Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Vilhjalmur Stefansson (Icelandic: Vilhjálmur Stefánsson) (November 3, 1879 – August 26, 1962) was a Canadian Arctic explorer and ethnologist. He was born at Gimli, Manitoba, Canada, of Icelandic descent. He was educated in the universities of North Dakota and of Iowa (A.B., 1903). He studied anthropology at the graduate school of Harvard University, and for two years was an instructor there.

Explorations
In 1904 and 1905, he made archæological researches in Iceland. He lived with the Eskimos (referred to now in Canada as the Inuit) of Mackenzie Delta during the winter of 1906-07, returning alone across country via the Porcupine and Yukon rivers.

Under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, he and Dr. R. M. Anderson undertook the ethnological survey of the Central Arctic coasts of the shores of North America from 1908-12. He discovered a group of previously unknown Eskimos, the blond Eskimos, who had never before seen a white man in 1910.

From 1913-16, for the Government of Canada, he took command of an expedition to explore the regions west of Parry Archipelago. Three ships, the Karluk, the Mary Sachs, and the Alaska were employed. His main ship, the Karluk, was beset in ice, crushed, and sunk on January 11, 1914, with the loss of some men who disappeared in making their way to Herald Island. Stefánsson abandoned the Karluk when it became stuck in the ice in August/September of 1913, leaving the crew with Captain Robert Bartlett of Newfoundland stranded on the frozen Arctic Ocean. He resumed his explorations by sledge over the Arctic Ocean, here known as the Beaufort Sea, leaving Collinson Point, Alaska in April, 1914. A supporting sledge turned back 75 miles (121 km) offshore, but he and two men continued onward on one sledge, living largely by his rifle on polar game for 96 days until his party reached the Mary Sachs in the autumn.

In 1921, he encouraged and planned an expedition for four young men to colonize Wrangel Island north of Siberia, where the eleven survivors of the twenty-two men on the Karluk had lived from January to September 1914. Stefansson had designs for forming an exploration company that would be geared towards individuals interested in touring the Arctic Island.

Stefansson originally wanted to claim Wrangel Island for the Canadian government. However due to the dangerous outcome from his initial trip to the island the government refused to assist with the expedition. He then wanted to claim the land for Britain but the British government rejected this claim when it was made by the young men. The raising of the British flag on Wrangel Island, acknowledged Russian territory, caused an international incident.

The four young men, consisting of Fred Maurer from America, Allan Crawford, Lorne Knight and Milton Galle of Canada, were ill equipped, both materially and in experience for the trip. All perished on the island or in an attempt to get help from Siberia across the frozen Chukchi Sea and the only survivor was an Inuk woman named Ada Blackjack whom the men had hired as a seamstress in Nome, Alaska and taken with them.

Blackjack had taught herself survivor skills and cared for the last man on the Island, E. Lorne Knight, until he died of scurvy. Ada Blackjack was rescued in 1923 after two years on Wrangel Island and Stefansson drew the ire of the public and the families for having sent such ill equipped young men to Wrangel. His reputation was largely destroyed by this disaster and that of the Karluk.

His discoveries included new land and the edge of the continental shelf. Stefansson's journey and successes are among the marvels of polar exploration. He extended the discoveries of McClintock. From April, 1914 to June, 1915, he lived on the ice pack. Stefánsson continued his explorations, leaving from Herschel Island on August 23, 1915.

Stefansson was an extremely well-known explorer in his lifetime. Late in life, through his affiliation with Dartmouth College (he was Director of Polar Studies), he became a major figure in the establishment of the US Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) in Hanover, New Hampshire. CRREL-supported research, often conducted in winter on the forbidding summit of Mount Washington, has been key to developing matériel and doctrine to support alpine conflict.

Mr. Stefansson joined The Explorers Club (New York City) in 1908, four years after its founding. He later served as Club President twice: 1919-1922 and 1937-1939. In the all-male Club the Board made quite a splash under Stefansson's reign when it put forth an amendment to its Bylaws that read (Minutes, Jan. 4, 1938), "A Woman's Roll of Honor shall be instituted to which the Board of Directors may name women of the United States and Canada in recognition of the noteworthy achievements and writings in the field of the Club's interests, primarily exploration." Perhaps to comfort fellow members, the article added, "This Woman's Roll of Honor shall be quite outside the Club's organization but shall correspond in dignity to the Honorary Class of (male) members within it."

Stefansson's personal papers and collection of arctic artifacts are maintained and available to the public at the Dartmouth College Library.

Stefansson is frequently quoted as saying that "adventure is a sign of incompetence."

Low-carb diet of meat and fish
Stefansson is also a figure of considerable interest in dietary circles, especially those with an interest in very low-carbohydrate diets. Stefansson documented the fact that most Inuit lived on a diet of about 90% meat and fish, often going 6-9 months a year on nothing but meat and fish--essentially, a zero-carb diet. He found that he and his fellow European-descent explorers were also perfectly healthy on such a diet. When medical authorities questioned him on this, he and a fellow explorer agreed to undertake a study under the auspices of the Journal of the American Medical Association to demonstrate that they could eat a 100% meat diet in a closely-observed laboratory setting for the first several weeks, with paid observers for the rest of an entire year. The results were published in the Journal of the AMA, and both men were perfectly healthy on such a diet, without vitamin supplementation or anything else in their diet except meat.

Literature

 * Vilhjalmur Stefansson: My Life with the Eskimo; The Macmillan Company, New York, 1912
 * Vilhjalmur Stefansson: Stefánsson-Anderson Expedition, 1909-12; Anthropological Papers, AMNH, vol. XIV., New York, 1914
 * Vilhjalmur Stefansson: Not by Bread Alone; The Macmillan Company, New York, 1946
 * Vilhjalmur Stefansson: Discovery - the autobiography of Vilhjalmur Stefansson; McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1964
 * Vilhjalmur Stefansson: Cancer: Disease of civilization? An anthropological and historical study; Hill and Wang, Inc., New York, 1960
 * William R. Hunt: Stef: A Biography of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Canadian Arctic explorer; University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 1986, ISBN 077480247-2
 * Jennifer Niven: The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk, Hyperion Books, 2000
 * Jennifer Niven: Ada Blackjack: A True Story Of Survival In The Arctic, Hyperion Books, 2003
 * Gísli Pálsson: Writing on Ice: The Ethnographic Notebooks of Vilhjalmur Stefansson; Dartmouth College Press, University Press of New England, Hanover, 2001, ISBN 158465119-9
 * Gísli Pálsson: The legacy of Vilhjálmur Stefansson, the Stefansson Arctic Institute (and individual authors), 2000
 * Vilhjalmur Stefansson(ed): Great Adventures and Explorations; The Dial Press, 1947
 * Richard Diubaldo: Stefansson and the Canadian Arctic; McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, 1978.