Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962) was a Canadian explorer. Born William Stephenson, he grew up in Iceland, and read for degrees at the universities of North Dakota and Iowa, where he changed his name to the Icelandic form. He also studied anthropology at Harvard, and went on to live amongst the Inuit people of the Mackenzie Delta in 1906. Somehow or other, this anthropological research qualified Stefansson to organise a trip to the unexplored Arctic on behalf of the Canadian government between 1913 and 16. His belief, incredibly, was that there was a ‘hidden continent’ under the polar ice cap.
He made a number of terrible errors from the start, mostly based around his unwillingness to part with any money, despite the government’s funding. The ship he purchased, the Karluk, was a retired whaler totally unsuitable for exploring the Arctic. He also bought cheap, low-quality thermal gear and inferior tins of pemmican for his men. Three months into the expedition, the Karluk became stuck in the ice, and Stefansson scandalously abandoned the 22 adults and children on board. Half died, but this wasn’t Stefansson’s fault: if only they’d had his survival skills, he explained, they would have been fine.
Two men also died because of the poor quality of the pemmican, with scores of others falling ill. The ‘hidden continent’ was, of course, never found, but the expedition survived two further poor-quality boats to discover new islands in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Stefansson, frankly, underestimated the dangers of the Arctic, and refused to take any responsibility for the Karluk disaster he caused. And he never learned his lesson. In 1922, he published a book entitled The Friendly Arctic, which claimed that the inhospitable region was ‘a friendly place to live in for the man who used common sense’.