With Stefansson In The Arctic

WITH STEFAJSTSSON IN THE ARCTIC PREFACE THIS book is the narrative of my first two years in the Arctic. The first two chapters, dealing with my adventures before I joined the Canadian Arctic Expedition, are written chiefly from memory. The later chapters I have carefully checked by the copies of my diaries and Stefanssons filed in the Canadian Archives Department of Naval Service at Ottawa. I should perhaps add that while it is written from the standpoint of a boy of twenty to twenty-two years, captivated by the romance of a new world, it is also inevitably coloured by my increased knowledge of the North acquired during the four years following as ethnologist of my own expedition to the Coronation Gulf country. HAROLD NOICE ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE NATKUSIAK Frontispiece CAPTAIN GONZALES 14 L. KNIGHT 14 A GROUP OF ALASKAN ESKIMOS 26 ESKIMOS IN UMIAK 36 THE POLAR BEAR IN ICE 40 STORKERSON 50 MRS STORKERSON 50 STEFANSSON AND MARTIN KILIAN BUILDING A SNOW-HOUSE 62 THE LAST BLOCK BUT ONE 62 ESKIMO VILLAGE, KING ISLAND, ALASKA 68 CHRISTMAS AT PETE BERNARDS 86 ILLUN AND HIS WIFE 94 THE NORTH STAR 112 BEARDED SEAL AFTER SKIN HAS BEEN REMOVED 126 NOICES FAVOURITE DOG, COMIC 136 LOOSE, BROKEN ICE DANGEROUS TO TRAVEL 150 GEORGE H. WILKINS 178 OVER SEA-ICE WITH A DOG-TEAM 218 MAP TO ILLUSTRATE THE EXPEDITION bctwcenpp joandzji WITH STEFANSSON IN THE ARCTIC CHAPTER I TN the summer of 1915 I found myself on a whaler in I the Arctic Ocean, north of Alaska. Six months before JLnothing could have been farther from my thoughts, for all my hopes and ambitions had lain in another direction. I had pictured myself lion-hunting in Africa, or exploring the headwaters of the Amazon, or prospecting for gold inBolivia, but I had never felt any enthusiasm for the Arctic, There had been two serious obstacles between me and my dreams. One was the lack of money, and the other the objection of my parents, who thought that a boy not yet through high school had no business hunting lions. Still, I continued to read adventure stories and to grow more restless. I wanted to break away from the trodden paths of civilization, to do something different from the things which people around me were doing. So, at the age of nineteen, with the idea of fitting myself for the life of a gold-seeker in Bolivia, I entered a technical school and began a course in mineralogy and prospecting. Before I had finished my studies I met a moving-picture photographer named Baldwin, who was bound for the Arctic. He painted such vivid pictures of polar bears, icebergs, and Eskimos that I at once decided it would be much more interesting to see these than to dig gold in Bolivia. Baldwin wanted a companion, and I easily per suaded him to take me north with him. My father, after talking himself hoarse in urging me to finish my studies before starting out on such a harum scarum expedition, finally gave his consent, and I was the 9 WITH STEFANSSON IN THE ARCTIC happiest boy in the world, for I thought it would be only a question of talking my mother into letting me go. But here I met with real opposition. My mother, it seemed, had a number of friends who knew all about the North and the terrible hardships suffered by all who dared to venture into its icebound recesses. Only a few months before the newspapers had been filled with chapter after chapter of the terrible Stefansson tragedy, to my mother an expected verification of theterrors that lie in wait beyond the polar circle. Now since this tragedy, and the man at the centre of it, which seemed so remote from me at the time, were to have a very great influence upon my life and future work, I shall set clown what was known about them then all the desolate facts reiterated so often by my mother and her friends...