Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  There is little doubt that in the final months of 1918 the Saviour of Romania had fallen deeply in love with its queen. He saw her periodically as he moved in and out of Jassy. They managed to spend hours together after rides through the countryside. He told her about the Yukon, which she had long confused with Alaska, and the great gold dredges of the Klondike (but not about the wife he had left behind with whom he did not bother to correspond—a later revelation that shook Marie). He spoke of returning to the North and read to her from the works of Service, long passages of which he knew by heart. One of the Queen’s biographers has called her “the Last Romantic.” That she admired him and felt sustained by him there is no doubt. But was their relationship physical?

  Boyle’s two leading biographers differ. Certainly there were whispers about “Colonel Lawrence of Romania,” as the catty court ladies dubbed him behind his back. The Romanian court was a hotbed of sexual intrigue, the by-product of a network of arranged marriages consummated in the interests of the state. Affairs, both grand and fleeting, were common and expected. The Queen herself enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Prince Barbu Stirbey, a courtier with a lengthy pedigree, but she did not distribute her favours widely, if at all. In Boyle she discovered “an unexpected touch of early Victorian Puritanism that added much to his quaintness.”

  It is possible, as William Rodney has suggested, that in his relations with Marie, Boyle saw himself as a white knight, too chivalrous to sully this, the most important relationship of his life, with mere carnal appetite. Leonard Taylor, who had access to a newly discovered cache of Boyle papers after Rodney’s book was published, disagrees. “That they became lovers seems certain,” he wrote, pointing out that “both were full-blooded passionate individuals who made their own rules.… They were living at a pace only those who have survived a war can understand. When you may be dead tomorrow there is every reason to live today.”

  Given the situation, it is hard to dispute Taylor’s assessment. Though the sentimental and elegant queen might have seemed unapproachable to a Romanian courtier, Boyle was not a man to let such class restraints deter him. To her, the Yukoner appeared the epitome of rugged masculinity. To him, she was almost the direct opposite of his previous partners—a highly intelligent woman of the world who before her death would publish no fewer than sixteen books and innumerable articles in magazines ranging from Ladies Home Journal to the Paris Review. The fact that they came from totally different worlds only increased their mutual attraction.

  Queen Marie (left) in peasant costume with Joe Boyle and Princess Ileana.

  In June 1918, the two were thrown together by an unexpected circumstance. Boyle, who hadn’t had a real holiday since he left Great Britain, was felled by a near fatal stroke that left him partially paralyzed. For a fortnight his life hung in the balance. Marie was devastated. “I felt my heart die within me,” she wrote; “Boyle, my great strong invincible friend.”

  He had been stricken in Kishinev (now Chisinău, the capital of Moldova), but as soon as he could move she had him installed in a small cottage on the grounds of the summer palace in the Romanian hill country. There he fought back against his condition, exercising his stricken arm and leg and smoothing out the paralyzed side of his face in front of mirrors—a minor spectacle made to order for Act Three of The Saviour of Romania. Finally he managed to shave himself with an old-fashioned razor and it was clear that he was recovering. Marie had breakfast with him daily and took him on drives in the country. Her ten-year-old daughter, Ileanna, became his constant companion, and Boyle delighted the little princess by reciting for her Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” At last the King of the Klondike had found a warm and fulfilling family.

  Marie had never met a man like Boyle. He did not fit the palace stereotype. To the stuffy salons of the Romanian court he brought a whiff of the clean, northern Canadian air. There, he was “Klondike Boyle,” a soubriquet bestowed in admiration but one that also stamped him as an alien, albeit a glamorous one.

  For all of his career he had been beholden to no one, but now, day by day, he was becoming a slave to a new kind of passion. Marie had only to crook her finger and he stood ready to do her bidding. Back in Canada his demure little wife tried vainly to get an answer to her official inquiries about him. In the Yukon, Joe Boyle, Jr., was trying to reach his father to discuss his concerns about the state of the Canadian Klondyke Company. From the maelstrom of eastern Europe there was no response. His company was now in receivership, yet Boyle appeared indifferent to the collapse of his empire. Though he yearned for the Klondike, as Marie’s writing makes clear, he didn’t try to launch a rescue attempt.

  Why? Was it that he had done what he set out to do and moved on? To quote his favourite poet: “It wasn’t the gold that I wanted, so much as just finding the gold.” But these excuses for his inaction are not very plausible. Something else was holding him back, keeping him tied to the exotic kingdom, and that something, surely, was Marie. He could not bear to slip away with scarcely a goodbye, as he had slipped away from Elma Louise, still waiting for him wistfully on the other side. The great dredges had been his toys, but now he had put away childish things and flung himself into a romance that some might consider adolescent but that turned out to be the first abiding love affair of his life.

  As he recovered from his devastating illness, new challenges presented themselves, all revolving around the needs and desires of his royal confidante. In the late fall of 1918 he masterminded a successful campaign to spirit the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, the Queen’s cousin, out of Odessa. In Paris in December he persuaded his old Klondike acquaintance Herbert Hoover of the Allied Food Council to dispatch three shipments of food to starving Romania. Next, in London he negotiated a twenty-five-million-dollar loan for that beleaguered country, lobbied (unsuccessfully) for a massive Allied intervention in Russia, and arranged for young Prince Nicholas, Marie’s son, to attend Eton.

  In the midst of this whirlwind of activity he was “knocked clean out” by an attack of influenza that weakened him further. The Saviour of Romania was also, thanks to Marie, now the Duke of Jassy. That did not deter the War Office, which was back with annoying questions about his right to wear the King’s uniform. Boyle continued to resist all attempts to put him into mufti. Grudgingly, the War Office agreed to allow him to continue the masquerade until September 1920, a deadline later extended to the following January.

  Joe Boyle recovering from his near fatal illness, Kishinev, Bessarabia, 1918.

  By this time, political opposition to Boyle in Romanian court circles was building. His attempts, at Marie’s behest, to separate Crown Prince Carol from his commoner mistress were seen as an intrusion into internal affairs that was much resented. The government had changed, and there was continuing uneasiness about the supposed influence of an outsider on the royal family. The intrigue began to tell upon the Queen herself. “They one and all torture me about faithful old Boyle and my unshakeable belief in him,” she wrote. Yet the crisis only deepened their affection for each other. “You and I are man and woman and we have come together at a late period of our lives and come together in a way but few could understand,” he wrote to Marie. In the end, however, it became obvious that Boyle was no longer welcome at court, and it fell to Marie herself to break the news as gently as she could.

  In later years, Marie briefly drew aside the veil of circumspection that had masked her own inner passion for the soldier of fortune whom she had admitted into her personal life. She had been, she said, “torn between two loyalties and two affections.” (She did not name anyone, but she may well have meant Prince Stirbey or even her husband.) “It was unbearable to me to hurt anyone and yet I was hurting them and myself even more.” Boyle was devastated by this unexpected blow. In the correspondence that followed, it is possible to discern another side of Boyle, one that he had concealed perhaps even from himself. He had always been the loner, the leader who faced every setback with aplomb. Women had been secon
dary in his career. Now, in middle age, he found himself consumed by the kind of ardour usually associated with lovesick youths. From the moment of their first meeting he was the rock to which Marie clung, the haven to which she retreated. Now the tables were turned, but there was no way in which he could reach out to her. In one remarkable and revealing letter that has all the resonance of a wail in the night, he laid himself bare. “I do not think in my whole manhood I actually knew what fear was until … you told me I must go.” The bold adventurer was now the prisoner of a hopeless passion. “I found myself paralyzed with fear, preventing myself from screaming … by cramming my hand in my mouth and nearly biting my fingers off.”

  Boyle’s life had been marked by a series of stunning successes. Now, at last, he had a family on which he doted; the young crown prince and his siblings called him Uncle Joe. He had found a woman who could easily have been his life’s companion—a contrast to his dizzy first wife and her uninspiring successor. He was in love with Marie, and on more than one occasion she demonstrated her affection and respect. But the ultimate consummation of that unlikely affair was denied them by circumstances over which they had no control. Indeed, much of the fire in his heart may have been fuelled by the lure of the unattainable. For the first time in his life, Boyle, the take-charge man, found himself powerless to act.

  Boyle’s career at this critical time was winding down, but he refused to admit it. Settling down … taking it easy … resting on his laurels—such senior-citizen goals were foreign to his makeup. He had one last service to perform for his queen. He had finally managed to separate the future king, Carol, from the arms of his unsuitable morganatic wife, Zizi Lambrino, and nudge him in the direction of an acceptable (if unlovable) princess, Helene of Greece.

  He needed a new adventure, a new career goal, and he found it in the petroleum-rich Caucasus between the Black and Caspian seas. In May 1921, Royal Dutch/Shell, the international oil conglomerate, made him its representative in dealing with the Soviets, and he was off again for Constantinople (Istanbul), pausing for a bittersweet two-week idyll in the Romanian countryside with Marie. His treatment at the hands of the Romanian court had left him depressed. “In spite of his mighty spirit and energy he does mind being so unfairly attacked,” Marie noted as he reluctantly took his leave. He felt the Canadian cold shoulder no less keenly. He had undertaken his several adventures on behalf of the Romanians and the western Allies at his own expense, and all he had received from the military (apart from the grudging gift of a DSO) was a long haggle about his right to wear his uniform.

  By the end of August, Boyle was back in London, outwardly the man of action but inwardly at odds with himself. Only Marie understood the extent of his despair. “I am gone,” he wrote to her in a melodramatic letter at the end of October. “Do not let me be a shadow on your life—you never owed me anything—always you gave and I am grateful and love you—remember only that.” He had written her many letters but tore them up because they were “just lonesome wails,” and Boyle was not a man to wail. She was, he told her, the “one human being that fills every spare moment of his mind” and one who also haunted his sleep. “There are nights when I am so completely worn out that I am almost dazed and the only way I can settle it is to conclude with ‘I love her and I don’t know anything more nor do I want to.’ ”

  The following spring, having set up a network of trusted followers in the Caucasus, he was off again to Constantinople and then across the Black Sea to Batum to meet Podge Hill, who was again his associate. Hill was disturbed by Boyle’s appearance. This was a sick man, “aged almost beyond recognition,” whose clothes hung in folds over what had been a robust body. The pair set off for the Georgian capital of Tiflis (modern Tbilisi) on an inspection tour, but not for long. An international economic conference was slated for Genoa, and Boyle was determined to attend it.

  The train journey to Tiflis had exhausted him. Hill noticed that he was increasingly short of breath and looked worn out. Nonetheless, he insisted on heading back on a dangerous and jolting journey through the mountains on a dilapidated train that at one point plunged headlong into a gorge. Its brakes had been tampered with by dissident anti-Bolshevik saboteurs, and the crash that followed killed the crew and many passengers. The Boyle party escaped, but Boyle’s condition worsened. His breathing was laboured and his legs were swollen so alarmingly that he had to walk with two canes. The subsequent voyage to Constantinople aboard a pitching vessel battered by a Black Sea squall only increased his suffering. Taken on a stretcher to his hotel, he was told by the examining physician that if he tried to continue on to Genoa he would be risking his life. But risk it he did by way of the Orient Express, eager to make an oil deal with the Russians who were attending the conference. When not confined to his bed in Genoa he moved about by wheelchair.

  Back in London in May, having lost sixty pounds, Boyle was examined by one of the city’s leading heart specialists who told him to put his affairs in order and abstain from worry and from any thought of travel, under which conditions he might live for two or three more years. Go straight to a nursing home, the doctor told him—don’t even bother to go back to the hotel.

  Boyle followed instructions but proved a difficult patient, holding board meetings with Shell officials and his own staff in his bedroom, to the consternation of the nurse who was now attending him. In June he stubbornly insisted on going to an international conference at The Hague, hoping to continue to negotiate with the Russians on behalf of Shell in its increasing rivalry with Standard Oil. The conference accomplished nothing, and when Shell, in effect, abandoned him, Boyle, ever litigious, turned to the courts for compensation, an action that was settled quietly by the company with Joe Boyle, Jr., after his father’s death.

  Ill or not, he could not resist embarking on one more piece of derring-do. In September, when he found out that one of his associates, Charles Solly, was locked up in a Tiflis prison, he set off again for the Black Sea, shooting off telegrams of protest en route. There he learned that Solly had been released as a result of diplomatic pressure and also, perhaps, because of Boyle’s stream of protests. He made his way from Constantinople back to London by way of Greece, where he visited with Marie’s eldest daughter, now queen of that country, albeit temporarily (she fled to Romania in mid-December). But his pride kept him from Romania. He did not want Marie to see the shadow of the big man she had known and loved. They had corresponded regularly, but now, in one last letter, he rejected her invitation to come to her. “I want you to remember me as the man I was,” he wrote back. “I am no more Joe Boyle.”

  He spent his last days in the spring of 1923 at the home of his old Klondike friend Ted Bredenberg in Hampton Hill, Middlesex, reminiscing about the old Yukon days, rereading Service’s verse, and, in Marie’s words, “longing to get back to his mountains, his river rapids, his great forests and silent snows.” He did not speak of his illness and fought it to the end, as his last words make clear. The date was April 14, 1923. He had spent a peaceful but sleepless night and now he seemed ready for action. “I want to get up,” he said, and struggled to raise himself, only to fall back upon the pillow. At the age of fifty-six, the King of the Klondike was dead.

  Though he did not die intestate as some writers have suggested, most of his great fortune had been dissipated as a result of his many philanthropies, the expense of his failing dredging company, and his costly and varied exploits in Europe. Marie learned the full details of his passing in a letter from his former Russian interpreter, a trusted employee, Dimitri Tzegintzov, who planned Boyle’s funeral service. She responded in an emotional and affecting twelve-page letter in which she described the special understanding between the two as “something deep, real, strong, I may say holy, based upon a perfect belief, faith, and respect.” Fate, she wrote, had brought them together. “We had clasped hands at the hour of deepest distress and humiliation and nothing could part us in understanding. No one knew his heart better than I. Women played but little p
art in his life and he had a wealth of love unspent … when he had his stroke I was the haven in which he anchored for awhile.”

  When she visited his grave at Hampton Hill—and she returned to visit it almost yearly on her visits to England—she was not impressed. She immediately arranged for a more appropriate memorial in the shape of an ancient six-foot stone slab to be placed atop the grave, engraved with the insignia of the Order of Maria Regina together with Boyle’s name and relevant dates. There was something more. At the foot of the slab appeared a line from “The Spell of the Yukon” that she had often heard from his own lips and that would serve as his special epitaph:

  Man with the heart of a Viking and the simple faith of a child.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Blond Eskimo

  Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the last of the old-time explorers, on a hunt with the Canadian Arctic Expedition in 1914.

  —ONE—

  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.