page_title: Last voyage of the Karluk
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Last voyage of the Karluk / Canadian Arctic Expedition / Background
caption_attribution_description: Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879–1962)
context_page_description: The last voyage of the Karluk, flagship of the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–16, ended with the loss of the ship in the Arctic seas, and the subsequent deaths of nearly half her complement of 25. In August 1913, Karluk, a brigantine formerly used as a whaler, became trapped in the ice while sailing to a rendezvous point at Herschel Island. After a long drift across the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, in January 1914 the ship was crushed and sunk. In the ensuing months, the crew and expedition staff struggled to survive, first on the ice and later on the shores of Wrangel Island. In all, eleven men died before rescue.
  The Canadian Arctic Expedition was organised under the leadership of Canadian anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and had both scientific and geographic purposes. Shortly after Karluk was trapped, Stefansson and a small party left the ship, stating that they intended to hunt for caribou. However, the ice carried Karluk westwards, far from the hunting party who found it impossible to return to the ship.
context_section_description: The Canadian Arctic Expedition was the brainchild of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a US-based, Canadian-born anthropologist of Icelandic extraction who had spent most of the years between 1906 and 1912 studying Inuit life in the remote Arctic Canada. His fieldwork had resulted in the first detailed information on the life and culture of the Copper Inuit, the so-called "blond Eskimos". Stefansson had returned home with plans for another expedition to continue his Arctic studies, and obtained promises of financial backing totalling US$45,000 (around US$750,000 in 2010) from the National Geographic Society (NGS) in Washington and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. However, he wanted to extend his plans to include geographical exploration in the Beaufort Sea, then a blank space on the world's maps. For these expanded aims he needed more money, and approached the Canadian government for assistance.
  The area known as the "High Arctic" was subject to claims of sovereignty not only from Canada, but also from Norway and the United States. The Canadian government was concerned that an American-financed expedition would give the United States a legal claim to any new land discovered in the Beaufort Sea, so when the Canadian prime minister Robert Borden met Stefansson in Ottawa in February 1913 he offered to assume financial responsibility for the entire expedition. Borden's government was hopeful that the expedition would strengthen Canada's claim to sovereignty over the Arctic islands. The American sponsors agreed to withdraw, subject to an NGS condition that the Society could reclaim its rights to the expedition if Stefansson failed to depart by June 1913. This created a narrow deadline and hurried preparations for the journey north, although Stefansson maintained in his 1921 account that "forethought appeared to have anticipated every eventuality".
caption: Vilhjalmur Stefansson, leader of the Canadian Arctic Expedition
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