The Conservative Archipelago, Part 1

The Canadian Arctic Expedition, led by Vihljalmur Stefansson, was sponsored by the Canadian government and was active in the western Arctic from 1913 to 1918.

It was intended to carry out geographical exploration and scientific work. The expedition had two divisions. The Northern Division, under Stefansson himself, was concerned primarily with exploration, while the Southern Division, led by Rudolph Anderson, conducted scientific activities in and around Coronation Gulf.

Stefansson, as was the case with most Arctic explorers, was very liberal in bestowing place names on new lands he discovered. In the case of most explorers, the places they named already had perfectly good Inuktitut names, which the explorers generally ignored.

But Stefansson’s case was different. The new lands he was discovering were genuinely new to humanity. Many of them had never been seen by humans before, so he was perfectly within his right to bestow names.

The names he gave were generally not descriptive in nature, but instead glorified politicians or influential bureaucrats in southern Canada, people usually associated with the governing Conservative party. The idea was to reward them with a place name that would live on, and probably also to curry favour for support he might need in future expeditions.

In the winter of 1914-15, Stefansson and three other men, Storker Storkerson, Ole Andreasen, and Karl Thomsen, wintered at Cape Kellett on southwestern Banks Island, in the vicinity of present-day Sachs Harbour.

In 1915, they travelled north from there. Stefansson was an extremely hardy explorer who believed in living off the land and sea as much as possible, and so they travelled with a minimum of rations.

In June, they reached Prince Patrick Island, which had been discovered over half a century earlier by Sir Leopold McClintock on his expedition in search of traces of the missing Franklin expedition. Stefansson and crew travelled northeast along its coast.

Just past the northern tip of Prince Patrick Island, they found an area of reefs which McClintock had called Polynia Islands, for no apparent reason.

On an Admiralty Chart published after McClintock’s explorations, there appears an island called Ireland’s Eye, although it is a mystery why it appears at all, for McClintock made no reference to naming such a place.

Stefansson and his party then crossed Ballantyne Strait to a new island, eventually to be called Brock Island, but at this time given no name at all.

Storker Storkerson was the first to sight it: “A new land a great deal larger than any of the scattered islands we had been seeing all day.”

Storkerson was Norwegian and, Stefansson wrote, “Norwegians are the greatest people in the world for celebrating every conceivable happening by some sort of feast,” and so they celebrated “with a sort of stew or soup made of … malted milk and… [biscuit] crumbs.”

There is considerable confusion over the name of the island Stefansson had found. In his book about the expedition, The Friendly Arctic, he does not mention the name Brock Island in the text.

In his chapter “Exploring the New Land,” the island remains unnamed. And there is no reference to it by that name in the volume’s index. In fact, he had discovered two islands and thought they were one.

Eventually — before publication of The Friendly Arctic in 1921 — Stefansson realized his error and subsequently named the first island Brock Island, after Reginald Walter Brock, who had been director of the Geological Survey of Canada and was named deputy minister of mines in Sir Robert Borden’s Conservative government in 1914.

Stefansson apparently realized his mistake before the book’s publication, for a map of his 1916 work includes Brock Island as distinct from Borden Island.

In his autobiography, Discovery (1964), all Stefansson says is, “On June 20, [1915], we landed on the unknown coast of what we were to name Brock Island.”

“We did not find out until much later that what we had discovered was really two islands, the second … being much larger than the first.”

He blamed his mistake on the sea ice: “The nature of the ice that I had crossed to reach the second had not clearly indicated that it was sea ice.”

On its discovery in 1915, Stefansson referred to the unnamed Brock Island and the larger island to its east only as First Land.

By 1916, he had named his discovery Borden Island, after the Conservative prime minister. Robert Laird Borden, born in Nova Scotia, was Canada’s eighth prime minister, serving in that capacity from 1911 to 1920. He was a strong supporter of Stefansson.

The index to The Friendly Arctic, refers to “Borden Island, discovery of,” although it remained nameless in the narrative at the time of its discovery.  When Stefansson realized he had discovered two islands, he gave the name Brock Island to the first-discovered island, retaining Borden Island for the larger one.

But he was in error again. In fact, there were three islands. But more on that in the next instalment.

Taissumani is an occasional column that recalls events of historical interest. Kenn Harper is a historian and writer who lived in the Arctic for over 50 years. He is the author of Give Me Winter, Give Me Dogs: Knud Rasmussen and the Fifth Thule Expedition, and Thou Shalt Do No Murder, among other books. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.