Charting Disaster: Arctic Museum Discovers Century-Old Record of Ship’s Sinking – Bowdoin News

January 12, 2015

The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum has determined that a chart donated to the museum is the one on which ice captain Robert A. Bartlett recorded the disastrous 1914 Arctic expedition of the Karluk ship.

The Karluk was carrying scientists and explorers along the north coast of Alaska when it became trapped in pack ice and began to drift north and west. Several months later, the ship sank.

When the chart arrived at the museum, it was unidentified and came in a large envelope that had been unopened for many years. The document was donated, along with dozens of miscellaneous papers, photographs, and artifacts, to the museum in 2012 by the family of William James (“Jim”) Dove, a nephew of Bartlett’s.

The museum’s curatorial staff examined the chart and noticed annotations of locations and dates. They realized that they corresponded with the drift and sinking of the Karluk, so they compared the document to a chart illustrated in Bartlett’s published account of the disaster. Soiled areas, a major tear and fold patterns are all identical.

Read More: http://community.bowdoin.edu/news/2015/01/arctic-museum-discovers-century-old-karluk-chart/