Britain's Deadliest Arctic Expedition

Dan Snow's History Hit

The episode explores the harrowing saga of Viljalmur Stefansson's Canadian Arctic Expedition and the subsequent struggle for survival on Wra

Key takeaways

• Viljalmur Stefansson claimed to find a lost tribe of blonde-haired Vikings in the Arctic, a claim later debunked by DNA testing.
• Captain Robert Bartlett led a desperate 700-mile trek across sea ice to reach Siberia and raise the alarm for stranded crew members.

Main topics

• Canadian Arctic Expedition
• Viljalmur Stefansson

Notable quotes

He was a complete charlatan. He is a fantastic Jekyll and Hyde figure.

Conclusion

A gripping look at how personal ambition and geopolitical maneuvering

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History It and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com slash subscribe. Speaker 4 (0:35) Imagine for a second how you would retrieve a dead seal from the Arctic Ocean. It's probably not something you've asked yourself before, but it is worth it. You'll see why. You might find yourself in this situation. You could perhaps use a rope or a gaff, a piece of stick with a hook at the end. It might be useful to have a boat. Or if you're Captain Robert Bartlett, you could simply hurl yourself face first across a sheet of wafer-thin sea ice. clamp your front teeth around the seal's flipper and hope that your companion is then strong enough to haul you back across the ice with your dinner safely in your mouth. So believe it or not, that is the strategy that Bartlett and his Inuit guide, Kartakhtavik, went with. And astonishingly, that was by no means the strangest or hardest part of their journey. We're back in spring of 1914, and these two men are attempting to cross 700 miles of treacherous frozen ocean and rugged coastline. They're travelling from Wrangell Island towards a friendly port in Siberia. Behind them, they had left an expedition in catastrophe. Ahead lay frozen wastes, a bit of open water, blizzards, temperatures approaching 60 below zero. Speaker 4 (1:58) Now you have heard me on this podcast before talk about the greatest high latitude journeys of all time, the greatest Arctic and Antarctic journeys of all time. Fortunately, I do apologise, I have another one for you. I don't know where this fits in the league table, but my God, it's up there. This is a journey that starts with an epic struggle against Arctic sea ice, crevasses, shifting flows, stretches of slush-filled water that forces men to crawl on their bellies. Their dogs, understandably, regarded the whole enterprise as a really terrible idea, and at one point the dogs broke free and attempted to return to Wrangel Island, forcing Bartlett to spend hours pursuing them with a tin of food, pretending it was dinner time. And then there were the seals. Kartakovic would shoot them for food, but then their slippery corpses would disappear beneath broken ice. So Bartlett devised this ingenious retrieval system. He would slide across the ice, he would seize the seals with his mouth, and then Kartakovic would... hold onto his feet to stop him plunging into the freezing water. The seal meat, once they did recover it, froze almost instantly. The men had to thaw it in their underwear and they ate it raw. This was an astonishing feat of endurance and ingenuity. And it is just one of the extraordinary episodes in the story of Wilhelm Steffensen's Canadian Arctic Expedition. It's an expedition that set out in 1913 in search of new lands and knowledge in the name of expanding the British Empire. It instead became a desperate saga of survival, isolation, and rescue. Today we're going to dig into that story with the help of one of the best in the business, Giles Milton, author of Empire at the Edge of the World, Endurance and Madness in the High Arctic. It is a remarkable tale of endurance, mutiny, Feuds, geopolitics, ambition, treachery, in the furthest flung corners of the world, there's even, we think, a murder. This is a story that I'd never heard of, and I'm incredibly embarrassed to admit it. But once heard, you'll never forget it. Let's get into it. Speaker 4 (4:17) Charles, great to have you back on the podcast. Great to be invited on. Thank you for having me. It's been great. I'm very, very glad you got this new book out. It's a fascinating one. Tell me, who on earth is Wilhelm Mir? Speaker 1 (4:27) So he is Wilhelm Stefan. Wilhelm, okay. So this is one of the great celebrity explorers of the early 20th century, which no one will have heard of. And the reason why they won't have heard of him is the reason why I wrote my book. He was actually born William Stevenson, but he was so totally obsessed with the Vikings that he changed his name to this Viljalma Stefansson, which frankly no one could say or pronounce. And so he became from that point on known simply as Stefansson. Speaker 4 (4:58) Isn't that interesting? So the Vikings have long exercised a very powerful grip on the world, but the British imagination. Absolutely. So he was British, he was Canadian, and he was Speaker 1 (5:09) American. He had these three nationalities. And he was obsessed with the Vikings. And what happened in 1911, and this was really the starting point for the whole story of his career, his career in the Arctic, is that there have for many, many years have been rumors of a lost tribe that lived up in the high Arctic. And the high Arctic was unexplored at this point, a million square miles of deep frozen wilderness. But these stories persisted that there was a lost tribe who'd been living up in the high Arctic for generations, cut off from the rest of humankind. And so Stephenson goes off to try and find them. In 1911, he comes back two years later with the most astonishing story, which becomes headline news around the world. because he has found the lost tribe in the middle of nowhere. And they don't have dark hair and dark eyes like the Inuit. They have blonde hair and they have blue eyes. And Stephenson tells the world's press that he's found the survivors of the Viking colony in Greenland, which had gone missing in about 1400. causes a sensation around the world and makes him suddenly, overnight, he becomes the most celebrated explorer of the early 20th century. And Speaker 4 (6:25) what makes it very resonant today, and we should bear in mind the strategic context, which is high latitude exploration is a thing in this period. So it's the blank space on the map, as you might put it, have been sort of filled in elsewhere. So is the Antarctic and the Arctic the sort of exciting frontier? for fans of exploration, adventure, and resource extraction and imperialism in this period. Speaker 1 (6:47) Yeah, I think the Arctic was the last area of the map where no one knew what was there. And there'd been rumours, you know, that there was a continent up in the high Arctic just waiting to be discovered. And so this was sort of the holy grail of exploration. And this is one of the things that attracted Stephenson. But it wasn't just a question of oil, gas, rare metals and all that sort of stuff that he was in search of. Stephenson was great friends with the Wright brothers. And the Wright brothers, just a few years before, had invented the... the aeroplane. And Steffensen saw this invention and he said, this is going to change the future of the world. And in those days, of course, this is a very early days of aviation, you know, planes had to refuel every couple of hundred miles, you know. And he said, well, if you're going to fly from, say, London to Japan, you're going to fly over the Arctic. And that means you're going to have to refuel your plane every couple of hundred miles, which means we need to have all of these islands in the Arctic scattered over the Arctic Ocean. under our control because they're going to be of vital geopolitical and strategic importance in the future. And he said, we'll build little bases on these islands and they're going to be called, a thing called airports, you know, and we're going to stop there and we're Speaker 4 (7:59) going Speaker 1 (7:59) to refuel our planes there. So there was a very serious reason behind, you know, this was not just... planting the Union Jack in some distant frozen shore. This was a strategic and geopolitical sort of challenge that he'd set himself to bring the entire Arctic under the British Empire. The Speaker 4 (8:16) corridors Speaker 1 (8:16) of power in Ottawa Speaker 4 (8:17) are very interested in this. What really gets me excited, the blondies lost in the Arctic waste or the fact that the Canadians want to keep pushing north. They want to claim territory, Speaker 1 (8:27) keep pushing the bounds of that British Empire. Steffensen got back from this Viking Eskimo as they became known expedition. And he was such a celebrity, you know, as I said, this was splashed across the world's newspapers, that he was almost immediately was put in charge of what was going to be the greatest Arctic expedition ever to set sail up into the polar north. And this was the Canadian Arctic Expedition, which was to last five years from 1913 to 1918. And its goal was really... to explore this huge area of frozen wilderness. And any land that was found, they were going to plant the flag in it and claim it for the British Empire, which would immediately bring the Arctic under the protection of the Royal Navy. So this was an important goal. But the goal slightly shifted. And this is really the story behind my book, that under international law, you couldn't just stick the Union Jack in some frozen beach and say, right, this is ours now. Under international law, you had to send colonists there. So you had to prove that this was a viable place to live. And so the Canadian Arctic expedition under Stephenson would change tack as the years go on. And Stephenson would decide, OK, we've got to colonize these places. And this, of course. is where it began to go badly wrong. Because you're going to send young, you know, bright young things up onto islands where the temperature falls as low as minus 60 degrees Celsius in the winter. Not pleasant places to live. And Speaker 4 (9:55) just for context as well, Roald Amundsen, who was first to the South Pole for his forgotten achievement, he was first to fly over the North Pole, wasn't he? But that was in the 1920s. That's a long way off in the future. This is unexplored. No Speaker 1 (10:05) one knows what's up there. This is pristine, unexplored. deep frozen wilderness. No one has any idea what's there. They believe there's going to be a continent up at the kind of covering the top of the world, but they simply don't know. So this is a real pioneering expedition. And Stephenson, what makes him so unusual? You know, we're used to seeing photos of these explorers setting off in their tweed jackets and worsted and, you know, hopelessly ill-equipped. Stephenson... had spent a lot of time learning the skills from the local indigenous Inuit. He knew how to keep himself alive in freezing temperatures. He knew how to kill a seal, which is an extremely difficult thing to do. But if you can kill a seal, you've got food to keep yourself alive, you've got fuel for lighting and heating, and then you can use the skin to make clothing. So being able to kill a seal was absolutely crucial to everything. So Steffensen, before setting off on this adventure, He was really extremely well-equipped to set off into the unknown. The problem is, of course, he's taking with him some of the world's greatest scientists to go on this expedition. They have absolutely zero knowledge of survival in extreme temperatures. And so this is where it's going to go horribly wrong. Speaker 4 (11:20) So he sounds, Teffensen sounds like an interesting character because on the one hand, he has made up this, we should finish this in case people don't realise that he's made up this fact about a tribe of Viking descendants. That's just... pure nonsense. And yet there are elements of his character and outlook that are quite interesting. He's not just a sort of total fantasist. Speaker 1 (11:38) He's such a peculiar figure, Stephenson. And one of the things that... drew me to the story really was that he was brilliant at manipulating the press and using the press for his own advantage. You know, he was the first explorer to set off with his own press man, his own photographer to record, in fact, cinematographer to record everything on moving film, what he was doing. The press really builds him up into this incredible celebrity figure. And he's going to use that, exploit it mercilessly to get everything he wants. So the Canadian Arctic expedition, this Expedition is basically bankrolled by the Canadian state who give him unlimited amounts of money to set off into the unknown. It's unheard of. No one's ever had this before. But he's so sort of gregarious. He's so charming. He's so brilliant at twisting politicians around his little finger. He gets everything he wants when he goes off on this expedition. Speaker 4 (12:34) Is he also good at referring to the fact that there will be a... Scramble for the Arctic, as there was a scramble for Africa, a scramble for us, I mean, are the Russians a sort of feature here? Does he talk about other people taking advantage of these high latitude exploration? Very Speaker 1 (12:48) much so. He describes the Arctic Ocean as the 20th century Mediterranean. He has this vision of cities springing up on the shores of the Arctic