Prisoners of the North by Pierre Berton Page A

to see the shadow of the big man she had known and loved. They had corresponded regularly, but now, in one last letter, he rejected her invitation to come to her. “I want you to remember me as the man I was,” he wrote back. “I am no more Joe Boyle.”
    He spent his last days in the spring of 1923 at the home of his old Klondike friend Ted Bredenberg in Hampton Hill, Middlesex, reminiscing about the old Yukon days, rereading Service’s verse, and, in Marie’s words, “longing to get back to his mountains, his river rapids, his great forests and silent snows.” He did not speak of his illness and fought it to the end, as his last words make clear. The date was April 14, 1923. He had spent a peaceful but sleepless night and now he seemed ready for action. “I want to get up,” he said, and struggled to raise himself, only to fall back upon the pillow. At the age of fifty-six, the King of the Klondike was dead.
    Though he did not die intestate as some writers have suggested, most of his great fortune had been dissipated as a result of his many philanthropies, the expense of his failing dredging company, and his costly and varied exploits in Europe. Marie learned the full details of his passing in a letter from his former Russian interpreter, a trusted employee, Dimitri Tzegintzov, who planned Boyle’s funeral service. She responded in an emotional and affecting twelve-page letter in which she described the special understanding between the two as “something deep, real, strong, I may say holy, based upon a perfect belief, faith, and respect.” Fate, she wrote, had brought them together. “We had clasped hands at the hour of deepest distress and humiliation and nothing could part us in understanding. No one knew his heart better than I. Women played but little part in his life and he had a wealth of love unspent … when he had his stroke I was the haven in which he anchored for awhile.”
    When she visited his grave at Hampton Hill—and she returned to visit it almost yearly on her visits to England—she was not impressed. She immediately arranged for a more appropriate memorial in the shape of an ancient six-foot stone slab to be placed atop the grave, engraved with the insignia of the Order of Maria Regina together with Boyle’s name and relevant dates. There was something more. At the foot of the slab appeared a line from “The Spell of the Yukon” that she had often heard from his own lips and that would serve as his special epitaph:
Man with the heart of a Viking and the simple faith of a child .

CHAPTER 2
The Blond Eskimo

    Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the last of the old-time explorers, on a hunt with the Canadian Arctic Expedition in 1914 .
    —ONE—
    In the tangled history of Arctic exploration, it is safe to say that no man had so much calumny visited upon him nor enjoyed such public admiration as did the Canadian-born Icelander who called himself Vilhjalmur Stefansson.
    In the early decades of the twentieth century he was the best known and also the most controversial of that singular breed of venturers who set out to unlock the secrets of the frozen world. His supporters ranged from Sir Robert Borden, the Prime Minister of Canada, to Gilbert Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society. His critics included two fellow explorers, Roald Amundsen, the first to sail a ship through the Northwest Passage, and Fridtjof Nansen, the first to cross the formidable Greenland ice cap.
    Richard J. Diubaldo, who has written the most critical study of Stefansson’s Arctic career, admits that his explorations between 1906 and 1918 were monumental by any standard. In his third and best-known expedition, sponsored in its entirety by the Canadian government, Stefansson discovered some of the world’s last major unknown land masses—Brock, Borden, Meighen, and Lougheed islands—thus identifying one hundred thousand square miles of territory in Canada. In addition, he outlined the continental shelf from