Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  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.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Persevering Lady

  Jane Griffin, the future Lady Franklin, at twenty-four. From Portrait of Jane by Frances J. Woodward, Hodder and Stoughton, 1951

  —ONE—

  In September 1859, when Leopold M’Clintock’s little schooner Fox entered the English Channel from the mists of the Arctic labyrinth, Jane, Lady Franklin, hurried back from her mountain-climbing expedition in the Pyrenees to resume her role as one of the best known and most venerated women in England.

  Her husband’s fate and that of the 134 men he commanded in his search for the Northwest Passage had finally been established as a result of her own determined quest. Her twelve-year struggle to accomplish his rescue and, when that failed, to enshrine his memory as the greatest of all Northern explorers had touched off the most intense decade of Arctic exploration in history and caught the imagination of the world. It was now her purpose to ensure that posterity would hail him as the discoverer of the elusive Passage.

  In that determination she did not lack for supporters. “She now holds the highest p
osition of any English woman,” her brother-in-law exclaimed, and that assessment was echoed by more independent observers. As Francis Spufford has written in I May Be Some Time, “No other nineteenth-century woman raised the cash for three polar expeditions, or had her say over the appointment of captains and lieutenants.”

  The Daily Telegraph called her “our English Penelope”—a reference to Odysseus’s chaste and faithful wife, the heroine of the Odyssey. Benjamin Disraeli, referring to the successful discovery of her husband’s expedition by M’Clintock on King William Island, noted that “these are deeds that will claim the pages of history and the name of the true heroine of the tale will never be forgotten.”

  “What the nation would not do,” an Aberdeen editor wrote, “a woman did.” The plaudits were indeed worldwide as she discovered when a group of natives paddled her up the Fraser River in the colony of British Columbia. The citizens of the town of Yale had hung a banner across the narrows emblazoned with the words “lady franklin pass.” In the Sandwich Islands, Queen Emma sent her own chariot complete with footmen to convey her to her lodgings. In London, the Royal Geographical Society awarded her its Founder’s Medal, the first ever offered to a woman.

  The object of this veneration was then approaching seventy. Since 1845 her life had been centred on the Canadian Arctic. Though she had never personally experienced the frozen world, she could not escape it. Now, as she prepared herself one more time to ensure her husband’s place in history, she remained its prisoner.

  She did not seek celebrity for herself; it sought her. Nor could she avoid it, much as she might have wished. She suffered from a shyness that made her shrink from personal publicity. She refused to have her photograph taken and was afflicted by recurring headaches that, in her youth, she described as “an excess of nervousness.” She left no personal memoir, and there are only two portraits of her, both in chalk. The first drawing, made when she was twenty-four, shows a pleasant, if placid, young woman with a studied countenance, “artificially tranquil,” to use her own expression. Indeed, she told the artist that “tranquility if not sadness was the habitual expression of my countenance for I feared she would give me a false, artificial simper which I would hate to see.”

  The second chalk drawing, made two decades later, shows a still attractive woman with only the suggestion of a double chin and no simper. John Franklin’s wife was certainly not one to simper, but the drawing fails to reveal the steel in her character. She kept her looks well into middle age. One acquaintance remembered her shortly before she turned forty as “the most beautiful woman she had ever seen.” At about the same time she attended a party where she produced “an extraordinary sensation” and “there was not a gentleman in the room who did not go up to ask Mr. Le Maistre [the host] in a whisper who that very pretty young lady was sitting on the sofa by the fire.” This she reported in a letter to her fiancé, Captain John Franklin, explaining that he must not think it an instance of excessive vanity but related only to please him. It was one of close to two thousand letters that she turned out, often at great length, in her cramped and spidery handwriting. This vast collection is housed at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge and amplifies an astonishing shelf crammed with some two hundred hand-written journal-diaries, the main resource that Frances J. Woodward used in her brilliant and scholarly Portrait of Jane, the only biography of Lady Franklin ever written and one that can honestly be described as “definitive.” I have seen this long shelf of journals and can only applaud the biographer for working her way through them. Much of this essay is based on her painstaking research.

  Jane was late when it came to marriage, although that was not for lack of suitors; one of them was Peter Roget, whose name was later immortalized on the title page of his famous Thesaurus. Perhaps it was her innate shyness that held her aloof; equally likely might have been the prospect of losing her independence. At the age of twenty-eight, with no suitable husband in sight, she consoled herself with the resolution that “whenever I marry, whoever I marry, I will open my whole heart to him who will then possess supreme & exclusive dominion over it.” In the same year she wrote: “Shall I really make a good wife as I intend to be? Or is it one of my romantic fancies to think that the supremest bliss of a woman is to be found in her sanctified affection towards her husband?” She was longing to be married but had no intention of marrying without love, and as her biographer has noted, “none of the numerous offers she received fulfilled that indispensable condition.”

  As the daughter of a well-to-do silk weaver she was able to travel and did so with her family—all travellers—to the Netherlands and the south of France. For all her life she was an inveterate wanderer, a kind of professional tourist to whom travel was a form of education. She wrote it all down in her journal, complete with tables of distances covered, lists of sights seen and sights unseen and of souvenirs bought and not bought, not to mention mountains climbed and unclimbed.

  At home, she attended the lectures at the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Science, a series of subjects that ranged from magnetism and electricity to mechanics and optics. She dabbled briefly in phrenology, a great fad of the Victorian era, and did her best to learn French, Italian, shorthand, and even a few words of Arabic. She was an active member of the Book Society and read as many as three hundred books a year, but no novels.

  When she first encountered Captain John Franklin in 1824 at the age of thirty-two, she was plain Jane Griffin. He was married to her friend Eleanor Anne Porden, a poetess of some consequence, the author of a prodigious epic, Richard Coeur de Lion, a two-volume tome of sixteen cantos. Eleanor was a fellow member of the Book Society and also of the Royal Institution’s lecture series. She was also tiny, frail, and sickly, and therein lay her tragedy.

  Even as John Franklin was preparing for his third voyage to the Arctic, his wife was dying of tuberculosis. It is difficult to know whether Franklin understood the seriousness of her condition. Certainly he was prepared, if necessary, to scrap his plans and remain at her side, but she would have none of it. She insisted that he carry on, and carry on he did. One week after he left, she succumbed.

  When Franklin returned in 1827, the Griffin family, who had, as usual, been travelling about, this time in the Scandinavian countries, discovered that he had named Cape Griffin in their honour. That led to closer relations, which developed into an intimacy between the two and led to a dinner party with Jane seated at Franklin’s right. The details seem to have been torn out of the notes she made for her journal “by some misguided relative.” As Frances Woodward writes: “It is a great loss that we do not know how these diverse personalities grew to love each other.”

  “Diverse” is certainly the word. Franklin, in middle-age, was plump, balding, and bovine, scarcely the image of a dashing polar explorer or even a staunch sea captain. But it must be remembered that in this age of exploration, when the English were unlocking the secrets of darkest Africa, the mysterious East, and the chill channels of the Arctic labyrinth, they had an aura about them that made them instant celebrities like the movie stars and sports heroes of our own day. Franklin was as stolid as they come—conventional, unimaginative (at least in his letters to Jane), and ill at ease in the company of those outside his own tight circle. “One is even tempted to believe,” Ms. Woodward has written, “that the most interesting thing about Franklin is his choice of wives.”

  What was it, then? What drew him to these two remarkably gifted women, and, more to the point, what was it that drew them to him? There was about Franklin a certain human kindness that was rarely apparent in the martinets who rose to command in His Majesty’s navy. Franklin, quite literally, would not have hurt a mosquito. There was, as he put it, room enough for both of them in his world. Men were rarely flogged aboard the ships he commanded in that age of corporal punishment, and that speaks greatly in his favour. It was said that on those few occasions when he was reduced to using that form of discipline, he trembled from head to foot. He
was highly moral without being prissy and actually believed in the principles of honour and duty that came with his calling. He was, in the best sense, a good man and a genuinely likeable one. Above all, as his biographer has put it, “he had essential nobility of character.” If his honour was impugned, as it certainly would be within a few years of his marriage, he would not rest until it was restored, even if it meant returning, in advancing age, to the white hell of the Arctic maze.

  In choosing Jane Griffin as his second wife, Franklin made an inspired choice. It was through her and because of her that this plodding and unexceptional explorer was hoisted to the pinnacle of the polar pantheon. It is interesting to speculate how things might have turned out had he remained a widower or chosen a different sort of woman as his consort. He is in the school books today, when many of his colleagues are half forgotten, through the stubborn and unceasing campaign of the indomitable Jane.

  He had made three unimpressive forays into the Arctic. The first, in 1818, was an abortive attempt to reach the North Pole in which he served as second-in-command to David Buchan. That was called off as the result of a storm so savage that the expedition, instead of advancing toward the Pole, ended up two miles farther from it. The second was an unmitigated disaster. Franklin’s task was to take a party overland from York Factory on Hudson Bay to Great Slave Lake and on to the mouth of the Coppermine River. From there its task was to map the unexplored Arctic coast using small boats.