9 THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE KARLUK 
upon by way of comparison; the events of those fif¬ 
teen months, I must say, justified the prophecy 
that I made in a letter to a Boston friend, just be¬ 
fore we left Esquimault: “This will have the 
North Pole trip ‘beaten to a frazzle/ ” 
It did; and there were two main reasons why. 
One was that the Karluk, though an old-time 
whaler, was not built, as the Boosevdt was, espe¬ 
cially for withstanding ice-pressure; very few ships 
are. Dr. Nansen’s ship, the Fram, was built for 
the purpose and has had a glorious record in both 
the Arctic and the Antarctic. The Karluh , a brig¬ 
antine of 247 tons, 126 feet long, 28 feet in beam, 
drawing 16/4 feet when loaded, was built in Ore¬ 
gon originally to be a tender for the salmon-fish¬ 
eries of the Aleutian Islands. Her duty had been 
to go around among the stations and pick up fish 
for the larger ships. The word harluh , in fact, is 
Aleut for fish. When later in her career she was 
put into the whaling service her bow and sides 
were sheathed with two-inch Australian ironwood 
but she had neither the strength to sustain ice-pres¬ 
sure nor the engine-power to force her way through 
loose ice. She had had, however, an honorable 
career in the now virtually departed industry of 
Arctic whaling, and was personally and pleasantly 
known to Stefansson, who had travelled on her 
from place to place along the Alaskan coast on 
