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.
—THREE—
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 a
llowed 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.
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