Collectively, during Stef’s three Arctic expeditions, he covered a lot of the Arctic by
sledge and boat and on skis. Here, apart from the ill-fated Karluk drift, are Stef’s own
surface travels, during which he adopted Inuit habits and Inuit diets.
13
Wilkins did not last the whole CAE, as he was called up to serve with the Royal
Australian Air Force during WW I as one of the first wartime aerial photographers.
14
The low point in Stef’s public esteem came in 1920-21, when he inspired an ill-starred
venture to colonize Wrangel Island by four adventurers and an Inuit guide and cook.
She was the only survivor of the ordeal.
Sullivan, Walter. 1963. “Obituary: Vilhjalmur Stefansson 1879-1962”. Geographical
Review 53 (2). [American Geographical Society, Wiley]: 287–91.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/212514.
15
Although Stef never personally went back to the Arctic after his close call with death
in 1918, the Arctic was deeply entrenched in his makeup and interests for the
remainder of his life. He became the president of the NYC-based Explorers’ Club in
the 1930s, in recognition of his writings, lectures, and connections.
16
Meanwhile Sir Hubert had moved on (not off) to promoting the idea of exploring the
Arctic Ocean by means of submarine. He acquired the use of an obsolete WW I Sub,
the Nautilus, pictured here, and named after the Jules Verne fictional vessel of the 19th
century.
17
Fate would bring Wilkins and Stef back together for a final Arctic adventure in 193738. That fate later drew me into becoming very familiar with the writings of both
men.
Here’s how it happened: In the 1930s, aviation was beginning to thrive in the Far
North. The USSR was striving to become a modern industrial power, while keeping a
wary eye on growing threats by Nazi Germany after 1933. One of the original seven
heroes of the Soviet Union was Sigismund Levanevsky, an aviator with extensive
Arctic experience and close ties with a number of U.S. aviators. He’d already flown or
ferried several aircraft through Alaska to the Soviet Union by 1934-36.
In 1937, the USSR put on quite a show of aviation prowess. In May several 4-engined
Tupelev airplanes landed near the North Pole to establish a floating research & radio
relay station on an ice floe, known as NP-1. In June, a giant single-engined
monoplane-glider took off from Moscow, crossed over ice station NP-1 and the North
Pole and landed unannounced at Vancouver Washington 63 hours later, astonishing the
world with unknown prowess. A second monoplane left Moscow a month later and
flew all the way to the California border with Mexico before landing. By August
1937, Stalin had approved a 4-engined airplane stunt, featuring Levanevsky and 5
crewmen crossing the Pole and landing in Fairbanks on the way to further stops in
Edmonton, Chicago, and New York City. This airplane and its crew never arrived in
Fairbanks.
18
Stef, by now head of the NYC Explorers Club, and Sir Hubert Wilkins, were engaged
by the Soviet Embassy to search for the missing Levanevsky and his crew from the
North American side of the Arctic. Between late August the following March (1938)
Wilkins handled the navigation and flew with airplanes purchased for the search by
the Soviets. Stef served as point of contact and liaison with the Embassy in NYC.
The Soviets called off the North American search in March 1938, although they kept
searching a little while longer from the Eurasian side of the Arctic.
In October of 1967, I was just starting here as a graduate student, when news broke of
an aircraft gone missing between Fairbanks and the Canadian Arctic coast, en route to
Spitsbergen and Norway. Volunteers were needed as spotters to fly in Wien Airways
F-27 airplanes. I tried to volunteer, but missed the last seat available on what I
believe was the very airplane that spotted the wreckage and the survivors of a crashlanded twin-engined airplane, near Sam Lake in central Yukon Territory.
Two years later, I learned the full story of that crash east of Old Crow YT from Sverre
Pedersen, son of the SAS chief navigator at the time, Einar Sverre Pedersen, who
survived the crash, and discovered a survival camp from many years earlier. Einar
had written a book in Norwegian, in which he advanced the theory that he might have
discovered a key clue in the disappearance 30 years earlier of S. Levanevsky.
Here’s a picture taken in August 1987 of U.S. and Canadian searchers near Sam Lake.
19
In 1941, Stef married his secretary in NYC, Evelyn. After the war, they moved to
Hanover NH, where he secured a faculty apointment at Dartmouth College, and where
he encouraged the founding of the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research and
Engineering Laboratory (CRREL).
Having participated in a search at Einar Pedersen’s survival camp in 1987 I was eager
to pursue any clues that I might find in the Stefansson Collection at the Baker Library
about his thoughts on the Levanevsky Search, now just over 50 years earlier.
I spent an, entertaining, enlightening week in the Stefansson Collection in the autumn
of 1989, pretending to be a scholarly library researcher like Marvin Falk. Many
wonderful anecdotes: Reasons for Stef and Wilkins not to search mountains in YT;
Secret scheme to fly PBY Catalina to Moscow in March 1938; Correspondent
threatening Stef, should Stef send him “one more {bleeped} carbon copy of
correspondence” in which he was not least bit interested; Stef and Wilkins’ profound
admiration of Soviet meteorological prowess during search; Stef and McCarthyism;
Later, Jess Walker’s story about Stef’s comparison of U.S. and Soviet attitudes toward
one another
20
Our time scale, again. Stef left Canada in some “bad odour” after the CAE of 19131918. He’d had a falling out with RM Anderson, the botanist on the CAE, who never
produced his report on the southern wing of the expedition. Stef had to write an
overview report, which was published as The Friendly Arctic. In 1921-22, the illfated Wrangel Expedition took place, without Stef, who was publishing the strange
speculative book, Northward Course of Empire. Later that decade, Stef got more
ambitious, and published Introduction to the North Pole.
In the 1930s, Stef kept busy writing, publishing, lecturing, and collecting Northern
and Polar written wisdom. His old friend and associate, G. H. Wilkins developed a
fascination with submarines as the key vessels to the future of the Arctic. Within 24 h
of Levanevsky’s failure to arrive in Fairbanks in August of 1937, the Soviet Embassy
contacted Stef, as President of the Explorers’ Club in NYC, to manage the U.S. efforts
to locate the missing Soviet airplane and its crew. Stef contracted with Wilkins to be
the chief navigator of several aircraft based variously in Coppermine and Aklavik
NWT, and Barrow and Kaktovik, AK from Aug. 1937 to Mar. 1938, when the
Embassy called off the searches.
My week in the Stefansson Collection was very rewarding. I developed an
appreciation for the way Stef thought, and for his wicked sense of humour (Phil
Cronenwett’s story); (Dave’s carbon-copy story); (Jess Walker’s underestimation
story); (Dave’s story on secret flight of Guba to USSR)
21
Talking it over last week, Marvin and I agreed that we had failed to exploit a whole
guild that is laced with candidates for scoundrel awards: northern aviators.
At the end of World War II, author Jean Potter was thoroughly entertained by one of
the “Deans” of Arctic Flying, Scoundreldom, and outrageous and profane humor,
Archie Ferguson of Kotzebue.
22
For a little man, Archie cut a swath both deep and wide, as well as long-lasting.
23
But Archie had rivals, and Jean Potter had literary descendants who mined the rich
guild of pilots for memorable stories and humor. This is the illustration
accompanying one episode of flying by the inimitable Bill Munz of Nome, anti-FAA
scrooge, and owner of Munz Northern Airways. Joe Rychetnik’s writing in this book
is supplemented by Sandy Jamieson’s fine art work.
24