Prisoners of the North
Read Prisoners of the North Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
Prisoners of the North
Pierre Berton
Anchor Canada (2011)
Rating: ★★★★☆
Tags: History, Canada, General
Historyttt Canadattt Generalttt
Canada’s master storyteller returns to the North to chronicle the extraordinary stories of five inspiring and controversial characters.
Canada’s master storyteller returns to the North to bring history to life.
Prisoners of the North
tells the extraordinary stories of five inspiring and controversial characters whose adventures in Canada’s frozen wilderness are no less fascinating today than they were a hundred years ago.
We meet Joseph Boyle, the self-made millionaire gold prospector from Woodstock, Ontario, who went off to the Great War with the word “Yukon” inscribed on his shoulder straps, and solid-gold maple-leaf lapel badges. There he survived several scrapes with rogue Bolsheviks, earned the admiration of Trotsky, saved Romania from the advancing Germans, and entered into a passionate affair with its queen.
We meet Vilhjalmur Steffansson, who knew every corner of the Canadian North better than any explorer. His claim to have discovered a tribe of “Blond Eskimos” brought him world-wide attention and landed him in controversy that would dog him the rest of his life.
There is John Hornby, the eccentric public-school Englishman so enthralled with the Barren Grounds where he lived that he finally starved to death there with the two young men who had joined his adventures.
Berton gives us a riveting account of the contradictory life of Robert Service — a world-famous poet whose self-effacement was completely at odds with his public persona.
And we meet the extraordinary Lady Jane Franklin, who belied every last stereotype about Victorian women with her immense determination, energy, and sense of adventure. She travelled more widely than even her famous explorer husband, Sir John. And her indefatigable efforts to find him after his disappearance were legendary.
A Yukoner himself, Berton weaves these tales of courage, fortitude, and reckless lust for adventure with a love for Canada’s harsh north. With his sharp eye for detail and faultless ear for a good story, Pierre Berton shows once again why he is Canada’s favourite historian.
From the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
The five mid-19th- to mid-20th-century Arctic adventurers Berton profiles here won’t be familiar to most readers, but that doesn’t make them any less heroic. Joe Boyle, "King of the Klondike," for example, was an innovative gold prospector who was never satisfied settling in one situation for too long, whether it was with a wife or in a job. This inability to stay in one place eventually made him a hero in Romania, where, after a series of extraordinary events, he became a trusted intermediary between that country’s citizens and the Bolsheviks. Similar stories about amazing accomplishments fill this workmanlike yet quirky book, as Berton, a veteran Arctic chronicler (Klondike Fever, etc.), sheds light on the lives of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who deeply admired and lived among the Inuit; Lady Jane Griffin, the first woman to be awarded the Royal Geographic Society’s Founders Medal; naturalist John Hornby, who took pride in his ability to live off the land yet starved to death on the banks of the Thelon River thanks to a terrible miscalculation; and poet Robert Service, "the Bard of the North." Although the work suffers at times from a plodding pace, there’s no denying Berton’s admiration for these people. As he shows, they were always seeking and never satisfied; it’s the quintet’s shared feeling of wanderlust that makes this book endearing. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The five "prisoners" of the Arctic were Joe Boyle, Vihjalmur Stefansson, Lady Jane Franklin, John Hornby, and Robert Service. Boyle was a wealthy gold prospector, Stefansson claimed to discover a tribe of blond Eskimos, and Franklin was the widow of the famed explorer Sir John Franklin. Hornby's obsessive quest for adventure took him to the Arctic's Barren Ground, and Service was the poet who found refuge in the frozen North. Berton tells their stories in this, his fiftieth, book. He points out that the five diverse characters, all loners, were rugged individualists--impatient of authority, restless, energetic, and ambitious--and driven by wanderlust. Boyle worked his way on foot through the mountains in perilous weather, Stefansson traveled thousands of miles behind a dog team, and Franklin climbed the most precipitous mountains searching for her missing husband. Hornby trudged across the Arctic on foot, and Service struggled sometimes as much as 12 hours a day up the Rat River. Their adventures read like the wildest fiction.
George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
You who this faint day the High North is luring
Unto her vastness, taintlessly sweet;
You who are steel-braced, straight-lipped, enduring
Dreadless in danger and dire in defeat;
Honor the High North ever and ever,
Whether she crown you or whether she slay;
Suffer her fury, cherish and love her—
He who would rule her must learn to obey.
—Robert W. Service
Copyright © 2004 by Pierre Berton Enterprises Ltd.
Anchor Canada edition 2005
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Berton, Pierre, 1920–2004.
Prisoners of the North / Pierre Berton.
eISBN: 978-0-385-67358-7
1. Canada, Northern—Biography. 2. Northwest, Canadian—Biography.
3. Canada, Northern—History. 4. Northwest, Canadian—History—1870–1905.
5. Adventure and adventurers—Canada, Northern—Biography. I. Title.
FC3957.B47 2005 971.9′009′9C C2005-901094-0
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for the images in this book. In the event of an inadvertent omission or error, please notify the publisher.
Published in Canada by
Anchor Canada, a division of
Random House of Canada Limited
Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:
www.randomhouse.ca
v3.1
Books by Pierre Berton
The Royal Family
The Mysterious North
Klondike
Just Add Water and Stir
Adventures of a Columnist
Fast Fast Fast Relief
The Big Sell
The Comfortable Pew
The Cool, Crazy, Committed World of the Sixties
The Smug Minority
The National Dream
The Last Spike
Drifting Home
Hollywood’s Canada
My Country
The Dionne Years
The Wild Frontier
The Invasion of Canada
Flames Across the Border
Why We Act Like Canadians
The Promised Land
Vimy
Starting Out
The Arctic Grail
The Great Depression
Niagara: A History of the Falls
My Times: Living With History
1967, The Last Good Year
Marching as to War
Cats I’ve Known and Loved
The Joy of Writing
Prisoners of the North
P
ICTURE
B
OOKS
The New City (with Henri Rossier) Remember Yesterday
The Great Railway
The Klondike Quest
Pierre Berton’s Picture Book of Niagara Falls
Winter
The Great Lakes
Seacoasts
Pierre Berton’s Canada
A
NTHOLOGIES
Pierre and Janet Berton’s Canadian Food Guide
Historic Headlines
Farewell to the Twentieth Century
Worth Repeating
Welcome to the Twenty-first Century
F
ICTION
Masquerade (pseudonym Lisa Kroniuk)
B
OOKS FOR
Y
OUNG
R
EADERS
The Golden Trail
The Secret World of Og
Adventures in Canadian History (22 volumes)
Maps
Drawn by CS Richardson
Eastern Europe and Russia, 1914
Hornby and Bullock’s Route to Hudson Bay
Service’s Return Trip to Dawson via the Edmonton Trail
Contents
The King of the Klondike
The Blond Eskimo
The Persevering Lady
The Hermit of the Tundra
The Bard of the North
Foreword
In the Yukon, where I spent my childhood and much of my teens, the old-timers had a phrase for those who had been held captive by the North. “He’s missed too many boats,” they’d say. When the sternwheeler
Casca
puffed out into the grey river on her last voyage of the season toward the world we called the outside, the dock would be crammed with veterans waving goodbye—men and women who had given their hearts and their souls to the North and had no intention of leaving.
