Joseph Bernard – explorer extraordinaire

Joseph Bernard’s specially built ship, the Teddy Bear, was known as “the ship that laughs at the ice.” (Photo by Leo Hansen, courtesy of Arktisk Institut)

Joseph Bernard was not like other Arctic explorers and he knew it.

When in old age he settled down to write his autobiography, he admitted on the very first page: “I was a trader, uninterested in fortune; an explorer, uninterested in fame; but consumed with a great curiosity about things of science and nature.”

Joseph-Fidèle Bernard was at various times a fur trader, trapper, miner and explorer in Alaska, Siberia, and northern Canada. He was also an avid photographer and collector of items that interested him and could eventually contribute to his income — ethnological, archeological and natural history objects.

Born in Tignish on Prince Edward Island, he was sickly as a child and unable to attend school past the age of eight. He suffered from whooping cough, a chronic ear infection which led to partial deafness, and tuberculosis.

He wrote, “From the time I was 8 years old until I was 15, I passed more time in bed than out of it.”

But he had been a good student during the three years when he had been at school, and he learned to read in both English and French.

By his late teens, he had recovered enough strength that he was able to work on fishing schooners.

In 1901, when he was 22 years of age, he joined his uncle, well-known Arctic trader Peter Bernard, in Nome, Alaska. He worked there for two years, loading and unloading ships.

Then he and his uncle worked together, hauling freight and trading along the Alaskan coast and into Chukotka, on the Russian side of the Bering Strait. He especially liked working with the Chukchi people and developed a sympathy for them and the harsh conditions under which they lived.

Bernard decided that he wanted to go farther into the Arctic than other traders had gone. He was independent: “I did not have any government, society nor any museum officials to tell me where to go, how long to stay, what to collect or what to do.”

In 1908, he designed a ship and had it built in Seattle to his specifications: “Small and very strong in order to resist the severe ice conditions I knew I would find.”

What he got was a sturdy sailboat with auxiliary power supplied by a 20-horsepower gas engine.

One day, still in Seattle, while he was working in the cabin he overheard a conversation between a little girl and her father who were admiring his ship. Excitedly, the little girl remarked that, if the as-yet unnamed ship were hers, she would name it the Teddy Bear.

Bernard loved children, although he had none of his own. And so he christened his tough little vessel Teddy Bear. She was once described as “the ship that laughs at the ice pack.”

In 1909, Joseph Bernard ventured far into the Arctic on the Teddy Bear. It would be five years before he returned to Nome.

He spent three of those winters in Coronation Gulf, farther west than any white trader had ventured before. He traded with the Inuinnait, a group of Inuit once formerly known as the Copper Eskimos, most of whom had never seen a white man.

Bernard trapped, hunted, traded and collected ornithological and ethnological specimens. When he returned to Nome, the Teddy Bear carried more than two tons of furs, artifacts and natural history specimens.

Bernard later wrote, “I had spent five long winters and five short summers east of Point Barrow and north of everything. I had been worn out and ready to quit the Arctic for good when I had reached Nome in 1914.”

And so he headed south to Seattle. From there he travelled to the eastern United States where he sold much of his collection of ethnographic objects to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia.

Bernard quickly tired of “civilization” and wanted to return north, but he lacked sufficient funds to properly outfit his vessel. So he headed for California to exhibit some of his ethnographic and natural history items at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco.

He followed that by partnering with another man to set up an “Eskimo Village” attraction in Santa Monica.

Joseph Bernard himself became an attraction at the village. He personally demonstrated how to handle a kayak. To “give my spectators a thrill and to advertise my show,” he would even stand up in the kayak — not recommended — and took “many a tumble into the surf” but said it was “all in a day’s work.”

In 1916, he headed back to Nome, and from there farther into the Canadian Arctic than he had been before. He attempted to go through the Northwest Passage, hoping to sail in to the Atlantic Ocean and on to Prince Edward Island. But it was not to be. He wintered twice near Coppermine, then twice at Taylor Island off Victoria Island. He travelled far enough east to visit the Netsilingmiut, at that time the most isolated Inuit in Canada.

In 1920, he returned to Nome with three tons of fur and a collection of ornithological and ethnological specimens and mineral samples. He sold some of his collection to Canada’s national museum. From 1921 until 1924, he traded again into Chukotka, always using the sturdy Teddy Bear. In 1924, on his final trip there, he took the Danish-Greenlandic explorer Knud Rasmussen to visit Siberian Inuit.

In 1929, Joseph Bernard, then 51 years old, settled down in Cordova, Alaska, to a life of fox farming, fishing, and building small boats. He spent his last days in Sitka and died there in 1972 at the age of 93.

The New York Times would call Bernard “the greatest individual hunter of material in the North.”

He is largely forgotten today. That’s a shame. Bernard was a great explorer and collector, who loved the North and its people.

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.