The Polar Regions: An Environmental History by Adrian Howkins

Author:Adrian Howkins [Howkins, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509502004
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-11-20T02:00:00+00:00

This was one of Knight’s last diary entries, and two months later he died. As he mentioned in his diary, this was the second time in his short life that he had experienced scurvy. The first was when he was on an “ice trip” with his hero Stefansson in 1917. Reading his description of his slow death from insufficient vitamins, it is difficult to retain the optimistic idea of a “friendly Arctic.”

Knight’s three companions were never seen again after they made an attempt to cross the sea ice to Siberia. The rescue of Ida Blackjack in 1923 brought to light the fiasco of Stefansson’s Wrangel Island scheme. Stefansson faced numerous recriminations, not least the criticism he received from Roald Amundsen. Wrangel Island was formally occupied by the Soviet Union in 1926. Despite this tragic setback, Stefansson continued to promote the idea of Arctic development as if nothing had gone wrong. Many of his ideas today sound a little odd: he believed, for example, that Arctic musk oxen were related to Scottish Highland cattle.34 Until 1928 Stefansson promoted the benefits of an all-meat diet in order to show that living off the land in the Arctic was not only possible, but preferable for good health. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Stefansson is that his ideas were not dismissed as completely crazy. In fact he remained tremendously influential throughout his life and his idea of a “friendly Arctic” provided the intellectual foundations for many development schemes in the North. Even the Soviet Union would take up many of Stefansson’s ideas in support of their own attempts to colonize the Arctic.35

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