| Book
Review:
THE
LAST
IMAGINARY
PLACE:
A Human
History of
the Arctic
World
by
Robert
McGhee
New
York: Oxford
University
Press, 2005,
296 p.
ISBN
0195183681 |
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Communicating the
wonders of the Arctic and
its long neglected human
side in a new
history
Robert McGhee is not
just another writer-author
who dabbles in Arctic
topics. He may be Canada's
leading archeologist of the
Far North, the Curator of
Arctic Archeology at the
Canadian Museum of
Civilization. An
archeologist who has
conducted over thirty years
of research on the ancient
peoples of the Arctic, he
was awarded the 2000 Massey
Medal of the Royal Canadian
Geographical Society,
Canada's highest award for
excellence in the
geographical sciences.
The Last Imaginary Place
has drawn significant
praise from some of the top
critics of the Arctic scene
in both Canada and the
United States. "McGhee
makes us care about this
precious part of the world
by putting color, flesh,
diversity, and
particularity back into a
complex history and
multifaceted human
geography that has often
been homogenized and
generalized, removed from
time and objectified. This
is a beautiful book and a
fine testimony to McGhee?s
expert and long-standing
love of the Arctic." says
Sherrill Grace, Professor
of English at the
University of British
Columbia, and author of
Canada and the Idea of
North.
The author even offers
his opinion of the two
American explorers who
brought the imaginary top
of the globe to the
attention of the world in
1909, and who subsequently
consumed much of the
discussion about the
Arctic. Cook and Peary earn
biting commentary in four
pages (see
box) in this
human history of the
region.
Amazon.com Books says:
"in this fascinating
volume, renowned
archeologist Robert McGhee
lifts the veil to reveal
the true Arctic. Combining
anthropology, history, and
personal memoir, this book
dispels romanticized
notions of the Arctic as a
world apart, exotic and
isolated, revealing a land
far more fascinating than
we had imagined. McGhee
paints a vivid portrait of
the movement of Viking
farmers across the North
Atlantic islands, and of
the long and arduous
searches for sea-passages
to Asia. We meet the fur
traders who pioneered
European expansion across
the northern forests of
Canada and Siberia, the
whalers and ivory-hunters
who ravaged northern seas,
and patriotic explorers
racing to reach the North
Pole." Most important,
McGhee offers far more
coverage of the native
peoples of the Arctic,
societies that other
histories usually neglect.
We discover how northerners
have learned to exploit a
rich "hunter's
world" where
game is, contrary to our
expectations, far easier to
find than in more temperate
lands. McGhee takes us to a
thousand-year-old Inuit
campsite perfectly
preserved in the Arctic
cold, follows the
entrepreneurial Inuit as
they cross the Arctic in
search of metal, and
reveals the dangers that
native people face today
from industrial pollution
and global warming.
"Flavored by McGhee?s
personal reflections based
on thirty years of work and
travel in the region, here
is a wide ranging,
enlightening look at one of
the most culturally rich
and fascinating areas of
the world."
"This is an important
book by a prominent
researcher and highly
accomplished author who
presents his global arctic
view to readers here for
the first time." offers
William Fitzhuah, Director,
Arctic Studies Center,
Smithsonian Institution.
"The Last Imaginary
Place is very well written
and built on a lifetime
outstanding research. It
succeeds in communicating
some of the wonders of the
Arctic and its
extraordinary human
history, while making the
choices and challenges
people have faced familiar
and recognizable," declares
Susan Kaplan, Director,
Peary-MacMillan Arctic
Museum & Arctic Studies
Center at Bowdoin College.
McGhee discusses the
race to the pole: "The
stage was now set for the
race to the pole by the
"American
route," pioneered
by Kane and Hall and
Greely, which by the turn
of the twentieth century
was firmly in the grip of
Robert E. Peary. Peary was
an engineer, an American
naval officer with no
maritime experience and a
man driven by a consuming
need for recognition and
fame. Writing to his mother
in 1880, Peary had stated
"I don't want to live and
die without accomplishing
anything or without being
known beyond a narrow
circle of friends. I would
like to acquire a name
which would be an open
sesame to circles of
culture and refinement
anywhere, a name which
would make my mother proud,
and which would make me
feel that I was the peer of
anyone I might meet."
Through a series of
near-disastrous expeditions
in - Greenland, Peary
obsessively accumulated the
admiration and financial
support of the men whose
counterparts a half century
later would be known as the
American
"military-industrial
complex." He tirelessly
depicted the quest for the
Pole as a patriotic
endeavor that could be
attained only through the
right combination of
military- like organization
and that peculiarly
American characteristic
known as "dash." The
Inughuit sled-drivers and
their seamstress wives, on
whom Peary depended for
transport and survival,
were portrayed as cogs in
the great machine that he
was assembling to roll
inexorably to the Pole.
They in turn gave Peary a
name that translates as
"the one who is
feared."
McGhee on Cook:
"the
most perceptive as well as the most
vilified of Polar
explorers"
Cook's story told of a
much smaller and simpler
expedition, financed as far
as the Inughuit homeland by
an American sportsman. Here
Cook, who had previously
served as doctor to one of
Peary's Greenland
expeditions and had also
traveled to Antarctica,
hired Inuit families and
their dog-teams. The group
hunted its way across the
interior of Ellesmere
Island so that the supplies
that they carried could be
used on the polar ice. From
the northern tip of Axel
Heiberg Island Cook set out
with two Inuit companions
and two sleds pulled by
twenty-six dogs. The 900
kilometers to the Pole was
covered in five weeks, and
the group barely survived
the southward retreat when
food ran out and leads of
open water barred their
progress.
The ice drifted westward
and away from the caches of
food they had left ashore
for their return, and they
eventually landed among the
barren islands to the west
of Alex Heiberg, where they
made their way southward
through the melting ice to
Devon Island. Having
exhausted their ammunition
and abandoned their dogs
and sleds, they lived by
Inuit ingenuity and passed
the winter in a refurbished
winter house that had been
built centuries before by
prehistoric Inuit on the
coast of Jones Sound.
The following spring
they walked back to
Greenland where the Inuit
were welcomed with joy by
families who had assumed
them to be dead. Cook's
report that he had reached
the Pole the previous year
reached the world only a
few weeks before Peary
returned with his more
recent claim. Peary was
appalled by the news, and
immediately set out on a
life-long campaign to
discredit Cook and
everything that he had
claimed to accomplish. A
vicious propaganda campaign
financed by the National
Geographic Society and
Peary's other wealthy
backers successfully
destroyed Cook's claim as
well as his life. Yet no
amount of money and
influence was able to bury
the questions surrounding
Peary's own claim to have
reached the Pole in the
spring of 1909.
In his recent exhaustive
book Cook and Peary: The
Polar Controversy Resolved,
Robert M. Bryce concludes
that neither explorer is
likely to - have attained
the goal that he claimed. I
am not convinced that Bryce
is right. It is clear that
Peary could not have
attained the Pole, and that
he was a liar as well as a
megalomaniac. Yet when one
strips away the false
testimony and the biased
judgments that emanated
from Peary and his
supporters, there is no
reason to believe that Cook
could not have accomplished
what he claimed. It is true
that Cook was no navigator
and may not have been able
to precisely identify the
location of the Pole, but
he certainly could have
found his way to the
general vicinity. His small
and lightly supplied
expedition may have seemed
impossible in the early
twentieth century, but
similar trips have since
been achieved by others
with fewer resources. In
1996 the Canadian-Russian
team of Hans Webber and
Mikhael Malakhov traveled
from Ellesmere Island to
the Pole and back, entirely
unsupported and hauling all
of their equipment and
supplies on light
toboggans, are now mounted
on almost an annual basis.
Frederick Cook remains
one of the most perceptive
as well as the most
vilified of Polar
explorers. In the
posthumously published
book, Return From the
Pole,
he wrote of his discovery
that "the greatest mystery
- the greatest unknown, is
not that beyond the
frontiers of knowledge but
that unknown capacity in
the spirit within the inner
man of self.... Therein is
the greatest field for
exploration. To have
suffered the tortures and
to have become resigned to
the aspects of death as we
did--to learn this is
experience which no gold
can buy. The shadow of
death had given new
horizons, new frontiers to
life." Cook had made a
discovery that no amount of
humiliation could take from
him, and one that only the
most fortunate and
observant of Arctic
explorers ever learned.
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