The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1961, Blaðsíða 26

24
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Summer 1961
when he was offered the post of ethn-
ologist on an expedition which pro-
posed to operate in the Canadian
North.
While at Herschel Island waiting
for the expedition’s ship to arrive, he
was told by sailors from a whaler of
Eskimos they had seen in Victoria Is-
land who resembled people of Europ-
ean ancestry. The possibility that these
strange people might be descendants
of the “lost” Norse colonists of Green-
land fired his desire to see them at first
hand.
The ship was wrecked and Stefans-
son found himself footloose on the
Arctic coast. With little money and no
knowledge of the ways of the country,
he decided to learn how to become
self-supporting by living with Eski-
mos and, nearly as possible, becoming
one of them. During the winter of
1906-1907, he was a member of two
successive Eskimo households.
Young and inexperienced when he
arrived, his head was filled with the
myths upon which the popular view
of the Arctic is based; but approach-
ing it as an anthropologist, he soon
saw that a land in which children are
born and live happy lives through to
old age cannot be the terrible place
of popular imagination. Elis success in
the Arctic is not due as many believe
to exceptional endurance, but to his
intelligence.
By spring the Arctic had already
claimed Stefansson for its own and the
desire to visit the people who re-
sembled Europeans had become a fix-
ation wth him. In order to do so he
must organize his own expedition, and
this took him to New York where he
quickly gained the backing of the
American Museum of Natural History.
He proposed to go alone to the Arctic,
living mainly “off the country”, and
especially to spend some time with the
Eskimos in the vicinity of Victoria
Island. A University of Iowa classmate,
R. M. Anderson, a naturalist, wrote
suggesting that without greatly increas-
ing the cost two could secure much
more information than one, and asked
if he might join the expedition. Ste-
fansson agreed and had no difficulty
in securing the Museum’s consent.
Owing to various delays, it was not
until the spring of 1910 that Stefansson
came into contact with people (at Cape
Bexley) who had never seen white
men, and a few days later, on the south
shore of Victoria Island, he encounter-
ed the first of the Eskimos he had most
wished to meet. His impression of that
event is given in My Life With the
Eskimo (1913):
When I saw before me these men
who looked like Europeans in
spite of their garb of furs, I knew
that I had come upon either the
last chapter and solution of one
of the historical tragedies of the
past, or else that we had here a
new mystery for the future to
solve: the mystery of why these
men looked so much more Euro-
pean-like than other Eskimos if
they are not of European descent.
In the fall of 1912, the expedition re-
turned to the United States, and Ste-
fansson was front-page news; magazines
requested articles and he was in de-
mand as a lecturer. The discovery of
the “Blond Eskimos” as an imaginative
reporter dubbed them, greatly over-
shadowed in public interest the other
accomplishments of the expedition.
In spite of his many activities, Ste-
fansson was promoting a new expedi-
tion — one that would differ from any
of its predecessors. At that time the
Arctic Ocean, except in the vicinity