Prisoners of the North (10 page)

Though he did not die intestate as some writers have suggested, most of his great fortune had been dissipated as a result of his many philanthropies, the expense of his failing dredging company, and his costly and varied exploits in Europe. Marie learned the full details of his passing in a letter from his former Russian interpreter, a trusted employee, Dimitri Tzegintzov, who planned Boyle’s funeral service. She responded in an emotional and affecting twelve-page letter in which she described the special understanding between the two as “something deep, real, strong, I may say holy, based upon a perfect belief, faith, and respect.” Fate, she wrote, had brought them together. “We had clasped hands at the hour of deepest distress and humiliation and nothing could part us in understanding. No one knew his heart better than I. Women played but little part in his life and he had a wealth of love unspent … when he had his stroke I was the haven in which he anchored for awhile.”

When she visited his grave at Hampton Hill—and she returned to visit it almost yearly on her visits to England—she was not impressed. She immediately arranged for a more appropriate memorial in the shape of an ancient six-foot stone slab to be placed atop the grave, engraved with the insignia of the Order of Maria Regina together with Boyle’s name and relevant dates. There was something more. At the foot of the slab appeared a line from “The Spell of the Yukon” that she had often heard from his own lips and that would serve as his special epitaph:

Man with the heart of a Viking and the simple faith of a child
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CHAPTER 2
The Blond Eskimo

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the last of the old-time explorers, on a hunt with the Canadian Arctic Expedition in 1914
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—ONE—

In the tangled history of Arctic exploration, it is safe to say that no man had so much calumny visited upon him nor enjoyed such public admiration as did the Canadian-born Icelander who called himself Vilhjalmur Stefansson.

In the early decades of the twentieth century he was the best known and also the most controversial of that singular breed of venturers who set out to unlock the secrets of the frozen world. His supporters ranged from Sir Robert Borden, the Prime Minister of Canada, to Gilbert Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society. His critics included two fellow explorers, Roald Amundsen, the first to sail a ship through the Northwest Passage, and Fridtjof Nansen, the first to cross the formidable Greenland ice cap.

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.

Pannigabluk with her son, Alex Stefansson. The explorer never admitted that she was his wife though it was common knowledge in the Arctic
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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.