Then still north, but east now, too, past Point Lay—then a village on a barrier island in Kasegaluk Lagoon, now a village on the mainland after relocating in the 1970s—and past Wainwright, founded just five years earlier. Seventy miles east of Wainwright the Teddy Bear entered the ice at Point Barrow, the northernmost point in the United States, 350 miles above the Arctic Circle.
A few hundred miles later, when shifting ice grew too dangerous, Joe found a small natural harbor near Barter Island. Arctic winters are impossibly long and preposterously cold. The sun sets in November and doesn’t rise again until nearly February—when the average daily temperature hovers around -24 degrees Fahrenheit—and then just for a brief appearance. Joe knew they wouldn’t be able to sail again until at least July, maybe August. But they were young, free, and aching for adventure in a wild land north of the world. In mid-September, less than a month after they left Nome, ice held the schooner fast. They readied her winter quarters and settled in.
Was Joe’s anchorage as quiet as mine, or did the Arctic offer a steady interruption of unfamiliar sounds? The cannon fire of breaking ice, the groan of the frozen sea squeezing the timbers of his hull, the huff of a polar bear outside the cabin, the barking of a nervous dog team? Could he hear footsteps in the frozen snow outside, or the wind a steady whistle rising to the occasional howl? Quiet enough, maybe, to hear the sputter and hiss of the Northern Lights.
When I put down his manuscript and shut off the cabin lamp, no light creeps through the deck hatch or windows, no star blinks in the overcast sky. The darkness is absolute, and it’s only 7 p.m. The Northern Lights don’t dance tonight, but I’ve seen them here, anchored beneath them just as Joe was, the two of us joined by an ocean, tethered to the planet by anchor chains, curtains of light shifting overhead, only the century between us.
Wind whispers at the windows and water licks at the hull, a lullaby so comforting that I wonder whether I’ll ever be able to sleep anywhere else again.
That first year at Barter Island, winter approached the Teddy Bear with the ferocity of a spring uncoiling. I doubt Joe found much peace—there was work to do securing the boat against the jaws of the frozen sea, filling the larder with game, trapping and cleaning the skins and furs with which he would repay the claim he’d been staked. He had only his thoughts for company. By January, Gus Sandstrom, his only companion, was dead.
Throughout his manuscript, Joe details encounters with the people he met in the Arctic—whalers, sailors, explorers, Natives—and you don’t have to read long to realize what it takes to commit willingly to such circumstances. Hunger for adventure drove some, and failure others, but none took lightly the hardships and risks of the north. Maybe that’s why so many of the people he met had such interesting, often tragic stories. For all its vastness, the Arctic must have seemed small at times, with such a finite pool of travelers, the same names popping up both in Joe’s manuscript and in the diaries and books of his contemporaries. Many wanted to leave their mark upon the Arctic, but more often it left its mark upon them.
Whalers had been wintering there since the 1800s. Long before petroleum, whale oil served as the world’s fuel, an ingredient in everything from industrial lubricants to soap. Baleen—the whale’s elastic upper jawbone plate that filters food from seawater—was the plastic of its day, used in everything from fishing rods to corsets. Though the whaling industry was already declining when Joe sailed north, exploration was on the rise, and the crew of the Teddy Bear encountered their first expedition at Flaxman Island, about 60 miles west of their Barter Island anchorage, where Ernest Leffingwell and Storker Storkerson had made camp.
No stranger to the Arctic, Leffingwell had made a failed attempt to reach the North Pole in 1901, returning five years later to colead the John D. Rockefeller–funded Anglo-American Polar Expedition with Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen. That venture ended abruptly when ice crippled the expedition’s schooner, the Duchess of Bedford. Mikkelsen left by dogsled to find help, eventually reaching Valdez some 600 miles south. The remainder of the crew dismantled the schooner for wood and built a cabin on Flaxman Island, where a passing whaler rescued them. Leffingwell left only briefly, returning to the same cabin to spend the next half-dozen winters creating the first accurate map of Alaska’s Arctic coastline. He’d been there three years when the Teddy Bear met him.
Born in Norway, Storkerson had been going to sea since he was sixteen years old. Also a member of the failed Leffingwell-Mikkelsen expedition, he returned with Leffingwell to map the coast and told Joe that he dreamt of surveying the Arctic continental shelf. A decade later he got the chance when, as a member of Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition, he led a party of five who “set out from the Alaska coast to drift westward on an ice cake across the polar basin,” according to a 1919 New York Times article. Stefansson’s theory that “currents would land him on the coast of Siberia” proved baseless, and the underprovisioned team circled endlessly in an eddy until rescued. Today, to gauge ocean currents, you might sink a GPS beacon on the ice and set it adrift, but a hundred years ago you did the same with a handful of hungry Scandinavians.
Storkerson’s life proved both triumphal and tragic, and though he’d served as Stefansson’s trusted right hand, his contributions to Arctic exploration never brought the recognition he sought. He returned to Norway in 1927, leaving an Eskimo wife and children waiting for him in a northwest Canada mission, and suffered a nervous breakdown after his claims of being Stefansson’s partner met with ridicule. Stefansson later enlisted Storkerson for a reindeer-farming experiment, which he mismanaged into bankruptcy. In a last-ditch effort at redemption, he tried and failed to mount an expedition to cross the North Pole to rejoin his family. “His collapse was complete,” Gísli Pálsson writes. “Doctors diagnosed him as schizophrenic and he died in a Norwegian psychiatric hospital in 1940.”
Their cabin just 60 miles west of the Teddy Bear’s anchorage, Leffingwell and Storkerson were neighbors by Arctic standards, and Joe’s partner, Gus Sandstrom, set out by dogsled to visit them in January 1910, hoping to exchange food and reading materials. Joe remained in camp, hobbled by a minor leg injury. Sandstrom expected the trip to take a day, but a storm forced him to spend the night on the ice. He arrived at Flaxman Island a day late, feet frozen, and stayed two days to recover. When he left to return to the Teddy Bear, he told Leffingwell he planned to cover 20 miles and spend the night at an Eskimo cabin before completing his trip the following day. A few hours after his departure, another storm rolled off the frozen sea, the temperature plummeted from around zero to 40 below—where Celsius and Fahrenheit meet—and windswept snow erased the landscape.
Blinded, lost, and alone, Sandstrom likely became hypothermic and made a mistake, something as simple as removing a mitten to adjust a strap, a button, or a lace. That’s all it takes for the cold to find a point of exposure, a single unthinking act from muscle memory. When his partner’s dog team arrived at camp without its driver, Joe—unable to walk until his own leg healed—organized a search party that found Sandstrom’s sleeping bag and, some distance away, his cap and a single mitten. His tracks disappeared into the snow. They never found his body.
Among Joe’s personal correspondence is a letter from H. T. “Ned” Arey, a prospector in the area since 1901, delivered by one of Joe’s Native helpers. He and his son Gallagher had joined Leffingwell, Storkerson, and a group of Eskimos in the search.
I am afraid that your partner is lost and frozen. On the 26th I found his sled, sleeping bag and dog harness about 4 miles west of my house. We traced his footsteps a short distance east of that then lost them on the hard ice. . . . He passed my camp at Collinson Point without my seeing him I think about the 20th, and slept where his sled and bag was. When he left there he must have been frozen some, as his footsteps were very short and uncertain. We will look for him again.
Seven hundred miles from Nome, locked in ice, injured
and alone in the Teddy Bear’s winter quarters. An inauspicious start to Joe’s maiden Arctic voyage.
I fall asleep wondering what compelled Joe to choose such an existence. Curiosity sends you once, maybe, but he returned again and again. And not glory—he chose not to capitalize on his feats. The coming years saw Arctic exploration make headlines, and though Joe got his fair share of exposure, he purposely remained at the edges, a source for information about Stefansson and his expeditions more often than the subject of the attention. That Stefansson received much of the press’s focus came as no coincidence. He contributed much to the Arctic canon, and certainly his education and training gave him advantages over Joe. But he wasn’t a better explorer, just better at PR and self-promotion.
Nor did money drive Joe northward—despite the value of the collections he donated to museums and universities, he retired from Arctic trading completely broke. A 1923 article in Montreal’s Loyola College Review celebrating the enormous collection of artifacts he’d given the school summed up his existence neatly: “Captain Bernard has hazarded much for small personal reward,” adding that his only stipulation for the donation was “reserving to himself only the right to add to this collection in the future.” The piece heaped further praise on his efforts:
His work has been so systematic that great universities of America consider his scientific collections, archaeological, ornithological and ethnological, to be among the most complete and rarest in the world. He has worked without the blare of press agents and of public appreciation to spur him on. He has protected innocence, honored virtue, and his record is one of integrity, daring, and courage.
So what reason did that leave? Maybe the same motivation that brought me here, and to question his motives any further only questioned my own.
More than 300 days a year, the temperature at Barter Island falls below freezing. In January the brief Arctic summer—in a good year, the only time that travel is possible—remains six or seven months away, and even then an average of eleven days in August see subfreezing temperatures. Did that first winter make him question his dreams of exploration?
We’re never truly alone anymore. Cell phones, e-mail, twenty-four-hour news and weather cycles, gossip, baseball scores, radios and televisions, crowds, traffic, neighborhood bars, shopping malls—all of it encases us. We have become a society of companionship you have to work hard to avoid. Twice I’ve driven alone cross-country, camped solo in remote places, and logged countless hours with just my fly rod for company, enjoying the wordless whispers of wooded trout streams or buggy estuaries. I’ve drifted my old canoe up streams and across glassy ponds with an empty bow seat, and I’ve even slept beneath that canoe, the hull propped up by paddles as a heavy rain beat against it, tethered through blood, history, and time to Grégoire Bernard on the Tignish beach. Nights like those have no borders, and solitude changes the way you perceive them. One night alone, two, five. But a month? An entire Arctic winter? A 60-mile sled trip separated him from his nearest English-speaking neighbors. The relentless windswept darkness and bitter cold that killed his companion surrounded him.
Few will ever know that solitude. Either you embrace it and spend the rest of your life chasing more, like an addict, or you reject it, move to a city, and drown yourself in the madding crowd. We know which path Joe chose, but what did it cost him?
I wasn’t in Alaska long before I realized what silence sounded like. The quiet of remote places doesn’t exist beyond them. A few months after I moved here, I flew back to Boston and saw more people standing around the luggage carousels at Logan Airport than lived in all of Sitka. Boston felt claustrophobic, chaotic. What must Joe have felt when he returned to Nome after those first years in the Arctic?
I once saw a deer trapped on the slimmest of highway medians, flanks trembling as Massachusetts drivers careened by her, four lanes deep on either side. Her eyes betrayed her panic. Foam gathered at her mouth. Instinct told her to run, but if she did she’d never survive. Wild animals don’t fare well when they collide with urban civilization. After years of living off his rifle, Joe might have felt the same way.
Maybe I would never learn why Joe went north in the first place, but his character revealed itself following his first winter alone at Barter Island on the heels of Gus Sandstrom’s death. Instead of returning to Nome—and who could have blamed him?—he sailed east, deeper into the Arctic, for four more years.
By morning the Dickinson is cold. I crawl out of my sleeping bag, even colder. The boat’s windows have turned opaque with ice, inside and out, everything vaguely damp. I relight the stove, put water on for coffee, and climb back into my bag to wait. It’s as black outside as when I went to bed. I’ve slept a dozen hours or so, but daylight’s still an hour away.
After breakfast I pull on all the clothing I’ve brought, tuck my 12-gauge Winchester into its waterproof case and load it into the canoe, fill a thermos, and hop the transom. The inch of rainwater that fell into the canoe’s bilge overnight has frozen solid. Ice has painted its ash gunwales, seats, and paddles white, and a thin film of it parts ahead of the canoe’s bow, scraping the hull as I paddle through the cove. An hour later I’m drinking coffee in my blind when the sun finally rises.
Morning passes slowly, a beautiful day dawning. A lone seal swims circles nearby without making a wake, the new sun a bright spot on his wet skin. When a hand of mallards flies overhead, the blast of my shotgun makes a volley of echoes that rises up the slope of the mountain behind me, returning fire from every tree and stone, sending the panicked seal beneath the surface.
Stefansson wrote in detail of his theory that the best way for explorers and other outsiders to travel the Arctic was to act like Natives—to live off the land as they did, adopt their methods whenever possible and practical, dress in the skins and pelts of the animals designed by nature to live there. To exist in the Arctic, you have to coexist with the Arctic. Joe practiced that theory before Stefansson wrote about it. At Barter Island he befriended an Inupiat family camped near his Barter Island anchorage—Tulugak; his wife, Saijak; their fifteen-year-old son, Putoga, and ten-year-old daughter, Anaetsea; Tulugak’s mother; and his seven-year-old brother, Ayiak—and he learned their ways. They called him “Yo,” and he called them “the Tulugaks.”
Tulugak and Putoga became regular hunting companions, and Joe traded them rifles and taught them new ways to harvest game using firearms, iron traps, and fishing nets. The women worked as seamstresses and cooks and helped skin and treat the hides of the animals they caught. The family helped him establish the trading business he’d gone north to foster, exchanging pieces of cloth and metal, guns, and other pieces of the civilized world for the furs and artifacts he sought. With the loss of Gus, Joe had also lost his entire crew. In the summer of 1910, when the ice thinned and Joe broke the schooner free, he loaded his gear back onto the boat and moved the Tulugaks on board with him.
In Joe’s shoes, having lost your partner and friend, coming out of a long winter in the ice, and facing rough sailing with a ragtag crew, you sail west and south, return to Nome to regroup and find new shipmates for a second attempt at an expedition. But he and his unlikely crew sailed the Teddy Bear east into Canada, leaving Alaska behind.
In 1912 Leffingwell submitted his charts of the Arctic to the US Geological Survey. They showed the Barter Island anchorage where Joe wintered that first year as “Bernard Harbor,” and all these years later the name remains on maps. The Arctic claimed a piece of Joe when it took his partner. It’s only fair that Joe claimed a piece of the Arctic in return.
A cold rain begins to fall as I warm up the engine and pull the anchor. Soon I’m leaving behind my cove, but I know it’s here and it always will be. As I run out toward the sound, a pair of deer emerge from the tree line on the beach and watch me leave.
7
Cities at Sea
They also told me that a ship needing 8 fathoms of w
ater was coming up with supplies. It had not come in last summer; they believe it was caught in the ice.
It’s hard to look big in a state that dwarfs everything. Polar bears grow to 1,500 pounds, then disappear against endless fields of snow. Whales fins seem finger-sized at sea. Muskeg swallows moose whole, and 200,000 caribou become a trail of ants marching across the tundra. But Statendam, the Holland America cruise ship, looks immense as she approaches, a skyscraper out for a swim. Over 100 feet above the surface at her tallest, she looms over the spruce canopies of the islands that she passes on her way into Sitka Sound. Even middle-deck passengers at the ship’s waistline, where her white top meets the blue skirt of her hull, have to look down to see the beacon atop the Rockwell Lighthouse tower. Humbled, the lighthouse hangs its head in turn, blinking at its own reflection in the sea.
When she bears down on the Monkeyfist, Mike puts down his beer and starts reeling in his fishing line.
“Does she have the right of way?” I ask.
“Do you want to play chicken with her?”
He has a point.
The 720-foot ship stretches two and a half times as long as the state’s tallest building reaches high. She’s not large for a cruise ship, but here at sea level, starboard of her bulbous chin, it’s difficult to imagine anything bigger. She drifts to a stop almost directly alongside us, eclipsing the 9 p.m. sun and casting us into darkness—big enough to shorten our day.
Her stomach-shaking horn blasts and scatters ravens and seabirds from island trees. When the surface of Sitka Sound begins to tremble, for a moment I wonder if she’s even big enough to affect the tides. Then her anchor, all 18 tons of it, drops from the hull. Pity the unsuspecting starfish or crab hugging the seafloor where it lands. A few chaotic moments of wake pitch and yaw our boat, spilling beer and rattling gear. Then the Statendam blows her horn again, announcing her presence, as if there were any question she’d arrived.
Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now Page 6