Bob Bartlett

Robert Abram Bartlett (August 15, 1875 – April 28, 1946) was a Newfoundland-born American Arctic explorer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Early life

Born in Brigus, Colony of Newfoundland, Bartlett was the oldest of ten children born to William James Bartlett and Mary J. Leamon, and heir to a family tradition of seafaring. He grew up in Hawthorne Cottage in Brigus. By the age of 17, he mastered his first ship and began a lifelong love affair with the Arctic Ocean.

Career

Bartlett spent more than 50 years mapping and exploring the waters of the Far North and led over 40 expeditions to the Arctic, more than anyone before or since.

Bartlett was captain of the SS Roosevelt and accompanied United States Navy Commander Robert Peary on his attempts to reach the North Pole. He was awarded the Hubbard Medal of the National Geographic Society for breaking the trail through the frozen Arctic Sea to within 150 miles of the pole, yet was excluded from the final exploring party (possibly due to a rivalry between the two men). Bartlett took a ship and was the first person to sail north of 88° N.

In 1914, Bartlett's leadership in the doomed Karluk Expedition helped save the lives of most of its stranded participants after leader Vilhjalmur Stefansson abandoned the expedition. After being stranded for several months, Bartlett and Inuk hunter Kataktovik walked 700 miles from Wrangel Island over the ice of the Chukchi Sea and across Siberia and then mounted an expedition from Alaska to rescue his surviving companions on Wrangel Island. He received the highest award from the Royal Geographical Society for his outstanding heroism. However, despite his popularity among the press, the public, and those he had rescued, he was later censured by an admiralty commission for taking Karluk into the Arctic, and for allowing a party of four (the expedition's medical officer Alistair Forbes Mackay, biologist James Murray, anthropologist Henri Beuchat, and seaman Stanley Morris) to leave the main group—despite a letter that Mackay and the others had signed, absolving the captain from responsibility (all four subsequently died).