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,[2] yet was excluded from the final exploring party (possibly due to a rivalry between the two men).

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).

[6] From 1925 to 1945, at the command of his own schooner, Effie M. Morrissey, Bartlett led many important scientific expeditions to the Arctic sponsored by American museums, the Explorers Club and the National Geographic Society.

Author Eric Walters documented some of the aspects of his journey to find Arctic islands in the historical novels Trapped in Ice and The Pole.

Bartlett and Kataktovik's journey through Chukotka, Siberia is recounted as an episode in Chukchi author Yuri Rytkheu's novel A Dream in Polar Fog.