Book Review: The Voyage of the Schooner Polar Bear

 Kettleson Memorial Library, our local library, has a great Alaskan section which is great fun to browse.  I found a book of which the full title is "The Voyage of the Schooner Polar Bear: Whaling and Trading in the North Pacific and Arctic, 1913-1914" by Bernhard Kilian.

The text is a journal kept by the author, Bernhard Kilian.  Bernhard (Ben) and his brother were trained machinists and saw a job advertisement to be the engineers for the Polar Bear.  They were instructed to be at the boat at 6 a.m. on the day of the hiring.  They were, and despite the fact that no-one else was there except the watchman who clocked them in - including the owner/captain, they got the job on the merit of having been there at 6.   Let that be a lesson to all of us!

Ben Kilian also learned to take and develop pictures.  Neither the pictures and the text aren't fancy or WOW(!)  or anything, but both of them are an honest depiction of what went on during the trip.  I found it fascinating.

On the left is a picture of the schooner after a bit of snow.  I often think about what is not in the picture.  Ben Kilian behind a large format camera, loading film and taking the picture in the cold.  Then developing it later in the cold with no running water.  Hmmm.  He's a lot tougher than I am.

The voyage took the better part of two years.  The boat was frozen into the ice on the northeast coast of Alaska.  The men moved off the boat and built a shelter with sailcloth and driftwood.  I love this picture of the men building the winter shelter and the camera (which might be a "movie" camera) in the picture over on the right.

This looks like it might be hard to see, but it is a map of the voyage.  The boat started out from Seattle, then all the way out the Aleutian Chain (which ends up being closer to Japan than the continental USA), goofed around the Kamchatka Pensinsula and visited Russia a number of times, then through the Bering Strait, the Arctic Ocean, and on into the Beaufort Sea.  The voyage was a mixture of trading, whaling, and a "charter" for east coast hunters.

The excitement of northern experience doesn't stop there!  The Captain of the boat and a few others decided that they needed to take care of some business in Seattle over the winter.  So they took off on some dog sleds in early November, up the Kongucut River, across the pass to the Yukon River, and made their way south to Cordova where they got a boat.  This is approximately 1000 miles during the dark of winter with no freeze dried food, goretex, down jackets, or toilet paper.  In fact, the notes in the book said they lost their compass after a week and dead reckoned most of the way across the Brooks Range until they discovered some Alaska Natives to give them some directions!

My guess is that this book will not be in your local library.  But, if you like this kind of stuff, request it from interlibrary load.  You'll be glad you did.

P.S. All pictures are digital representations from the actual book.  I hope I haven't transgressed copyright law.