Tom Henighan - Vilhjalmur Stefansson: Arctic Adventurer

Vilhjalmur Stefansson
1879-1962

Tom Henighan

Tom Henighan is Professor Emeritus at Carleton University, and a faculty member at the Pari Centre for New Learning in Tuscany, Italy. For many years he taught a course in mythology in Carleton's elite Humanities program, and is the author of fifteen published books, several of which have received prize nominations, as well as "notable books" citations in the Globe and Mail, and elsewhere. He has been a consultant to many of Canada's major arts institutions, and in 2008 received the Victor Tolgesy Award for lifetime contributions to the arts in Ottawa.

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Vilhjalmur Stefansson

TOM HENIGHAN

DUNDURN PRESS
TORONTO

Copyright Tom Henighan, 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Michael Carroll
Copy Editor: Allison Hirst
Index: Darcy Dunton
Design: Courtney Horner
Printer: Webcom
Cover photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Henighan, Tom

Vilhjalmur Stefansson : Arctic adventurer / by Tom Henighan.

Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-55002-874-4

1. Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, 1879-1962. 2. Arctic regions--Discovery and exploration--Canadian. 3. Explorers--Canada--Biography.
4. Anthropologists--Canada--Biography. I. Title.

G635.S7H45 2009 917.1904'2092 C2008-906217-5

1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on recycled paper.

www.dundurn.com

To the Millikens:
Patricia, Bill, Sarah, Erin, Emily, and Andrew,
with thanks for long friendship, generous hospitality,
and many delightful memories of town and country.

1. Epilogue: Ice Follies: Dialogues in Limbo
   

"Exploration is but the physical expression of the intellectual passion."

- Apsley Cherry-Garrard

"I may say that this is the greatest factor - the way in which the expedition is equipped - the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order - luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck."

- Roald Amundsen

"Exploration is the poetry of action."

- Vilhjalmur Stefansson

T his short biography of the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson is designed to provide a readable and concise summary of his life and a fresh estimate of his considerable achievements, with a special emphasis on his Canadian adventures. In terms of research, my book is deeply indebted to several diligent Stefansson biographers and chroniclers, all of whom are credited in the bibliography and cited in the text. I learned from them even when I found it necessary to differ from them.

My book was commissioned as part of a series in which "creative non-fiction" is encouraged, and you will find this approach predominant in the first chapter and in the Epilogue of my book. This kind of writing - using fictional techniques to deal with history or biography - is not new. The wonderful English writer Ford Madox Ford, for example, espoused it - although he called it "impressionism." When Ford wanted to present "the real" Joseph Conrad, or Henry James, or Ernest Hemingway, he did not simply recount biographical facts; he presented his fellow writers, living and breathing, on the page. This approach underlies the form of my book: the first and last sections are meant to reveal by evoking rather than by chronicling. Yet most of the allusions in Chapter One and in my Epilogue, "creative non-fiction" or not, are quite faithful to our information about Stefansson. His dialogue with his dog Dekoraluk, for example, is taken almost verbatim from Stefansson's diary. I do assume in the Epilogue that Stefansson may have told his lover Fanny Hurst about his Inuit family. There's no evidence for that, but it seems perfectly possible to me. Fanny was an enlightened woman and could have handled it; it may also have titillated her. Apart from that, both the imaginative parts of the book and the more mundane sections are as accurate as I can make them. My chief aim is to present Stefansson's life and career as straightforwardly as possible, but also to evoke his remarkable personality and to relate his work to our contemporary ideas of exploration, as well as to traditional and current visions of "the North."