Read Prisoners of the North Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
Prisoners of the North (43 page)
Jane Franklin in her youth had many aspirants after her heart but only one companion in her later years, her fanatically loyal niece, Sophy Cracroft, who, one suspects, was more of a nurse than an intimate. Her personal relations with the husband whose memory was to dominate her life for nearly thirty years seemed casual, marked as they were by long separations, especially when she was exploring the Mediterranean, which occupied a full year after he was recalled to England, before coming home to him.
It is impossible to think of John Hornby as having an intimate relationship of any kind. Critchell-Bullock does not fit the bill; he could never inveigle his partner into any kind of serious conversation. The ribald stories that male friends often exchange were anathema to Hornby. Olwen Newell was prepared to marry him, but he put her off, explaining that he was not the marrying kind. When, years later, he finally made a stab at proposing, she found an excuse to reject him.
Service was a loner all his life. In later years he had difficulty recognizing his own siblings. He went off to Canada on a whim, rejecting his father’s attempt at farewell at the dockside, and on another whim turned up unexpectedly on the doorstep of his mother’s Alberta home, to be greeted after a dozen years’ absence no more emotionally than with a peck on the cheek. In his memoirs he suggests that he married because he “needed” a wife. He made a good choice because she indulged him when he wanted to be left alone. He went off to exotic and little-known corners of the globe such as Tahiti and Soviet Russia, but he did not take her with him. During the Second World War, when he was exiled to Canada, he did not bother to travel back to the Yukon, which was the basis for his fortune. His wife and daughter went off in his stead.
Restless, rugged, independent loners—this is the culture shared by these prisoners of the north. There is one other quality: all, in their own ways, were driven by an ambition that they achieved during their lifetime, or thought they had. In the end that ambition turned out to be a chimera.
Boyle wanted to build the largest gold dredges in history, and he succeeded, over the skepticism of others, only to find his empire taken over by others. His relationship outside the Yukon with the romantic Romanian queen contributed to that loss, and the bitter truth was that the true love for which he yearned could never be more than an unfulfilled longing.
Stefansson was determined to be the greatest of all Arctic explorers. He came close, but he tried too hard; his theories about the “blond Eskimos,” his loss of the
Karluk
, his attempts to colonize a small island off the Siberian coast still continue to sully his reputation.
Lady Franklin moved heaven and earth to achieve her ambition—to enshrine her husband as the true discoverer of the Northwest Passage. When the appropriate plaque went up in Westminster Abbey shortly after her death, she seemed to have succeeded. But in recent years, the revisionists have downgraded Franklin’s achievements and bestowed the accolade on Robert McClure.
John Hornby in his day was seen as a legendary, albeit tragic, figure hailed while being mourned as the epitome of the romantic Englishman, facing hardships and surviving trials in unknown country. But over the ensuing years that legend has been torn to shreds.
Of these five, Service is to me the most interesting and baffling. In his lifetime he overcame the put-downs of his critics and emerged as the people’s poet. If that was his ambition, he succeeded only partially. It surely must have galled him to realize, at the end, that the only lasting works he produced were his first two published poems, “Dan McGrew” and “Sam McGee.” All the others, including his much-praised wartime poems, have lost much of their lustre. When one reads Service’s memoirs, a Shakespearean sort of phrase pops into the mind: Methinks the poet doth protest too much. He tells us again and again that he’s a rhymester, not a “real” poet. Does that mask an unstated desire to be something more? He pretends that he is lazy, that he is shy, that he suffers from an inferiority complex. He constantly plays down his work as mere rhymes, ballads, and songs. “I’m afraid of these big fellows,” he says in reference to “real” poets. That can be seen as his way of saying that he is afraid to take a chance, to attempt any other style than the one that made his reputation. In my view, Service had nothing to be ashamed of, yet one suspects that there may have been moments when he could have wished to be likened to Wordsworth or Shelley and seen by his snootier critics as something more than a profiteer from his Northern ballads.
For all of his career, Service considered himself a Northerner. His poems identified him as a true sourdough, and his struggle over the Edmonton Trail confirmed it to himself. That was true in various ways of the others as well: Boyle in his trademark uniform, garnished with gold nuggets; Stefansson creating his miniature iglu on the Dartmouth campus; Jane Franklin soaking up every available scrap of Arctic lore; Hornby appropriating the Barrens as his own domain.
They belonged to a vanishing era, these five—one that was fading fast. There can never be another Klondike-style stampede. Today the Chilkoot Pass is for sightseers who go on to Dawson by bus or automobile. The thrill of discovery that once lured explorers has been replaced by the thrill of stranger discoveries in outer space. The bush plane, the snowmobile, and the radio have made another Franklin-style search unnecessary while at the same time diminishing the hazards of the Barrens.
There are still men and women among us who are captivated by the North, but not in the way these five were: willing prisoners who for a time gave themselves to it heart and soul, driven by the kind of passion that bespeaks a love-hate relationship. The North, in its turn, gave them something they might hope for but did not expect—a measure of immortality. It was, I think, a fair exchange.
Acknowledgements
I want to express my gratitude to the dedicated team of associates who have worked with me on most of my books of narrative history: Elsa Franklin, producer and organizer; Barbara Sears, research assistant; Janet Berton, editorial backstop; Janice Tyrwhitt, editor; Janet Craig, copy editor. Without this meticulous and dedicated quintet, I could not have brought these works to fruition. To it, I must also gratefully add the name of Amy Black, Doubleday’s associate editor, who oversaw the manuscript on its journey to the printed page.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - The King of the Klondike
Chapter 3 - The Persevering Lady
Chapter 4 - The Hermit of the Tundra
Chapter 5 - The Bard of the North
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - The King of the Klondike
Chapter 3 - The Persevering Lady
Chapter 4 - The Hermit of the Tundra
