Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

by C. B. Bernard

  Another field of fireweed lights up one side of the plane, surrounded by green and brown as far as the eye can see. On the other side, water stretches to the horizon and blends almost seamlessly with the sky through the glass overhead, both the color of a bruise. Cloward lifts open one of the windows so the air rushes in, and we become part of the sky itself, nothing between us and the outside world. The plane seems to disappear, and for a few seconds we’re not a game warden on duty or a writer riding shotgun but part of this living, breathing, remarkable world.

  “Beautiful,” I say.

  Cloward agrees, his voice subdued.

  Even with all that he’s seen—willful crimes, senseless poaching, all the failed search-and-rescues, everything he’s trained for and prepared against—even with all of that, he still has moments every day when Alaska humbles him.

  He drops low along the beach and lower still until I can read the texture of the sand, lines of prose written by nature’s own hand.

  “It gets lonely up here sometimes,” he says. It’s not a confession, not a show of weakness, but a statement made honestly and unbidden. “There’s just so much to see, so much that’s beautiful, you want to share it sometimes.”

  Cloward finds the Kiklukh River and follows it to a series of buildings, which look woefully out of place in the midst of such a vast and lovely wilderness. There are trucks and four-wheelers that must have been barged in, two planes on a small airstrip. He circles around, debating landing, but checks his watch.

  “We should get back,” he says, sadly. “Dixie will be expecting us soon.”

  He turns along a beach, which stretches nearly all the way to Yakutat, a couple hundred miles known as Alaska’s “Lost Coast”—exposed to the Gulf of Alaska, unsheltered, largely uninhabited—and points out the landmarks around us: Ragged Mountain, Kayak and Kanak Islands, Controller Bay.

  We fly over the Softuk Bar, the long, narrow finger pointing northwest that Joe crossed with the Teddy Bear after his engine trouble on his way south after retiring from his Arctic travels. That event changed the course of his life. No signs of civilization in sight, just unblemished coastline and pristine wilderness. Since Joe’s time, the tides have reshaped the shores, the wind and the weather have worn some things away and knocked some things down. Trees and plants have grown, others have vanished. A map of a place like this is outdated the moment it hits paper. Still, the landscape beneath us couldn’t have looked much different to Joe in 1924 than it does to me now. For a moment, Joe’s Alaska and my own converge.

  30

  The Unfriendly Arctic

  Out on the ice they had met with some Eskimos who told them a ship with a white man was here. They were as surprised as I to find a white man in this remote and uncivilized land.

  In Joe’s albums I find a series of photos taken by professional photographer C. W. Scarborough during a 1922 voyage on the Teddy Bear shortly before he retired from Arctic travel. One of these has become perhaps the most iconic image of the schooner, her hull surrounded by mounds of ice reaching higher than her transom, masts mirrored by their reflection in the sea. Joe sits high in the crow’s nest scanning the ice pack for a clear path, a rescue mission for a small group of colonists stranded on Wrangel Island. His failure to reach them haunted him for years to come.

  In 1914 eleven members of the doomed Karluk’s crew lived for nine months on the island, north of Siberia and closer to Russia than Alaska, while awaiting rescue after Stefansson abandoned them at the start of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. Seven years later, Stefansson organized an expedition to “seed” the island with the colonists in a speculative effort to claim it—first for Canada, then later Great Britain. One of the colonists, Fred Maurer, had survived the earlier Karluk disaster. That he volunteered to return speaks to the respect Stefansson’s reputation then carried in some circles.

  But from the start, the expedition proved both ill-advised and ill-prepared. Stefansson barely scraped together enough funding. He convinced the four colonists and their Inuit seamstress, Ada Blackjack—who volunteered in order to earn money to pay for her son’s medical treatments—that game would be plentiful on the island, and on his recommendation they brought just six months’ supplies. Brave, but inexperienced, the volunteers had a lean first winter, their situation growing dire when Stefansson struggled to raise money for a relief ship. When it finally sailed, early winter ice blocked it from reaching the island. Bowing to public pressure, Stefansson telegrammed Joe in Nome: “Relieve parties on Wrangel Island at all cost. I will pay the bills. —V Stefansson”

  Though he had just returned from a calamitous year shipwrecked with the Teddy Bear in Siberia, and believed the relief mission impossible, Joe consented. Scarborough volunteered to go with him. The Teddy Bear set sail in late August, and by late September the Los Angeles Times, among other publications, feared her lost:

  Capt. Joe Bernard . . . again has sailed into the frozen wastes and is lost again . . . when, after six other rescue vessels had failed to reach members of Stefansson’s crew, stranded on Wrangel Island, he was persuaded to attempt what the others had failed. All of the six other boats, many of them larger than the Teddy Bear . . . were caught in the ice flow off Wrangel Island. . . . It was through them that reports of the dangerous ice conditions were learned and predictions made that the Teddy Bear would never come back. Capt. Bernard himself is said to have remarked upon leaving Nome that this was to be the Teddy Bear’s last trip, as the engines were “shot” and the hull was in a condition unable to withstand the terrible pressure of a protracted ice crush.

  Stefansson’s attempt to claim the island for Canada and Great Britain had angered both the United States and the Soviet Union, making international news. Nor did public opinion favor him, the colonists’ families having voiced their fears to the press. One account in the New York Times illustrates the diverging personalities of Joe and Stefansson. “Although more than a year has elapsed since the Wrangell Island party landed . . . Stefansson said that he was not worried about the party’s plight. . . . Word of the trapping of the Teddy Bear came in a telegram which Stefansson received yesterday morning at the Harvard Club.” Joe was risking his own life deep in the Arctic to save five people put at risk by Stefansson’s missteps. Stefansson remained “unworried” at an exclusive private club in Manhattan. While Joe navigated ice floes, Stefansson was navigating the pitfalls of fame and fortune.

  Ice presses the Teddy Bear against the beach during her failed attempt to reach the Wrangel Island colonists. PHOTO BY C. W. SCARBOROUGH

  Joe and the Teddy Bear survived the mission and returned to Nome but failed to reach the colonists—as he’d predicted. When rescuers arrived at Wrangel Island the following summer, only Ada Blackjack had survived.

  Scarborough returned to the Arctic the following year only to disappear without a trace while hunting on Flaxman Island. Charles Brower—the “King of the Arctic” who had turned a short trip to Barrow on a whaling ship into a life retold in his best-selling autobiography, Fifty Years Below Zero—later found Scarborough’s account of the failed Wrangel Island mission stored in a cache on the island.14 In it he paints a compelling portrait of the Teddy Bear’s captain.

  Captain Bernard was away somewhere on the Siberian Coast on a trading cruise, and though he was overdue, no one worried about that, as it was a regular thing for Captain Joe to be overdue. Only last fall he had sailed out dangerously late for a two-weeks’ trip to Siberia and had been gone until the following July with never a word from him until June, when that good Samaritan of the North, the U.S. Cutter Bear, plowing along the Siberian coast looking for his bones, had discovered the Teddy Bear shoved high and dry by the storms and ice of the fall before. Captain Joe and his crew of two were well and preparing to launch the battered little schooner for the belated homeward trip. . . . No man in all the Northland was more ice wise, more capable, or fearless t
han he.

  Looking at photos from the doomed voyage, it’s hard not to think about how the world has changed. Wrangel Island now belongs to the Russian Federation, Stefansson’s legacy grows increasingly tarnished, the Northwest Passage has melted open to cruise ship traffic, and Charles Brower’s grandson and I are friends on Facebook. What would Joe make of it all?

  Joe lost no love over Stefansson. At Baillie Island in 1911, the explorer lured Billy Banksland away from his contract with Joe, revealing a glimpse of his true character. They butted heads many more times over the years, each time the stakes growing higher.

  As leader of the Canadian Arctic Expedition’s southern party, Joe’s old friend Dr. Anderson established base camp at “Ougruk Bay,” the natural harbor where the Teddy Bear had spent the winter of 1912–13. He had learned about it from Joe, who had given him drawings and soundings when they met in 1914 as he and Old John Cole were leaving the Arctic for Nome. In his official capacity, Anderson successfully requested that the Canadian government name the anchorage Bernard Harbour—the second such landmark to bear that name, distinguished by its Canadian spelling of harbour. In 1920 Stefansson appealed to the government to reject the name, claiming to have discovered the harbor in 1910 prior to the Teddy Bear’s anchoring there. Anderson, who had been with Stefansson in 1910, disputed the deceitful appeal and won.

  The second of several Arctic landmarks named for Joe and his uncle, Bernard Harbour in later years became the site of a Hudson’s Bay Company post and one of fifty-eight Distant Early Warning Line stations authorized by President Eisenhower to warn against a Soviet over-the-pole invasion of North America. Today it’s also a shore stop for a Canadian cruise line that tours Coronation Gulf.

  But the Wrangel Island incident became the field on which the two explorers waged their most heated battles. The failed expedition, which ended in a tragedy that echoed the Karluk disaster on the same shores, also caused the first cracks in Stefansson’s legacy. Jennifer Niven—author of both the best-selling The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk and Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic—feels that “those who died were, first and foremost, victims of Stefansson’s bravado, poor planning, and grand and ill-founded schemes.”

  Salting the wound, Stefansson never publicly expressed regret or even embarrassment about the failure of his expedition. “My impression was that he was anxious for the whole matter to disappear,” Niven said, “and in later years he tried to avoid the subject and pass responsibility for the expedition onto the young men who died under his command.”15 He also tried to pass the buck to Joe. His correspondence reveals an almost sociopathic ability to defer blame, twist words, and manipulate people. It also documents a rapid unraveling over the incident. In those letters and telegrams you can learn more about each of their characters and personalities than in all their journals, manuscripts, and books combined.

  Nearly a dozen in all and too long to quote in full, their sequence reveals almost as much as their content. In the earliest letters, written in 1922, Stefansson is “very grateful for the fine attempt you made to get to Wrangel Island,” and invites Joe to New York. When Joe declines due to “financial trouble,” Stefansson, whose Arctic career ran half as long but paid immeasurably more, offers to pay Joe’s way, suggesting that he call on him at the American Geographical Society or the Harvard Club.

  In later letters, civility begins to falter. After a schooner captained by Harold Noice—who had written about the holiday he spent at Peter Bernard’s on Banks Island—rescued Ada Blackjack and deposited fifteen new colonists on Wrangel Island, Stefansson writes Joe in 1924 that “Noice claims to have information to the effect that in 1922 you did not make a bona fide effort to reach Wrangell Island. Of course, I feel certain that this is not true and that you did your best. Still, I would like to get a statement from you.” He also inquires as to whether Joe might be available for a trip to Wrangel Island the following summer. Joe responds: “I should be very interested to know how many statements you want. I made one upon my arrival in Nome and delivered same to . . . your agent; and again I gave another report to your secretary in New York in January 1923, going into every detail in connection with that expedition. What more do you want—my opinion?”

  Joe suggests that Stefansson can read his opinion in a letter published a few weeks earlier in the Montreal Star, in which Joe defends himself against public remarks that Stefansson made, disparaging Joe’s effort to reach the colonists, faulting his skills, and claiming he left Nome too late to succeed. “As for whether I have a ship at Nome, I have the Teddy Bear which I had repaired and remodeled last summer. As to the matter of your obtaining her, it might be possible by purchase or otherwise. As for myself it is not likely that I would consider accepting the job . . .”

  Stefansson follows with two letters to Joe blaming Harold Noice for many of his own negative statements and encouraging him to change the story he’s been telling the press, “or you will be in every way the loser. You will be causing pain to the relatives of the boys, you will be heaping discredit upon yourself, and all you will gain will be a little annoyance to me.” Stefansson bitchily sent a copy of this last letter to the president of Loyola College, with whom Joe had become close, with a note saying: “Captain Bernard is doing me some hurt but in the long run he will hurt himself more if he goes ahead under his present mistaken impressions and continues to make newspaper charges.” Then to Joe, he adds:

  Thinking you . . . are in this case in need of good advice, I am sending a carbon copy of this letter to the President of the College with a short letter urging him to counsel you to be more cautious in the future and to be sure you have been attacked before you again begin to defend yourself. A person may easily put himself in very bad light even when he is innocent when he is trying to defend himself against serious charges which he only imagines someone has made.

  Vehemently defending his own planning for the expedition, Stefansson disputes Joe’s claims that the colonists had few provisions and ends the letter viciously: “You have only to think of the death of your own partner on the north coast of Alaska to remember that loss of life in the Arctic does not necessarily come from shortage of food.”

  The president of Loyola, a Jesuit priest, responds to Stefansson’s letter, “I may say that I have rarely, if ever, met a man so simple, so unassuming, so free from boastfulness, so intelligent in weighing evidence, so careful and guarded in his every statement as is Captain Bernard. Believe me.”

  When it becomes clear that Stefansson is trying to play them against each other—and failing—Joe writes directly to Noice and asks him to submit a statement on the Wrangel Island incident.

  It seems to me, that a smooth speaker does not necessarily mean a kind heart. Well, whatever you do, be careful for you have a wonderful and smooth guy to deal with in VS. And any litigation you might bring against him is just as likely to turn dollars into his pocket as out of it, for he has now reached that stage where publicity, no matter how he gets it, does him good.

  Noice did make a statement—it excoriates Stefansson and accuses him of character defamation, theft, and encouraging him to commit perjury.

  Joe made notarized copies of all of Stefansson’s correspondence and sent it to Noice in care of the Explorer’s Club in New York, to which Stefansson also belonged. The following March, Joe wrote a second letter to Noice inquiring after the materials he’d sent.

  I have a suspicion that you never received these papers. It is possible that they have fallen into the hands of your enemy. Please let me know at once together with any information regarding Wrangel Island affair and your connection with V.S. that you may care to let me know. You are and have been accused of various things in connection with it that I know for a fact that you are innocent of. . . . If claim is made on the Stefansson Exploration and Development Company, it is more than probable that V.S. will try to lay the blame on you.


  Joe’s suspicion proved correct. Noice never received them. The notarized copies of the letters form part of the collection of Stefansson’s own papers that he left to Dartmouth College before his death.

  31

  Voices in the Wilderness

  There had been a concern as to my fate. Some people had given me up as dead. Reports had come from the far north during the year of thousands of Eskimos having starved to death. It was a mystery to the museum officials how I had managed to keep myself and my crew alive through the rigors of four winters.

  With so many questions I’ll never be able to ask Joe, his voice lost forever, I meet Bill for coffee at the Cordova Hotel Bar and Cafe to see if he can answer some in Joe’s stead. The front half of the CoHo, as it’s known locally, contains the bar—pool table and woodwork with a few decades of smokers’ varnish—the back half a cafe with an old diner feel. Pegboard wall, old decorative cookie jars, coffee strong enough to dissolve rust. We sit beneath a sign that captures two Alaska ideologies, a fierce libertarian approach to individual freedom and polite concern for your neighbor’s well-being: “Smokers please remember smoking is a privilege here. Let’s not abuse it. If no one else is smoking or children are here, don’t light up.”

  Bill knows the waitress—of course—and asks after her family as she refills his Burma-Shave mug (“A shave that’s real, no cuts to heal!”). The mug signals that time has forgotten the CoHo, and Bill tells me stories about the good old days before the oil spill when fishing money gave Cordova a reputation for enjoying itself. Fistfights, cocaine on the bar, bullet holes in the floor. “Maybe there was more money than brains,” he says, at once amused and nostalgic.