Long Drive North

In the winter of 1897, eight American whaling ships froze into the Arctic ice at Point Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost point on the continent. Their 265 crew members had provisions for weeks and a winter ahead of them that would last eight months. When news reached Washington, the government conceived an answer so audacious it nearly wasn't attempted: send three Revenue Cutter officers overland across 1,500 miles of frozen wilderness, driving a herd of reindeer, to arrive at Barrow as a walking food supply before the men starved. This is the story of what happened next. Lieutenant David Jarvis is a man who solves problems until there are no more problems to solve, laconic, driven by duty, capable of managing ninety days in the Arctic dark without losing a single note from his field report. Ellsworth Bertholf is younger, sardonic, quietly brave, writing letters to a woman in Seattle that he isn't sure he'll live to deliver. Dr. Samuel Call carries a cast-iron skillet and a camera and a belief that documenting what is happening is as important as surviving it. William Lopp is a missionary who has become the kind of man the country needed, leaving his wife and children to drive 438 animals north through conditions that test every quality he has. And Charlie Antisarlook, Inupiat herder, husband, guide, knows this land in ways the officers can only approximate, and whose contribution the official record will undercount, and whose story this is as much as anyone's. On the ships in the ice, Captain Edmund Tilton manages thirty men through one hundred and fifty-four days of the Arctic winter on insufficient food, with no word from the outside world, by the blunt and unshowy method of doing the next thing and then the thing after that, every day, for as long as it took. Based on the true story of the Overland Relief Expedition, 1897–1898.