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

by C. B. Bernard

  Though Bill is somewhat isolated here—his children, grandson, and most of his siblings live elsewhere—he’s a warm and generous guy, gregarious personality lighting up whenever he talks about his grandson. I wonder if Joe was the same way. “Joe mentioned in his journals a number of times that he liked children,” I say. “Was that your experience?”

  “Sometimes. He loved kids, and he was real good to us. He could be a crabby old guy, but he was great. A real gentleman.”

  “In nearly every photo, he’s wearing a suit and tie.”

  “Yeah, he was like that, just proper. Didn’t cuss, really. He went to church every Sunday too. I don’t think he ever missed. He was hard of hearing, and it got real bad as he got older. We’d go to church on Sunday, and Uncle Joe would read out loud, whispering to himself, but it was much louder than he realized. It used to drive my mother nuts. He’d get this sort of high-pitched feedback in his hearing aids that everyone could hear. Kind of a shrieking—but he couldn’t hear it and had no idea it was happening.”

  When Joe got older, he moved into a trailer behind Bill’s family’s home and walked down to the house for meals. With so much of his journals devoted to solitude in the Arctic, it’s strange to think of him passing quiet Sunday dinners with family. Maybe the family found it equally strange to think of him in the Arctic.

  “Was he Captain Joe the Arctic explorer to you or just Uncle Joe?”

  “Just Uncle Joe,” Bill says.

  “What was he like? How did he speak? Did he still have a French accent?”

  “No, not that I remember.”

  “He didn’t swear? Did he drink?”

  “No. He was polite as can be.”

  “He didn’t drink?”

  “Oh, he might have had a beer at dinner now and then or something, but I don’t think I ever saw him drunk.”

  At dinner with Bob the other night, I also tried to learn more about Joe’s personality. Bob remembers his great-uncle as more gruff and curmudgeonly, with a character a little less pristine. “He used to cuss all the time,” Bob said. “He used to drink too. He was always brewing beer in his cabin or fermenting something. I remember all the bottles up on the shelves with balloons on them. What do you think was in those balloons if he wasn’t making some kind of drink?”

  Bill’s descriptions don’t line up with his brother’s. Why the discrepancy? It’s hard to say. Time, perhaps, and the mutability of memory. Bill is protecting his great-uncle’s image too. We naturally polish the memories of those we love. But the way each remembers Joe meshes with his own personality too. The entire time in Cordova, I don’t recall hearing Bill swear even once. But Bob uses curses as punctuation, one of the few people left who can teach me new ones. Bill is upbeat and cheery, Bob darker and more intense. They each remember Joe as they saw him through their own eyes, his image colored by their own personalities.

  “He never drove a car,” Bob said. “He used to walk everywhere, and as he got older his hearing got real bad. It made it hard for him to . . . participate. That could be hard to watch sometimes.”

  “Uncle Joe was popular with the ladies,” Bill says, “but he didn’t relate to them in the same way he related to men.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He could be unpleasant to my mother,” he says. “Oh, he gave her an awful time. It was so easy for him with my dad, but he just . . . I don’t know. He just didn’t know what to do with my mother, you know?”

  “Did you ever know him to have a girlfriend or a partner of any kind?”

  Bill thinks for a moment—choosing his words cautiously. “When he was harbormaster here, his office on the water was small. He kept a calendar hanging there from the Club Bar, with pictures of naked women on it. My brothers and I used to stare at them until Dad told us to knock it off.” He pauses. “There were two brothels in town. That was kind of how it was then. I heard rumors that Uncle Joe visited them, but never saw it for myself.”

  Bill remembers him pulling chunks of frozen fish from the freezer to gnaw on, a habit he developed in the Arctic and never quite shook. “We would just watch him do it, our eyes this big,” he says, holding his hands wide in front of his face. “That was something to see. It was kind of gross.”

  Bob told me the same story with the same opinion: “Gross.”

  Joe’s love of science also remained with him when he left the Arctic. “He always had some experiment or another going, tinkering with things, mixing things, taking them apart,” Bill says.

  Bob described his cabin as filled with scientific and historical books, tools, papers. “He could be a crank.”

  Bill agreed. “He was a gentleman, but he could definitely be a crank. He liked to be alone.”

  Joe survived the Arctic. By the 1950s and 1960s he had aged into a traveler from another century, a man from a different world entirely. If the residual effects of the life he’d lived were stubbornness, grumpiness, irritability, and a preference for solitude, who could blame him? Those are not unreasonable allowances to grant an old man who had contributed to the world what Joe had. Reentering civilization—especially in a world rapidly modernizing—no doubt posed challenges that he never wholly overcame.

  “Joe lived in the wild for so long, lived off his rifle,” Bob said, admiringly. “After that, he turned a little feral, I think. You’d have to.”

  After breakfast, Bill and I visit the Cordova Historical Museum, which shares a building with the public library. That’s changing, according to Director Cathy Sherman, who welcomes us warmly. A building under construction will provide new homes for both facilities as well as the city’s administrative offices sometime in 2013.

  “It’s exciting,” Bill says. “A new home for Uncle’s Joe’s stuff.”

  The exhibit isn’t large—just one small portion of the museum’s collections—but it’s remarkable for its depiction of an era and part of the world not otherwise visible. On display in its original case is Joe’s sextant from the Teddy Bear, manufactured by the Hezzanith Instrument Company of London, along with an inspection certificate from 1928 listing “Sextant No. X465” as “examined and found to reach a Class A standard.” This instrument guided him throughout the Arctic and brought him home each year. There is the original Department of Commerce Bureau of Navigation Bill of Sale for the Teddy Bear and a few framed photographs of an older Joe standing in the doorway of his house at Odiak Slough—where Bill’s stands today—looking soberly at the camera. I ask Bill to stand beside it, and without prompting, he adopts the same dour expression. Photo albums show maps of Joe’s voyages, labeled chronologically, and images of Chukchi, Eskimo, and Inuit families and hunters, the ships of the explorer fleet, the unforgiving landscape.

  Bill Bernard poses in front of a photo of his great uncle Joe at the Cordova Historical Museum.

  A description of the collection says that “Cap” turned down offers to have his Arctic manuscript published when he was younger, but as he aged he became more interested in the idea. Though Peter’s daughter, Augusta—the museum calls her his niece, but she was actually his first cousin—edited earlier versions, he turned to his friend Betty Helm for help with later versions.

  Helm was the US magistrate in Cordova from 1946 to 1955 and later became a nun: Sister Joan Helm of Gig Harbor, Washington. I’d only recently learned about her during a conversation with Paul Krejci, a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who has been studying Joe’s explorations. Between Augusta’s heavy hand and later edits made by a judge-turned-nun, it’s little wonder the rough spots have vanished from Joe’s journals.

  A few years ago Krejci came to Cordova and spent a week picking Bill’s brain about Joe, whom he has researched from an academic perspective. He hopes to write about him, and if he does, Joe’s story may get the academic treatment it deserves. It’s nice to think that Captain Joseph
F. Bernard and the Teddy Bear might someday occupy a bookshelf alongside Stefansson, Anderson, Jenness, and the others with whom he occupied the Arctic. But that’s Paul’s book. I’m here on a more personal mission. I’ve lived with Joe’s ghost for more than a decade, haunted by this malleable fragment of a life glimpsed in journals, letters, photos, and footnotes—ink echoes of long-distant family. I’m here to tell his story, the one he told for years to anyone who would listen. I’ve also come to learn more about myself: as a man, a Bernard, a writer.

  Back at Bill’s, I crack open a beer and flip through Joe’s photo albums once more. Many of the Arctic photos I’ve seen before. In Juneau I spent a day poring over materials at the Alaska State Library Historical Collections, much of them donated by Bob DeArmond, who shared some of the first information I learned about Joe shortly before he died in 2010. All those times he called me but couldn’t remember what he wanted to tell me? This was it: He had an entire box full of Joe’s prints.

  Joe also saved documents and souvenirs in his albums, including newspaper clippings about him or that piqued his interest. One from the Boston Globe recounts a 1958 visit he made to see his cousin, Joseph A. Bernard, former lieutenant governor of Prince Edward Island, in Boston. “Famed P.E.I. Cousins Meet Again in Hub,” the headline says. Another cites his inclusion in the 1960–61 edition of Leaders in Science, an award that surely thrilled him. A letter from Dr. R. M. Anderson begins “My Dear ‘Yo,’” and refers to the family’s Acadian heritage:

  You told me once that les Anglais were not able to catch your ancestor because he was too speedy on his legs when they deported some of the other Acadians to Louisiana, where they fought the “Bostonnais” in the American Civil War and are still presumably voting the Democratic ticket. Well, I am glad that the Bernards are still flourishing, as they are fine people, as far as I have seen them.

  Joe visited the aging Anderson in Ottawa in 1957 and took a picture of him with his wife, Ida Mae, and their grandchildren. Three years later he returned to Ottawa for Ida Mae’s funeral. He kept the memorial program and her obituary, mourning from a distance along with his friend.

  His pictures range from turn-of-the-twentieth-century Nome through the late 1960s, and with no strict organization, depict unlikely collisions of worlds and periods. A photo of a toddling Bill with his two brothers shares a page with images of a Chukchi Eskimo family on the Diomede islands and Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen on the deck of the Teddy Bear, the latter a reminder that Joe’s path intersected those of many who made their names exploring the Arctic. In a trench coat and fedora, clutching a leather briefcase, Rasmussen looks more like a suburban commuter riding a train through a John Cheever story than one of the world’s better-known explorers on his way to the Siberian hinterlands. Joe saved a 1925 letter from him too: “You may be assured that it is with great pleasure and appreciation I remember the time we spent together, and that I consider it quite an adventure to have met you. . . . Your literary and scientific work still has my greatest interest, as you really have a fund of knowledge that nobody else has.”

  Famed Danish explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen aboard the Teddy Bear.

  Unidentified people lean against automobiles from the 40s and 50s, a pouting man in waders holds a giant salmon, bears wander across beaches. Copper River Inuit and Chukchi Eskimo load the Teddy Bear. Ice surrounds abandoned whale boats, and men hoist dead polar bears onto ships. Joe stands on the deck of his schooner, confident, proud, able, young. The Teddy Bear lies at anchor at Bernard Harbour, snow deeper than her mainmast boom.

  Some images capture the people Joe knew in the Arctic: Old John the Sailmaker, Gus Sandstrom, Dr. Anderson, Storker Storkerson, Billy Banksland sealing with a harpoon, Tulugak’s younger brother Ayiak and his daughter, Anaetsea. Tulugak stands over a polar bear he’s killed, his spear protruding from the improbably large body, the two figures surrounded by an endless blankness of ice.

  The pictures jump across decades and miles, some old fading Kodachromes, others hand-printed black-and-whites. Natives line up for Joe’s camera, as fascinated by the white interloper as he was by them. One taken in Coronation Gulf shows an Inuit in a dapper derby hat. Joe’s note on the photo: “I had many of these, sold in trade.” Not quite selling ice to the Eskimos, but close.

  Some photos represent more of Joe’s life outside the Arctic. His parents peer out of one frame, stern and unsmiling, the family resemblance so strong that his father could pass for a time-traveling brother of Bill and Bob. Pasted next to it, his father’s obituary from the Island Farmer. Others chronicle not only his own history in Alaska, but the history of Alaska itself. A prospector pans a stream during the heyday of the gold rush. Makeshift tents and cabins spring up around a new mining camp. Crews build the harbor jetty at the Snake River in Nome. A man stands on the frozen sea beside the passenger steamship Oregonian in 1901. The schooner Olga sails during the 1909 storm that wrecked her near Nome. The steamship Yukon leaves Seward in 1924, twenty-two years before she ran aground at Cape Fairfield.

  Joe returned to Nome at statehood for an address by Alaska’s first governor, William Egan. Next to his pictures of Egan, he pasted a certification of his voter participation in Alaska’s first presidential election. A year later he flew to Dawson, the Yukon city where the Klondike gold rush began. Strange to think of him as a tourist where his Uncle Pete joined the stampede. A photo shows him standing on a tarmac beside a Cordova Air jet, a jarring anachronism. On other flights he took over-the-wing pictures looking down at the ocean below. What must he have felt to see the ocean from that vantage point after spending so much of his life upon it?

  But it’s the photos from his later years that provide clues about his personality and a sense of him as a man. He smiles brightly in many taken during his younger days of exploration, but in only a few taken later in life. His worsening deafness isolated him, his solitude turned to loneliness, his stubbornness made him gruff.

  In one he stands in the cabin he built himself on Odiak Slough wearing grease-stained coveralls and a work cap, interrupted in the middle of some project or experiment. He’s not smiling, but in his element he looks at ease, happy even. It offers a stark contrast to another picture taken when he was older. He sits on a sofa sandwiched between two men the same age, gray-haired, elderly. The other men both smile at the camera, but Joe, wedged between them in a red cardigan and necktie, looks miserable, hands awkward in his lap, elbows and shoulders tucked in. It’s a terrible picture. Why did he choose to keep it? The men in the photo must have meant something to him, his posture not a symptom of his feelings for them but his general discomfort around other people. I’m sure it’s the product of an ill-timed shutter release rather than a window into his soul, but at the same time it’s a portrait of a man who never quite adapted to civilization.

  He survived years in one of the least hospitable places on earth, wide open spaces, savage conditions. “My gun, practically, was my living,” he says in one of the newspaper articles he saved, summing up a simple fact of his life. After having all of the North in which to stretch your legs, who wants to squeeze onto a couch for a photo between two old farts in their Sunday best?

  I’m not the first to try to help Joe tell his story. In 1926 Canadian novelist Madge MacBeth wrote him to propose collaborating on a book about his life. MacBeth saw the story for what it could be: a collection of exploits of a dashing free trader, exploring a winter wasteland always one step ahead of the trained and funded government explorations. The Arctic Voyages of the Schooner Teddy Bear had all the hallmarks of a good adventure story, including an unlikely and humble hero, storms on the high seas, impossible conditions, conflict with “noble savages.”

  But Joe always saw his tale in a different light. He wanted to contribute to science, as he told her in response.

  Now my dear Mrs. Macbeth, my accumulation of Arctic information may not be so extensive and valuab
le to science as you imagine it to be, however it might be possible as you suggest that it could be publish in a popular style, and not destroying whatever scientific value it might contain, as for my collabora with you in a publication be a-sure that I’ll be more then glad to, but how that can be done is more than I can say, it seem to me that ther is no other way but throught personal interview, Ottawa would be the proper place to do such work, for me to go East within the near future at present seem impassible, and for you to make the journey to Alaska for that purpose it’s not lickly for it in wort it, then how can we cooperate with eatch other? The chief difficult with me, is, that as I have made a financial failure of my Arctic venture, witch the greatis part of my life as been spend without a thought of the rainy-days, I now find myself oblige to begain life an’new in a difference country witch it will take me some time of hard work to get my self a foot-hold, I have now sat my mind to this locality.

  Two years earlier he’d arrived in Cordova after a second extended Arctic voyage and a handful of shorter trips, his career as an explorer behind him. Substitute “writing” for “trading” in his confession that he’d given himself to it without thought for the “rainy days” and made a “financial failure,” and you have another connection between us. Joe was forty-seven when he wrote this letter, just a handful of years older than I am now, a somewhat advanced age to begin a new life in a new place with a new career, so much work and effort just to reach the starting line again.

  He also addresses MacBeth’s suggestion that she work with him to weave a narrative into his manuscript. “I my to understand by your suggesting of narrative style to mien that fiction is to be add to it, Ho, Ho, O well its what nearly every Arctic traveler as done, and ther ar doing it yet and getting by with it even do some of them where authorize Explor.” It’s worth noting that Macmillan had published Stefansson’s The Friendly Arctic and My Life With the Eskimo by the time Joe wrote this.