Despite the connection I’ve developed to Joe, it will always be one-sided. He died the year after I was born, and I’ll never get to ask him questions, shake his hand, or go fishing with him. For me he will never be more than a name on a page or a face in a photo, but the brothers grew up with him for the better part of their first two decades, and they remember Uncle Joe well.
The year before he died, they’d lost their father when Alaska Airlines Flight 1866 crashed into a mountain near Juneau. Francis Bernard, who went by Smokey, was on his way to Sitka to visit with Joe. Six months after I moved to Alaska, in January 2000, I wrote a newspaper article about Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crashing off the coast of California. While researching the airline’s earlier crashes, I saw Francis Bernard’s name listed on the flight manifest. I’d only just learned about Joe and Peter Bernard coming to Alaska and didn’t yet know what had become of Joe, but I wondered if this Francis and I were related somehow.
“It’s a small world,” Bob says.
We sift through his uncle’s belongings and mementos, including several Native artifacts, some papers and books, and a bronze porthole from the Teddy Bear—a remarkable moment for me, to hold in my hands a piece of the schooner I’ve studied for so long.
“Wait here,” Bob says and ducks into another room. He returns with a framed picture of the Teddy Bear.
“I’ve had the same picture hanging over my desk for almost twelve years,” I tell him.
“Yeah, but the wood in that frame is from her hull,” he says. I’m literally holding a piece of the past.
A quiet intensity informs Bob, but he keeps it behind a wall. I get the sense he’s worked hard to build that wall, that maybe it’s not all that solid, not all that new. He married his wife, Ginger, later in life after his kids were mostly grown, and when I meet her later that day—as sweet and kind as can be—I wonder if marrying her had something to do with it. His intensity shows through from time to time, especially when talking about Peter and Joe, and it’s the kind of intensity that makes you wonder why you’re not more passionate about the things you believe in yourself. In some ways he’s rougher around the edges than his brother, and maybe even has more edges. I get glimpses of what he must be like barking orders from the bridge after a few days away from civilization. But here in his home, he’s polite and friendly, a truly interesting guy whose company I enjoy quite a bit. Just like his brother.
Before I leave, he gives me an old copy of a hardcover book that belonged to Joe, Greyhounds of the Sea: The Story of the American Clipper Ship. Joe signed his name on the inside cover, along with a Seattle address that belonged to his uncle Pete’s widow, Etta. The book will always be one of my prized possessions.
A few months later, Bob and I meet again for a late dinner in Cordova. He picks the venue—a bar and grill built on the site of the old Copper River Railroad powder house—orders a soda, and jokes with the waitress, whom he seems to know well. Doors open onto a big deck overlooking Eyak Lake—or they would if they were open—but it’s too dark to see the view, and the large banner welcoming summer is a cruel joke considering the weather, which is wet, cool, and rainy.
As close as Bob was to Uncle Joe, he says he’s more drawn to the stories about Peter Bernard. Joe was flesh and blood to him, wrinkles and bad moods, hang-ups and birthdays. Pete for him lived only in stories. Pete’s life also ended in tragedy before he had a chance to establish his place in history, he says.
But the driving factor, I think, is that history—specifically, the version set forth by Vilhjalmur Stefansson—has failed to do right by the Bernards. Bob has advocated tirelessly for the family’s place in history and for years has communicated, and at times argued, with the Canadian documentarians, anthropologists, curators, and legislators who keep the official record of Arctic exploration. Stefansson has become a much-lauded national figure in Canada, despite all signs that he was something of a prick. By the time his own legacy began to unravel in later years, he had already done damage to the Bernards—both of them—and Bob wants to right those wrongs.
It’s one of those passionate topics. When I raise the subject, he leans forward in his chair, and his posture, voice, and mood all change.
Among Bob’s more legitimate gripes is Stefansson’s mistreatment of Pete’s reputation after his death. Official records of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, including the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s Northern People, Northern Knowledge exhibit, list seventeen members who gave their lives, among them Peter Bernard and Charlie Thomsen, who died together on Banks Island. But in a letter written a few years after the expedition ended, Stefansson claimed that “neither men nor dogs have been lost and that neither men nor dogs have suffered serious hardship.” He pointedly titled his published account of the expedition The Friendly Arctic.
There’s also the matter that he convinced the Canadian government to withhold from Pete’s widow the profits that the CAE rightfully owed Pete, though he was one of just five members recommended for the Arctic Medal.
Bob has a theory about Stefansson and Pete’s death, too long and complex to nutshell, but he remains absolutely convinced that there’s more to the story than history has recorded officially. Between fishing seasons, he searches relentlessly for documents to prove it. He believes some members of the CAE were to blame for Pete’s death. It’s a story with many moving parts, but there’s something to it. Unfortunately, most of the people and records that might vindicate him are likely lost to history, buried beneath a century of Arctic snow and federal and provincial red tape.
In 1919, when Joe met Otto Binder in the Arctic and first learned about his uncle’s death three years earlier, he wrote:
This tragedy need never have happened. Binder said that Stefansson changed his mind about wanting the mail taken to him at Melville Island so he sent the Kilian brothers from the Polar Bear which was wintering in Prince of Wales Strait on the east coast of Banks Land to go to [Camp Kellett] to tell him not to bring the mail. Well, they arrived just 2 days after my uncle and Thompson had left, he said. Jennie Thompson, Charlie’s wife, told the Kilian boys, “You have a light sled, please go on and you will overtake them in 2 or 3 days.” But they would not go!
Binder was very disgusted with the Kilians and their indifference to Jenny’s request. He said the boys knew very well what a hard trip it is from Cape Kellett up to McClure Strait, particularly with such a heavy burden of mail. The Kilians could make 20 miles a day in their light sled but with uncle Pete and Thompson it was impossible to make at the most, 10 miles a day. Any decent man would never have hesitated to prevent the long, arduous trip. I was sickened on hearing this news—not only about the loss of the man who was like a father to me but that two young men had deliberately refused to perform a simple act of mercy, or, as it is in the Arctic, a duty of any Christian gentleman.
The only reason for the Kilians’ trip from the Polar Bear was to deliver the orders not to take the mail to Stefansson. It was within their power to take only 2 or 3 more days to deliver that message. They chose, instead, to let the men continue. How burdened must be their consciences now knowing they could have prevented the deaths of two great men?
Bob has searched for journals or correspondence kept by the Kilian brothers that he thinks might reveal more about the motivation behind their failure to act, but has not yet found the proof he’s seeking.
In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez writes that Stefansson “wrung fame from the Arctic.” Even given the benefit of the doubt, he was tactless and cold, willing to paint over his own mistakes with a shiny coat of glory while taking credit for the accomplishments of others, eager to climb the backs of better men to reach greater heights. With each new piece of the puzzle I learn about Stefansson, the more I believe Bob’s hunch.
Peter Bernard seems a very different person than his nephew. Physically, he was shorter, more powerfully built, balding. Joe, with his wir
y frame, neatly parted hair and eyeglasses, and his penchant for suits and fedoras, looked more like an academic than an explorer. Without diaries or journals of his own to read, I have no insight into Pete’s personality other than what others have written, portraying him as a man’s man who worked with his hands, worked hard and without complaint, and was quick to produce a drink or a smoke. Unlike his nephew, Pete had no pretensions toward science or literary aspirations. He just wanted to do what he knew how to do.
On the Canadian Arctic Expedition, that meant running the Mary Sachs and building dog sledges at Camp Kellett, and, at least for the latter, Stefansson had nothing but praise. In The Friendly Arctic, he called Pete “an excellent dog driver and one of the best traveling companions I have ever had in spite of his fifty-six years.”
His ingenuity and industry were beyond price, for we had no good sledge except the one used in coming to Banks Island over the ice the previous spring. Neither did we have any really suitable material for making a new sled, but by plundering the Sachs of a bit of hardwood here and a strip of iron there Bernard was able to make us one of the finest sleds we ever used.”
But Stefansson also undermines his praise for Pete with a typically backhanded compliment.
When Thomsen had arrived at Kellett from Liddon Gulf the Spring of 1916, he and Captain Bernard had decided upon a well-meant disregard of my orders. There was no man on the expedition more loyal than Bernard or more interested in its success. He had been commander and owner of the Sachs for many years, and aboard of her there had never been discipline but a sort of friendly and amiable anarchy. Apparently the Captain never expected his own orders to be carried out except in the most general way, nor did he have a conception of carrying out orders in any other spirit. He tried to understand what was wanted and worked hard and faithfully towards its accomplishment, worked before breakfast and after supper, but always in his own way.
In his book With Stefansson in the Arctic, Harold Noice devotes a chapter to a holiday celebration at Pete’s winter quarters at Camp Kellett in 1915. Among their companions that night were Stefansson, whom Noice calls “the Commander,” and CAE members Charlie Thomsen, Lorne Knight, the Kilian brothers, and Aarnout Castel.
Captain Bernard had been prevented by bad weather from doing much hunting, but that did not prevent him from serving a rich New Year’s feast. He dished up a young wolf that had been caught in a trap, with a spicy dressing and currant jelly, French peas and sweet potatoes; for dessert he gave us mince pie made of chopped caribou meat, caribou suet, raisins and dried apples. He even had a bottle of brandy and a box of cigars. We played the phonograph, sang songs, and had a good time generally. I made a couple of batches of fudge, and the Commander, who does not use tobacco or liquor, celebrated with the fudge.
Noice writes that Pete “was always the first up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night, working continually at something or other,” a description that applies to most of the Bernards I’ve known—including my own grandfather and father. Every day that I stayed at Bill’s house on Odiak Slough, I’d wake up at 5 a.m. and hear him already moving around upstairs. The second time Bob ever called me, he rang at 6 a.m. “You’re a Bernard,” he said, “I knew you’d be up.”
Last year he traveled to Sachs Harbour (population 135), Canada’s northernmost community and the only permanent settlement on Banks Island. The village takes its name from the Mary Sachs, whose final resting place lies 6 miles to the west at Cape Kellett. Prior to her arrival there with the CAE, the island was uninhabited. In that community Pete’s legacy lives on in small ways, Bob says. He saw pieces of the engine from the Sachs rusting on the beaches, and wood scavenged from her hull went into some of the hunting cabins there. The sled dogs that roam the village descend from the dogs Pete brought with him to the island. A few village elders remember the Canadian Arctic Expedition, and others grew up hearing stories from parents or grandparents who met the explorers. Parts of the Sachs’s engine were incorporated into a cairn built on the hillside above Sachs Harbour in the late 1960s to commemorate its founding.
Billy Banksland lived in the area in the years after the CAE. He searched extensively for Pete’s body, but never found any sign of him or the load of mail he carried. Bob is planning an expedition of his own to return to Banks Island aboard the Alaskan Pacific to search for the remains. He believes there’s something in the mailbag that might help clear the family name, taking some of the wind out of the sails of Stefansson’s legacy. It’s an ambitious plan. If anyone can pull it off, it’s Bob, and damned if I’d bet against him. He adored the people he met in the Arctic last year, and enjoyed spending time among them. Had he been born a century earlier, he would have lived a life not unlike Pete’s. A competent guy with a fierce independent streak, he’s just crazy enough to plow through the logistical hurdles that might stop other people from mounting and succeeding at such an expedition.
He’s got a bit of an antigovernment bent to him as well, which can only help. The way the provincial and federal governments of his homeland have embraced Stefansson’s version and undervalued Peter Bernard’s role has lit a fire in his belly not easily put out.
If it’s possible to master a place the way you can master an art or skill, Joe was Alaskan the way Mozart composed or Ted Williams played ball. He gave his name to maps of the land and to a species of wolf that roamed it.13 When he chose to be buried there instead of Prince Edward Island, he gave himself to the land too. He embraced Alaska, and it embraced him in return. By the time I found his headstone in Sitka, three decades of moss and weeds had obscured it. The ground there keeps the secrets of its own history, so many people buried and quickly forgotten, as if the earth had patiently endured their days walking upon it only to swallow all trace of them once they were gone.
Forty years ago Bob stood on that spot and said good-bye to his great-uncle—the only family member able to attend the funeral—and I’m the only Bernard to stand there since.
Before we left Sitka, Kim and I visited the Pioneer Cemetery a decade after I’d last been there. It had rained overnight, and the deep grass soaked our shoes and pants as we crossed the field. The unlevel ground skews at opposing angles with no discernible pattern. The trees angle oddly too, pointing to disparate corners of the sky. Maybe the state workers didn’t grade the land before they began filling the 6-foot pockets of earth, or maybe decades of tectonic unpredictability have indiscriminately tilted the land. The air dull with morning fog, clinging raindrops made the grass and forest around it shine, so thick, so lush, so bright; green the grass carpet, darker green the tree walls, the field so overgrown you wouldn’t know it to be a cemetery if not for the sign.
When I lived there, I could walk out my door past Joe and into the mountains without ever stepping foot on a road. Mornings before work, the dog and I would search the woods for bear sign—claw marks on tree bark, a pile of scat—or startle Sitka blacktails into twitching retreat. Evenings I drank beer with the neighbors while the dogs ran near the woods.
I’d moved to Alaska not knowing my family had history there. How does a family unlearn its own past? The cemetery offered a metaphor. Each generation becomes its own layer of soil and moss and growth hiding the dead. It’s not willful—few plan to neglect their past—it just happens. Each day we move further and further away until one day, collectively, everyone has forgotten. To learn about Joe was to learn about myself, about my father, my father’s father, all their fathers before them. Wasn’t I a part of them, and they of me? Joe and I came from different branches of the same tree. Maybe I’d moved to Sitka only by coincidence, a whimsy of chance rather than fate, but that didn’t diminish its impact on me.
All his time in the Arctic, all that he’d seen and done and endured, all the people he’d known—both famous and nameless—and all the lives of quiet resolve in desolate places. All that he’d learned, discovered, taught, and shared—it all ended there
, where Joe tried for years to tell his story until I found him and heard what he had to say. The first time I found him, it took weeks. This time, it took less than an hour. When I found his headstone, dirt had filled the engraved name and date in a natural palimpsest that made them difficult to read.
Clearing away the moss and weeds seemed a natural extension of all my research and writing about Joe, reclaiming him from history as from the earth, doing my part like Bob and Bill, each in our way, to make sure he will not be forgotten.
JOSEPH BERNARD
1878–1972
Joe Bernard’s grave in Sitka’s Pioneer Cemetery.
29
Convergence
When they got to the inlet the guide they hired would not go when they wanted him to. Street insisted and when the Eskimo still refused, he used his dog whip to hit the Eskimo. Then one of the natives stabbed Street. Having killed Street they had to kill Radford, a witness to the murder, although he had done no wrong.
Surrounded by glass and stuffed into the tail seat of the Alaska State Troopers’ Piper Cub, I’m developing a new empathy for wine bottle corks. The plane’s two seats line up one behind the other in the narrow cabin, mine where the plane’s already narrow body begins to taper, my knees wedged against the back of the pilot’s seat. Sergeant Marc Cloward, an Alaska Wildlife Trooper, normally flies a Cessna 185, but the far roomier six-seat 185 Skywagon is in Anchorage for repairs, which is why I’m nursing a growing case of what Cloward calls “Cub ass.” I feel like I’m stuck in the pointy end of a funnel.
Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now Page 24
