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The Last Gentleman Adventurer: Coming of Age in the Arctic

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The author may well deserve the distinction of his title: "The Last Gentleman Adventurer." When 16 years old in 1930, Maurice joined the Hudson's Bay Company and journeyed off to a remote post on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. White population: 7. Over the next five years the author learned the Innuit language and the skills of the north, including seal and caribou hunting, dog sledding, trapping, and survival in the long, sub-zero winters. This was no vacation sojurn as are so many "adventure" tales. Maurice was as far away from civilization as one could be, save for a radio that worked sporadically and a supply boat that called once a year.

Maurice had a genuine affection and admiration for the Eskimos (Innuit) who were both his customers and his companions. He writes as a naive boy slowly growing in maturity and comprehension rather than as a Great White Father presiding over a flock of primitive people. We are treated to discussions of how the Innuit build snow houses and keep the runners of their sleds from icing as well as amusing tales of making home brew and celebrating Christmas among his tiny community in the Arctic. He writes sadly of the epidemic that raged among the Innuit and his attempt to save them with little more than cough syrup. And, eventually, after a noble Victorian struggle against lust, he takes himself a temporary wife among the uninhibited Innuit.

Maurice writes in a deceptively simple manner. This is his only book and he wrote it in his old age and died at nearly age 90 before it was published. That perhaps accounts for the abrupt ending to the book with his departure on furlough after five years in the Arctic, although he was to return for a second stay. "The Last Gentleman Adventurer" is among the best books ever written about the Arctic and the Innuit.

Smallchief

"The Last Gentleman Adventurer" is a delightful, even beautiful account by Edward Maurice of his time as a young clerk for the Hudson's Bay Company in the Canadian Arctic of the 1930's. Maurice was working literally at the intersection of the Inuit and European worlds. We are most fortunate as readers that the author was unjaded, exceptionally observant, and open to the possibilities of life in that time and place.

Maurice's job was to run a trading post, swapping rifles, ammunition, and other finished trade goods for furs trapped by the local Inuit. His status as a company employee with a high school education often placed him in a position of responsibility in the local community. In addition, Maurice made the effort to learn the language and local customs, and through trial and error, the survival skills of his neighbors.

Maurice's account captures in often touching detail the way of life of the Inuit in a rugged land that provided only a thin living and little margin for error. The Inuit are portrayed as tough, resilient and generous people who live very much in the moment in a land where death from disease, accident, or starvation is never far away. Maurice's gradual acceptance of the Inuit, and their acceptance of him, form the core of the narrative. His efforts to care for his neighbors during an outbreak of disease and his organization of successful hunts to stave off starvation earn their trust to the extent that at least two women will consider him a very desirable catch as a husband according to the Inuit fashion. This acceptance makes his parting all the harder at the end of the story.

This book is highly recommended to those interested in life in the Arctic and to those looking for an excellent account of life in a different culture.

A surprisingly good book about a lost time.

In 1930, sixteen year old Edward Maurice was assigned to the Hudson Bay Company (aka as HBC which some say really stood for 'Here Before Christ') fur trading post at Pangnirtung on Baffin Island, just west of Greenland. He was to stay in the arctic for nine years.

This is a book of love for the people, then called Eskimos; love for the arctic; love for adventure. It is a tale of coming of age as he leaves childhood at a boarding school in England for life in a much less inhibited part of the world. It is missing much of the bravado that is seen in the books published by older men who are more generally the leaders rather than the lowly apprentice.

It is also a tale of the impact that the diseases man brought to the area. Common diseases like flu and mumps, were deadly to the local natives. And there was little or no medicine to treat the ill. Many died.

This is a wonderfully written book, reading almost as easy as a novel. Mr. Maurice wrote it in his later years when he was a bookseller in rural England, but he had clearly left his heart in Canada.

This is the perfect cold weather book just in time for winter.

In June, 1930, at 16 Edward Beauclerk Maurice sets off from London on his life-altering journey. From Pargnirtung to Frobisher Bay, he travels to Hudson's Bay Company trading posts around Baffin Island, a Canadian territory just south of Greenland. He is eager for excitement in this new land, but the naïve, sheltered, accident-prone teenager has much to learn. Maurice learns the Inuit language and way of life from his new companions. A mutual relationship of love and respect is forged.

Maurice departed in 1939 and never returned to the land and people who claimed his heart. But he obviously returned to the Arctic many times in his mind! Embodying a remarkable sense of a lost world, this is a thrilling surprise of a book.

In June 1930 16-year-old Maurice stood on a London train platform bound for a five-year apprenticeship in the arctic hinterlands of Canada. A cerebral, sheltered, not very practical boy, Maurice had been inspired mostly by what he did not want. His family - widowed mother and siblings - had decided to immigrate to New Zealand to farm. Rather than share that agrarian fate, Maurice answered a Hudson Bay recruiting ad.

A few months later he was on that train platform under a sign reading: " `BOAT TRAIN, DUCHESS OF BEDFORD LIVERPOOL. HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY PARTY.'

"The other travellers hurrying to and fro across the concourse, impelled to haste by the alarming pantings, snufflings and whistlings coming from the impatient engines, hardly spared us a glance, despite the flavour of distant adventure in that simple notice. For in those days, London was still the centre of a great empire and it was commonplace for parties to be seen gathering at railway stations, or at other places of departure, to begin their long journeys to far-away places."

But his was one of the last such departures, as the world was about to plunge into the Depression, which would be followed by WWII.

Maurice's memoir of his arctic years (which ended forever when he went off to war in 1939), is one of those captivating books that begins charmingly, develops depth and atmosphere as it goes along, and engages all the senses throughout. It's a page-turning adventure and a portrait of a bygone era when Britannia ruled, the Inuit were called Eskimos and their resourceful, delicately balanced lives were just beginning to lean on Western technology. During its course a boy becomes a man, and a fine one, too.

Though he kept journals and logs at the time, Maurice did not write the book until near the end of his 90-year life, most of which was spent quietly, as a bookseller in London. The distance works.

He recalls his youthful self with indulgence and humor, but no particular nostalgia or self-consciousness. His early ignorance and naievety are profound. He's quickly dubbed "The Boy" by the Eskimos, who call everyone by an informal, descriptive name. When two of the resident Eskimo men take him on a deer-hunting trip he's unable even to light the primus stove, his only job. And then, on his own while the men hunt, he falls off a cliff and ends up clinging to a root until rescued. On the bright side, he's highly enthusiastic and ready for his first seal hunt that same afternoon.

Though never particularly good with his hands, Maurice compensates with enthusiasm and curiosity. He immediately sets out to learn the language - despite a discouraging talk from the post manager on becoming "too involved," a talk which founders on the manager's relationship with their Eskimo cook. Maurice's success with the language not only increases his standing with the natives, it also helps him immensely in his work.

His growing appreciation of Eskimo culture, customs and skills is infectious. From building a snow house on a hunt in near-blizzard conditions to the sly and bawdy songs of an Eskimo dance (some at the expense of patronizing white people) to the care of dogs and sledges and the tending of the Eskimo's all-purpose lamp, Maurice conveys the immediacy of his experience through the personalities of the people and the beauty and harshness of the landscape.

He doesn't lecture, he illustrates, mostly through action, which largely takes place on trap lines, in buffeting snowstorms, on hunting trips over dangerous seas and through unreliable snowfields. He illustrates the principle and practice of wife sharing through his handling of a dispute between two gun-toting men, and his own shy avoidance of the challenges of women close to him.

By the age of 21 Maurice has abruptly acquired his own post, in an even more remote spot, with no radio. By this time he has earned his new name "He Who Thinks." But bad luck has descended on the place and grows worse as disease strikes, killing the best hunters. The story becomes more intense as Maurice battles to save lives using mostly his wits. Hunts go bad, equipment fails, accidents happen, but the Eskimos (although easily felled by fatalism when ill) keep going and so does Maurice, proving himself nearly as resourceful and determined as they are.

Though the memoir ends when Maurice leaves that post, he went back to the arctic twice more before the war, and then never again. His touching, finely written story, as thoughtful as it is adventurous, is as valuable for its author's voice as it is as a portrait of a recent but nevertheless remote past.

--Portsmouth Herald

A truly engaging book. Maurice writes of his five years with the Hudson Bay Company in the Canadian Arctic during the 1930's. Called "the boy" by the Inuit (or Eskimos as they were then called), he gained their respect and earned the name Issumatak, "he who thinks." He was one of the few Company men who bothered to learn the Inuit language and made the effort to fit into the Inuit lifestyle rather than trying to impose his own upon them.

He relates his adventures in a straightforward, self-deprecating manner that somehow still manages to convey the perils, fears and excitement of the moment. With only one supply boat a year bringing news from family and of the rest of the world, Maurice embraced his new life, not with zeal, but with determination and full knowledge of his own limitations.

Although he returned to spend more time with the Inuit after his contract with Hudson Bay Company, this is the only account he wrote. I would gladly have read more, but I'm sure Maurice, in his humble manner, felt he'd said all that needed saying.

Edward Beauclerk Maurice, in his waning years, looked back on his first job, a job so distant in time and space that it might as well have been hundreds of years ago: In the 1930s, Maurice was recruited as a teenager to run one of the last fur-trading outposts in Arctic Canada operated by the Hudson Bay Company. Dropped off in a tiny Inuit village with a year's worth of trading supplies, he is meant by the Company to be both purveyor and parent to the local people. Of course, as an unexperienced teenager he had no skills for either role, and it is only through the benevolence of the villagers that he is able to cope.

Maurice's writing style makes the title perfectly apt: there is both wild adventure and a heavy dose of gentlemanly decorum. His story is full of perilous adventures (chasing polar bears, getting knocked off his sled in a blizzard and left behind by his dog team), and he tells these in a gripping way. He seems also to have been an astute observer of character - his characterizations of his particular native friends are distinct whole persons not stereotypes.

Like others before him, there is also a touch of gentlemanly paternalism about his attitude towards the natives, although it is warmly intended: when many of the village's men die in an epidemic, this inexperienced hunter must work out how to hunt enough meat for the remaining villagers to survive the winter. There is also a very old-fashioned veil of discretion drawn over his personal relationships with two village women, Inook and Rebecca, a veil so think I'm still not sure whether he slept with them or not. Either way, when he leaves the post at the end of the book he dispatches them without any overt trace of sentimentality. Nevertheless, a half-century later he is able to bring them back to vibrant life with genuine affection. Definitely worth the read!

It's hard to imagine anyone taking an honest read of this book without it having stirred deeply buried ideas about morality and decency. The fact that it is a memoir rather than fiction is no small part of this revelation.

The prose is pure: Maurice never resorts to sarcasm or satire to make a point. He describes angry moments, but never tirades. In fact -- and I hope this engenders curiousity more than disdain in this era of high regard for irony -- he doesn't even employ irony to tell his beautiful story, except that which emerges naturally about the chasm between humans and nature. He doesn't tell secrets about the characters that the narrator doesn't know first hand. And while paternal, in full synch with the culture of that time, Maurice isn't in any way righteous. Purity could also describe the structure of the storytelling. One never gets the sense that comes with the (extreme) genre example of "Dances with Wolves" -- no gratuitous yanking of emotional chains.

A magnificent and edifying book.

I can count on one hand the number of books that have truly and wholly transported me to another time and place. The Last Gentleman Adventurer easily joins the work of Jack London and Herman Melville in this regard, with the happy and astonishing distinction of being a true account rather than fiction. The author, Edward Maurice writes with a rare kind of insight, humane and honest. His adventures are at once breathtaking and sobering. My only regret is that this was his only book.

An amazing account of a young man stepping up to the plate of life in a difficult environment requiring not only daring and tenacity, but incredible personal and political skills not usually inherent in a man of his age. An amazing tale of adventure, friendship, and loyalty.