Prisoners of the North (12 page)

The trail followed the ice of Dolphin and Union Strait, which separates Victoria Island from the mainland. Stefansson and two of the Inuit followed it with the dogs and soon came upon another village at Point Wise near the mouth of the strait. From the top of one of the snow houses he could see a group of men squatting around seal holes. Soon he was surrounded by the seal hunters, not in the least menacing but excited by the spectacle of mysterious beings from another world. They were brimming over with hospitality, insisted on building a snow house for the travellers, and urged them to stay until the last scrap of food was eaten.

These almost Stone-Age people, who had never before set eyes on a white man, had knives made of copper, just as Klengenberg had told him. Stefansson could not contain his excitement. It was an encounter that the would-be poet would never forget. “It marked my introduction to men and women of a bygone age,” he recalled years later when he likened the experience to that of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, who went to sleep and woke up in the court of King Arthur. “I, without going to sleep at all,” he wrote, “had walked out of the twentieth century into the intellectual and cultural world of men and women of an age far earlier than Arthur’s.… Their existence in 1910 on the same continent with our populous cities was an anachronism representing a time lapse of more than ten thousand years.”

The marvel was that he was able to converse with them in their own tongue—a dialect that differed from that of the Mackenzie River natives but was easily understandable. His months of living in the houses and camps of the western Inuit had paid off. What a triumph! “It cannot have happened often in the history of the world that the first explorer to visit a primitive people was one who spoke their language.”

This was in itself a remarkable achievement. It would certainly ensure his reputation as a true Arctic explorer and a practical anthropologist. But for the ambitious explorer that was not enough. He had discovered a primitive Inuit band—“Copper Eskimos” they would come to be called—who were astonished when he lit a sulphur match and demonstrated the marvels of his rifle. But were these Klengenberg’s pale-skinned natives? The following day he made it clear that he was a white man, the kind they called
kablunat
, whom they had heard about from other tribes. “Couldn’t you tell by my blue eyes and the color of my beard?” he asked. Their reply must have brought another thrill. “We didn’t know,” they told him, “what sort of complexion the
kablunat
have. Besides, our next neighbors north have eyes and beards like yours.”

Those words were enough to convince Stefansson that Klengenberg’s tale, which had occupied his imagination for four years, was not fictional. He had already half-persuaded himself that the mysterious race of “blond Eskimos” existed. Now he set off across Victoria Island with Natkusiak, the most faithful of his Inuit companions, to prove it. What a prize it would be!

On May 15, he found what he thought he was looking for. “We were not prepared for what we saw,” he wrote. Standing in front of their house of snow and skin were nine men and boys who seemed to him similar to the Inuit that Klengenberg had described. Their faces seemed paler and one or two had brownish hair. Buoyed up by his companion’s remark that “these are not Eskimos, they merely dress and talk and act like Eskimos,” Stefansson again could not contain himself. “I knew I had come upon either the last chapter and solution to one of the historical tragedies of the past, or else that I had added a new mystery for the future to solve: the mystery of why these men were like Europeans if they were not of European descent.”

A member of the band of “blond Eskimos” who Stefansson thought were descended from Leif Ericsson’s Norse expedition, some thousand years before
.

Where had they come from? The romantic explorer considered the possibilities. Were these descendants of the lost Franklin expedition, whose ships had foundered off King William Island across the water from Victoria Island? Or did they trace their ancestry back to Leif Ericsson, or to the Scandinavian colony of Greenland, which had disappeared into the Arctic mists?

All these suppositions have since been discredited. It has long been recognized that not all Inuit are alike, that occasionally a blue-eyed native does turn up, and that skin and hair pigments come in different shades. These isolated people were simply a branch of the Copper Eskimos, whom Stefansson could rightly claim to have discovered. But Stefansson couldn’t settle for that. In the years to follow, his insistence that within that tribe was to be found another fair-skinned tribe with a different historical and, perhaps, ethnic background would only cause confusion and cast a cloud over his reputation.

One might have expected Stefansson to dash back to civilization to break the news of his discovery. He did nothing of the sort. In fact, almost two years elapsed before he finally boarded a ship from Nome, Alaska, to Seattle. His reasons were sensible. First, he wanted to study the Copper Eskimos, and he was one of the few scientists with the experience and the language to do so. Secondly, he wanted to explore the unknown territory that lay for three hundred miles between Cape Parry and Coronation Gulf. A host of matters, both archaeological and ethnological, needed inquiry. There was, for example, the controversy over whether or not the Inuit used pottery. Stefansson solved that by collecting specimens of pottery utensils discovered on the ground—a slap in the face for Dr. Franz Boas, a leading authority, who had insisted there was no evidence that Inuit pottery existed. Stefansson delighted in this piece of archaeological one-upmanship. Boas was in his view a mere theorist; he, Stefansson, was a practical scientist. It was another triumph for his burning desire to be the best-known and best-informed Arctic specialist in the world.

There was also the need to impress the natural history museum with the work that he and Anderson, working separately, had done. During the first two years he had produced very little. If he were to get funds for the future expeditions he was planning, he would now have to show results. But had he accomplished enough, he wondered. He was not a man normally afflicted with self-doubt, yet there were moments when he questioned his own achievements. Was he satisfied with his own work, he asked himself. And would the professional world be satisfied—“the small circle of scientific men who are not always sympathetic or generous”? Such men, he told his diary glumly, were “not even always scientific.”

Therein lay the paradox. Stefansson expected to spend another twenty years in the Arctic and to become the greatest living expert on the Inuit; but at the same time he relied for funds on those who had what he considered old-fashioned and obsolete beliefs about the country and its people. He had little use for the British naval explorers, portrayed as the heroes of polar exploration, because they declined to “go native” as he had. In his view they were tragic failures. He admired Dr. John Rae, the Hudson’s Bay trader, and Charles Francis Hall, the eccentric American publisher-explorer, who had learned from the Inuit. But since old prejudices die hard, old attitudes prevailed, as he discovered some years later when he lectured to the Royal Geographical Society in London. The response of his audience to his lavish praise of Rae’s adaptation to Inuit methods of travel was chilly. Rae was a mere trader who had gone native, the only explorer of consequence who had not received a knighthood or a peerage like the gentleman officers of His Majesty’s Royal Navy.

Stefansson was well aware that his theories would meet with criticism and disbelief—his view that the Inuit were just as intelligent as white men, his argument that winters were colder in North Dakota than in the Arctic, or his insistence that winter was the best time to travel and that there was no need to hole up in a cabin for the duration. To support himself and also to raise funds for another expedition with Anderson, he planned to lecture and write articles as well as a book, which would include a spirited account of his discovery of the “blond” Eskimos of Victoria Island.

The conventional scientific approach would have been to prepare a scholarly article for a recognized academic journal outlining his theories about the “Copper” Eskimos, and follow up with more popular publications and press interviews. But Stefansson could not keep the story of the strange Inuit to himself. He talked about them on board ship, and when he reached Seattle, a former Alaska newspaperman, John J. Underwood, was on hand at the dock to interview him. The next day, September 9, 1912, the
Seattle Times
headlined Underwood’s interview “american explorer discovers lost tribe of whites, descendants of leif eriksson.”

Ranking next in importance … to the discovery of the lost tribes of Israel is the discovery made by Prof. Vilhjalmur Stefansson of the American Museum of Natural History of a lost tribe of 1,000 white people, who are believed to be direct descendants from the followers of Leif Eriksson who came to Greenland from Iceland about the year 1,000 and a few years later discovered the north coast of America.

The story went on to say that all the members of the tribe had rusty-red hair, blue eyes, and fair skins. Underwood later admitted he had used his “ingenuity and imagination” to enhance his story, but there is little doubt that Stefansson, in his excitement, had perhaps unwittingly contributed to what was certainly a sensational tale. Since he had been for a time a newspaper reporter before going north, he should have understood the consequences of blurting out the details of his exploit to a seasoned journalist as he had done to his fellow passengers on the boat out of Alaska.

The wire services seized upon the story, and the following day, the
New York Times
had its own version:

STEFANSSON TELLS OF WHITE ESKIMOS
The American Museum Explorer
Thinks Alaskan Tribes Descendants of Scandinavians
TALLER THAN OTHER NATIVES
Many of the Strange Tribes Had Never Seen
A White Man Before Meeting Stefansson

The story would not go away and overshadowed Stefansson’s and Anderson’s real contribution to the American Museum of Natural History. The next day the
Times
ran a story (headlined “new race solves mystery of ages”) in which it stated: “Stefansson’s Discovery of Tribe of White Eskimos Stirs Scientists.” The paper quoted Henry Rood, editor of
Harper’s
—for whom Stefansson wrote—who declared: “If Stefansson says he has proofs of this remarkable find I would believe him absolutely and so would anyone else who knows him.”

Perhaps. But other scientists were skeptical. The
Times
reported in a cable dispatch from London that “Professor Stefansson has not hitherto been regarded here as an authority.” The London
Morning Post
interviewed several authorities who disputed Stefansson’s report, which they described as “improbable.”

Stefansson now found himself at the centre of a full-fledged controversy. What hurt most were the attacks by two of the Arctic explorers he most admired, Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen. Nansen tempered his criticism when he read Stefansson’s side of the story in a special article commissioned by the
New York Sun
. It occurred to him that no Icelander could be as ignorant of the North as the Seattle stories suggested. Amundsen never changed his view that Stefansson’s discovery was “the most palpable nonsense that ever came from the north.” His tale of a separate race of blond Eskimos, Amundsen declared, “merits no more serious consideration than a sensational news item in the boulevard press.”

It was the term “blond Eskimo” that caused the trouble. If Stefansson had announced the existence of a Stone-Age people who had never seen a white man but used tools fashioned of native copper, he would have been on solid ground. But he could not free himself from the original tales of mystery that had sparked his long quest. “Blond Eskimo” (or “White Eskimo,” to use the
New York Times’s
eyecatching phrase) fitted neatly into the headlines at a time when other strange tribes in distant corners of the globe were exciting the public’s imagination.

The controversy dogged Stefansson all his life. Few major articles were written about him that did not refer to it. His detractors put it all down to a lust for publicity and press coverage. Certainly, he had been a master of public relations before that phrase came into popular use. But to be fair, he needed the public’s attention in order to raise funds for his next expedition. If the blond Eskimo dispute made him famous it also helped turn the eyes of the continent—indeed, the world—to a forsaken land that even the government of Canada had neglected and to a large race of aborigines who had too long been the objects of the white man’s mythology.