Sex, lies and northern explorations: Recent books on Peary, MacMillan, Stefansson, Wilkins and Flaherty CHRISTOPHER, Robert J., 2005 Robert and Frances Flaherty: A documentary life, 1883-1922, Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 453 pages. JENNESS, Stuart E., 2004 The making of an explorer. George Hubert Wilkins and the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913-1916, Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 417 pages. MacMILLAN, Donald B., 2008 How Peary reached the Pole. The personal story of his assistant, introduction by Genevieve M. LeMoine, Susan A. Kaplan, and Anne Witty, Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 307 pages. PÁLSSON, Gísli, 2005 Travelling passions. The hidden life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, translated from the Icelandic by Keneva Kunz, Winnipeg, University of Manitoba Press, 374 pages.

Arctic explorers carry with them an aura of braveness, stamina and tremendous determination. Stories about their travels to exotic places have always attracted the public’s imagination. In the case of the Arctic, the explorers’ description and images of the Inuit they met were also part of the appeal for their publications. However, the personal life of male explorers during their stay in the Arctic kept private if not completely hidden once they were back south. Although some had sexual relationships with Inuit women and even fathered children, neither were acknowledged by them. In this essay, I will focus on four recent books on Arctic explorers from the same period, the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, who shared similar experiences. The explorers are Peary, MacMillan, Stefansson, Wilkins and Flaherty. Keeping in mind the possible influence of senior explorers on younger ones, I will present them in chronological order of their Arctic explorations, starting with MacMillan’s book on Peary’s final expedition to the North Pole in which he took part, then Pálsson’s book on Stefansson, Jenness’s book on Wilkins, and finally, Christopher’s book on Flaherty. All authors use diaries and letters as their main sources of information. Donald B. MacMillan (1874-1970) wrote his book How Peary reached the Pole in 1928, almost 20 years after participating in Robert Peary’s final trip to northwest Greenland, but published it only in 1934. Out of print for many years, Susan Kaplan and Genevieve LeMoine, both from the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum of Bowdoin College, decided to republish it with a new introduction and extra photographs (drawn from hand-tinted glass lantern slides) to commemorate the centennial of Peary’s discovery of the North Pole. Peary’s 1908-1909 North Pole Expedition was the first Arctic journey that MacMillan participated in and it would change his life forever. After this trip, the high school teacher, an alumnus of Bowdoin College like Peary, undertook graduate studies in anthropology at Harvard and became an explorer himself. This first-hand account of difficult and dangerous travels in an exceedingly cold environment is definitely an homage to Robert Peary (1856-1920). MacMillan, who had lost his father at age 9, portrayed Peary as a paternal figure to whom he vowed a Scout-like loyalty: “We were to give him our best, perhaps our hands, our feet, or even our lives, as one did” (p. 160). “The Commander,” as MacMillan often referred to him, is depicted as very concerned about the well-being of his men, who trusted him because his methods “were the results of his own experience over many years” combined with that of the “most efficient men” in the Arctic: the Inuit (p. 97). Unlike previous explorations, the “Peary system” used sled dogs and dispersed caches with precise amounts of food for humans and dogs. The Inughuit, or Polar Eskimos of earlier literature, are indeed very present in the book, although predominantly referred to anonymously as “my Eskimos.” Given that after 1909 the author pursued explorations and research in the North for over 30 years, it is surprising that even in 1928 he did not moderate his initial racist comments about them. Despite the note in the introduction by LeMoine et al. that “[…] although a condescending tone, born of deeply ingrained characteristic of the time, creeps into the prose sometimes, for the most part MacMillan writes of the Inughuit as equals […]” (p. xli), one is not always convinced. Rather, he seems to follow Peary’s paternalistic tone about the Inughuit (e.g., Peary 1898). Even when praising their physical qualities (e.g., p. 177), MacMillan used the …