Prisoners of the North: Portraits of Five Arctic Immortals [Hardcover]

Pierre Berton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 15, 2004

Pierre Berton—Canada's most celebrated historian—has earned more than thirty literary awards for his distinguished body of work, and in Prisoners of the North he offers the reader a multitude of magnificent exploits and dazzling personalities. Witness John Hornby risks death as if for amusement as he pursues his obsessive quest for adventure in the Barren Grounds. Watch the poet Robert Service earn the fortune he so craves—and the fame he so reviles. Judge the veracity of Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s claim to discover a tribe of “Blond Eskimos”—and see the international controversy that ensues. Meet Joe Boyle, the wealthy gold prospector whose military valor in the Great War earned him the admiration of Trotsky—and the love of the Romanian queen. Join Lady Jane Franklin on her transcontinental journey in search of her lost husband, the famed explorer Sir John, who never traveled so widely, or so bravely, as his indefatigable wife. These are Pierre Berton’s prisoners, whose compelling and unusual stories he weaves together with unparalleled skill. Evocative, thrilling, and deeply original, Prisoners of the North is as daring and uncommon as its exceptional title characters.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The five mid-19th- to mid-20th-century Arctic adventurers Berton profiles here won’t be familiar to most readers, but that doesn’t make them any less heroic. Joe Boyle, "King of the Klondike," for example, was an innovative gold prospector who was never satisfied settling in one situation for too long, whether it was with a wife or in a job. This inability to stay in one place eventually made him a hero in Romania, where, after a series of extraordinary events, he became a trusted intermediary between that country’s citizens and the Bolsheviks. Similar stories about amazing accomplishments fill this workmanlike yet quirky book, as Berton, a veteran Arctic chronicler (Klondike Fever, etc.), sheds light on the lives of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who deeply admired and lived among the Inuit; Lady Jane Griffin, the first woman to be awarded the Royal Geographic Society’s Founders Medal; naturalist John Hornby, who took pride in his ability to live off the land yet starved to death on the banks of the Thelon River thanks to a terrible miscalculation; and poet Robert Service, "the Bard of the North." Although the work suffers at times from a plodding pace, there’s no denying Berton’s admiration for these people. As he shows, they were always seeking and never satisfied; it’s the quintet’s shared feeling of wanderlust that makes this book endearing. Photos.
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From Booklist

The five "prisoners" of the Arctic were Joe Boyle, Vihjalmur Stefansson, Lady Jane Franklin, John Hornby, and Robert Service. Boyle was a wealthy gold prospector, Stefansson claimed to discover a tribe of blond Eskimos, and Franklin was the widow of the famed explorer Sir John Franklin. Hornby's obsessive quest for adventure took him to the Arctic's Barren Ground, and Service was the poet who found refuge in the frozen North. Berton tells their stories in this, his fiftieth, book. He points out that the five diverse characters, all loners, were rugged individualists--impatient of authority, restless, energetic, and ambitious--and driven by wanderlust. Boyle worked his way on foot through the mountains in perilous weather, Stefansson traveled thousands of miles behind a dog team, and Franklin climbed the most precipitous mountains searching for her missing husband. Hornby trudged across the Arctic on foot, and Service struggled sometimes as much as 12 hours a day up the Rat River. Their adventures read like the wildest fiction. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf; 1St Edition edition (November 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786715073
• ISBN-13: 978-0786715077
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,254,441 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Portraits of Notable Northern Characters, December 21, 2005

By 

Michael J. Muller "Adirondack Reader" (Queensbury, New York USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Prisoners of the North: Portraits of Five Arctic Immortals (Hardcover)

Pierre Berton an accomplished and beloved Canadian author presents here five essays on different notable characters that stand tall in the history of Canadian arctic discovery, exploration, exploitation and settlement. The author is a master of arctic history, legend and lore. His most notable works include Klondike Fever and The Arctic Grail. This effort is interesting but falls a bit short of the mastery and command that the author presented in his earlier efforts. It is notable that this work was completed in 2004 which was the last year of the author's life. It is still a worthwhile book to read for those interested in arctic history and the hardy colorful characters that accomplished early settlement and exploration of the extreme north. It is recommended that if you read this during the winter months sit close to your fireplace or woodstove.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unknown in America, June 1, 2009

By 

Rodney Meek (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Prisoners of the North: Portraits of Five Arctic Immortals (Paperback)

This book is an interesting collection of biographies about five people who are almost certainly virtually unknown to the vast majority of Americans--which is understandable, since the subjects were either Canadians or folks from the U.K. whose greatest exploits took place in Canada. Most Americans would be hard-pressed to name five cities in Canada, much less five famous Canadian people. Hockey players excepted, perhaps.

The late Berton covers the lives of five people: Joe Boyle, an entrepreneur in the gold rush at the turn of the Nineteenth Century and the so-called "King of the Klondike"; Vilhjamur Steffansson, a talented explorer with some unfortunately misguided theories about the Inuit; Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of Sir John Franklin who led the famous and doomed expedition of the "Erebus" and the "Terror" to find the Northwest Passage; the repulsive and possibly insane John Hornby, who kept flirting with disaster and starvation on his forays into the Barren Grounds, Canada's tundra territory, until finally he met his well-deserved fate; and Robert Service, a versifier and balladeer of whom Berton is enormously fond and who he claims, ludicrously, to have possibly been the most famous English-language poet of the Twentieth Century.

In the case of Service, Berton, born in the Yukon in 1920, had a personal connection, having interviewed him for a TV special in 1958 shortly before Service's death. Indeed, Berton had many connections to the Canadian Arctic, as he reveals in many asides.

His premise for this collection is that the lives of these five people became forevermore captured by the Arctic, and that in some ways they left the best parts of themselves there. Only the eccentric and incompetent Hornby actually died in the north, but the others found their fame there, and, with the exception of Lady Franklin, mentally never really left that land in some primal and essential way, no matter where their subsequent journeys took them physically.

The book is copiously illustrated and contains a number of helpful maps. The most gripping section is that dealing with Hornby, since it's the only one that ends in complete and utter tragedy, which always makes for more compelling reading.

Recommended for collectors of books about Arctic explorers or famous Canadians, but probably not of general interest to the average reader.