1BIRTH OF AN EXPLORER
Seattle Daily Times, September 9, 1912
AMERICAN EXPLORER DISCOVERS LOST TRIBE OF WHITES, DESCENDANTS OF LEIF ERICKSSON
The Sun (New York City), September 10, 1912
BLOND ESKIMO STORY CONFIRMED!
In early September 1912, a sinewy, sun-seared, elfish-looking man disembarked a steamer at the Port of Seattle with stunning news: He’d encountered a previously unknown tribe of red-haired, blue-eyed, light-skinned “Eskimos” of Scandinavian origin who’d never seen another white person.* He also claimed that he’d met about a thousand Native people with blond eyebrows and beards, who were taller than other Eskimos, suggesting a mixture of European and Eskimo blood. The news of the “discovery” was met with awe and wonder among the global public—and deep curiosity, excitement, and intrigue among the world’s scientific community.
The man telling the story of this spectacular find—one journalist sensationally ranked it “next in importance only to the discovery of the lost tribes of Israel”—was an Icelandic American named Vilhjalmur Stefansson. He was a daring explorer and ethnologist who had just returned from a four-year odyssey roving about North America’s Arctic coastal regions, exploring, mapping, and living off the land and among the Native peoples he encountered around Coronation Gulf and Victoria Island. Stefansson’s 1908–12 Arctic Expedition, which had been sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, was a resounding scientific success. He and his partner, Dr. Rudolph Anderson, had safely returned with a remarkable haul of zoological and ethnological collections, but it was Stefansson’s story of the lost tribes—alleged Norse descendants of the legendary Leif Eriksson—that fired the public imagination.
Of his first meeting with these people, Stefansson proclaimed, “That morning … I knew I was standing face to face with an important scientific discovery.” But there was something else he knew: the story was gaining traction, garnering an audience, and—perhaps most important—the “discovery” was making him famous. Spurred by his initial recounting and a number of highly imaginative journalists’ embellishments, the narrative grew: Descendants of the great Erik the Red, who had landed on Greenland in the late tenth century, had managed to make their way to Canada, where they traveled west, intermarried with Indigenous peoples, and survived. Using stone points and local copper for arrows and spearheads, living off seals, walrus, and caribou, they’d flourished in one of the last unexplored and unmapped regions on earth. Their language, Stefansson said, resembled Icelandic, a kind of Scandinavian-Eskimo dialect. It was all astounding.
What Stefansson did not immediately tell anyone as he headed straight for New York to write up his official reports and meet with his patrons at the American Museum of Natural History was that the tale of the Blond Eskimos was neither entirely new nor entirely his own. But he wasn’t worried about that just now. The exact details of the Blond Eskimo narrative would work themselves out over time. For now, let the public revel in it and wonder. He would allow the story to resonate and grow, and meanwhile, he would use it to help bolster a grand and ambitious new plan: to return to the Arctic as soon as possible, with the largest contingent of scientists ever assembled on a polar voyage.
* * *
Vilhjalmur Stefansson was in many ways—even after returning from nearly a half decade in the polar north—a rather unlikely looking Arctic explorer. Though blue eyed and of Icelandic descent, at thirty-three he did not possess the stunning Nordic handsomeness of, say, Fridtjof Nansen or the wizened, craggy, leather-skinned appearance of either Roald Amundsen or Robert Peary. Stefansson was slight, even diminutive, with a foppish swale of curly dark hair, but there was a fire in his veins and heart that belied his unimposing stature. He was a knot of sinew and dreams and bravado.
Stefansson was the product of a pioneering family, one accustomed to daily toil outdoors and subsistence living as well as tragedy and disaster. His parents had emigrated from Iceland to Manitoba, Canada, in 1876, settling in a log cabin on the west shore of Lake Winnipeg after two long years of nomadic, hardscrabble existence. But soon after they had cleared forest and begun farming, a great flood swept away most of their cattle and all their hay crop. Spring followed, bringing famine and smallpox and taking two of their young children, a son and a daughter. The infant Vilhjalmur, born William in 1879 just before the flood,* somehow managed to survive, and the bereft Stefanssons left Manitoba, traveling south by ox wagon for the prairies of the Dakota Territory in the United States.
There, in low, timbered country, they built another log cabin, where little Willie—as he was called by his mother and schoolmates—spent the first formative ten years of his life. They farmed the short growing season and spent the long cold winters reading scripture and the Icelanders’ sagas by dim tallow candles and fish oil lights. At school Willie Stefansson began reading ravenously in English, though the library offerings at the small schoolhouse were scant. As he put it, “There were never enough books in our library. This, I feel sure, was largely what made me yearn for more.”
Blessed with a clever, active mind and a voracious appetite for learning, Stefansson enrolled at the State University of North Dakota at Grand Forks in his late teens. There, he developed a chameleonlike character he would deploy when needed for the rest of his life, the ability to shape-shift for his own ends. “I am what I want to be,” he is quoted as saying. He discovered that being bookish and scholarly impressed his teachers but not his classmates. As a result, because he craved adoration and friendship, he began to “study in secret and loaf in public. As a further refinement, I began to give wrong answers in class even when I knew the correct ones. Immediately, I gained new friends.” Even at a young age, he came to understand the power of deception and perception—of what others thought of him—and he manipulated the truth to suit his own purposes. He was learning, as Dale Carnegie later put it, “how to win friends and influence people,” whatever the cost.
Stefansson performed well in school, working to pay his way with summer employment like “grubbing”—digging up tree stumps, roots, and rocks to prepare land for plowing—and even hiring on as a cowhand and working cattle drives. On the range, he lived in makeshift haylofts or camped under the stars on the plains and learned to subsist on a diet almost entirely of sowbelly bacon.
Back at college, he dabbled in poetry, even publishing a few poems in the campus magazine. Two events soon altered the trajectory of his life. First, he joined the debate team and won a prize for best individual debater, an achievement that not only earned him a ten-dollar prize but made both the local papers and regional ones from Minneapolis to Winnipeg. His victory confirmed what he’d already sensed: that he had a knack for persuasion. It also garnered him a trip on his first railcar, for he was asked to represent his college at an International Conference of Liberal Religions in Boston. There, he met and apparently impressed a man named William Wallace Fenn, a professor of theology at Harvard.
The second seminal event was expulsion (for excessive absences) from the State University of North Dakota in his junior year. Although he’d excelled in his coursework, Stefansson had missed three consecutive weeks of the term. His explanation was that a high school educator in Grand Forks had needed an emergency operation, and Stefansson, who had done plenty of tutoring in high school and college, offered to fill in since the pay was excellent. But the college president’s hands were tied. Rules were rules, and he needed to set an example to all students lest they, too, become habitual truants. The other students admired and looked up to Stefansson; his magnetic personality influenced them greatly, and it simply would not do for them to think that they could miss weeks at a time with no consequences. Of his expulsion Stefansson later said, with a matter-of-factness that underscored his natural ability to instantly adapt to an unexpected situation, “I was given three days to remove myself from the campus.” The result was that Stefansson immediately applied to and was accepted at the University of Iowa, where he would finish his bachelor’s degree within a year.
Diploma in hand, he began considering the next chapter in his life. Things happened fast for Stefansson; he moved seamlessly through the world, transitioning from one phase to the next with ease, and he was never idle. He had briefly contemplated life as a poet—devouring nearly all the great English poets in numerous languages (including Icelandic and German)—but after reading adventurous tales of explorers, he experienced an epiphany. As he put it, “There is not only the poetry of words but a poetry in deeds. Magellan’s voyage rounded out a magnificent conception as fully and finally as ever did a play of Shakespeare’s. A law of nature is an imperishable poem.” Stefansson had developed a burgeoning interest in the study of anthropology as well. Just before graduating, he had received a letter from William Wallace Fenn asking if he would come to Harvard on a fully paid fellowship. There was one hitch: Fenn wanted him to enroll in the Harvard Divinity School to prepare him for life as a Unitarian clergyman.
Stefansson’s mother had wanted him to be a clergyman, too. But then, as now, he had other plans. He sought constant movement, propulsion. In reading about the curriculum at Harvard Divinity School, he noticed that the sciences possessed three main subdivisions: physical anthropology, ethnology, and folklore. Stefansson believed that religion was folklore. He took out his pen and scribed a letter to Fenn, thanking him for the offer but explaining that he did not think he was suited for the ministry. He wondered, however, whether they might allow him to study religion as a branch of anthropology? Would they finance his study of religion as an aspect of folklore?
It was a long shot, and he doubted that they’d go for it. But he received an immediate positive reply, and just two days after graduating from Iowa, he was on his way to enroll at Harvard. His skills of persuasion had worked for him once again.
* * *
At Harvard, Stefansson took a position as a doctoral student. He wrote vigorously, even publishing an article on, as he summarized it, “how the Norsemen discovered Greenland about nine hundred years ago, and how they were the first Europeans who ever saw Eskimos.” His oratory skills earned him a teaching assistantship, but his time at Harvard was mired in some controversy. He borrowed money from undergraduates and became involved in a scandal for selling exam questions to students. In the end, his mind was too restless for teaching, and he determined to conduct anthropological field research in tropical Africa. For two years he read every book available on Africa, and eventually managed to get himself invited on a British commercial expedition into the heart of East Central Africa. His goals were vague, and he would be poorly funded, but it was better than the doldrums of the classroom.
Everything was set for the Africa expedition when, one day at lunch with colleagues, Stefansson was handed a telegram. He opened it and craned forward, squinting, reading carefully. It was from the American explorer and geologist Ernest de Koven Leffingwell, who was organizing a polar expedition that aimed to chart the Beaufort Sea and “study the Eskimos in Victoria Island who had never seen a white man.” Leffingwell, it turned out, had read Stefansson’s paper on the Norse discovery of Greenland, and he’d been impressed. He wondered whether Stefansson might want to join him as anthropologist on his upcoming Anglo-American Polar Expedition (1906–8).
Stefansson shelved his books on Africa and began packing warm clothes.
He was headed north.
2MASTER MARINER
May 1913
Brigus, Newfoundland
Captain Robert “Bob” Bartlett, standing on the steps of the front porch of Hawthorne Cottage, took the telegram from his father. He turned the yellow envelope over and over in his hands. A superstitious mariner, he did not trust telegrams, believing they brought bad news more often than good. They were usually a harbinger of tragedy: the death of a relative, a shipwreck, or some other calamity. He was reluctant to open it.
He’d just returned from a lengthy and unsuccessful sealing voyage, and already he was restless. Their cottage was comfortable, certainly, and it was good to be with family again. His parents were both nearing seventy, and they could use his help. But it didn’t do to be idle, to remain landlocked for long. Strong spring winds blew in from the Labrador Sea, raising whitecaps on Conception Bay and rattling the eaves of the cottages in the little fishing village at the far easterly fringe of North America. It was here, just a few miles from St. John’s—the last stop and embarkation port of many of the world’s great polar voyages—where Bartlett had spent his entire life. Well, where he’d spent those rare, impatient days when he was home at least. Most of his thirty-seven years had been logged—as had the lives of his father and his father before him and his uncles and brothers—at sea.
Bob Bartlett’s ancestors had skippered ships in the seal and cod fisheries for generations. The famous Bartletts of Brigus were involved in exploration as well. In 1869, his uncles John and Sam, and his father, William—as captain, first mate, and second mate, respectively—took polar explorer Dr. Isaac Hayes above the Arctic Circle, north as far as the treacherous Melville Bay on the Greenland shores, vainly searching for traces of Sir John Franklin’s vanished expedition of 1845. His great-uncle Isaac Bartlett was captain of the Tigress in 1874 on the rescue mission searching for Charles Francis Hall’s lost USS Polaris. He discovered survivors of that shipwreck on a moving raft of ice in the lower reaches of Baffin Bay. They’d been adrift for nearly two hundred days, and yet not one of them had died. Bob Bartlett’s great-uncle returned to a hero’s welcome.
* * *
Seagoing adventure was in Bob Bartlett’s blood. Throughout his childhood and teens, on summer vacations from school, he’d joined his father on sealing voyages. At seventeen he commanded his first schooner, the Osprey, returning from the rough Labrador waters with his cargo holds bursting with cod. By then he’d been studying for two years at the Methodist College at St. John’s, his mother having sent him there with the hope that her eldest son would become a minister. But the thrill of the wind-filled sails, of salt spray washing over the rails, the sight of an open, endless horizon—their draw proved too alluring. He’d tried his best, and though he was an excellent student, he knew the only classroom for him was the next ship, the next sea voyage. He yearned to be, like his father and uncles, a master mariner. But Newfoundland strictly regulated such titles, requiring four years at sea to become second mate, another year to make first mate, and a sixth year, culminating with arduous examination in Halifax, to make master.
Bartlett would later explain his decision to quit school and follow his heart in nautical terms: “I held the tack as long as I could, and then came about, eased off, and ran before the wind of what I was meant to do.”
That wind took him, at eighteen, on his first long voyage as a hired seaman aboard the Corisande, bound for Brazil carrying a shipment of dried cod. He spent the next six years almost entirely aboard one ship or another: on cod and sealing vessels in the Labrador waters in spring and summer, on merchant ships every fall and winter. He sailed south to the Caribbean and Latin America on runs for bananas and other tropical fruits scarce in the North; he sailed across the North Atlantic and through the Strait of Gibraltar to the Mediterranean Sea, visiting some of Europe’s most vital and vibrant port cities. By 1898, at the age of just twenty-three, he’d passed his written and technical exams and now possessed the right and privilege to command a ship anywhere in the world. His papers also gave him the hard-earned title reserved for those rare men who had the stuff to spend their lives at the ship’s wheel or in the crow’s nest: captain and master mariner.
Captain Bob Bartlett weighed his options. He could command a fishing or merchant vessel, but he yearned for something new, something different and more challenging. He did not have to wait long. In July of 1898, his uncle John Bartlett came to him with a tantalizing offer. The uncle had been asked to captain the Windward, the 320-ton flagship of American Robert Peary’s first North Pole expedition. The plan was to sail from New York north clear through the Davis Strait and Smith Sound, aiming as far north between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island as they could go before they were iced in. After that, Peary aimed to strike out with dogsled teams and go on snowshoes the remaining four or five hundred miles to the North Pole. Uncle John invited his nephew Bob to come along. It promised to be one hell of an adventure.
Bob Bartlett agreed on the spot. This was the beginning of ten years of Arctic service and three attempts at the North Pole alongside the inimitable, complex, and controversial Robert Peary. During the first expedition (1898–1902), Bartlett was first mate aboard the Windward; for the next two (1905-6 and 1908–9), he would serve as captain and ice master of the magnificent 1,000-horsepower steel-hulled SS Roosevelt.
The 1898 voyage offered enough excitement and drama for an ordinary person’s lifetime, but Bob Bartlett—even in his early twenties—was hardly ordinary. The Windward became stuck fast in the ice north of Cape Sabine, where, in 1884, Commander Adolphus Greely and his party of twenty-five men had fought starvation and one another during a dark, dreadful, and tragic winter. From the deck of the Windward, Bartlett could see the barren, fatal shores of Ellesmere Island and, to the east, twenty-five miles across the Smith Sound, the mountainous Greenland coastline.* He was learning about life above the Arctic Circle, about the capricious mercies of sea ice.
Since Peary knew that the Windward would remain icebound until the following spring, he left Bartlett and most of the crew and struck out through December’s polar darkness with two dogsled teams to see how far north he could go. They plowed through blizzards and temperatures plunging to −50ºF, camping on the ice and sometimes building igloos. He made it as far as Fort Conger, the barracks and base Greely had established at Lady Franklin Bay on northern Ellesmere Island almost twenty years before. But by the time he reached those long-abandoned dwellings, his feet were severely frostbitten, and as they thawed in the warmth of the wooden shelter, they became gangrenous. After a time, he realized his feet would not improve, and he ordered his men to lash him onto a sled and return to the Windward, two hundred miles to the south.
When Peary returned in March of 1899, having been gone almost three months, Bartlett helped to lay him out for surgery on the Windward’s cabin table. Bartlett then assisted the ship’s doctor, administering the ether Peary would need for the operation. The skin of his toes had sloughed off almost entirely, the necrotic flesh black and blistered. The doctor amputated eight of his toes. Before long, Peary was up and hobbling around on crutches, eager to start exploring again. Through the whole ordeal, he’d never uttered a word of complaint. Bartlett, deeply impressed by Peary’s toughness, asked him how he managed to stand the pain.
Peary just looked up and said stoically, “One can get used to anything, Bartlett.”
They spent the next three years far above the Arctic Circle, both aboard the ship and on the ice. Bartlett was deepening his icecraft and navigation skills, spending time with the Greenlandic Inuit of the region. Peary adopted the practice of explorers before him like Roald Amundsen to emulate the survival skills of the Native peoples, and to employ local guides and interpreters. He relied on their superior knowledge of the harsh region and learned how to live in it. Bartlett benefited immensely from this Arctic apprenticeship. He discovered the importance of keeping his feet dry at all costs to avoid the nightmare that Peary had been through. An Inuit guide showed him how to line the bottoms of his boots with grasses and lichens as insulation to keep the soles of his feet from freezing.
Copyright © 2022 by Buddy Levy