Prisoners of the North (17 page)

These were not good years for Stefansson’s reputation, though he continued to look ahead with his usual confidence. In
The Northward Course of Empire
, published in 1922, he foresaw the changes that would come to Arctic exploration through air and undersea travel. The book did poorly but his predictions would turn out to be on the button.

That year the
Karluk
disaster returned to haunt him. His old
bête noire
, Anderson, kept it alive until his critics publicly re-examined the tragedy. There were some who charged, wrongly, that Stefansson had left the ship to save his own skin, knowing she was doomed. That jibe was far-fetched, but some
Karluk
survivors continued to be critical, especially William Laird McKinlay, who spent a lifetime working on an anti-Stefansson book that he finally published in 1976. McKinlay believed that the expedition was ill-conceived, carelessly planned, badly organized, haphazardly manned, and almost totally lacking in leadership.

Piled on top of all that was a new tragedy centring again on Wrangel Island, the spot from which some of the
Karluk
survivors had been rescued. Stefansson wanted to claim the island for Canada and in 1921 applied for permission to do so from Prime Minister Arthur Meighen, Borden’s successor. There were objections, and when the government stalled, Stefansson, with his usual impetuosity, decided to go ahead anyway—a fateful decision. He formed the Stefansson Arctic Exploration and Development Company for the purpose of exploring the island and claiming it for Canada with a view to colonization.

On September 9, 1921, four young men and one Inuit seamstress led by Allan Crawford, a twenty-year-old University of Toronto science student, set off for Wrangel Island by way of Nome on the schooner
Silver Wave
. For the next two winters, nothing was heard of the expedition.

In April 1923, Stefansson appeared before the Canadian cabinet, but the cabinet dithered. Was Wrangel Island part of Canada? On May 23, the explorer left for London to meet with the Minister for the Colonies and to raise funds for a rescue attempt. There matters moved with glacial speed. The Foreign Office wanted to sound out other nations about the sovereignty of the island. Nothing more could be done, Stefansson was told, until the Canadian prime minister arrived for the Imperial Conference of Prime Ministers in September. On September 1, he received the tragic news that all four men had perished—three in a vain attempt to reach the Siberian shore, the fourth of scurvy on Wrangel Island. Only the seamstress, Ada Blackjack, and the inevitable ship’s cat survived.

The young men who set off so enthusiastically to occupy a distant Arctic island did not heed Stefansson’s instructions to take along a little umiak (a wooden boat covered with animal skin) and more than one Inuit companion to do duty as seamstress and hunter. The tragedy, as Stefansson was to write, was “a fearful blow.” It played hob with his “friendly Arctic” theory. But it can also be argued that Stefansson’s own impetuosity in mounting the expedition before being sure of the island’s sovereignty contributed to the tragedy. It would have made more sense to get those essential details cleared up before embarking on what proved to be another wild goose chase. As for Wrangel Island, Russia claimed it, and nobody raised objections—the Canadians because they thought it worthless and the British because they did not want to jeopardize relations with the new Soviet Union. Four young men had gone to their deaths on a distant speck in the ocean that nobody really cared about—and also because nobody really seemed to care about them.

Throughout these unfortunate events, Stefansson continued to write and lecture on the North, apparently unruffled by Canadian criticism and certainly buoyed up by American hero worship. His literary output was prodigious: no fewer than thirty-nine books and close to four hundred magazine and newspaper articles, some for popular publications such as
Harper’s, Maclean’s
, and
Physical Culture
but others for scholarly publications including the
Geographical Journal
, the
Quarterly Review
, and
Nature
. He was elected president of the Explorers’ Club, received medals from half a dozen geographical societies, and attained the supreme journalistic accolade—a two-part profile in
The New Yorker
magazine.

The North continued to hold him in thrall. He never stopped preaching the advantages of living as the Inuit did and even published an entire book on diet. He was for thirteen years adviser to Pan American Airlines, which was pioneering trans-polar flights. When the Second World War broke out he became an adviser to William J. Donovan, coordinator of information for the United States, and, through him, produced a memorandum regarding Alaskan petroleum resources. From this came the notorious Canol enterprise to pump oil by pipeline from Norman Wells on the Mackenzie River to Whitehorse. Stefansson, ever the iconoclast, damned the development as “the worst possible route.” It turned out he was right; the Canol project was a boondoggle that gobbled tax money to no great purpose and was allowed to fall into disrepair after the war.

By this time he was married. The nuptials took place on April 10, 1940, when he was in his sixty-second year. The bride, Evelyn Schwartz Baird, whom he met in Greenwich Village where he was living at the time, was a vivacious, dark-eyed, twenty-eight-year-old divorcee and sometime folksinger. She was, in her new husband’s view, “a perfect human being” and one who coaxed him out of what had been a confirmed bachelorhood. Bachelor, yes, but by no means unattracted to women. He had enjoyed a passionate five-year affair with Betty Brainerd, whose father had helped boost Seattle during the Klondike gold rush. “I love you with every atom of my being,” she once wrote to him. Stefansson, on his part, told her that “the only thing that I care to know about you is that you love me.” Alas, the romance faded in New York, partly because of Stefansson’s indifference to the letters she sent him. “Silence is not an alarm, but a rebuff,” she told him.

Stefansson was exceedingly discreet about his several attachments. He enjoyed a seventeen-year love affair with Fannie Hurst, by far the best-selling woman novelist in the country (if not the world). But in his autobiography he scarcely mentioned her; she was little more than a name in passing, although he did dedicate one book to her.

The subject of Stefansson’s “marriage” to Pannigabluk always remained off limits. Evelyn Stefansson tried to breach her husband’s wall of discretion but failed. Her intense curiosity about Pannigabluk led her to question Richard Finnie about her. On one occasion when Stefansson’s mixed-breed grandchildren wrote him a letter, his only instruction to his wife was not to answer it. Gisli Palsson, an Icelandic anthropologist, suggested a possible explanation in
The Intimate Arctic
, pointing out that Pan, as Stefansson called her, often travelled with Rudolph Anderson and might well have had an intimate relationship with him, too, a speculation that would have infuriated the explorer.

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
.