THE LAST VOYAGE OF 
THE KARL UK 
CHAPTER I 
THE EXPEDITION AND ITS OBJECTS 
We did not all come back. 
Fifteen months after the Karluk , flagship of 
Vilhjalmar Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedi¬ 
tion, steamed out of the navy yard at Esquimault, 
British Columbia, the United States revenue cut¬ 
ter, Rear, that perennial Good Samaritan of the 
Arctic, which thirty years before had been one of 
the ships to rescue the survivors of the Greely Ex¬ 
pedition from Cape Sabine, brought nine of us 
back again to Esquimault—nine white men out of 
the twenty, who, with two Eskimo men, an Eskimo 
woman and her two little girls—and a black cat 
—comprised the ship's company when she began 
her westward drift along the northern coast of 
Alaska on the twenty-third of September, 1918. 
Years of sealing in the waters about Newfoundland 
and of Arctic voyaging and ice-travel with Peary 
had given me a variety of experience to fall back 
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