Karluk (ship)
ship crushed and sunk by Arctic ice in January 1914
Karluk was an American-built brigantine which, after many years' service as a whaler, was acquired by the Canadian government in 1913 to act as flagship to the Canadian Arctic Expedition. While on her way to the expedition's rendezvous at Herschel Island, Karluk became trapped in the Arctic pack ice and, after drifting for several months, was crushed and sank in January 1914. Of the 25 aboard (crew and expedition staff), eleven died, either during the attempts to reach land by marching over the ice, or after arrival at the temporary refuge of Wrangel Island.
Ship history
Karluk was built in 1884, at Matthew Turner's shipyard, Benicia, California, as a tender for the Alaska salmon fishery industry (karluk is the Alutiiq word for "fish"). She was 129 ft (39 m) in length with a beam of 23 ft (7.0 m), and 321 gross register tonnage, 247 net register tonnage powered by sail and a 150 hp auxiliary coal-fired compound steam engine. In 1892 Karluk was converted for use as a whaler, when her bows and sides were sheathed with 2-inch (51 mm) Australian ironwood. She completed 14 whaling trips, the last of which was in 1911.
For her role in the Canadian Arctic Expedition, Karluk had been acquired by expedition leader Vilhjalmur Stefansson in 1913 for the bargain price of $10,000, and sold at cost to the Canadian government when it assumed overall responsibility for the expedition. Robert Bartlett, appointed Karluk's captain for the expedition, was concerned about the ship's fitness for the task, believing that she had not been built to withstand sustained ice pressure, and that she lacked the engine power to force a passage through the ice.
Even after refitting, the engine had a habit of breaking down.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Karluk (ship)” is ship crushed and sunk by Arctic ice in January 1914. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Karluk, ship and crushed, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3482461. The Library of Congress control number is n99009555. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1913, 1914, 1884 and 1892.
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This entry incorporates text from “Karluk (ship)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.