Meet Canada’s overlooked Arctic explorers
Larsen, ‘horse-sailors’ of the St. Roch took Northwest Passage west to east
Henry Asbjorn Larsen should be Canada’s most celebrated Arctic explorer, but he has been largely and absurdly overlooked in the recent Franklin fever that was fuelled by the federal government and the subsequent discovery in 2014 of one of the British explorer’s wrecked ships.
Larsen was the first to travel the Northwest Passage from west to east, the first to do the round trip in a single season, and the first to circumnavigate North America. He did it all in an uncomfortably small ship with a crew most of whom had never sailed before.
In his 20 years at the helm of the St. Roch, only one crew member died (of a heart attack) on that historic transit through the passage. To ensure Const. Albert Chartrand’s proper burial, Larsen and Cpl. R.G. Hunt travelled more than 600 kilometres by dogsled to fetch a Roman Catholic priest.
What makes the story all the more extraordinary is that Larsen and his crew weren’t simply explorers. They were all RCMP officers, taking care of themselves by adapting the Inuit ways of dressing, hunting and fishing. They travelled overland using dogsleds to dispense justice, deliver mail, conduct the census, collect taxes, issue family allowance and old age pension cheques, ferry the sick and dying to medical treatment, and monitor both the level of rivers and numbers of different wildlife species. A lesser-known fact is that when they left in 1940 on their historic west-to-east voyage through the Northwest Passage, they were also prepared to invade Greenland and secure it for the Allies during the Second World War.
Sir John Franklin, on the other hand, failed to find the Northwest Passage, lost his life, both his ships, and all his crew. Still, the Canadian government has poured, and continues to pour, millions of dollars into recovering artifacts from Franklin’s Erebus and searching for the still-lost Terror.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper stoked the Franklin fever, describing the failed, mid-19th-century expedition as having “laid the foundations of Canada’s Arctic sovereignty.” That’s a bit of a stretch considering that: Canada didn’t exist when Franklin and his British crew set sail in 1845; Franklin didn’t find anything new (the discoveries came in the 30-plus subsequent searches for him); and, both Franklin and the British Admiralty held scant regard for the Inuit and voyageurs — future Canadians.
There’s no need for magical thinking when it comes to Larsen, the St. Roch and its crews. How could there be any more Canadian expression of sovereignty than “horse-sailors” plying the Arctic waters year after year to uphold peace, order and good government?
Yet, it has always been and continues to be a struggle to get money for the St. Roch, which is now a national historic site that has been housed at the Vancouver Maritime Museum for 50 years. Even as the 31.6-metre ship was being built in 1927-28 at the Burrard Wharves, Larsen wrote in his autobiography that it was fitted with “antiquated equipment,” including anchor gear that broke during the ship’s sea trials. When Larsen asked for a small skiff that could be rowed ashore and easily pulled over the ice, his commanding officer refused “in spite of the fact that such a boat could have been had for around $30 at the time.”
The official reason for Larsen’s first Northwest Passage trip in 1940 was asserting Canadian sovereignty. It was to be the first time in 23 years that a Canadian ship had ventured to some disputed parts of the Arctic Archipelago that Norwegian explorer Otto Sverdrup had claimed for his country in 1907.
But the top-secret (and ultimately aborted) plan that only came to light more than 50 years later was that the crew was to occupy Greenland, securing it for Canada and the Allies after Denmark had fallen to the Nazis. Its deep fiords offered excellent hiding spots for German U-boats. But more importantly, the island colony was more crucially the Allies’ only source of cryolite, an essential element in making aluminum that was being churned out by the Aluminum Company of Canada (Alcan).
Norwegian-born Larsen got the secret orders in April 1940. He was enthusiastic about the trip because one of his heroes was Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer who in 1903 was the first to sail through the Northwest Passage.
The schooner-rigged ship with a small, 125-horsepower engine and its eight-man crew left Vancouver on June 21, 1940. They hoped that the trip would take no more than three months, even though only Larsen and Fred Farrar knew how to steer the ship or could understand the compass readings. The ship was steered from a wheelhouse that was exposed to the elements. They had no reliable charts. The gyro-compass didn’t work close to the North Pole. There was no depth sounder, so often someone was at the bow taking soundings. And, because of the primitive navigational tools, Larsen spent a lot of time atop the mast in the crow’s nest.
Larsen later described the weather and ice conditions as the worst he’d ever experienced. At the end of September, he anchored the ship at Walker Bay on the east coast of Victoria Island to the west of what is now Larsen Sound. The RCMP officers spent the winter patrol- ling the area and nearby Banks Island by dogsled, explaining and enforcing new hunting and trapping regulations.
When the breakup came, the ship was ordered to go west, not east, to help unload cargo in “Tuttujartuuq” (what is today known as Tuktoyaktuk) that was bound for the scattered RCMP detachments. With a war on, there were no others available to do that work. Underway once more, ice again barred their passage. Using 1855 British Admiralty charts, Larsen put the St. Roch in at Pasley Bay just off Larsen Sound. They were only halfway to Greenland and, by the time they were freed from the ice, it was too late. Pearl Harbor had been bombed. The Americans had joined the fight and had taken control of Greenland. So instead of invading Greenland, the horse-sailors were ordered on to Halifax, arriving on Oct. 11, 1942.
After a refit that included a 340-horsepower engine nearly double the power of the original that gave the St. Roch a top speed of six knots, Larsen made the return trip of 7,295 nautical miles in 86 days on the more northerly route through Lancaster Sound, across M’Clure Strait to Prince of Wales Strait. Again, its route was kept top secret.
“This was the real Northwest Passage, I felt, and it had never been navigated,” Larsen wrote in his book, The Big Ship. “I was sure that this would become the northern route of the future. The main thing was for someone to try it, and if it could be proved that a small ship like the St. Roch could make it, then others would surely follow.”
There was no one to meet them when they docked in Vancouver on Oct. 16, 1944. “Canada was still at war and had no time for frivolous things,” Larsen wrote.
From 1928 to 1948, Larsen and the St. Roch made many trips that helped map the Arctic as they provided essential services to remote communities and RCMP outposts in places like Gjoa Haven, Pond Inlet and Cambridge Bay.
Larsen and his crew wore sealskin suits as they travelled. They hunted, fished and ate as the Inuit. But they also wore their red serge, breeches and tall boots. There was even one Christmas when Larsen traded sealskin and serge for a different red outfit. He dressed as Santa Claus and distributed presents to the Inuit and their children because, as he wrote in his autobiography, “Ours is a police force not to be feared.”
It’s hard to understand why Larsen and the St. Roch remain so little known in Vancouver, let alone the rest of Canada. Maybe it’s because they were the last of the sea-based explorers.
“They were the bridge between the European explorers and the modern age,” says Ken Burton, a former RCMP maritime officer and executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum. “In 1954, they circumnavigated North America and, a generation later in 1969, man landed on the moon.”
More likely, it’s because the story of St. Roch and its crews is uniquely Canadian.
The St. Roch, as Burton likes to say, was built on the West Coast, named for a parish in Quebec, captained by a Norwegian immigrant, crewed by farm boys, and helped by the Inuit.
It is also a modest story. They were working-class men whose wages were low enough that no one with a university degree ever applied. They shared minuscule quarters on a ship lacking almost every creature comfort. Unlike Franklin’s Erebus and Terror, there were no fancy dishes, no libraries, and no pretensions. And, the few luxuries they had — tobacco, sugar and tea — Larsen and his crew shared liberally with whoever they met, from families who helped them to missionaries to prisoners that they transported to court. They weren’t technically explorers, yet they charted new territory. And they weren’t only policemen — the people they served called them “the men who speak the truth.”
They did all of that and more under the harshest and most unforgiving circumstances imaginable.
dbramham@postmedia.com twitter.com/daphnebramham Above the Arctic Circle: For 12 days, I am one of a group of privileged visitors, including two scientists from the Vancouver Aquarium, on a 96-passenger expedition ship operated by Squamish-based One Ocean Expeditions making a journey through the Northwest Passage.