Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Hunt, William R.

Stef: A Biography of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986.

Stefansson was a rebellious explorer, a great innovator of Arctic travel, and promoter of northern Canadian and polar development. Manitoba-born Stefansson attended university in North Dakota and Iowa, and then studied anthropology at Harvard, reading about diets of northern peoples. He was brought into various exploration projects of Mikkelsen and Leffingwell, and in 1906 his experiences led to a study of the Mackenzie River Indians, or Dene, whom he reported as being kept in place by the Hudson's Bay Company. Acquiring skills in the native languages of the north, he developed a preference for the study of the Eskimo or Inuit in and around Herschel Island, near the Canadian-United States boundary, and enhanced his beliefs about the ease of men living in the "friendly Arctic," or "hospitable north." He further developed a theory that the "Copper Indians" of Victoria Island, in the central Canadian Arctic, might be descendants of the Norse peoples or of the lost Sir John Franklin party. In 1913 he headed up the Canadian Arctic Expedition, and proceeded from Victoria to Nome and thence to the western Arctic Ocean. Here the ship Karluk met with disaster. Stef, meanwhile, had gone on alone (as was customary) and made further journeys in northern Canada. The expedition was covered in controversy owing to the loss of the Karluk, the Canadian-American rivalry over Wrangel Island, and the infighting of various jealous civil servants and scientists in Ottawa and elsewhere. Hunt's masterly biography presents his subject "warts and all," and as such, contributes mightily to the annals of polar exploration and Canadian northern discoveries in particular.

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