KARLUK (Book review)

Karluk: The Great Untold Story of Arctic Exploration by Willaim Laird McKinlay has now been told. Setting off in June 1913, Vilhjalmur Stefansson was a Canadian explorer who captained the Karluk, a ship with a 25-member crew of seamen and scientists. Shortly thereafter the ship became stuck in Arctic ice, stranding the crew which, fortunately, included an Eskimo family consisting of mother, father, and their two daughters, Helen and Mugpi, aged five and three. This family was an invaluable Godsend, using their Arctic skills (hunting, shoemaking, clothe making and repairing, cooking skills etc.) to help save the survivors as they wandered around the frozen wastelands of drifting and raggedy icefloes for six months. Eleven of the crew never made it.

Dogsleds and snowdrifts, polar bears and snow blindness. The weather was extreme and brutal, especially during times of 24-hour darkness. Yet periodically there were rays of hope. The author, William Laird McKinlay, lived to tell the tale, wanting to set the record straight, which he did in 1976 before dying in Glasgow at a ripe old age of 95 in 1983.    

McKinlay does well describing the personality clashes and group dynamics of men when under unimaginable stress. They were ill-equipped, lacking in leadership and survival skills, and were suffering from malnutrition and many mysterious ailments.

Aged only 25, McKinlay was the ship’s magnetician and meteorologist, a scientist not an Arctic explorer, yet not without hope. McKinlay wrote,

Just before I left home our family minister had given me a Bible, with ‘Psalm 121’ inscribed on the fly-leaf. My Bible was somewhere on the Mary Sachs or the Alaska, but just the thought of it sustained me. And when I walked along the sandspit and looked at Wrangel’s distant mountains, I was seeing my own Scottish hills and remembering those lines from Psalm 121: ‘I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence doth come mine aid.’ My thoughts were not gloomy. (Page106) 

Many times, close to starving, sick and weak, with periods of malnutrition, bouts of diarrhoea and constipation, surely for McKinlay the timeless truth of Jesus’s words rang true, when He said, ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread along, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’ God’s Word sustained him. Spiritual food! Facing one gruelling ordeal after another, day after day, night after night, he just seemed to ‘get on with it’ as the party struggled to walk from the ice-crushed Karluk to Wrangel Island, from whence they hoped to be rescued. And rescued they were! What a remarkable story of resilience. McKinlay concluded,

It is enough for now that the whole story of the Karluk has been told. I thank God that I have been spared to tell it. I have never ceased thanking Him for bringing me through the experience of the Karluk and Wrangel Island. I believe it was my faith in God that sustained me, a faith kept alive by the memory of Psalm 121: ‘I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence doth come mine aid.’

As that great Scottish theologian, Professor William Barkley put it: ‘The fact that God is on our side does not mean that we will enjoy a comfortable troublefree existence. What it does mean is, that no matter what comes to us, we can face it erect and foursquare.’ (Page 162)