Prisoners of the North (11 page)

He was popular with his fellow students but not the professors, who found him far too cocky. When he entered university he had already learned to speak Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and German and was not above showing off his superior knowledge by challenging his professors. At the end of a term, it is said, one of the faculty checking on attendance found to his dismay that his pupil wasn’t turning up at classes. “How is it,” he asked, “that you got a grade of ninety in my own class and only attended two lectures?” To which the brash student responded, “If I hadn’t attended those two, I would doubtless have got a hundred.” Or so the story goes.

The story is typical of the future explorer, who all his life was at war with traditional authority. In his junior year the university expelled him on the grounds that he cut classes. The true reason was that the faculty considered him the ringleader of a group of undergraduates who were getting out of hand. As one professor saw it, Stefansson “had settled the problem of life a little too decidedly and dogmatically.” Unfazed, he moved to the University of Iowa, which allowed him to study and take classes on his own time. His reputation as a prize-winning debater—a hint at his future platform style—gained him an invitation to be a delegate to a conference of Unitarian ministers in Winnipeg, which later led to a scholarship at the Harvard Divinity School. He accepted but made it clear that he considered religion to be mere folklore—in short, a legitimate branch of anthropology. The ministry was not for him. After a year at Harvard he was offered a fellowship in anthropology.

Those college years marked several significant changes in Stefansson’s outlook. In 1899, after some soul-searching, he had decided to change his name from plain William Stephenson to the more exotic Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a jawbreaker of a moniker but one that would establish him as an unconventional figure with a romantic background. The new name set Stefansson apart from the John Smiths and Bob Browns. Unpronounceable it might be, but it would be remembered—the perfect brand name for an Arctic explorer. (His critics would often cattily refer to him as “Windjammer.”)

Stefansson’s total rejection of religion included Unitarianism, a liberal faith that had itself rejected the concept of the Holy Trinity. As his friend A. E. Morrison declared, “Any assembly of theologians is the best example we have of insanity reduced to a science, a systematic fraud … that … wastes the life of man and shrivels up his soul.” Disillusioned by his experience as a delegate to a Unitarian convention, Stefansson could only argue that, though everything in nature denied the existence of a personal God, “this does not break on clouded minds chained like slaves to tread the mills of toil, to make brick without straw.” To Stefansson, the world was full of sheep who believed what they were told and refused to explore the dogmas that bound them.

The romantic young student had originally intended to be a poet, and for a time poetry was his life and his passion. He read quantities of it and in his own words, “had written verse by the yard,” committing Kipling’s
Barrack-Room Ballads
and other works to memory and exulting when his own poetry was published in the university monthly. He mused vaguely on becoming Kipling’s successor, but the dream collapsed when he read a poem in
Scribner’s
by William Vaughan Moody, a young man of his own age of whom he had never before heard. He saw that it was superior in every way to his own work and, dejected, never wrote another line. As he put it later, “I began to see that there is not only a poetry of words but the poetry of deeds.”

The poetry of deeds! The phrase would define Stefansson’s view of Arctic exploration over the next twelve years. In the autumn of 1905, after a summer spent as a physical anthropologist in Iceland, he secured a teaching fellowship at Harvard. He was looked upon, he said, as “the Anthropology Department’s authority on the polar regions, particularly the Arctic, I suppose, because my parents were Icelandic and I had been born ‘way up North in Canada.’ ”

Having written several articles for academic publications, he was offered in the spring of 1906 the position of anthropologist with the Anglo-American Arctic Expedition sponsored jointly by Harvard and the University of Toronto. Its chief task would be to determine whether an undiscovered continent lay somewhere in the Arctic and, if so, to study its native population. Nothing came of this hare-brained scheme. Stefansson was dispatched by way of the Mackenzie Valley and Herschel Island, a tiny speck on the Arctic map just east of the Yukon–Alaska border, but by the time he joined the leaders, the expedition was disbanded. Nevertheless, it had a considerable effect on Stefansson’s career, for it provided him with his first experience of the Inuit, with whom he spent some time. It also helped launch him on a wild goose chase that brought him worldwide publicity but at the same time touched off a storm of criticism from which he would never be free.

On Herschel Island he encountered a Danish whaling captain, Christian Klengenberg, a Jack London character, “unscrupulous … and two-faced,” who admitted to at least one murder as well as the theft of an entire ship. Stefansson believed a story this dubious rascal told—perhaps because he wanted to. He claimed to know of a mysterious race of native people who dressed and acted like Inuit but did not look like them; some, indeed, appeared to have light hair and blue eyes. The young anthropologist was entranced: an unknown race who had never seen a white man! Klengenberg’s tale continued to obsess him after he returned to civilization. Did these strange people actually exist or was the story he had heard too romantic to be true? The whalers who visited Herschel Island had dismissed the tale, but some Inuit seemed to confirm it when they told him that several of their race on Victoria Island looked as if they were white men in native clothing. If he could actually discover and report on a new race of people living in the Arctic untouched by civilization, it would be the discovery of a lifetime! Discovery rather than mere exploration was Stefansson’s stock-in-trade, and when he came at last to write his memoirs,
Discovery
would be the title he gave them. “Discovery,” he wrote, “has been my life.”

Back in New York in the fall of 1907, he had one goal in sight: he must return to the Arctic, make his way through unexplored country to Victoria Island, and seek out its strange inhabitants. To do that he would have to mount an expedition of his own. That was a tall order for a twenty-eight-year-old anthropologist, but Stefansson managed to get backing from the American Museum of Natural History in New York as well as some assistance from both the Meteorological Service and the Geological Survey of Canada to add prestige to the venture. With his enthusiasm and charm he had no difficulty raising money. His costs, he told the museum, would run no more than a measly two or three thousand dollars since he intended to live off the land, like the Inuit, for most of the time. The museum shipped two thousand dollars’ worth of goods to Stefansson on the Arctic coast, none of which he ever received because of the vagueness of his itinerary. Convinced that he was either lost or starving, the museum ended up spending fourteen thousand dollars trying to find him. All the while Stefansson was flourishing on a diet of seal meat and blubber. It was the first but by no means the last time that he would be given up for dead in the Arctic, only to confound both his admirers and his detractors by turning up unexpectedly, having stayed healthy on a food regimen entirely of meat, with neither a vegetable nor a slice of fruit.

He delighted in such surprises. His original plan had been to go north alone to live with the Inuit and travel as they did. But when he received an offer from an old college friend, Dr. Rudolph Anderson, to go with him, he quickly accepted. Anderson, an ornithologist, was an exceptional scholar, a top athlete, and a one-time soldier in the Spanish-American war with several learned articles and books to his credit. The museum was enthusiastic; Anderson’s involvement would add to the institution’s prestige.

How could Stefansson guess that in the controversial years to come Anderson would turn on him and become his bitterest critic and enemy? They were opposites in almost every way except for their mutual desire for fame within their respective disciplines. As Richard Diubaldo has written, “Anderson’s diffidence was the perfect foil for Stefansson’s ego.” One bone of contention was Stefansson’s view of the Inuit as the “chosen people.” Like most whites at that time, Anderson considered them inferior, an attitude that Stefansson himself would help change.

Anderson held his tongue publicly but admitted in a letter to his sister, written just after their arrival in the Arctic, that “one point of disagreement is that he considers any attention to cleanliness, hygiene, and camp sanitation as a ‘military fad.’ If you have read his articles in
Harper’s
you may have noticed that there is really only one great Arctic and Eskimo authority—who has learned more in one year than all previous explorers combined. But I understand the situation and don’t worry much about it.” Fortunately, for long periods during this four-year exploration, each man went his separate way and there was no open breach between them.

The two met in Toronto in April 1908 and reached Herschel Island in late summer. It was Stefansson’s intention to leave Herschel, head east toward the Mackenzie delta, and then move on to Victoria Island. But now he faced an unexpected and frustrating delay. Francis Fitzgerald, a Royal North West Mounted Police inspector on Herschel Island, was convinced that Stefansson would perish during his proposed journey. It was the task of the Mounties to protect all travellers who entered the Yukon, as they had been doing since the gold rush days. Now, when Stefansson asked to borrow a winter’s supply of matches for Anderson and his party of pipe-smoking Inuit, Fitzgerald refused. He offered them lodgings near the barracks; but he would not be party to their suicide, for that was how he envisaged Stefansson’s search for the blond Eskimos.

Fitzgerald couldn’t conceive of an explorer living off the land. He believed that a white man needed twelve months’ provisions to exist in the Arctic. To him both men were destitute, and since they had no visible means of support, he had the right to ship them out of the country. Stefansson was infuriated. His time with the Inuit had convinced him that anyone who adopted their methods and lifestyle could easily live off the land. For him that would become a public crusade. Now there was this whipper-snapper of a policeman suggesting that he and Anderson couldn’t look after themselves!

They could go west to Point Barrow, Alaska, four hundred miles along the coast, for matches, the Mountie told them; the whaling station there was well provisioned and there was no chance they would starve.
Starve?
In the midst of plenty, where seals and caribou abounded? Stefansson was frustrated at the prospect of this delay. He never touched tobacco himself; now, instead of heading east toward his goal, he would have to trek along the coast in the opposite direction for the sake of his companions’ nicotine craving. (By a bitter irony, a Mounted Police patrol led by Fitzgerald himself starved to death two years later in attempting to reach Dawson by way of Fort McPherson. They travelled light—too light, as it turned out. Had they adopted Stefansson’s credo of living off the land, it is more than possible they would have survived.)

By the spring of 1910, two years after the expedition left New York, the impetuous explorer was still at Cape Parry, three hundred miles west of Victoria Island. The party had spent two winters on the Arctic coast, plagued by the vagaries of weather, by sickness, by the reluctance of their Inuit companions to move into unknown country, and also by the need to spend much of their time in the ceaseless hunt for game to stave off starvation. They had just come through what Stefansson called “a winter of misfortunes.” They had lost more than half of their dogs, including some of the best ones, during a period of such scarcity that the very wolves had starved to death. Now Stefansson was ready to travel east into unknown territory. He still had faith that a white man could live off the land when an Inuk could, but he was not certain that any natives existed where they were going. None had been seen on this stretch of coastline.

The party split up, with Anderson heading back west to the Mackenzie country, told by Stefansson “to take action and to answer questions in case we failed to return.” These instructions included the date after which he would need to worry about Stefansson’s safety and the effort he must make to rescue them.

On the afternoon of April 21, with Pannigabluk and two male Inuit, Stefansson set off for Coronation Gulf, a body of water that hugs the southwest corner of Victoria Island. As Stefansson admitted, “No one but myself was very enthusiastic about the enterprise.” The Inuit feared that this unknown country would be empty of game; even more they dreaded the legendary “people of the caribou antler,” a barbarous and bloodthirsty tribe who were said to kill all strangers.

None of these warnings deterred the super-optimistic explorer, who was keeping his eyes focused for clues that would lead him to the mysterious race. Nineteen days into the search he found a hint that made his heart beat faster. On a driftwood-strewn beach he came upon a piece of wood that was marked by crude choppings apparently made by a dull adze. More of these chopped pieces of wood were scattered along the beach for over a mile. Apparently they had been tested to see if they were sound enough to use for making sledges.

He could not sleep that night, nor could his companions, who were even more excited than he, not to mention apprehensive. They talked far into the night, their curiosity about dreaded strangers growing stronger than their fears. Their search took on some of the aspects of a detective story. The next day they found more shavings, more chips, more evidence of the hewing and shaping of wood. Then—a footprint in the crusted snow and after that a sledge track no more than three months old. A little later they came upon the ruins of a deserted village whose size—more than fifty snow houses—took their breath away.