Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the last of the old-time explorers, on a hunt with the Canadian Arctic Expedition in 1914.
In the tangled history of Arctic exploration, it is safe to say that no man had so much calumny visited upon him nor enjoyed such public admiration as did the Canadian-born Icelander who called himself Vilhjalmur Stefansson.
In the early decades of the twentieth century he was the best known and also the most controversial of that singular breed of venturers who set out to unlock the secrets of the frozen world. His supporters ranged from Sir Robert Borden, the Prime Minister of Canada, to Gilbert Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society. His critics included two fellow explorers, Roald Amundsen, the first to sail a ship through the Northwest Passage, and Fridtjof Nansen, the first to cross the formidable Greenland ice cap.
Richard J. Diubaldo, who has written the most critical study of Stefansson’s Arctic career, admits that his explorations between 1906 and 1918 were monumental by any standard. In his third and best-known expedition, sponsored in its entirety by the Canadian government, Stefansson discovered some of the world’s last major unknown land masses—Brock, Borden, Meighen, and Lougheed islands—thus identifying one hundred thousand square miles of territory in Canada. In addition, he outlined the continental shelf from Alaska to Prince Patrick Island and revealed the presence of mountains and valleys beneath the frozen surface of the Beaufort Sea.
In spite of this record, Canada declined to make further use of his abilities after he returned from the Arctic. He was not an easy man to deal with and had a cavalier attitude toward budgetary restrictions. Egotistical, iconoclastic, and dogmatic, he was always convinced that his way was the right way. He was impetuous to the point of rashness and heedless of peril in a perilous environment, gambling his life aboard the drifting ice islands north of the Arctic coast and testing himself against the snow-choked crevasses of the great pack.
He was built for the challenges that faced him, always in superb physical shape, able to lope hour after hour and day after day behind a dog team without tiring while others became exhausted. It is estimated that he covered twenty thousand miles in this fashion, rarely sitting on a sledge but trotting behind it. He was also a crack shot with a rifle and could bring down a caribou at several hundred yards. And he had one more quality that every Arctic explorer needed: he had incredible luck. He survived and thrived as much by happenstance as by design. The caribou turned up at the last moment; the ice cracked beneath his feet, but he endured. Given up for dead time and time again, he emerged from the unknown glowing with health to the astonishment of his “rescuers.”
The last of the old-time Arctic explorers, he was prescient enough to foresee the changes that the airplane and submarine would bring to the land of the dogsled and mukluk. Unlike his nineteenth-century British predecessors—Franklin, Parry, Ross, and the others—who insisted on bringing their environment and their way of life with them, Stefansson was not repelled by the idea of “going native.” Indeed, he revelled in it. For most of his dozen years in the Arctic he lived with the Inuit, adopted their diet, spoke their language (including several dialects), and adopted their dress, their customs, and their lifestyle.
No previous explorer had gone quite so far as Stefansson. To him, the Inuit were not an inferior people, as the elite of the white world—the police, missionaries, and whalers—then believed. In the Arctic he saw them as superior. They were his teachers, and from the moment of his arrival in their land he set out doggedly to learn from them.
The Inuit trained him in the difficult technique of building a snow house (or iglu)—how to chop out the building blocks of ice, each a different shape from its neighbours, and fit them neatly into the frozen spiral that formed the structure. They taught him to wear loose clothing with few or no buttons that could be donned quickly after sleep to allow the body’s heat to circulate under the fur (as opposed to the tight naval serge of the British). They told him how to keep his face from frostbite, not by rubbing snow on it—a superstition that Stefansson called idiotic—but by always keeping the hands warm and pressing them to the cheeks every few minutes.
“When a man is properly dressed for winter,” Stefansson learned, “his coat is a loose fitting one with the sleeves cut so that any time he likes he can pull his arm out of the sleeve and carry his hand on his naked breast inside his coat. The neck of the coat is made loose, and whenever any part of his face refuses to wrinkle up he pushes his hand up through the loose-fitting neck of the coat and presses it for a moment on the stiffened portions of the face. As soon as the frozen spot is thawed out he pulls his hand in upon his breast again. In this way he can walk all day facing a stiff steady breeze at −35° or −40° Fahrenheit, which is the worst kind of weather one ever gets in the Arctic, for when the temperature falls below −50° Fahrenheit there is always a dead calm.”
Stefansson learned from the Inuit to keep his face shaven; if he wore a beard, the moisture of his breath would congeal in it, creating a frozen mask that would prevent him from getting at the cheek or chin to thaw it out with the warmth of his hand. His Inuit instructors exploded another of the white man’s misconceptions: that one must never fall asleep during a blizzard for fear of not waking up. The real problem, the explorer was to write, was that too many white men became so exhausted from the effort of trying to stay awake they placed themselves in danger. The secret was to wait until the blizzard ended, conserve energy, and try not to perspire and freeze their clothing.
Stefansson also learned to do without salt or sugar and to thrive on the Inuit diet of 60 percent fat and 40 percent raw or rare meat. He existed year after year on this all-meat regime and remained in the best of health. With his shock of white hair, his high cheekbones, and his full lips, he was himself a kind of “blond Eskimo,” an unfortunate newspaper term that his critics would later use to his detriment.
His most important and effective native teacher was a remarkable Inuit widow, Pannigabluk, who appears in passing throughout his accounts, but only as a name. He refers to her fleetingly as “Pan”—the only hint of familiarity he ever allowed himself. She was, in fact, his sexual partner through most of his Canadian-sponsored expedition—his “wife” in the true native sense though he never acknowledged her even to his closest friends. She was clearly the key figure in his retinue—strong, capable, independent, and a skilled seamstress who “made the finest boots I have ever seen.” On more than one occasion she helped Stefansson in his ethnographical studies since she could comment on the people he met and discuss such topics as Inuit shamanism, seances, and hunting methods. Her position as his wife and the presence of their son, Alex, was no secret in the Arctic, where many an explorer or trader took a sexual companion. Stefansson’s Yukon friend, Richard S. Finnie, author of Canada Moves North, often tried to draw him out on the matter, but when it came up, Stefansson changed the subject or pretended not to hear. Once, when leafing through an album of photographs with the explorer, Finnie remarked on one. “There’s Alex!” he exclaimed, but Stefansson turned to the next page without a word. Finnie eventually met Alex (who proudly bore the name Stefansson) during his travels in the Arctic and told Vilhjalmur about the encounter. The explorer replied vaguely that he didn’t remember many people whom he had met in the Mackenzie delta. But Finnie noted that Alex, with his Nordic features, bore a striking resemblance to the youthful Stefansson. “He was the only half-breed Eskimo I ever saw with a cleft chin.”
Finnie recounted one story he had heard in the North when Stefansson seemed to take responsibility for Alex, though not in words. In the midst of a conversation, Pannigabluk approached the explorer, saying, “Missionary going to baptize Alex; give me five dollars.” Stefansson silently fished a bill from his pocket and Pannigabluk marched off with it.
In his private life Stefansson was remarkably, even painfully, discreet. During his last expedition, he suffered from hemorrhoids so acute they sometimes confined him to camp; but he could not bring himself to discuss the ailment with his companions and so suffered in silence to the point where some believed he was malingering. One of Stefansson’s biographers, D. M. Le Bourdais, wrote a long manuscript about him but withdrew it after a disagreement that centred on the explorer’s health. “Such things are never mentioned in biographies,” he told Le Bourdais. Finnie has commented that his friend’s reticence was understandable. “It was unromantic and out of harmony with the picture of a hardy explorer and hunter on the march.” But why the refusal to acknowledge a relationship that was public knowledge and acceptable throughout the Arctic? In the North, Robert Peary, for one, had made no secret of his Inuit wife; Stefansson acted as if his did not exist. That was out of keeping with his general view that the Inuit were the equal of the whites and, in the Arctic, even superior.
Pannigabluk with her son, Alex Stefansson. The explorer never admitted that she was his wife though it was common knowledge in the Arctic.
Much of Stefansson’s silence on these matters can be attributed to his North Dakota upbringing, especially the influence of his mother, whose deepest desire was that he should become a clergyman. He was born William Stephenson in 1879. Both his parents were Icelanders of Norwegian descent who had immigrated to Manitoba two years before. In the devastating flood of 1880 they lost two of their children and most of their possessions and fled Canada for North Dakota, where young Willy Stephenson attended school with his surviving brother and sister.
They were Lutherans and, in that conservative stronghold, committed liberals, which suggests a certain independence of mind. Willy’s father was a modernist who wanted his church to temper its teachings to meet every advance in knowledge. “No amount of ridicule or social pressure could have induced him to modify his beliefs or his expression,” Stefansson remembered.
The family were all great readers, in the Icelandic tradition. Young Willy had devoured the Old Testament by the age of six. He read avidly and would collect books—thousands of them—all his life. By the time he arrived at the University of North Dakota, he was familiar with the works of Robert Ingersoll, the leading American freethinker, and was a follower of Charles Darwin—enthusiasms that prompted the straitlaced family with whom he stayed to dismiss him from their boarding house.
He was popular with his fellow students but not the professors, who found him far too cocky. When he entered university he had already learned to speak Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and German and was not above showing off his superior knowledge by challenging his professors. At the end of a term, it is said, one of the faculty checking on attendance found to his dismay that his pupil wasn’t turning up at classes. “How is it,” he asked, “that you got a grade of ninety in my own class and only attended two lectures?” To which the brash student responded, “If I hadn’t attended those two, I would doubtless have got a hundred.” Or so the story goes.
The story is typical of the future explorer, who all his life was at war with traditional authority. In his junior year the university expelled him on the grounds that he cut classes. The true reason was that the faculty considered him the ringleader of a group of undergraduates who were getting out of hand. As one professor saw it, Stefansson “had settled the problem of life a little too decidedly and dogmatically.” Unfazed, he moved to the University of Iowa, which allowed him to study and take classes on his own time. His reputation as a prize-winning debater—a hint at his future platform style—gained him an invitation to be a delegate to a conference of Unitarian ministers in Winnipeg, which later led to a scholarship at the Harvard Divinity School. He accepted but made it clear that he considered religion to be mere folklore—in short, a legitimate branch of anthropology. The ministry was not for him. After a year at Harvard he was offered a fellowship in anthropology.
Those college years marked several significant changes in Stefansson’s outlook. In 1899, after some soul-searching, he had decided to change his name from plain William Stephenson to the more exotic Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a jawbreaker of a moniker but one that would establish him as an unconventional figure with a romantic background. The new name set Stefansson apart from the John Smiths and Bob Browns. Unpronounceable it might be, but it would be remembered—the perfect brand name for an Arctic explorer. (His critics would often cattily refer to him as “Windjammer.”)
Stefansson’s total rejection of religion included Unitarianism, a liberal faith that had itself rejected the concept of the Holy Trinity. As his friend A. E. Morrison declared, “Any assembly of theologians is the best example we have of insanity reduced to a science, a systematic fraud … that … wastes the life of man and shrivels up his soul.” Disillusioned by his experience as a delegate to a Unitarian convention, Stefansson could only argue that, though everything in nature denied the existence of a personal God, “this does not break on clouded minds chained like slaves to tread the mills of toil, to make brick without straw.” To Stefansson, the world was full of sheep who believed what they were told and refused to explore the dogmas that bound them.
The romantic young student had originally intended to be a poet, and for a time poetry was his life and his passion. He read quantities of it and in his own words, “had written verse by the yard,” committing Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads and other works to memory and exulting when his own poetry was published in the university monthly. He mused vaguely on becoming Kipling’s successor, but the dream collapsed when he read a poem in Scribner’s by William Vaughan Moody, a young man of his own age of whom he had never before heard. He saw that it was superior in every way to his own work and, dejected, never wrote another line. As he put it later, “I began to see that there is not only a poetry of words but the poetry of deeds.”
The poetry of deeds! The phrase would define Stefansson’s view of Arctic exploration over the next twelve years. In the autumn of 1905, after a summer spent as a physical anthropologist in Iceland, he secured a teaching fellowship at Harvard. He was looked upon, he said, as “the Anthropology Department’s authority on the polar regions, particularly the Arctic, I suppose, because my parents were Icelandic and I had been born ‘way up North in Canada.’ ”
Having written several articles for academic publications, he was offered in the spring of 1906 the position of anthropologist with the Anglo-American Arctic Expedition sponsored jointly by Harvard and the University of Toronto. Its chief task would be to determine whether an undiscovered continent lay somewhere in the Arctic and, if so, to study its native population. Nothing came of this hare-brained scheme. Stefansson was dispatched by way of the Mackenzie Valley and Herschel Island, a tiny speck on the Arctic map just east of the Yukon–Alaska border, but by the time he joined the leaders, the expedition was disbanded. Nevertheless, it had a considerable effect on Stefansson’s career, for it provided him with his first experience of the Inuit, with whom he spent some time. It also helped launch him on a wild goose chase that brought him worldwide publicity but at the same time touched off a storm of criticism from which he would never be free.
On Herschel Island he encountered a Danish whaling captain, Christian Klengenberg, a Jack London character, “unscrupulous … and two-faced,” who admitted to at least one murder as well as the theft of an entire ship. Stefansson believed a story this dubious rascal told—perhaps because he wanted to. He claimed to know of a mysterious race of native people who dressed and acted like Inuit but did not look like them; some, indeed, appeared to have light hair and blue eyes. The young anthropologist was entranced: an unknown race who had never seen a white man! Klengenberg’s tale continued to obsess him after he returned to civilization. Did these strange people actually exist or was the story he had heard too romantic to be true? The whalers who visited Herschel Island had dismissed the tale, but some Inuit seemed to confirm it when they told him that several of their race on Victoria Island looked as if they were white men in native clothing. If he could actually discover and report on a new race of people living in the Arctic untouched by civilization, it would be the discovery of a lifetime! Discovery rather than mere exploration was Stefansson’s stock-in-trade, and when he came at last to write his memoirs, Discovery would be the title he gave them. “Discovery,” he wrote, “has been my life.”
Back in New York in the fall of 1907, he had one goal in sight: he must return to the Arctic, make his way through unexplored country to Victoria Island, and seek out its strange inhabitants. To do that he would have to mount an expedition of his own. That was a tall order for a twenty-eight-year-old anthropologist, but Stefansson managed to get backing from the American Museum of Natural History in New York as well as some assistance from both the Meteorological Service and the Geological Survey of Canada to add prestige to the venture. With his enthusiasm and charm he had no difficulty raising money. His costs, he told the museum, would run no more than a measly two or three thousand dollars since he intended to live off the land, like the Inuit, for most of the time. The museum shipped two thousand dollars’ worth of goods to Stefansson on the Arctic coast, none of which he ever received because of the vagueness of his itinerary. Convinced that he was either lost or starving, the museum ended up spending fourteen thousand dollars trying to find him. All the while Stefansson was flourishing on a diet of seal meat and blubber. It was the first but by no means the last time that he would be given up for dead in the Arctic, only to confound both his admirers and his detractors by turning up unexpectedly, having stayed healthy on a food regimen entirely of meat, with neither a vegetable nor a slice of fruit.
He delighted in such surprises. His original plan had been to go north alone to live with the Inuit and travel as they did. But when he received an offer from an old college friend, Dr. Rudolph Anderson, to go with him, he quickly accepted. Anderson, an ornithologist, was an exceptional scholar, a top athlete, and a one-time soldier in the Spanish-American war with several learned articles and books to his credit. The museum was enthusiastic; Anderson’s involvement would add to the institution’s prestige.
How could Stefansson guess that in the controversial years to come Anderson would turn on him and become his bitterest critic and enemy? They were opposites in almost every way except for their mutual desire for fame within their respective disciplines. As Richard Diubaldo has written, “Anderson’s diffidence was the perfect foil for Stefansson’s ego.” One bone of contention was Stefansson’s view of the Inuit as the “chosen people.” Like most whites at that time, Anderson considered them inferior, an attitude that Stefansson himself would help change.
Anderson held his tongue publicly but admitted in a letter to his sister, written just after their arrival in the Arctic, that “one point of disagreement is that he considers any attention to cleanliness, hygiene, and camp sanitation as a ‘military fad.’ If you have read his articles in Harper’s you may have noticed that there is really only one great Arctic and Eskimo authority—who has learned more in one year than all previous explorers combined. But I understand the situation and don’t worry much about it.” Fortunately, for long periods during this four-year exploration, each man went his separate way and there was no open breach between them.
The two met in Toronto in April 1908 and reached Herschel Island in late summer. It was Stefansson’s intention to leave Herschel, head east toward the Mackenzie delta, and then move on to Victoria Island. But now he faced an unexpected and frustrating delay. Francis Fitzgerald, a Royal North West Mounted Police inspector on Herschel Island, was convinced that Stefansson would perish during his proposed journey. It was the task of the Mounties to protect all travellers who entered the Yukon, as they had been doing since the gold rush days. Now, when Stefansson asked to borrow a winter’s supply of matches for Anderson and his party of pipe-smoking Inuit, Fitzgerald refused. He offered them lodgings near the barracks; but he would not be party to their suicide, for that was how he envisaged Stefansson’s search for the blond Eskimos.
Fitzgerald couldn’t conceive of an explorer living off the land. He believed that a white man needed twelve months’ provisions to exist in the Arctic. To him both men were destitute, and since they had no visible means of support, he had the right to ship them out of the country. Stefansson was infuriated. His time with the Inuit had convinced him that anyone who adopted their methods and lifestyle could easily live off the land. For him that would become a public crusade. Now there was this whipper-snapper of a policeman suggesting that he and Anderson couldn’t look after themselves!
They could go west to Point Barrow, Alaska, four hundred miles along the coast, for matches, the Mountie told them; the whaling station there was well provisioned and there was no chance they would starve. Starve? In the midst of plenty, where seals and caribou abounded? Stefansson was frustrated at the prospect of this delay. He never touched tobacco himself; now, instead of heading east toward his goal, he would have to trek along the coast in the opposite direction for the sake of his companions’ nicotine craving. (By a bitter irony, a Mounted Police patrol led by Fitzgerald himself starved to death two years later in attempting to reach Dawson by way of Fort McPherson. They travelled light—too light, as it turned out. Had they adopted Stefansson’s credo of living off the land, it is more than possible they would have survived.)
By the spring of 1910, two years after the expedition left New York, the impetuous explorer was still at Cape Parry, three hundred miles west of Victoria Island. The party had spent two winters on the Arctic coast, plagued by the vagaries of weather, by sickness, by the reluctance of their Inuit companions to move into unknown country, and also by the need to spend much of their time in the ceaseless hunt for game to stave off starvation. They had just come through what Stefansson called “a winter of misfortunes.” They had lost more than half of their dogs, including some of the best ones, during a period of such scarcity that the very wolves had starved to death. Now Stefansson was ready to travel east into unknown territory. He still had faith that a white man could live off the land when an Inuk could, but he was not certain that any natives existed where they were going. None had been seen on this stretch of coastline.
The party split up, with Anderson heading back west to the Mackenzie country, told by Stefansson “to take action and to answer questions in case we failed to return.” These instructions included the date after which he would need to worry about Stefansson’s safety and the effort he must make to rescue them.
On the afternoon of April 21, with Pannigabluk and two male Inuit, Stefansson set off for Coronation Gulf, a body of water that hugs the southwest corner of Victoria Island. As Stefansson admitted, “No one but myself was very enthusiastic about the enterprise.” The Inuit feared that this unknown country would be empty of game; even more they dreaded the legendary “people of the caribou antler,” a barbarous and bloodthirsty tribe who were said to kill all strangers.
None of these warnings deterred the super-optimistic explorer, who was keeping his eyes focused for clues that would lead him to the mysterious race. Nineteen days into the search he found a hint that made his heart beat faster. On a driftwood-strewn beach he came upon a piece of wood that was marked by crude choppings apparently made by a dull adze. More of these chopped pieces of wood were scattered along the beach for over a mile. Apparently they had been tested to see if they were sound enough to use for making sledges.
He could not sleep that night, nor could his companions, who were even more excited than he, not to mention apprehensive. They talked far into the night, their curiosity about dreaded strangers growing stronger than their fears. Their search took on some of the aspects of a detective story. The next day they found more shavings, more chips, more evidence of the hewing and shaping of wood. Then—a footprint in the crusted snow and after that a sledge track no more than three months old. A little later they came upon the ruins of a deserted village whose size—more than fifty snow houses—took their breath away.
The trail followed the ice of Dolphin and Union Strait, which separates Victoria Island from the mainland. Stefansson and two of the Inuit followed it with the dogs and soon came upon another village at Point Wise near the mouth of the strait. From the top of one of the snow houses he could see a group of men squatting around seal holes. Soon he was surrounded by the seal hunters, not in the least menacing but excited by the spectacle of mysterious beings from another world. They were brimming over with hospitality, insisted on building a snow house for the travellers, and urged them to stay until the last scrap of food was eaten.
These almost Stone-Age people, who had never before set eyes on a white man, had knives made of copper, just as Klengenberg had told him. Stefansson could not contain his excitement. It was an encounter that the would-be poet would never forget. “It marked my introduction to men and women of a bygone age,” he recalled years later when he likened the experience to that of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, who went to sleep and woke up in the court of King Arthur. “I, without going to sleep at all,” he wrote, “had walked out of the twentieth century into the intellectual and cultural world of men and women of an age far earlier than Arthur’s.… Their existence in 1910 on the same continent with our populous cities was an anachronism representing a time lapse of more than ten thousand years.”
The marvel was that he was able to converse with them in their own tongue—a dialect that differed from that of the Mackenzie River natives but was easily understandable. His months of living in the houses and camps of the western Inuit had paid off. What a triumph! “It cannot have happened often in the history of the world that the first explorer to visit a primitive people was one who spoke their language.”
This was in itself a remarkable achievement. It would certainly ensure his reputation as a true Arctic explorer and a practical anthropologist. But for the ambitious explorer that was not enough. He had discovered a primitive Inuit band—“Copper Eskimos” they would come to be called—who were astonished when he lit a sulphur match and demonstrated the marvels of his rifle. But were these Klengenberg’s pale-skinned natives? The following day he made it clear that he was a white man, the kind they called kablunat, whom they had heard about from other tribes. “Couldn’t you tell by my blue eyes and the color of my beard?” he asked. Their reply must have brought another thrill. “We didn’t know,” they told him, “what sort of complexion the kablunat have. Besides, our next neighbors north have eyes and beards like yours.”
Those words were enough to convince Stefansson that Klengenberg’s tale, which had occupied his imagination for four years, was not fictional. He had already half-persuaded himself that the mysterious race of “blond Eskimos” existed. Now he set off across Victoria Island with Natkusiak, the most faithful of his Inuit companions, to prove it. What a prize it would be!
On May 15, he found what he thought he was looking for. “We were not prepared for what we saw,” he wrote. Standing in front of their house of snow and skin were nine men and boys who seemed to him similar to the Inuit that Klengenberg had described. Their faces seemed paler and one or two had brownish hair. Buoyed up by his companion’s remark that “these are not Eskimos, they merely dress and talk and act like Eskimos,” Stefansson again could not contain himself. “I knew I had come upon either the last chapter and solution to one of the historical tragedies of the past, or else that I had added a new mystery for the future to solve: the mystery of why these men were like Europeans if they were not of European descent.”
A member of the band of “blond Eskimos” who Stefansson thought were descended from Leif Ericsson’s Norse expedition, some thousand years before.
Where had they come from? The romantic explorer considered the possibilities. Were these descendants of the lost Franklin expedition, whose ships had foundered off King William Island across the water from Victoria Island? Or did they trace their ancestry back to Leif Ericsson, or to the Scandinavian colony of Greenland, which had disappeared into the Arctic mists?
All these suppositions have since been discredited. It has long been recognized that not all Inuit are alike, that occasionally a blue-eyed native does turn up, and that skin and hair pigments come in different shades. These isolated people were simply a branch of the Copper Eskimos, whom Stefansson could rightly claim to have discovered. But Stefansson couldn’t settle for that. In the years to follow, his insistence that within that tribe was to be found another fair-skinned tribe with a different historical and, perhaps, ethnic background would only cause confusion and cast a cloud over his reputation.
One might have expected Stefansson to dash back to civilization to break the news of his discovery. He did nothing of the sort. In fact, almost two years elapsed before he finally boarded a ship from Nome, Alaska, to Seattle. His reasons were sensible. First, he wanted to study the Copper Eskimos, and he was one of the few scientists with the experience and the language to do so. Secondly, he wanted to explore the unknown territory that lay for three hundred miles between Cape Parry and Coronation Gulf. A host of matters, both archaeological and ethnological, needed inquiry. There was, for example, the controversy over whether or not the Inuit used pottery. Stefansson solved that by collecting specimens of pottery utensils discovered on the ground—a slap in the face for Dr. Franz Boas, a leading authority, who had insisted there was no evidence that Inuit pottery existed. Stefansson delighted in this piece of archaeological one-upmanship. Boas was in his view a mere theorist; he, Stefansson, was a practical scientist. It was another triumph for his burning desire to be the best-known and best-informed Arctic specialist in the world.
There was also the need to impress the natural history museum with the work that he and Anderson, working separately, had done. During the first two years he had produced very little. If he were to get funds for the future expeditions he was planning, he would now have to show results. But had he accomplished enough, he wondered. He was not a man normally afflicted with self-doubt, yet there were moments when he questioned his own achievements. Was he satisfied with his own work, he asked himself. And would the professional world be satisfied—“the small circle of scientific men who are not always sympathetic or generous”? Such men, he told his diary glumly, were “not even always scientific.”
Therein lay the paradox. Stefansson expected to spend another twenty years in the Arctic and to become the greatest living expert on the Inuit; but at the same time he relied for funds on those who had what he considered old-fashioned and obsolete beliefs about the country and its people. He had little use for the British naval explorers, portrayed as the heroes of polar exploration, because they declined to “go native” as he had. In his view they were tragic failures. He admired Dr. John Rae, the Hudson’s Bay trader, and Charles Francis Hall, the eccentric American publisher-explorer, who had learned from the Inuit. But since old prejudices die hard, old attitudes prevailed, as he discovered some years later when he lectured to the Royal Geographical Society in London. The response of his audience to his lavish praise of Rae’s adaptation to Inuit methods of travel was chilly. Rae was a mere trader who had gone native, the only explorer of consequence who had not received a knighthood or a peerage like the gentleman officers of His Majesty’s Royal Navy.
Stefansson was well aware that his theories would meet with criticism and disbelief—his view that the Inuit were just as intelligent as white men, his argument that winters were colder in North Dakota than in the Arctic, or his insistence that winter was the best time to travel and that there was no need to hole up in a cabin for the duration. To support himself and also to raise funds for another expedition with Anderson, he planned to lecture and write articles as well as a book, which would include a spirited account of his discovery of the “blond” Eskimos of Victoria Island.
The conventional scientific approach would have been to prepare a scholarly article for a recognized academic journal outlining his theories about the “Copper” Eskimos, and follow up with more popular publications and press interviews. But Stefansson could not keep the story of the strange Inuit to himself. He talked about them on board ship, and when he reached Seattle, a former Alaska newspaperman, John J. Underwood, was on hand at the dock to interview him. The next day, September 9, 1912, the Seattle Times headlined Underwood’s interview “american explorer discovers lost tribe of whites, descendants of leif eriksson.”
Ranking next in importance … to the discovery of the lost tribes of Israel is the discovery made by Prof. Vilhjalmur Stefansson of the American Museum of Natural History of a lost tribe of 1,000 white people, who are believed to be direct descendants from the followers of Leif Eriksson who came to Greenland from Iceland about the year 1,000 and a few years later discovered the north coast of America.
The story went on to say that all the members of the tribe had rusty-red hair, blue eyes, and fair skins. Underwood later admitted he had used his “ingenuity and imagination” to enhance his story, but there is little doubt that Stefansson, in his excitement, had perhaps unwittingly contributed to what was certainly a sensational tale. Since he had been for a time a newspaper reporter before going north, he should have understood the consequences of blurting out the details of his exploit to a seasoned journalist as he had done to his fellow passengers on the boat out of Alaska.
The wire services seized upon the story, and the following day, the New York Times had its own version:
STEFANSSON TELLS OF WHITE ESKIMOS
The American Museum Explorer
Thinks Alaskan Tribes Descendants of Scandinavians
TALLER THAN OTHER NATIVES
Many of the Strange Tribes Had Never Seen
A White Man Before Meeting Stefansson
The story would not go away and overshadowed Stefansson’s and Anderson’s real contribution to the American Museum of Natural History. The next day the Times ran a story (headlined “new race solves mystery of ages”) in which it stated: “Stefansson’s Discovery of Tribe of White Eskimos Stirs Scientists.” The paper quoted Henry Rood, editor of Harper’s—for whom Stefansson wrote—who declared: “If Stefansson says he has proofs of this remarkable find I would believe him absolutely and so would anyone else who knows him.”
Perhaps. But other scientists were skeptical. The Times reported in a cable dispatch from London that “Professor Stefansson has not hitherto been regarded here as an authority.” The London Morning Post interviewed several authorities who disputed Stefansson’s report, which they described as “improbable.”
Stefansson now found himself at the centre of a full-fledged controversy. What hurt most were the attacks by two of the Arctic explorers he most admired, Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen. Nansen tempered his criticism when he read Stefansson’s side of the story in a special article commissioned by the New York Sun. It occurred to him that no Icelander could be as ignorant of the North as the Seattle stories suggested. Amundsen never changed his view that Stefansson’s discovery was “the most palpable nonsense that ever came from the north.” His tale of a separate race of blond Eskimos, Amundsen declared, “merits no more serious consideration than a sensational news item in the boulevard press.”
It was the term “blond Eskimo” that caused the trouble. If Stefansson had announced the existence of a Stone-Age people who had never seen a white man but used tools fashioned of native copper, he would have been on solid ground. But he could not free himself from the original tales of mystery that had sparked his long quest. “Blond Eskimo” (or “White Eskimo,” to use the New York Times’s eyecatching phrase) fitted neatly into the headlines at a time when other strange tribes in distant corners of the globe were exciting the public’s imagination.
The controversy dogged Stefansson all his life. Few major articles were written about him that did not refer to it. His detractors put it all down to a lust for publicity and press coverage. Certainly, he had been a master of public relations before that phrase came into popular use. But to be fair, he needed the public’s attention in order to raise funds for his next expedition. If the blond Eskimo dispute made him famous it also helped turn the eyes of the continent—indeed, the world—to a forsaken land that even the government of Canada had neglected and to a large race of aborigines who had too long been the objects of the white man’s mythology.
A group of Copper Eskimos whom Stefansson discovered on Victoria Island.
A page from Stefansson’s diary, March 1912.
In his book My Life with the Eskimo, Stefansson devoted a whole chapter—5,100 words—to the subject, using literary, scientific, and historical references to support his conviction that this might be a unique band descended from survivors of the long-gone Greenland colony. “There is no reason,” he wrote, employing a lame bit of reverse logic, “for insisting now or ever that the ‘Blond Eskimos’ of Victoria Island are descended from the Scandinavian colonists of Greenland, but looking at it historically or geographically, there is no reason why they might not be.”
Stefansson’s new expedition, which again included Rudolph Anderson, was to search for new land in the Beaufort Sea, notably “Crocker Land,” which Robert Peary claimed to have seen in the misty distance during his quest for the Pole. It would be a three-winter, six-man expedition, and it would also attempt to measure the extent of the continental shelf in Arctic waters. For this Stefansson again secured the co-operation of the American Museum of Natural History but also that of the National Geographic Society, each of which was prepared to contribute $2,500 to the enterprise. Through his friendship with Professor James Mavor of the University of Toronto, another Arctic enthusiast, he also lobbied the prime minister, Robert Borden, for official support.
The whole question of Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic had become a major issue, and Borden was eager to ensure that any newly discovered lands would be Canadian. Stefansson, who knew exactly how to handle the prime minister, pointed out that as an American citizen and leader of the expedition, he would have to claim any new land for the United States—unless, of course, Canada became a partner in the venture. Borden turned the matter over to cabinet, whose members could not stomach any Yankee-led expedition claiming territory for the Land of the Free. They decided, in Stefansson’s words, “that it would be beneath Canada’s dignity to go into partnership with others in such an expedition.” Instead, the Canadian government would take over the entire venture, placing it under the Department of the Naval Service. With that the two American institutions bowed out, and the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913 was born.
Herein lay a recipe for trouble. When Stefansson reported his new deal to the National Geographic Society in February 1913, that organization made one condition: unless he got the Canadian expedition underway by June, the society would revert to its own investigation of Crocker Land. At the same time, the Canadian government decided it wanted to expand the venture beyond mere exploration. There would now be two parties, both acting for Canada and both under Stefansson’s leadership.
The Northern Party would follow an expanded version of the original plan. Its task would be “to discover new land, if any exists, in the million or so square miles of unknown area north of the continent of North America and west of the Parry Islands.” The vast frozen expanse of the Beaufort Sea stretched from the continental coastline north to the Pole. You could hide the province of Newfoundland in its waters and still have plenty of room left. Who was to say that another continent might not lie hidden under the ice? Peary had surely seen something when he glimpsed “Crocker Land” in the distance.
The Southern Party would be formed under Anderson, acting as Stefansson’s deputy, to engage in anthropological, archaeological, and zoological research on the Arctic coast. That would require fifteen trained scientists, most of whom had no Arctic experience, together with a support group to travel with them. Thus Stefansson’s tight little party of six was expanded to more than seventy, including Inuit.
That was a tall order, given the early deadline set by the National Geographic Society. It would have been sensible to forget about Crocker Land, which didn’t exist anyway, as later explorations would reveal. But Canadian nationalism together with Stefansson’s own impetuosity forced the issue. Now, on short notice, he had to comb North America and Europe for an appropriate scientific staff, complete some contracted articles for Harper’s magazine, take passage to England to enlist the aid of the Canadian High Commissioner, Donald A. Smith (Lord Strathcona, who gave him a personal cheque for a thousand dollars), and try to complete his book, an early chapter of which he managed to dictate during the Atlantic crossing.
Before Canada became involved, Stefansson had taken it upon himself to buy a ship to navigate the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic coast. He had several in mind but settled on a 247-ton brigantine, the Karluk, which had done duty as a whaler but was now laid up in San Francisco. Although it was not ideal for the purpose, the impulsive explorer insisted it was the only ship available, and besides, it was a bargain—a mere $10,000. He closed the deal with a down payment of $500, expecting that whatever sponsor took on the venture would underwrite the cost. The Karluk was sent to the government’s naval dockyard at Esquimalt, B.C., where it underwent repairs at a cost of $6,000, a hefty sum since it had already undergone repairs before being sold.
Bob Bartlett, the Karluk’s designated captain, a seasoned Arctic hand who had been with Peary in 1909, was more than dubious. The ship, in his opinion, was absolutely unsuitable for spending a winter in the ice. Should it take the expedition north, it would have to return south before the freeze-up; it didn’t have sufficient beams or sheathing to withstand the pressure of the ice pack.
Stefansson’s response was that the ship had wintered in the Arctic a dozen times and was as good as any whaler in the western Arctic. “Besides,” he said, “we have to use [the] only ship we have.” As usual, he was eager to get moving, and in this he was abetted by the government, which was as anxious as he was to get Canada’s name on any unknown islands in Arctic waters.
As an explorer, Stefansson preferred to plunge ahead, heedless of detailed planning, confident that everything would work out. His friend Richard Finnie described him as “really a lone wolf explorer … at best when travelling by himself or with a few congenial followers.” Later, at a ceremony in New York, Robert Peary would describe him as “the last of the old school” of Arctic explorers, “the worker with the dog and the sledge.” But now he was “leading an expedition that would eventually entail the use of half a dozen vessels.”
Stefansson dragging a seal across the ice, an image that was reproduced on the cover of The Friendly Arctic, perhaps his most controversial book.
As a one-man operator Stefansson had always been an improviser, roaming the frozen wilderness, acting instinctively on his own, free of authority, always sure that something would turn up. Now he was in charge of a major enterprise that his sponsors had expected him to plan perfectly—but he had left too little time for organization. In fact, there was no organization. During the time the venture was being mounted in Victoria, B.C., he was absent because of his other commitments. There was no supervisor because he could not delegate, and he did not turn up to take charge until late in the enterprise.
There were further complications. Not only did the fifteen scientists lack Arctic experience but nobody, apparently, had figured out a system of packing and stowing the goods of the two parties. To carry the scientists and the extra equipment, two gasoline schooners had to be bought, the Alaska and the Mary Sachs, both with auxiliary engines. The supplies purchased for both parties were put aboard without any thought or planning. Boxes intended for the Northern Party were mixed up with others intended for the Southern. The Karluk’s decks were piled with fifty tons of bagged coal and sacks of fresh meat, vegetables, snowshoes and skis, canoes, alcohol, drums, and assorted wooden boxes. The same disorder existed below deck.
Kenneth Chipman, the expedition’s topographer, was angered and disillusioned by the disorganized arrangements. As he told his diary, “The responsibility for systemizing things has never been given to any one man.” Boxes repacked in Esquimalt, when the division between the two parties was made, were either poorly packed or even half empty. As Stefansson himself wrote, “we have had a good deal of trouble and difficulty in finding certain articles that got shoved underneath other cargo.”
By the time he reached Victoria, the full complement of the two parties and the ship’s crew had already been selected. It was not a happy group. William Laird McKinlay, a diminutive twenty-four-year-old meteorologist who had been hired by telegram for the Southern Party, was skeptical of the crew that had been picked up from Pacific Coast ports before Bob Bartlett took over the captaincy of the Karluk. McKinlay, who was to become a lifelong critic of Stefansson, thought they were good enough seamen but lacked “the other qualities which would be necessary for harmonious living in the kind of circumstances which might face us in the north.” One crew member, he noted, was a drug addict; another suffered from venereal disease; two more had managed to smuggle liquor aboard ship.
Most of the scientists, of course, had no idea what they were facing and were given no training in polar conditions before the ship left Victoria. Chipman tried to stir up enthusiasm for the venture among other members of the party but failed. There was “practically no confidence in the leader [Stefansson] and little assurance of getting good work done.”
Much of this pessimism sprang from the cumbersome mix of the two-party expedition insisted upon by the Canadian government. Stefansson was to report to the Naval Service; the scientists were to report to the Geological Survey, an arrangement marked by interservice rivalry. The scientific staff was alarmed to find that Stefansson would be in overall charge while Anderson of the Southern Party would be his deputy.
Stefansson had made it clear to the government that he didn’t want a salary of any kind. He would work for free because he expected to pay for his efforts by writing magazine articles and a book and by giving lectures about the Arctic. As an unpaid leader he would be, in his own mind at least, answerable to no one. He would make his own decisions as he always had, without bureaucratic interference, and he alone would profit financially from the expedition. He would retain exclusive publication rights in Canada, the United States, and Europe for a full year after the end of the adventure. In Victoria he directed that all expedition members must turn over all their personal diaries to the government office after the expedition ended. That did not sit well with the scientists, who insisted on confronting their leader. Several members of the Southern Party, including Anderson, tried to resign, but as Chipman recalled, “the thing had gone so far that we could simply make the best of it.” Stefansson calmed down, giving Anderson the rights to reports on the activities of the Southern Party for two New York newspapers with which he, Stefansson, had a contract, but no others.
The problems did not go away. The scientists had little faith in Stefansson’s personal ambitions. His determination to live by his wits and push aside all obstacles clashed with the cautious, conservative attitude of the Southern Party members, whom he tended to patronize, as his published reference to the poor physical condition of one of them suggests. “Such softness,” he wrote, “is the inevitable result of the time-honoured polar explorer custom of spending the winter in camp.… Such idleness makes muscles flabby and (what is worse) breeds discontent, personal animosities, and bickering.…”
The discontent continued after the Karluk reached Nome. Stefansson, who was used to a lean, mean operation, was dealing with a group of scientific experts, many of whom had not comprehended that life in the Arctic differed from a cozy existence in Ottawa. He grew irascible at the questions flung at him about the expedition’s plans. When somebody wanted to know if the twenty tons of provisions purchased in Seattle would be suitable for sledge travel, he declared that the questioner had no right to ask. When James Murray, the oceanographer, acting as a spokesman for the party, asked what arrangements had been made for fur clothing, Stefansson retorted that the question was impertinent. Murray feared that the Karluk might get crushed in the ice and tried to suggest that the Northern Party establish a base on shore as well as on the ship. But Stefansson insisted on dealing with all the problems in his own way. When he bluntly told the scientific members that lives were secondary to the success of the expedition, they were shocked at what to them was inexcusable callousness. Irritated by their flood of queries, Stefansson told them that he was in command of the expedition and they must have confidence in him. According to Chipman, he made the remarkable statement that the expedition was not essentially scientific, and that scientists were inclined to be narrow-minded and engrossed in their own lives.
The Southern Party of experts, who often clashed with Stefansson over scientific matters (Stefansson in foreground in bowler hat).
Stefansson and the scientists on the cluttered deck of Karluk, just before it set off from Esquimalt, B.C. They had no idea what they were in for.
The gap between the two parties—created by the scientists’ ignorance of the Arctic on one side and Stefansson’s long polar experience on the other—is illustrated by the continual concern about drinking water. The scientists were worried because the tanks aboard the Karluk were much too small to handle enough fresh water for an expedition of this size. But Stefansson had long ago learned from the Inuit that fresh water always forms in pools on old ice and is easily available to Arctic travellers. He could not get that across to them, even when he appealed to Bartlett, who explained that in Newfoundland there was always plenty of fresh water available on the icecaps.
At Nome there was much sorting, repacking, and reorganizing, but with the Arctic summer ending (it was now August) there was no time to tarry. Stefansson reassured the party with the words “we’ll sort it all out when we get to Herschel.” But the Karluk would never reach that island, and its struggles with the ice pack would touch off one of the great Arctic tragedies of that time.
The Karluk rounded Point Barrow and moved eastward along the Arctic coast, leaving the Southern Party’s Alaska behind as well as the Mary Sachs, a forty-one-ton ship carrying much of the equipment. Besides the three larger vessels, the Canadian Arctic Expedition eventually consisted of five whaleboats, two motorboats, three canoes, two dories, a dinghy, and several skin boats—a small but costly navy.
Stefansson advised Bartlett to hug the shore in order to stay in sight of land and safe from drifting ice. As Stefansson was to point out, there were two main theories of ice navigation: the bold Atlantic policy of keeping away from the land to face the ice and take one’s chances, and the cautious western Arctic policy of playing it safe, hugging the coast, and “if you don’t get there this year you may have another chance next.” Bartlett, who belonged to the Atlantic school and had never navigated in the western Arctic, followed Stefansson’s advice but became frustrated when the ship went aground several times in the shallow coastal waters. He was as bold as he was stubborn, and what had been good enough for Robert Peary, whom he worshipped, was good enough for him. Stefansson himself had been urging him forward, emphasizing the need for haste before the winter set in.
The overloaded Karluk forcing a path through the ice pack.
Finally on August 12, while Stefansson was asleep, Captain Bartlett turned the Karluk’s prow north, hoping to find a lane of open water in the ice. That was a foolhardy decision. Soon the ship was out of sight of land and having followed one open lead north now found itself entering another that led south again. She was moving east, pushed by the shifting ice that imprisoned her. Those on board felt trapped. The white world stretched out bleakly in every direction, hazy with falling snow, and with no sign of land. By the end of August, the inactivity began to tell as it became clear to the old Arctic hands on board that there was no escape. They could now expect to be cooped up here for the winter. Even the Inuit on board were frightened.
As the moving ice continued to force the ship eastward, it became obvious that there was no chance of finding an open lead of water and nothing could be done about it. “How long will this continue?” McKinlay, the meteorologist, asked in his diary. “This … inactivity is becoming unbearable,” he wrote. “In the minds of all is the unuttered question: When will things change?” Things did not change: the snow continued; the temperature plunged.
The frustration and inactivity began to grate on Stefansson, whose desire to press forward at any cost was thwarted by the vagaries of the ice pack. The ship, which had been carried east of Point Barrow, was still some distance from Herschel Island, where presumably it would meet Alaska and Mary Sachs.
Now Stefansson realized that his hope of exploring the Beaufort Sea would have to be postponed for another year. And what if somebody else beat him to what would be his greatest discovery—Crocker Land?
He was also concerned about the need for more fresh meat, without which scurvy would incapacitate all on board, as it had on the ill-fated Franklin expedition. He felt himself helpless, unable to sleep. Day by day his restlessness increased until, on September 19, he told his crew that he intended to leave for a week or ten days to hunt in the Colville River area. The following morning he left, taking with him several dogs, two Inuit hunters, Asatsiak (“Jim”) and Pauyurak (“Jerry”), together with his secretary, Burt McConnell, the anthropologist Diamond Jenness, and the expedition’s photographer, George Wilkins, who as Sir Hubert Wilkins later explored the Antarctic by air.
This decision was to haunt Stefansson for most of his life. His detractors would attack him as a leader who left his post when he was most needed. Some, indeed, would suggest that he did it on purpose, believing that the Karluk was doomed. That was nonsense; there is no doubt that for the rest of his years, Stefansson bitterly regretted the move and underwent a great deal of soul-searching because of it.
To be fair, he had no reason to believe that the Karluk could escape the iron grip of the ice pack, and he was right to be concerned about the need for fresh meat. Despite the several rivalries that existed on board, a week or so of absence would not make much difference. Or so he thought.
But when the hunting party returned some days later, the ship had vanished, carried away to the westward by the ice after a dreadful two-day gale that tore at the pack and opened leads down which the Karluk was driven by the storm. Of the ship and her passengers there was no trace except a vague report that her masts had been seen in the distance twenty miles east of Fort Smyth, Alaska. Missing were twenty-two men, one Inuit woman and her children, sixteen dogs, and the ship’s cat. Of that beleaguered company, eleven would not survive the horrifying aftermath. The story of the Karluk is one of the bitterest of all the Arctic tales of struggle and survival. No fewer than four published books have dealt with the question of Stefansson’s judgment and the fate of those he left behind.
Stefansson leaving the Karluk, September 20, 1913, with a hunting party. The ship was never seen again, and the explorer was criticized for his actions.
The loss of the ship dealt a staggering blow to the projected work of the Northern Party. All their essential equipment including the oceano-graphical tools designed to test the depth of the Beaufort Sea was gone. And there was only one Inuit woman aboard the ill-fated vessel to make and repair clothing for the entire company, “an impossible task” in McKinlay’s words. Here was further evidence of the unseemly haste and lack of organization that had marked the expedition’s planning. Surely Stefansson with his long experience of the Inuit should have known that the expedition required more than one seamstress.
Now the key persons and equipment of the Northern Party were missing, along with the ship. Nobody knew where it was in that limitless ocean, and Stefansson realized that any search would be futile. He would have to shoulder full responsibility for any mishap it suffered. He had chosen the vessel. He had been in charge when Bartlett made his fateful decision. He had left it, albeit temporarily. All that would return to haunt him. McKinlay would never forget or forgive Stefansson’s declaration, in one of his early dispatches, that the “attainment of the purposes of the expedition is more important than the bringing-back safe of the ship in which it sails.” Understandably, that attitude nettled the scientists, who could not comprehend their leader’s single-minded credo that an explorer must be prepared to risk his life for the sake of discovery. Stefansson had already flirted with disaster more than once and was prepared to flirt with it again. For the time being he remained, as usual, optimistic. He did not consider that the Karluk was in any great danger. If it were crushed in the ice, the people aboard could reach shore by using the skin boats that were available for that purpose. That may have been wishful thinking, but Stefansson, obsessed by the need to find new land somewhere beneath the ice of the Beaufort Sea, put aside such concerns and determined to press on.
By late November he had reached Collinson Point on the Alaskan coast, after a six-hundred-mile sledge journey from Barrow to hook up with the Southern Party and the schooners Mary Sachs and Alaska. He informed Ottawa that he would leave Jenness to study the Inuit in the Colville River area while others explored the Mackenzie Delta. Anderson demurred, pointing out that the government had ordered a study of Coronation Gulf. Stefansson was irked and highly critical of what he considered the scientists’ sloth. The Southern Party had intended to sit idle for the winter and had made “a picnic-like attempt at hunting with no success.” The gap between the lean, rugged explorer and the “soft” scientists was widening.
The Southern Party of the Canadian Arctic Expedition.
In Anderson’s opinion, Stefansson had become a leader without followers. Since there was, in effect, no longer a Northern Party, he opposed Stefansson’s plans to take over the equipment and supplies it had left behind. For Reginald Brock, director of the Geological Survey of Canada, the scientific work had become the paramount objective. He sent a blunt message to Stefansson via Herschel Island that “the disappearance of the Karluk puts an end to the northern expedition, except what you may be able to accomplish yourself.” Anderson threatened to resign as second-in-command, but Stefansson refused to accept his resignation. The explorer set off for Herschel to arrange for stores to replace those lost on the missing ship and to make his own arrangements for his survey of the Beaufort Sea.
For most of the winter he was absent from Collinson Point, but a few miles out of Herschel Island he received a letter from Anderson, by way of several members of the Southern Party, announcing that he had received Stefansson’s instructions but was refusing to obey them. Since the Canadian expedition reported directly to the Naval Service, this was mutiny. Anderson told Stefansson that in the opinion of his colleagues, the leader’s proposed journey over the frozen Beaufort Sea was merely a ploy to get him newspaper notoriety.
Returning to Collinson Point, Stefansson had quietly secured the support of several in Anderson’s party. Now he asked each man whether or not he would volunteer to join him on the ice. The first he polled was Captain Joseph Bernard, a seasoned Arctic skipper, because he hoped Bernard would support him. Bernard’s prompt agreement came as a surprise. “I fear that some of the men had in a measure deceived Anderson,” Stefansson wrote later, “misleading him into thinking he would have the wholehearted support of the entire staff. Answering when their names were called, more than half were firmly on my side and a number of the rest wavering.” Anderson, who was “sometimes shallow,” at last consented to a face-saving agreement: Stefansson was to sign a statement promising that he would let all the scientists go on with their work. Since that had been his position since the beginning, Stefansson cheerfully accepted, and with that the mutiny dwindled.
On March 22, 1914, Stefansson set off at last on his ice journey across the inhospitable Beaufort Sea. The starting lineup consisted of twenty-five dogs, seven men, and thirty-five hundred pounds of equipment. Once the party worked its way through the expanse of jagged shore ice, it would be reduced to six dogs, one sled, and three men, while the others would act as a support party. No wonder the scientists left behind at Collinson Point were convinced that Stefansson was going to his doom. This was a new departure in polar exploration. As Stefansson recalled, “We were traveling over ice floating over an unknown ocean, far from any known lands, and without any immediate intention of turning back.”
Stefansson’s objective was to get farther north travelling on the ice than any ship had been able to navigate. By the time the support party left, he had achieved that objective. “No human beings of any race had set foot on the ice in this longitude so far from the coast of Alaska. Our position was dramatic and we knew it. We were about to settle the great question: Is the Arctic a barren waste incapable of supporting life, or is it hostile only to those who persist in thinking and living like southerners?”
Stefansson proved his answer, at least to his own satisfaction. He tried to make it sound easy, but of course it wasn’t. At the outset, a raging eighty-six-mile-an-hour gale drove them forty miles east, and when they struggled north, skirting lead after lead of open water, seals seemed to be non-existent, as some of the explorers’ colleagues had warned.
By mid-May they were down to three-quarters of a pound of meat a day while the dogs subsisted on old skin boots and grizzly bear hides, the hair of which had been clipped for bedding and later, when the kerosene ran out, for fuel in the absence of blubber. Only at the last moment, with about a day’s rations left, did they finally shoot a seal—so tasty they overindulged and were too ill to travel the following day.
On May 24 they found themselves marooned on an ice island four or five miles square. A fortnight passed before they were able to make their escape. The going was maddeningly slow. “Sometimes we waded through water nearly up to our waists while the dogs had to swim with the sled floating behind like a log being towed across a river.” On June 25, ninety-six days from the Alaskan coast, they made land on Norway Island. On July 31, they managed to cross over to Banks Island and establish a base camp. It was a daring enterprise and a remarkable physical achievement, but no wonder the other members of the Canadian Arctic Expedition thought they were long since dead. They had walked and trotted for seven hundred miles behind their dog team and had made a series of soundings through four degrees of latitude and nineteen of longitude that established the line of the continental shelf north of Alaska and west of Banks Island. And Crocker Land? It clearly didn’t exist, except as a figment of Peary’s wishful thinking.
Meanwhile, the battered and leaky Mary Sachs had made a memorable voyage under George Wilkins. By the time it finally reached Banks Island in late August, news of Stefansson’s death had been flashed around the world. Wilkins later described the general opinion of the enterprise among natives and whalers as “one crazy and two deluded men going north over the sea ice to commit suicide.” On arriving at Stefansson’s camp, Wilkins must have thought he was seeing a ghost, and a remarkably robust one, for Stefansson had thrived on his all-seal diet. When he realized that Stefansson had not perished, he “went wild with joy.” As he remembered, “never before or since, have I been stirred with such emotion. To this day I do not know what capers I cut … any observer might have thought I was mad.”
Now at last Stefansson had word of the fate of the Karluk. It had drifted west with the ice pack at the rate of nine miles a day until, when some three hundred miles north of the Siberian coast, it had, predictably, been crushed by the ice. Before it sank, the survivors were able to leave the doomed ship and move with as much equipment as they could carry over the ice to a point eighty miles north of Wrangel Island. They set up a base—Shipwreck Camp, they called it—from which to reach the rocky, ice-sheathed island.
They were a disgruntled company. Relationships were rent by quarrels over food, and as William McKinlay noted, “there was a feeling of every man for himself in the air.” They reached Wrangel Island at last on March 12, 1914. Here Bartlett decided to cross the ice to the Siberian mainland in search of help. He took with him a single Inuit hunter, Katakovik, realizing the need to move quickly before the ice broke. They set off at once, travelling across the sea ice for two hundred miles. That was only the beginning of a memorable and heroic race with time. On reaching land, they headed southwest along the coastline, guided by natives, on a gruelling seven-hundred-mile trek to the nearest settlement.
From that point Bartlett was able, after a long wait, to take a ship to St. Michael’s, Alaska, and telegraph for help. A rescue ship eventually reached Wrangel Island with considerable difficulty in October to discover that the seven-month travail on that rocky and desolate shore had cost eleven lives through scurvy, illness, starvation, and, in one instance, apparently suicide. Stefansson continued to take responsibility for Bartlett’s impetuous and, as it turned out, disastrous decision to move the Karluk into the ice, though in private he was highly critical. He realized that Bartlett’s remarkable rescue journey had eclipsed his tragic mistake.
Stefansson was preoccupied, too, with plans to discover new lands. This had always been his priority and it was the basis of his disagreement with Anderson. His exploration over the Beaufort had convinced him that there was no possibility of a new land hidden somewhere in that vast body of water, but he thought there was every chance that undiscovered islands could be found to the northeast of Prince Patrick Island.
Accordingly, in mid-June 1915, he led three men to the shores of Prince Patrick Island. One of the party, Storker Storkerson, who was five miles in the lead, climbed up on an ice hummock and surveyed the horizon with his binoculars. As Stefansson watched from a distance, Storkerson slowly swung his glasses toward the northeast. Without removing them from his eyes, he raised one arm as a signal, and his companions sensed something spectacular. As he turned to dash toward them, Stefansson rushed forward to meet him and climbed the ice hummock himself, trying to keep his excitement in check as his eyes swept the northeastern horizon. There was no mistaking what he saw: new, uncharted land “stretching blue and white and tawny gray from northeast to east by north.”
He could not contain himself. This was the prize that he had been seeking for the best part of a decade—the last great triumph left for an Arctic explorer, now that the Pole and the Passage had been achieved. “I have always thought,” he was to write, “that the discovery of land which human eyes have never seen, is about the most dramatic of possible experiences. I don’t pretend to be used to it or past the thrills that go with it.” It was this promise, now fulfilled, that had caught the imagination and brought the support of the stolid prime minister, Robert Borden.
Having planted a flag and taken possession of the new island for Canada, Stefansson named it Brock Island after the head of the Geological Survey, a generous gesture considering the survey’s earlier objection to him as leader of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. It turned out that Brock Island was actually two islands, the second larger than the first. Stefansson named this one Borden Island after his sponsor. Many years later it was found that Borden Island also was two islands. The second was named for Mackenzie King.
The world applauded his triumph, especially in Canada, whose prime minister exulted that many thousands of square miles of territory had been added to the country. But for what? Borden and Stefansson were both held captive by a nineteenth-century conceit: that the acquisition of real estate, in peace or in war, is conducive to success or victory. It was a principle familiar to every schoolchild who sang “Land of Hope and Glory,” with its wistful hope that “wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set.” As Stefansson caught his first tantalizing glimpse of Brock Island, a savage war in Europe was making that concept obsolete. Thousands of young lives were being snuffed out in a futile attempt to gain a few yards of No Man’s Land or a few acres of mud and wire. If Stefansson was a hero, it was not because he found a few chunks of barren rock for a country that had too much already; it was because, like a long-distance champion, he set out against all odds, and in the face of bitter criticism, to do the impossible, and he succeeded.
The party headed south again and reached Stefansson’s base at Cape Kellett. Once again the outside world had given up the explorer for dead. Stefansson must have enjoyed the weird little scene that took place on the shore when the schooner Polar Bear arrived. As he strolled along the beach to meet the dinghy from the ship, he could overhear the men in the boat discussing his identity. “He’s not an Eskimo,” said one. “He’s got field glasses.” Then he heard Constable Parsons of the Mounted Police, one of the party, exclaim, “That’s Stefansson.” Louis Lane, captain of the Polar Bear, shook his head. “Don’t you ever think it. The fish ate him long ago.” Stefansson’s identity was established only when the dinghy was a few yards from the shore. Lane immediately shouted to an orderly, “Don’t a damn one of you move till I shake hands with him!”
Stefansson chartered the Polar Bear from Lane and took it to Herschel Island, where he was “rescued” again, having been presumed dead. There he learned that Ottawa had issued orders to the Southern Party to pack up, but to try to learn the exact nature of his fate before returning to civilization in 1916. But Stefansson was determined to stay in the North. “In spite of the lack of renewed authority, I decided that, since I was not dead, Ottawa would, if the facts were known, approve of my course.” Stefansson ignored the order, bought the Polar Bear outright, and headed back north again. The government had other, more serious problems to contend with than the fate of one recalcitrant explorer. With the war in Europe siphoning off the country’s richest resources, who could be overly concerned with the fate of one man in the chilly waters of the Beaufort Sea?
The breach with Anderson was not healed, nor would it ever be. In Anderson’s view Stefansson’s explorations were mere grandstanding; what he really wanted and needed was notoriety. “I’ve wasted three years of my life on your fool errands,” he snapped when, at Collinson Point, Stefansson had tried to get some support for his first ice journey. The explorer’s championing of the Inuit and the Inuit way of life irritated Anderson. To him, the white northerners—missionaries, police, trappers—were far superior to the natives. They hadn’t even bothered to learn the Inuit tongue. How could Stefansson berate him for failing to appreciate the verities of the Inuit’s communal life? His leader’s insistence that he and the others turn in their personal diaries and refrain from writing for any publication convinced him that the expedition was no more than “a newspaper and magazine exploiting scheme.”
Anderson, a shy and conservative scientist, was clearly envious of Stefansson’s genius for turning accounts of his adventures into hard cash. He himself had no such talent, realized it, even mourned it. “Whenever I think of ‘exploring’ I get disgusted with it,” he wrote to his wife, “… because I haven’t any talent for making it pay. There are a good many things I like to do for the work’s sake, but I get sort of panic stricken when I think of having to tell about it afterward.…” Nor could he stomach Stefansson’s devil-may-care attitude to possible disaster.
Anderson’s antipathy toward his leader was fuelled by his wife, Bella, whom he had married in 1913 after the earlier expedition. She had followed him to Nome where she gave birth to a baby who died within three days. After that, she wanted no more of the Arctic. She was convinced that her husband was being badly underpaid for the work he was doing and the fact that his name was not on the title page of My Life with the Eskimo—for which he had done considerable work and writing—added to her antagonism. In one of her letters to Stefansson she made it clear that she “expected more from the expedition than a tiny salary and a baby’s grave.”
Stefansson, meanwhile, had discovered two more new islands farther to the east of Borden Island—Meighen Island, which he named for Borden’s successor as party leader, Arthur Meighen—and Lougheed Island, named for Sir James Lougheed, leader of the Conservative Party in the Senate.
It was not easy for the Canadian government to pry him out of his beloved Arctic. Ottawa wanted the expedition to wind up in 1916, but in April, the Minister of the Naval Services admitted to the Commons that it would not be over for another year. In June 1917, Ottawa ordered Stefansson, who was at Herschel Island, to return home, and that August, the minister gave another assurance to the Commons that it would all soon be over. But the stubborn explorer continued to linger, using a variety of excuses.
He was planning another ice expedition in the spring of 1918 at the age of thirty-nine when he was felled by a series of illnesses—pleurisy, typhoid, pneumonia. The police at Herschel were convinced that he would die and shipped him off by dogsled to Fort Yukon, Alaska, where he eventually recovered. Finally he was well enough to leave the North. He did not realize it then, but his years of Arctic exploration were over.
Robert Borden was delighted with Stefansson’s discovery of new lands; that, after all, had been the premise of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. The Geological Survey was less enchanted. Budgeted at $75,000, the expedition eventually cost the government half a million. At one point, Stefansson had promised to give Anderson control of the Southern Party, but that never came to pass. His resistance of authority, his habit of disregarding government orders, his dismissal of science as less important than discovery ensured that the Canadian government would never again employ him. It is significant that of the six honorary degrees awarded him in the course of his career, only one came from Canada.
Stefansson had taken no salary from the government during the six years of the expedition. Now he had to find some means of support. In London, before setting off for the Arctic, he had met Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic hero, who told him to get an agent and go on the lecture circuit. He took Shackleton’s advice. Lecturing appealed to him, and not just for the money at three hundred dollars a lecture; he wanted to use the platform to promote some of his ideas about the North.
It was an exhausting schedule. In one twenty-three-day period in 1921, he delivered twenty-three lectures in as many towns in California, Nevada, and Utah. He was a gifted speaker, never used notes, and seldom knew exactly what he was going to say until he started, often beginning with something he had read in that day’s newspaper. He liked to grab his audience with a provocative opening statement. One was “An adventure is a sign of incompetence,” followed by his belief that the leader of a good expedition should be able to anticipate and prepare for anything that might go wrong—advice he did not always follow himself.
One of Stefansson’s weaknesses, if it can be called that, was his impatience with detail and his disinclination to follow any rule that he did not lay down for himself. All this time, the government was trying to get from him the official report of the Northern Party’s six years with the Canadian Arctic Expedition. But Stefansson, who had written so romantically about the Arctic on his own terms, balked at the idea of turning out a dry-as-dust official document. This, of course, was the understanding he originally had with Ottawa, and it certainly would have been a valuable addition to the meagre store of knowledge available about the High Arctic. But the report was never written, which meant that the activities and scientific findings of the Northern Party did not appear in the fourteen-volume published report from the expedition, which dealt solely with activities of the Southern Party.
Something had changed Stefansson since those early days when he had been an enthusiastic young anthropologist. Certainly it had been necessary to use the media and the lecture platform to arouse interest in the Arctic and to raise funds for his northern ventures. But there was more than that. One cannot dispute Anderson’s conviction that Stefansson loved the attention. He loved to see himself extolled in the press. He enjoyed the applause of the large audiences that turned up to hear about his adventures and his philosophy. Certainly he wanted to find new lands and to explode old accepted theories. But he also wanted to be known as the greatest of the Arctic explorers. In the end, that became his primary goal. Popular books took precedence over unexciting official reports. As a contemporary anthropologist, E. S. Burch, has pointed out, while praising Stefansson’s exploratory work, “His results were far below what one has a right to expect, given his training and the extraordinary opportunities he had.… Stefansson was just too interested in being an explorer and an iconoclast … and not interested enough to put together a systematic ethnographical account of what he had learned.”
Stefansson’s response to Ottawa’s repeated requests was to announce that he was preparing his own book on the subject—and that seemed to be that. The book was The Friendly Arctic, a 784-page tome published in 1921 that portrayed the North as a kind of polar Mediterranean and brought choruses of praise and damnation from his supporters and critics. Robert Borden himself supplied the introduction, in which he wrote, “As a result of the Expedition many thousands of square miles have been added to the territory of Canada, much interesting material of great scientific value has been secured, unknown areas of vast extent have been explored, and many illusions with respect to Arctic conditions have been dissipated.”
Two of America’s greatest living explorers, Adolphus Greely and Robert Peary, praised the book. “By combining great natural, physical and mental ability, with hard practical common sense,” Peary wrote, “he has made an absolute record.” Greely was equally enthusiastic.
Balanced against this testimony were the comments of another world-class explorer, the navigator of the Northwest Passage, Roald Amundsen. “Of all the fantastic rot I have ever heard this comes close to the top,” Amundsen told the press. The book, he declared, was a “dangerous distortion of the real conditions.… [His] foolish tale also injured the prospects of more serious explorers.”
Stefansson admitted that sometimes he “oversold the merits of Arctic lands and seas.” As an explorer, he was as much a journalist as a scientist (when as a young man he had served briefly as a reporter on two newspapers, one the venerable Boston Evening Transcript). He knew a good story when he saw one and must have been torn by the need to keep his narrative readable and exciting while at the same time maintaining his thesis that a white man could survive in the Arctic if he lived like an Inuk. That, of course, ignored the truth—that the Inuit themselves often starved, were injured on the ice, or fell through the crusted surface.
The very title of the book betrays him. It certainly helped the sales, but there were times when the Arctic was distinctly unfriendly, as the survivors of the Karluk could testify. It was true that fresh caribou meat eaten half raw was an antiscorbutic, but there were times when the caribou didn’t come. It was true that Arctic weather had been given a bad name; it was often just as cold or colder in Minnesota. But it was also true that sometimes the dogs froze or starved to death.
Both My Life with the Eskimo and The Friendly Arctic are optimistic books. But Stefansson could not conceal the hardships and the danger in his kind of Arctic travel. There were times when men and dogs were forced to go on half-rations. Stefansson wrote of several narrow escapes from falling through the ice. In May of 1916 he broke through the snow cover into a crevasse, an accident that left him black and blue with a sprained ankle. That set his plans back by nine weeks and confined him to a sledge for thirty-seven days.
His thesis was simple (and some would say simple-minded): anyone could live in the Arctic if he adopted the methods of the natives who had been doing just that for hundreds of years. Yet he was ignoring the implications and contradictions of his message. He wanted those Inuit who had not been corrupted by white influences (such as the Copper Eskimos) to be left alone to live their traditional lives and at the same time seemed to be advocating the very opposite: more and more people thriving in the North. He believed that anyone could live off the land, and he certainly proved it in his own case. But there was one bitter truth that he brushed aside: living off the land is also time consuming. The ceaseless hunt for food interferes with ethnological and anthropological studies. Even a crack shot must wait for and stalk his prey. To catch a seal takes infinite patience; one must sit quietly beside the breathing hole in the ice and wait until the animal appears. Nor did Stefansson consider the likelihood that hundreds of potential hunters would wreak havoc on the caribou and muskox herds in the North. In my day in the Yukon, you could buy wild venison from the butcher and order it from a restaurant menu, but the time came when the herds were so diminished that the laws had to be changed to prevent its sale to the public in the interests of conservation.
The Friendly Arctic was Stefansson’s most popular book. Its real value lay in the light it shed on an unknown land and a misunderstood people. His readers were no doubt surprised to learn that the Inuit are just as susceptible to cold as white men; that only 10 percent of them live in snow houses; that the average snowfall in the Arctic is less than half, and in some places less than a quarter, of that in Montreal, Petrograd, Chicago, Warsaw, northwest Germany, or the Highlands of Scotland; and that the Arctic seas, which Clement Markham, a former president of the Royal Geographical Society, referred to as “the polar ocean without life,” have as much life per cubic mile as any other ocean.
The most controversial aspect of Stefansson’s iconoclasm was his advocacy of an all-fat-and-meat diet. Fresh meat, cooked rare with plenty of fat, he insisted, was a better antiscorbutic than the traditional bottled lime (rarely lemon) juice the British navy had been using since the days of Captain Cook. But Stefansson went further. Man, he insisted, can thrive forever on an all-fat, all-meat diet. This was the diet of the Inuit with whom he had lived and thrived. It bears a certain similarity to a number of present-day diets that also eschew carbohydrates.
Challenged by a group of doctors at the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology, Stefansson agreed to test his dietary theories for a year. He and a young Danish disciple, Karsten Andersen, entered Bellevue Hospital in New York, were carefully examined by doctors there, and set out on a supervised all-meat-and-fat diet for a year. They were at first confined to the hospital under supervision and allowed no cereals, vegetables, or fruit, and only water as a beverage. After six weeks they were allowed to venture out but always under the supervision of an orderly or a nurse—human guinea pigs, each with his own keeper.
During this experiment, Stefansson continued to lecture, often arriving on stage with a couple of lamb chops in his pocket. The pair took regular runs in Central Park, and it was noticed that during this period their stamina increased. After a year both men were tested again and showed no ill effects from the all-meat diet. “I never felt better in my life,” Stefansson announced, and for the rest of his life continued to concentrate on meat. As one dietitian put it, “he made an enormous stride toward liberalizing our ideas about diet,” a statement with which today’s committed vegetarians might take issue.
In 1921, Stefansson was planning another expedition to the Arctic under the sponsorship of the Canadian government. But Ottawa dithered. It developed that Ernest Shackleton wanted to head any new expedition, claiming that Stefansson had told him he did not intend to lead it. Stefansson was convinced that Shackleton had double-crossed him; at any rate, the proposal came to nothing. Always a controversial figure among the bureaucrats, Stefansson had his enemies in the Geological Survey. He had, indeed, been blackballed when he tried to join the prestigious Rideau Club in Ottawa, an astonishing development considering his accomplishments and the fact that Borden himself had sponsored his application, with the Speaker of the House seconding it. His attempt to settle Lapland reindeer on Baffin Island in 1920 ended in failure because the lichen that grew on Baffin turned out to be unsuitable for the herds. Nobody, apparently, had thought to test it.
These were not good years for Stefansson’s reputation, though he continued to look ahead with his usual confidence. In The Northward Course of Empire, published in 1922, he foresaw the changes that would come to Arctic exploration through air and undersea travel. The book did poorly but his predictions would turn out to be on the button.
That year the Karluk disaster returned to haunt him. His old bête noire, Anderson, kept it alive until his critics publicly re-examined the tragedy. There were some who charged, wrongly, that Stefansson had left the ship to save his own skin, knowing she was doomed. That jibe was far-fetched, but some Karluk survivors continued to be critical, especially William Laird McKinlay, who spent a lifetime working on an anti-Stefansson book that he finally published in 1976. McKinlay believed that the expedition was ill-conceived, carelessly planned, badly organized, haphazardly manned, and almost totally lacking in leadership.
Piled on top of all that was a new tragedy centring again on Wrangel Island, the spot from which some of the Karluk survivors had been rescued. Stefansson wanted to claim the island for Canada and in 1921 applied for permission to do so from Prime Minister Arthur Meighen, Borden’s successor. There were objections, and when the government stalled, Stefansson, with his usual impetuosity, decided to go ahead anyway—a fateful decision. He formed the Stefansson Arctic Exploration and Development Company for the purpose of exploring the island and claiming it for Canada with a view to colonization.
On September 9, 1921, four young men and one Inuit seamstress led by Allan Crawford, a twenty-year-old University of Toronto science student, set off for Wrangel Island by way of Nome on the schooner Silver Wave. For the next two winters, nothing was heard of the expedition.
In April 1923, Stefansson appeared before the Canadian cabinet, but the cabinet dithered. Was Wrangel Island part of Canada? On May 23, the explorer left for London to meet with the Minister for the Colonies and to raise funds for a rescue attempt. There matters moved with glacial speed. The Foreign Office wanted to sound out other nations about the sovereignty of the island. Nothing more could be done, Stefansson was told, until the Canadian prime minister arrived for the Imperial Conference of Prime Ministers in September. On September 1, he received the tragic news that all four men had perished—three in a vain attempt to reach the Siberian shore, the fourth of scurvy on Wrangel Island. Only the seamstress, Ada Blackjack, and the inevitable ship’s cat survived.
The young men who set off so enthusiastically to occupy a distant Arctic island did not heed Stefansson’s instructions to take along a little umiak (a wooden boat covered with animal skin) and more than one Inuit companion to do duty as seamstress and hunter. The tragedy, as Stefansson was to write, was “a fearful blow.” It played hob with his “friendly Arctic” theory. But it can also be argued that Stefansson’s own impetuosity in mounting the expedition before being sure of the island’s sovereignty contributed to the tragedy. It would have made more sense to get those essential details cleared up before embarking on what proved to be another wild goose chase. As for Wrangel Island, Russia claimed it, and nobody raised objections—the Canadians because they thought it worthless and the British because they did not want to jeopardize relations with the new Soviet Union. Four young men had gone to their deaths on a distant speck in the ocean that nobody really cared about—and also because nobody really seemed to care about them.
Throughout these unfortunate events, Stefansson continued to write and lecture on the North, apparently unruffled by Canadian criticism and certainly buoyed up by American hero worship. His literary output was prodigious: no fewer than thirty-nine books and close to four hundred magazine and newspaper articles, some for popular publications such as Harper’s, Maclean’s, and Physical Culture but others for scholarly publications including the Geographical Journal, the Quarterly Review, and Nature. He was elected president of the Explorers’ Club, received medals from half a dozen geographical societies, and attained the supreme journalistic accolade—a two-part profile in The New Yorker magazine.
The North continued to hold him in thrall. He never stopped preaching the advantages of living as the Inuit did and even published an entire book on diet. He was for thirteen years adviser to Pan American Airlines, which was pioneering trans-polar flights. When the Second World War broke out he became an adviser to William J. Donovan, coordinator of information for the United States, and, through him, produced a memorandum regarding Alaskan petroleum resources. From this came the notorious Canol enterprise to pump oil by pipeline from Norman Wells on the Mackenzie River to Whitehorse. Stefansson, ever the iconoclast, damned the development as “the worst possible route.” It turned out he was right; the Canol project was a boondoggle that gobbled tax money to no great purpose and was allowed to fall into disrepair after the war.
By this time he was married. The nuptials took place on April 10, 1940, when he was in his sixty-second year. The bride, Evelyn Schwartz Baird, whom he met in Greenwich Village where he was living at the time, was a vivacious, dark-eyed, twenty-eight-year-old divorcee and sometime folksinger. She was, in her new husband’s view, “a perfect human being” and one who coaxed him out of what had been a confirmed bachelorhood. Bachelor, yes, but by no means unattracted to women. He had enjoyed a passionate five-year affair with Betty Brainerd, whose father had helped boost Seattle during the Klondike gold rush. “I love you with every atom of my being,” she once wrote to him. Stefansson, on his part, told her that “the only thing that I care to know about you is that you love me.” Alas, the romance faded in New York, partly because of Stefansson’s indifference to the letters she sent him. “Silence is not an alarm, but a rebuff,” she told him.
Stefansson was exceedingly discreet about his several attachments. He enjoyed a seventeen-year love affair with Fannie Hurst, by far the best-selling woman novelist in the country (if not the world). But in his autobiography he scarcely mentioned her; she was little more than a name in passing, although he did dedicate one book to her.
The subject of Stefansson’s “marriage” to Pannigabluk always remained off limits. Evelyn Stefansson tried to breach her husband’s wall of discretion but failed. Her intense curiosity about Pannigabluk led her to question Richard Finnie about her. On one occasion when Stefansson’s mixed-breed grandchildren wrote him a letter, his only instruction to his wife was not to answer it. Gisli Palsson, an Icelandic anthropologist, suggested a possible explanation in The Intimate Arctic, pointing out that Pan, as Stefansson called her, often travelled with Rudolph Anderson and might well have had an intimate relationship with him, too, a speculation that would have infuriated the explorer.
Stefansson and his young wife moved to a picturesque brownstone house in Manhattan and also acquired a farm in Vermont. There, Stefansson continued his voluminous correspondence with a wide variety of prominent figures on both sides of the Atlantic, ranging from Orville Wright, the first man to fly an airplane, to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He never threw away a scrap of paper and made carbon copies of every letter he wrote, many of which he sent off to friends. By the time he was eighty, his letters to such prominent figures as the playwright Sir James Barrie, former president Theodore Roosevelt, and the poet Robert Frost, whom he resembled physically, occupied no fewer than one hundred vertical files. As a book lover, Stefansson had few peers; he bought so many they kept him poor. In his Village days he had had to occupy two apartments, the walls of both lined from floor to ceiling with shelves crammed with thousands of books and pamphlets—a private library that was one of the largest in the country. When he moved to a house, he was forced to buy a second one next door to contain it.
In the immediate post-war years, with the support and financial backing of the United States Office of Naval Research, Stefansson embarked on a monumental project that was close to his heart. He would oversee, edit, and contribute to an Arctic encyclopedia—twenty volumes, six million words—dealing with every aspect of the world north of the Arctic Circle. Because of his reputation as an explorer he was able to enlist the support of prominent scientists, historians, civil servants, and museum directors and to secure the co-operation of major universities and such business enterprises as the Hudson’s Bay Company and Pan American Airlines.
It was an ambitious but worthwhile venture, doomed, alas, by the international politics of the post-war era. By 1949, he and his wife, who was his chief assistant, had put in two years of work on the project and shipped manuscripts for the first two volumes to the Johns Hopkins University Press. Suddenly, without explanation, Washington cancelled Stefansson’s contract and the project was abandoned. Why? He was never able to get a reason for the disaster.
Stefansson and his wife, Evelyn, supervising the unloading of his Arctic collection at Dartmouth College. The explorer kept a copy of every letter he wrote.
Evelyn Stefansson was convinced, with good reason, that McCarthyism and the Cold War were to blame. Stefansson, who had secured the co-operation of both the British and the Canadian governments, had been hoping to enlist the USSR, which controlled 49 percent of the Arctic. The political situation made direct contact impossible, but he was able to subscribe to a good many Russian-language and English-language Soviet publications. When he hired a young American translator who had spent his final undergraduate year studying in Moscow, Washington wanted the assistant fired. Stefansson, with the backing of General George Marshall, refused. That, together with his long friendship with Owen Lattimore, the target of McCarthy’s most vicious attacks, was certainly behind the debacle.
Stefansson was devastated by this body blow. The encyclopedia was to have been his monument, the culmination of his ambitions, the crowning achievement of his career, and would have confirmed for all time his reputation as the greatest of all polar experts. “There was nothing to do but reduce our staff, give up what we could of our New York accommodations, and thereafter do practically nothing except type, file and otherwise try to salvage manuscripts, notes, maps and pictures.”
He could no longer afford the expense of housing this accumulation of research or his huge library. His only recourse was to turn the Stefansson Collection over to Dartmouth College in New England. There the explorer became a conspicuous figure on campus, hatless and coatless in spite of the New Hampshire winter and easily recognizable because of his shock of white hair. He put his final frustrations behind him. Always soft-spoken, he would lard his conversation with epigrams such as “False modesty is better then none,” and also with an enviable store of jokes. He was fond of quoting his youthful hero, Robert Ingersoll: “My brain may not be the best in the world but it is so conveniently placed for home use.” To those who wondered why he had never gone to the North Pole, he would reply: “I’m a scientist, not a tourist.” Richard Finnie described him as “ceaselessly expounding, but informal, jovial, trusting, warm-hearted, considerate, and generous.” Stefansson did not hold grudges in spite of the calumny visited upon him. He never spoke harshly of anyone, even his arch-enemy, Anderson. In The Friendly Arctic, Stefansson had high praise for Anderson and played down the mutiny at Collinson Point.
Evelyn Stefansson did her best to heal the breach between the two. She had been told that Anderson had been heard talking wistfully of a reconciliation. When she saw him at the first Alaska Science Conference, she noted that “he looked stooped and sad.”
Stefansson on the Dartmouth College campus showing students how to build an iglu. In one sense, he never really left the North.
“Suppose he wants to make up?” she told her husband. “Wouldn’t it be a pity if he had no opportunity? Help him, Stef. Go over and say hello.” Stefansson was reluctant, but to please his wife he walked across the room to Anderson. She followed in his wake, “slightly exalted in my new role as peacemaker.” But when her husband extended his hand, Anderson turned on his heel and walked away. “I wanted to die,” she remembered. It was the only time she saw Anderson and the last time her husband did.
Stefansson loved a party—an enjoyment he had picked up from the Inuit. At a dinner in late August 1962 for an old Greenland friend, his wife found him in marvellous form, merry and witty and stimulated by his guest. They discussed falconry, and warmed by good wine, took their coffee into the living room. Stefansson reached for a cup; his hand trembled, and the coffee splashed from the cup before he painstakingly replaced it on the table. His wife went to him at once and found that he was unable to speak, felled by a massive stroke with accompanying paralysis. It seemed physically impossible for him to stagger from the room, but, Evelyn Stefansson remembered, “his enormous dignity, which would not permit him to ruin a perfect evening by collapsing in front of his guests, combined with a strong act of will, had powered his exit and enabled him to do at the close of his life what he had often done during it—the impossible!”
Dignity, certainly, but also a fair measure of pride. He had, after all, successfully cultivated his image as the most rugged of the polar explorers, the one who always seemed to return from the dead, even in Fort Yukon when his end seemed certain. Through the eyes of a younger generation we get a final glimpse of him, bending over on the snow-covered Dartmouth campus, cutting out snow blocks and fashioning a miniature iglu—a blond Eskimo to the last and still a prisoner of the North. He could not bear to have anyone see him fail or falter, and so he struggled with the stroke only to fall into a deep coma until, less than a week later, on the morning of August 26, 1962, his doctors reported that in his eighty-third year, the last of the old-time explorers had finally gone to his rest.