Britain's Deadliest Arctic Expedition

In 1913, a celebrity explorer led an ambitious expedition into the frozen Arctic - and straight into disaster. From the ensuing catastrophe emerged three incredible stories: a captain's desperate 700-mile trek across treacherous sea ice; an Inuit mother's gruelling efforts to survive on the most remote island on Earth; and the 5-year journey of their charismatic, deceitful leader, who ventured into the frozen wastes with a bag full of Union Jacks in the pursuit of glory. Giles Milton, author of 'Empire at the Edge of the World', takes Dan through this extraordinary saga of endurance, mutiny and murder at the edge of the world. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Tim Arstall. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Dan Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:18Dan Snow?

  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.

• 1:59Dan Snow?

  So believe it or not, that is the strategy that Bartlett and his Inuit guide Kartakovic 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.

• 2:42Dan Snow?

  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 dinnertime. And then there were the seals. Kartakovic would shoot them for food, but then their slippery corpses would disappear

• 3:27Dan Snow?

  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 Kartakovic would hold on to 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 Wilhelm Stephenson's Canadian Arctic Expedition. It's an expedition that set out in 1913 in search of new lands and knowledge in the

• 4:11Dan Snow?

  name of expanding the British Empire. 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.

• 5:00Dan Snow?

  Giles, great to have you back on the podcast.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Great to be invited on. Thank you very much.

• 5:04Dan Snow?

  It's been ages. I'm very, very glad you got this new book out. It's a fascinating one. Tell me, who on earth is Wilhelm?

• 5:10Speaker 03

  So he is Viljalma Stephenson.

• 5:12Dan Snow?

  Viljalma, okay.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  So this is one of the great celebrity explorers of the early 20th century, which no one will have heard of. And the reason why they won't have heard of him is the reason why I wrote my book. He was actually born William Stephenson, but he was so totally obsessed with the Vikings that he changed his name to this Viljalma Stephenson, which frankly, no one could say or pronounce. And so he became, from that point on, known simply as Stephenson.

• 5:41Dan Snow?

  Isn't that interesting? So the Vikings have long exercised a very powerful grip on the, well, the world, but the British imagination.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So he was British, he was Canadian, and he was American. He had these three nationalities. And he was obsessed with the Vikings. And what happened in 1911, and this was really the starting point for the whole story of his career, his Arctic career in the Arctic, is that there have, for many, many years, had been rumours of a lost tribe that lived up in the High Arctic. And this, the High Arctic was unexplored at this point, a million square miles of deep frozen wilderness. But these stories persisted, that there was a lost tribe who'd been living up in the High Arctic for generations, cut off from the rest of humankind. And so Stephenson goes off to try and find them in 1911.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  He comes back two years later with the most astonishing story, which becomes headline news around the world, because he has found the lost tribe in the middle of nowhere. And they don't have dark hair and dark eyes like the Inuit. They have blonde hair and they have blue eyes. And Stephenson tells the world's press that he's found the survivors of the Viking colony in Greenland, which had gone missing in about 1400. This causes a sensation around the world and makes him suddenly, overnight, he becomes the most celebrated explorer of the early 20th century.

• 7:08Dan Snow?

  And what makes it very resonant today, and we should bear in mind the strategic context, which is high-latitude exploration is a thing in this period. So it's the blank space on the map, as you might put it, have been sort of filled in elsewhere. So is the Antarctic and the Arctic the sort of exciting frontier for fans of exploration, adventure and resource extraction and imperialism in this period?

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the Arctic was the last area of the map where no one knew what was there. And there've been rumours, you know, that there was a continent up in the High Arctic just waiting to be discovered. And so this was sort of the holy grail of exploration. And this is one of the things that attracted Stephenson. But it wasn't just a question of oil, gas, rare metals and all that sort of stuff that he was in search of. Stephenson was great friends with the Wright brothers. And the Wright brothers, just a few years before, had invented the aeroplane. And Stephenson saw this invention, and he said, this is going to change the future of the world. And in those days, of course, this is the very early days of aviation, you know, planes had to refuel every couple of hundred miles, you know.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  And he said, well, if you're going to fly from, say, London to Japan, you're going to fly over the Arctic. And that means you're going to have to refuel your plane every couple of hundred miles, which means we need to have all of these islands in the Arctic scattered over the Arctic Ocean under our control, because they're going to be of vital geopolitical and strategic importance in the future. And he said, we'll build little bases on these islands, and they're going to be called, a thing called airports, you know, and we're going to stop there, and we're going to refuel our planes there. So there was a very serious reason behind, you know, this was not just planting the Union Jack in some distant frozen shore. This was a strategic and geopolitical sort of challenge that he'd set himself to bring the entire Arctic under the British Empire.

• 8:58Dan Snow?

  The corridors of power in Ottawa are very interested in this. What really gets me excited, the blondies lost in the Arctic waste, or the fact that they, the Canadians want to keep pushing north, they want to claim territory, keep pushing the bounds of that British Empire?

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Stephenson got back from this Viking Eskimo, as they became known, expedition. And he was such a celebrity, you know, as I said, this was splashed across the world's newspapers, that he was, almost immediately was put in charge of what was going to be the greatest Arctic expedition ever to set sail up into the polar north. And this was the Canadian Arctic Expedition, which was to last five years, from 1913 to 1918. And its goal was really to explore this huge area of frozen wilderness. And any land that was found, they were going to plant the flag in it and claim it for the British Empire, which would immediately bring the Arctic under the, you know, protection of the Royal Navy. So this was an important goal.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  But the goal slightly shifted, and this is really the story behind my book. That under international law, you couldn't just stick the Union Jack in some frozen beach and say, right, this is ours now. Under international law, you had to send colonists there. So you had to prove this was a viable place to live. And so the Canadian Arctic expedition under Stephenson would change tack as the years go on. And Stephenson would decide, okay, we've got to colonize these places. And this, of course, is where it began to go badly wrong because you're going to send young, you know, bright young things up onto islands where the temperature falls as low as minus 60 degrees Celsius in the winter, not pleasant places to live.

• 10:38Dan Snow?

  And just for context as well, Roald Amundsen, who was first to the South Pole for his forgotten achievement, he was first to fly over the North Pole, wasn't he? But that was in the 1920s. That's a long way off in the future. This is unexplored. No one knows what's up there.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  This is pristine, unexplored, deep-frozen wilderness. No one has any idea what's there. They believe there's going to be a continent up at the, kind of covering the top of the world, but they simply don't know. So this is a real pioneering expedition. And Stephenson, what makes him so unusual? You know, we're used to seeing photos of these explorers setting off in their tweed jackets and worsted and, and, you know, hopelessly ill-equipped. Stephenson had spent a lot of time learning the skills from the local indigenous Inuit. He knew how to keep himself alive in freezing temperatures. He knew how to kill a seal, which is an extremely difficult thing to do. But if you can kill a seal, you've got food to keep yourself alive.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  You've got fuel for lighting and heating. And then, you know, you can use the skin to make clothing. So being able to kill a seal was absolutely crucial to everything. So Stephenson, before setting off on this adventure, he was really extremely well-equipped to set off into the unknown. The problem is, of course, he's taking with him some of the world's greatest scientists to go on this expedition. They have absolutely zero knowledge of survival in extreme temperatures. And so this is where it's going to go horribly wrong.

• 12:04Dan Snow?

  So Stephenson sounds like an interesting character because on the one hand, he has made up this, we should finish this in case people don't realise that he's made up this fact about a tribe of Viking descendants. That's just pure nonsense. And yet there are elements of his character and outlook that are quite interesting. He's not just a sort of total fantasist.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  He's such a peculiar figure, Stephenson. And one of the things that drew me to the story really was that he was brilliant at manipulating the press and using the press for his own advantage. You know, he was the first explorer to set off with his own press man, his own photographer to record, in fact cinematographer, to record everything on moving film, what he was doing. The press really builds him up into this incredible celebrity figure. And he's going to use that, exploit it mercilessly to get everything he wants. So the Canadian Arctic expedition, this expedition is basically bankrolled by the Canadian state, who give him unlimited amounts of money to set off into the unknown. It's unheard of. No one's ever had this before.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  But he's so, he's so sort of gregarious, he's so charming, he's so brilliant at twisting politicians around, you know, around his little finger. He gets everything he wants when he goes off on this expedition.

• 13:17Dan Snow?

  Is he also good at referring to the fact that there will be a scramble for the Arctic? As there was a scramble for Africa, scramble for, I mean, are there Russians a sort of feature here? Does he talk about other people taking advantage of these, of high attitude exploration?

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Very much so. He describes the Arctic Ocean as the 20th century Mediterranean. He, he has this vision of, of cities springing up on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. He has a vision of the riches that are going to pour into the coffers of any nation that controls it. And yes, there is a big wrangle over who is going to control this. And of course, the Soviet Union, or rather it's Russia at the, when he sets off on his expedition, by the end of his exploration, it's going to be the Soviet Union, you know? And they are very keen on claiming all these islands to the north of Siberia. My whole book, and really the focus of Stephenson's endeavours, is going to focus on Wrangel Island.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  And Wrangel Island is this deep-frozen speck of rock to the north of Siberia. So it really is the remotest island in the world. And Stephenson is determined to claim it for the British Empire, build an airport, a base there. He's also a great fan of the submarine, only recently invented. He said, this also is going to change the course of history. He said, there will come a day, he says, in 1912, when submarines will sail under the Arctic ice pack, which of course they did in the 1950s. And so he's visionary in some ways. And as people will see when they read the book, he's also a complete charlatan. He's a fantastic Jekyll and Hyde figure.

• 14:52Dan Snow?

  It's so interesting. So off they go, they're heading to the Arctic. How's it go, Giles?

• 14:56Speaker 03

  It doesn't go particularly well, as you might have expected. The Karlek is the flagship. This is the great ship that's going to, you know, explore all these territories. Unfortunately, within a few weeks of setting off into the Arctic Ocean, it gets trapped in the ice, deep frozen. Now, where does ship gets trapped in the ice? You know, I always thought, well, it's just stationary in the ice. But this is not the case because the Arctic ice pack, this vast sheet of incredibly thick ice, is constantly on the move. And it moves in a giant sweep, if you like, around the North Pole. So if you're trapped in the ice, you're not, yeah, you're not stuck in one position. You are gradually drifting with the ice into the most desolate part of the planet,

• 15:37Speaker 03

  where there is nothing, no, there's no food, there's no life, there's nothing there. And so you're completely dependent on what is on board your ship. The problem is, it's going to take you two or three years to go round the pole. So you're in deep trouble now. So the men on the Karlek and Stephenson with them realises they've got a serious problem. Not only are they stuck on the ship, but also the ice pack is constantly grinding and moving and twisting and turning. And you face a very real danger that your ship is actually going to be crushed. So Stephenson, what he decides to do, when they're trapped in the ice, they can still just about sight land. He says, we need to get some fresh food and meat urgently. We need to collect a huge supply, of which of course will remain deep frozen, you know?

• 16:21Speaker 03

  So he heads off with a few people, a few of his team, off to the land to hunt caribou. And then disaster strikes. There's a sudden few days of warmth, the Arctic Ocean melts, the ship drifts off into nowhere, you know, into the, who knows where, into the horizon. And Stephenson is left on land. And so Stephenson and his few core team are on the land. His ship is now being drifting up into the god knows where with all the other men on board, the world's most, the leading scientists. And this is going to be a big problem because Stephenson is not going to be reunited with his ship. They are now on their own, drifting into the high Arctic. The ocean is going to freeze again. And yeah, they're in big trouble.

• 17:06Dan Snow?

  Lots of similarities, as you'd expect, with the Shackleton expedition, which is about to depart and run into its own trouble. Very similar troubles down in the Antarctic. Is the world clamouring for news from this expedition? Are people following it closely?

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Yes, this, this expedition becomes sort of headline news. Everyone loves a good Arctic or Antarctic story, you know? It's men, always, always men actually, pitting their, you know, wits against the environment, incredibly hostile conditions, you know? It's so cold, it's like minus 50, minus 60. These guys are on the ship, their food supplies is dwindling, they're going hungry, they're absolutely freezing cold. And then, of course, darkness comes. The sun sets in November and it's not going to rise again until February. So they're in pitch darkness with very little food and terrified about what's going to happen next.

• 17:58Dan Snow?

  The caribou herds don't turn up, they don't deliver.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  No, Stephenson gets stuck on land. He can't, he can't get back to the ship. So the ship has lost its commander and several of its key people. And it is now in the hands of the captain, Captain Robert Bartlett, who's got to be one of the great sort of Arctic adventurers of all time, I think. And Captain Bartlett assumes responsibility for the 23, 24 people on board this ship. Not just men, because they've taken on board a couple of Inuit, including a family of Inuit who brought their children along, which seems absolutely extraordinary when I read this. This family have two young daughters, one is eight, one is three years old, who they bring on this expedition, which seems completely bizarre when you, you know, think about this nowadays.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  But they're on this ship, they're in the darkness, they've got very little food left. And then what happens? Well, there's a tremendous Arctic storm, a blizzard, the ice pack squeezes against the ship and cracks it in two. And the next thing they know, the ship is filling with water. And they are going to have to desperately gather as many of their belongings as they can, put it onto the sea ice and watch as their ship slowly sinks beneath the ice and is swallowed by the Arctic Ocean. They are on their own, in the middle of nowhere, on the frozen sea, wondering what to do next and how to keep themselves alive.

• 19:19Dan Snow?

  It's very interesting. What was morale like in the crew? Because I think this is one of the underrated successes of Shackleton is actually, once they're frozen in the ice down in the Weddell Sea a year or two later, that he keeps morale pretty high. They're doing musicals, they're all chipping in, they're cleaning, they seem to be getting on quite well. But there's many other examples of ships that are stuck in the ice through the winter when they all go completely bonkers.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'd love, I'd love to spin you a very optimistic story about this, but they are scared. They're very nervous about what's going to happen next. They don't trust Captain Bartlett. Captain Bartlett is a tough old sea dog. And the men on board, many of them apart from the crew, are the world's leading scientists. And this, you know, this is an age of social hierarchy. They look on Captain Bartlett as a rather inferior being. And yet Captain Bartlett is the only person who has the ability to keep these people alive, you know? And so there are incredible tensions which are really fuelled by living in darkness, you know, which causes many of them to get deeply depressed. One of the men on board is this Norwegian adventurer who came on board with depression anyway.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  He spirals downwards into a sort of pit of despair. One of them is a drug addict. Amazingly, he's come on board the ship with his supply of strychnine. He's a strychnine addict, which causes him to have these moments of bursts of exuberance, followed by hours and hours of deep depression. So there's all sorts of troubles on board that ship. The ship goes down, they're camping out on the ice, they call their camp Shipwreck Camp. They've salvaged what they can from the ship. But in the distance, there's a glimmer of hope because they, in the, in the glancing light of the moon, they sight a mountain and they realise that there is land, there's an island on the horizon. And this represents their only hope of survival is to make it to this island,

• 21:12Speaker 03

  where they're hoping to find caribou and other animals they can kill. But the problem is that island is 80 miles away. And to get there, they're going to have to cross 80 miles of frozen sea.

• 21:27Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about rivalries in the high Arctic. More coming up.

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• 23:41Dan Snow?

  It's a risk. It's a gamble.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  Well, it's a gamble because, because also, when I set out on this book, I just thought, oh, Arctic sea ice, you've got a nice flat sheet of ice, you could just walk across it.

• 23:50Dan Snow?

  There are mountain ridges.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Not, yeah, exactly. Pressure ridges. They are up to 100 feet high, vertical walls. They're like ramparts that surround Wrangell Island. They're maybe 50 feet thick. So to get to the island, they're going to have to cut their way, hack their way through with ice picks and axes. They're going to hack their way through these pressure ridges to get to an island, which is, as I say, pretty much the remotest island on the planet. And they have no idea what's there. No one's ever, you know, stayed any time on this island. Will there be food? They don't know. They just know they've got to get off the ice because at some point, the ice is going to break up and melt. And then they're going to be in deep, serious trouble.

• 24:32Dan Snow?

  And so they go for it, do they?

• 24:34Speaker 03

  So they go for it, led by Captain Bartlett. There is a mutiny, a mini mutiny. Four of the scientists decide to try and head back to Alaska. That's not going to end well for them. Captain Bartlett leads them across the ice. They get frostbite. They get snow blindness. They are suffering from intense cold, you know. It's, as I say, going down to minus 60 as they're crossing the ice. The ice splits at one point, they fall into the water. It's really, really, really extreme endurance that they're going through. But most of them will make it to Wrangell Island. And they arrive on the island and they're thinking, great, we've made it. We're going to shoot caribou. We're going to find driftwood. And it's always going to be more or less okay. They get to Wrangell Island. There is not

• 25:19Speaker 03

  a single animal on the island. There is absolutely nothing there, except for snow and ice. And so they realize, yes, they've reached the safety of land, but it's not that safe at all because there's nothing on this place.

• 25:33Dan Snow?

  My goodness me. Okay, that's pretty, that's pretty grim. And meanwhile, what's our hero up to?

• 25:39Speaker 03

  So Stephenson thinks, well, okay, I've lost my ship and I've lost all my men. That's a bit of a blow, but I still want to become the most famous explorer in history. And so I'm going to gather another group of little, little group of men, and I'm going to set off on foot. I don't need a ship to cross the Arctic Ocean. It's frozen. So he gets some husky dogs. He gathers a few hardened explorers who live up in these wild, you know, areas in the extreme north of Canada, mainly whalers, often tough North American whalers of Scandinavian descent. And so he gathers them up and he sets off into the frozen north. He literally heads off on foot, going directly due north in the hope of

• 26:22Speaker 03

  finding land. He has a backpack full of Union Jack flags, which he is indeed going to plant on any land he finds. And we have photos of, you know, him shoving a, you know, a flag into the shingle of these lands. And in fact, what he does over the course of the next few years is he will discover all the remaining undiscovered bits of land in the Arctic. And this is really completes the explanation of the planet, because this is the last bit marked Terra incognita on maps. Well, it's incognita no longer because Stephenson will return to North America in 1918, having explored every bit of the Arctic Ocean.

• 27:03Dan Snow?

  What, just wandering about or dog sledding around?

• 27:06Speaker 03

  Wondering, yeah. And this, but this is gonna, this is taking, this does take four years, you know.

• 27:11Dan Snow?

  I can see why.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's got dog sleds. He's also backed up. A ship is sent to help him in the summer months. So some of these islands are navigable when the ice melts. But generally, actually, travel is easier in the winter when everything is deep frozen.

• 27:25Dan Snow?

  Yes, I can imagine.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  You've got your husky sled. Your life is dependent on your dogs.

• 27:29Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  Stephenson said, I would never eat one of my dead dogs, even in extremis, because these are the only thing that are going to keep me alive. And so he discovers all these various islands in the absolute middle of nowhere, these deep frozen, high up in the, in the frozen north. He also discovers that there is no continent, because he takes measurements of the ocean floor and realizes that the Arctic shelf, you know, where it comes to an end, it goes into, plunges into incredibly deep water, which basically answers the question of whether there is a continent in the polar north or not. There isn't. And so, yeah, he returns, having mapped the last unmapped part of the planet.

• 28:06Dan Snow?

  He oddly doesn't get any credit for going to the North Pole, though, first. Does it, did he not, you didn't do that?

• 28:11Speaker 03

  No, no, no, he doesn't actually. In fact, you know, he's not interested in, in going to the North Pole. I mean, that was Peary, of course, had been up to the North Pole. I mean, there are all sorts of people who claimed to go to the North Pole. They were all disputed, you know, and no one can actually prove that they'd been there. It's very difficult. But, but no, Stephenson wasn't interested in that. He was interested in discovering new land. That's what gave him a real buzz, you know. And to come home, having discovered the last five major islands up in the Arctic North, it secured his celebrity status as this great explorer.

• 28:44Dan Snow?

  So he's operating largely, would you say, in what we now call the Canadian Far North? Or is he, is he going over towards the coast of Siberia?

• 28:52Speaker 03

  He's operating in, you're right, the Canadian Far North. It's islands, it's people do look at maps. It's Banks Island, Victoria Island, these sort of places. Yeah, there's, there's not a lot in these places, you know.

• 29:04Dan Snow?

  And does he think the rest of his men are dead?

• 29:07Speaker 03

  So he has absolutely no idea what's happened to them. So, yeah, we've left them on Wrangell Island, starving with no food and absolutely freezing. Incidentally, when I was writing the book, what was great, what made it so fascinating, was that most of them kept diaries of, really meticulous diaries of what happened to them. And none more so than one of the Scottish scientists, a young chap called William Weemack McKinley, who not only recorded what was happening to them, but records all the, the tensions and the fallout between these men who are, you know, they're, they're desperately hungry. They will fight each other to try and keep themselves alive. And Robert Bartlett, the captain, the sea dog, you know, he realizes that he has to get help because they are not going to

• 29:52Speaker 03

  stay alive on this island. There's simply no food. And so he sets off on what has to be one of the greatest voyages ever. He crosses with one of the Inuit he takes with him. He crosses the Arctic Ocean to Siberia. He reaches Siberia, incredibly treacherous journey across a sea ice that's breaking up all the time. He reaches Siberia, then has-

• 30:12Dan Snow?

  And he's on foot. He's on foot this time.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  He's on foot. He has a few husky, husky dogs, but he's on foot. He reaches Siberia. He then has to cross miles of Siberian coastline to reach a settlement from which he hopes to be able to get a whaling vessel, perhaps, to take him across to Alaska and raise the alarm. And it really is a remarkable journey. Robert Bartlett is one of the great heroes of the book, really. And he is successful. He eventually gets to Alaska, raises the alarm. A ship is sent in the summer months. This ship eventually arrives at Wrangell Island and picks off the desperate survivors of the Karlik expedition, who are emaciated.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  They're starving. Quite a lot of them have died. Several of them have had to have fingers and toes amputated because they've got frostbite. This is done without any anesthetic, without any tools, medical, medical equipment. They have to use little tin cans, hold, they pin people down, and then use tin cans to hack off their frozen fingers. This is pretty unpleasant stuff. But there's also, there's murder takes place on the island. There's madness aplenty. But the survivors eventually are rescued by Captain Bartlett and taken back to civilization.

• 31:31Dan Snow?

  So he sets off. In what sort of date does he set off? Let me get a sense of the time. So this is 1913.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  This is 1913. He sets off in the winter months because you can only cross the frozen ocean in the winter. So it's extraordinarily cold, you know, minus 50 when he sets off. No, it's a remarkable journey.

• 31:51Dan Snow?

  And he arrives in time for the, in the summer and they rescue them in that year.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  That's right. And then it goes into 1914 when he raises the alarm and it's the summer of 1914 when he manages to get a rescue ship to sail through the, what is still ice choked seas, but just about navigable. And they make it through to Wrangell Island and find these pitiful survivors clinging to life on the frozen shores of Wrangell Island.

• 32:19Dan Snow?

  On the eve of the First World War as well. Absolutely fascinating.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Extraordinary, yeah. In fact, they read, Captain Bartlett reads about the outbreak of war when he's sailing off to rescue the survivors from Wrangell Island. So yeah, this is all taking place at a time of incredible sort of turmoil in the world with everything up for grabs, you know.

• 32:39Dan Snow?

  And the Inuit family, do they survive?

• 32:42Speaker 03

  The Inuit family amazingly survive. Little Mugby, aged three, and not only does she survive, but she goes on to live till about 90, 95, I think she eventually dies and left an account of time on the island. At one point when they're camping out on the ice, they build an igloo, the ice splits in two, Mugby falls into a crevasse and is plucked from the frozen water. I mean, absolutely amazing. The other thing that survives this, this great adventure is the expedition cat, you know, which was, was taken from the port of Victoria when they originally set sail from Canada. And thank goodness that cat had nine lives because it was going to need every single one of those nine lives. It was eventually brought back to North America, had babies and there are, to this day, there

• 33:26Speaker 03

  are descendants of this cat that had survived this extraordinary expedition.

• 33:32Dan Snow?

  A lot luckier than Mrs. Chippy on the Shackleton expedition, who I'm afraid did not make it. So we have, thank goodness, those people are back safe and sound. But Stephenson is not, he is just, he's just out and he's on a mission. He's got his backpack full of Union flags. When does he come back to civilization?

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Well, it's very interesting, the date he chooses to come back. And those who do not like him are hostile towards him and he has plenty of enemies, as to be said. They say, oh, isn't it convenient that he waits until the, the great war is finished, the armistice is signed to come back so he can get all the heroes, you know, attention when he comes back. This is exactly what happens, comes back to North America and is feted as an incredible hero. Here is the world's greatest explorer. He's explored the last untrodden area of the planet. And on the back of this, now his decision is, okay, I've planted my flags in all these places. Now we are going to settle these islands with colonists.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  And the first one we're going to settle is the most strategically important of all is Wrangell Island, the very same island that those survivors from the Karlock have eked out an existence on, you know, for many, many months. An island where there is nothing, there is no wild, wild animals, there's nothing there. But strategically, very, very important. And so Stephenson begins to appeal for colonists to go and sail to the place and live there.

• 35:02Dan Snow?

  Can we believe a word he says about it, by the way, you know, in terms of his diary? I mean, his crew corroborated his discoveries and I suppose.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Well, this will become one of the sort of great reveals in my book in a way because Stephenson, half of him is a complete fantasist, but half of him is actually brilliant. This is what makes him such an interesting figure because he is extraordinary. He does go off to these places and he genuinely discovers these islands, you know, we know that for absolute certainty. But at the same time, he's desperate for fame. And so he will spin stories, he will twist people's accounts, he will do down his fellow explorers. So he's accompanied on this, this great expedition by one of his closest friends, Rudolph Anderson. And when he comes back, he does everything he can to diminish Anderson's discoveries.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  And Anderson has, has charted the land, he's, he's made extraordinary archaeological discoveries as well. And, you know, Stephenson does everything he can to put Anderson down. And this will lead to a great clash between the two. So this can be a huge fallout, which comes at the end of my book, where really Stephenson's claims and everything he's claimed is, is put into question. And so the press, which has built up Stephenson as the world's greatest explorer, will now really begin to investigate actually, you know, what's true in all of this and what is false? And it's a fascinating denouement really to his, to his story.

• 36:35Dan Snow?

  Well, in terms of the discoveries, are we saying mostly, mostly true? I mean, obviously not the fair haired tribe, but I mean, are we, what, what's your, as a historian who's now sifted the evidence, how do you, how do you come down on what he achieved in those years?

• 36:52Speaker 03

  No, his, his discoveries definitely are true and he mapped the coastlines and they were proved to be correct. Even, I have to say, the story of the Viking Eskimos, no one knew if it was true or not, this lost tribe. And in fact, I think it wasn't until 2007, when scientists went up to find this tribe and where indeed a group of people living in the high Arctic, who had been pretty much cut off from civilization. But it wasn't until DNA testing came in that they were able to test these people and they discovered that they had absolutely no Viking ancestry whatsoever. So I think, yes, Stephenson had spun this tale and allowed the press, the press then ran with it. You know what the press is like, they take a story and they spin it.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  And, you know, this story from him discovering some people with blondish hair and bluish eyes, suddenly it becomes, oh, they've got Norse words in their vocabulary and oh, they have tools, just like the Viking tools. This story just runs, spins out of control, basically. And the Telegraph, actually, the Daily Telegraph in Britain was one that really spun the Viking, Viking element of the story and says, oh yeah, they're descendants of Leif Ericsson. It was just such a great story. But Stephenson always allowed stories to spin out of control. And as I say, he always travelled with his press man, who would also chuck in some juicy details to help the, to feed the press, if you like.

• 38:14Dan Snow?

  I see. Interesting. Okay. Now, how does the colonization effort go?

• 38:19Speaker 03

  So Stephenson appeals for colonists, young men preferably, to sail off to Wrangell Island and settle there and thereby cement Britain's claim to this island. He gets four young men sign up for the task, no more than that. But he says, well, that's going to be enough. This will be the foundations of the colony and lots of people are going to follow in their wake, myself included, he says. He promises that in the following summer, he will arrive with a ship full of supplies and many more colonists. So these four young men set off, but on the way, they tried to persuade some Inuit to go with them because they realise the Inuit have skills that they don't have, hunting, seals, walruses and that sort of stuff.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  It is unfortunate indeed that only one Inuit signs up and that is a woman named Ada Blackjack, a young mother with a very sickly baby. The only reason she signs up for this expedition is that her young child, her young son Bennett, is extremely ill with tuberculosis. He desperately needs hospital treatment. She's got no money and the only way she will be able to afford for his hospital treatment is to sign up for this expedition as a seamstress. So she's going to be sewing the all important winter clothes that are very, very difficult to make. So only really the native Inuit can do this. The problem with Ada Blackjack is that she has been born and raised in a town.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  She has absolutely no knowledge of survival. She's never fished, she's never hunted, she knows nothing about, you know, living in the wilderness. So she sets off in the company of four young, full-blooded, you know, lusty young men and off she goes to Wrangell Island. And off they go. And the world is then left wondering what's happened to these people. Months go past, no news. The next summer comes around when Stephenson, remember, is going to sail to the island with supplies and extra colonists. Stephenson doesn't sail to the island with supplies and extra colonists. And after two years have gone by and there's been no news, the press is in a frenzy. They really want to know.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  This is a great story, you know, four young men and one single woman on an island. What's happened? How have they treated her? You know, are they still alive even? No one knows. And so eventually a rescue mission is launched and Harold Neuss is in charge of this rescue mission and he sets sail to go to Wrangell Island to find out what has happened.

• 40:52Dan Snow?

  And what, what does he find on that?

• 40:54Speaker 03

  And what did he find?

• 40:55Dan Snow?

  Jagged shore.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  He gets to the island, it's in the summer, but there's still lumps of ice in the sea, icebergs everywhere. The island is still covered in snow. He lands where they were meant to have their camp, nothing there. There's no hint that they'd been there. He sails around the coast, he finds the remnants of an encampment, but no one there. And then suddenly there's a shout from the lookout who's climbed up the mast. He says, I can see someone, I can see someone. And they put off, they go to land, they get their boat, row to the shore. And there they come across Ada Blackjack. Ada Blackjack has survived and she is about to tell the most extraordinary story of survival. You know, she is the female Robinson Crusoe.

• 41:42Dan Snow?

  It's the Downstairs History. We're talking about the Arctic and exploring it.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  And the misery. More coming up.

• 41:54Speaker 05

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• 42:24Speaker 01

  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2% daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 43:12Dan Snow?

  Just on the, on the note though, it does make me think about believing the reassurances of a charismatic duplicitous man who assures you that you should go and settle this hostile place. I'll definitely come and rescue you.

• 43:26Speaker 03

  I know.

• 43:27Dan Snow?

  It would make me think twice about signing up to the old Mars mission, I must say.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  I know. And what's so sort of tragic when I was in the archives is reading the desperate pleading letters from the parents of these poor young lads, you know, saying, you know, what are you going to do? When you sailing? Well, are they going to be okay? And he writes these incredibly flippant letters back saying they're safer than they would be, you know, in Downham, Manhattan or whatever.

• 43:51Dan Snow?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  They're safer than Robinson Crusoe on his island. And they sort of believe him, but as time goes on and they get more and more desperate, they really, they're really deeply, deeply concerned about their, you know, their poor sons on this island. And so they really support Harold Neuss, who leads this rescue mission. Stephenson doesn't lift a finger really to do anything to help these guys. Harold Neuss, the only reason he set sail, well, partly, obviously he wants to rescue the people, but he's also aware this is a global news story. And he does an incredible number of deals with newspaper syndicates. This is going to be a story that's syndicated right around the world. He has a deal with 50 newspapers in the U.S.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  He has a deal with newspapers in South America, obviously in Europe. He has a deal with newspapers in London as well. So he's going to make a lot of money out of this, you know? And he's expecting to have a tale, an incredible tale of survival. You know, this is what, this is what the world wants to hear, that these, these five colonists will have survived their ordeal and he'll pluck them off and bring them back to civilization. Unfortunately, that is not the story because the story is that the four young men have died in pretty horrific circumstances and Ada Blackjack is the only one left alive. Now, remember I said earlier Ada Blackjack, who's been brought up in a town, she has no skills at survival.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  She's never hunted, she's never fished or anything. And as the three of the young men leave the island in a desperate attempt to get rescue, get a rescue mission, a bit like Captain Bartlett had done, had done a few years earlier, unfortunately, they are never seen again. So that leaves Ada Blackjack on the island with Lorne Knight, one of the colonists. Lorne Knight has scurvy and he's dying of scurvy. And so he's stuck in his tent, unable to move. And so everything now is dependent on Ada Blackjack being able to shoot seal, being able to fish, to hunt birds or whatever she can find. There's very little food on the island, but her story is an absolute kind of miracle of survival.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  She teaches herself these skills in absolute desperation. Unfortunately, she can't keep Lorne Knight alive. He dies and so she's left alone on the remotest island in the world with no food, no supplies, and not knowing if a ship is going to come and rescue her. Imagine how terrifying that is. And she kept a diary written in her highly idiosyncratic English of her charting her life on the island. And what is so terrible about her story is how she was treated by the men and particularly Lorne Knight. He is absolutely horrible to her in the months before he finally dies. So she comes back with this remarkable story, which is then global news and Harold Neuss,

• 46:47Speaker 03

  who's gone on, who's led this rescue mission, will make his fortune. But in doing so, he will raise the wrath of Stephenson and you are going to have a massive showdown in the world's press between Harold Neuss, who blames, effectively accuses Stephenson of manslaughter, of willingly sending these colonists to an island where he knew there was no food and he knew the temperatures were, you know, absolutely bitterly freezing cold. And Stephenson, who writes, has already written one book called The Friendly Arctic, saying the Arctic is ready to be colonized. And he will now write another book called The Adventure of Wrangel Island. It sounds like a sort of famous five book, you know, a jolly adventure.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  But the fact is that four of the colonists are dead, you know? And so you have this great showdown and the question is, who's going to win? Will, will Stephenson destroy Harold Neuss or will Harold Neuss destroy Stephenson?

• 47:44Dan Snow?

  And the answer surely is Stephenson can't survive that, can he?

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Well, it's a fabulous battle in the press between them, you know, throwing accusations at each other. It gets so desperate that Harold Neuss actually has a complete nervous breakdown at one point. And then he is forced by Stephenson to sign a legal document saying that he invented all these stories of hardship and in fact, the, the young lads had plenty of food, et cetera, et cetera. But then what's rather amazing, all the people come out of the woodwork from the previous expedition, Robert Bartlett, Captain Robert Bartlett, William Weemack McKinley, who's been on that expedition, others too, Rudolph Anderson, formerly Stephenson's best friend,

• 48:29Speaker 03

  and most importantly, Rudolph Anderson's wife, Maybel Anderson, who's been the chronicler of the entire expedition of what's been, what's been taking place. So they all come out of the woodwork to undermine and challenge Stephenson's story. And it really is, you know, it's quite an amazing battle fought in public in the world's press between this one group on the one hand, saying Stephenson is an utterly despicable individual and Stephenson himself saying, no, I'm the world's greatest explorer.

• 49:01Dan Snow?

  So Stephenson, you write, dies in the 60s. It seems, it seems so, so recent. And presumably goes to his grave absolutely lashing out convinced he's right, firing all cylinders.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  And, and you know, you know, the old sort of Churchill thing, the winner, the winner should, should write their own account of how they won. He was not necessarily the winner, but he certainly writes the account of how he won and churns out book after book and article after article about how brilliant he is. He gets effectively hounded out of Canada once the press turns against him and really a few accuses of manslaughter, of killing these, these individuals. And he's handed out and he goes and settles in North, in America, in the United States, where he's treated rather better actually. And he ends up in Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, where he found this sort of huge Arctic archive, much of which is there to prove that he is brilliant.

• 49:57Dan Snow?

  And presumably in the anti-communist mood of the 50s, he can keep saying, you know, I understood that we had to grab these strategic islands. Of course it came at a cost, but it was an essential sort of geostrategic play. That would have been looked upon favorably, I guess.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  And, and this is the weird thing about Stephenson because he was right in many things, you know, despite managing to kill quite so many young men, because quite a few died on the Arctic expedition as well. But Wrangel Island, if you take a look at a map, you'll see it sits above the northern shoreline of Siberia. This stands at the gateway to the fast melting northern sea route, what we used to call the Northeast Passage. This is about to become, with the Arctic melting so rapidly now, is going to become the principal shipping lane between Asia and Europe. This cuts shipping times by many, many months, therefore cuts the amount of fuel that needs

• 50:51Speaker 03

  to be used and therefore makes shipping goods much, much cheaper between Asia and Europe. And so Stephenson, you know, way before anyone else, he understood the importance of geopolitical and strategic importance of Wrangel Island, this island standing at the gateway to the northern sea route. This has not been lost on Vladimir Putin, who has now built a military base on the island. It's an early warning. It's got radar systems all over. It's bristling with weaponry because he realizes that this, you know, is indeed an incredibly important island for Russia to retain. Because I should mention, in fact, in 1924, the Soviet Union sent a battleship to Wrangel Island. They sent troops there.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  They seized it and took control of it and have been in control of it ever since.

• 51:38Dan Snow?

  So what a, what a fascinating person to write about. He was both correct and fabulously extraordinarily wrong, both all at the same time.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  Which makes him such an interesting figure. He really is Jekyll and Hyde, you know? And he had some people to their dying days, thought he was absolute genius, absolutely fantastic. Others thought he was the most despicable being they'd ever come across. And so makes it a fascinating person to write about because it's not black and white, you know? It's black and it's white. And that makes him very, very interesting. He was a charlatan on one, on the one hand, and he was also a visionary on the other.

• 52:14Dan Snow?

  Well, I'm afraid that feels rather familiar in our modern world. And he's not alone in that. Let's finish off. Poor old Ada Blackjack, you said that she did return safely. Did her son survive his illness?

• 52:28Speaker 03

  She returned safely. Her son did survive. It's a sort of, it's the happy ending really with Ada Blackjack. And she went on to live a full and healthy life and died. I think in her eighties she was when she died. But she was haunted for the rest of her life by what she'd, the ordeal she'd been through on Wrangell Island. It remained with all of those who spent time on Wrangell Island, who'd actually survived. The other one I've mentioned, William Wemack McKinley. He said every single hour of his life, he had visions haunting him of his time on Wrangell Island. Wemack, who it should be said, after the Arctic expedition, went on to fight in the trenches in Flanders.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  He experienced the absolute horrors of the Great War. And he said, none of those horrors were anything like the terrible, appalling ordeal that we went through on Wrangell Island. He said, where there was none of the comradeship and the camaraderie that we had, at least to keep it, to pull us through trench warfare in the First World War. We had none of that in Wrangell Island. It was every man out for himself in this desperate battle to survive.

• 53:39Dan Snow?

  Oh, it sounds terrible. What a wonderful story. Thank you so much for bringing it to us. And another example of your cleverness in resurrecting these tales that we've forgotten to remember. What is the book called?

• 53:50Speaker 03

  It is called Empire at the Edge of the World. And yes, a story of endurance, hardship, madness and everything else that you could throw into it. It really is quite a story.

• 54:02Dan Snow?

  Every single facet of what makes us humans on display at the same time. Fascinating, isn't it? Giles Milton, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me on.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving tables have been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  Time to kick end of year into high gear.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2% daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts and more.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 55:15Dan Snow?

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