning up again, just when I was working on The Ice Master ? By now, through their diaries, letters and reports, and through my interviews, I knew these people intimately in mind and spirit. But the day this old box arrived in Los Angeles, I connected physically with the men of the Karluk . I could hold in my hands the snow goggles, the silver watch, the nickel belt buckle, the old hunting knife, and the haunting human remains. |
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