Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  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 so
rt 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.