Brief Feature:
Overland Expedition of 1898
The actual drama began in 1897 as President McKinley received word that the entire North American whaling fleet was trapped in pack ice north of the Bering Strait. In response, he summoned the Revenue Cutter Service (later renamed the US Coast Guard), to formulate a plan to rescue the icebound men. Without the aid of present day aviation and motorized vehicles, they created a plan to land three sailors and dogsleds, 1,500 miles to the south of the stranded ships. The three would attempt to cross the Arctic ice while driving a herd of reindeer to feed the trapped crews. Their journey, estimated to take up to six months, was deemed the only conceivable way to bring food to the icebound men until ships could break through the frozen Bering Strait in spring.
Unaware that a rescue team was being formed, the shipwrecked men escaped their vessels, now crushed by ice, and slowly made their way to a tiny whaling station at Point Barrow, Alaska. But the station lacked the food and facilities to feed the men and they slowly began to suffer from malnutrition and frostbite before finally falling into general lawlessness.
True to the plan, three sailors, Lt. David Jarvis, Lt. Ellsowrth Bertholf and Ship’s Doctor S.J. Call, landed 1,500 miles to the south to begin their northward trek only to fell prey to frigid temperatures and marauding animals. Just as the rescue party neared total exhaustion, they encountered two missionaries and eight Eskimo teenagers that volunteered to help drive reindeer the remaining distance to Point Barrow. After five months of impossible conditions including collapsing ice and devastating blizzards, the rescue party finally arrived to save the remaining men who they keep alive until the Coast Guard broke through the ice to reach the group on July 28, 1898.