Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  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.

  Pan
nigabluk 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 th
an 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.