The Making of an Explorer: George Hubert Wilkins and the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1916

Kerry Abel is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History, co-editor of Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, and co-editor of Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History.

Armchair adventurers and Arctic aficionados will be pleased to discover
that not all the treasures of northern travel have been mined. Here we
meet photographer George Wilkins, whose extensive diaries and
correspondence take us through the western Arctic during several years
of dogsledding, sailing, hunting, collecting, and observing. Although
few but the most dedicated will have heard of Wilkins, Jenness believes
him to be “one of the twentieth century’s great polar explorers.”

Wilkins was an Australian photographer who joined the Canadian Arctic
Expedition of 1913–16 led by the controversial Vilhjalmer Stefansson.
In this book, Jenness meticulously reconstructs Wilkins’s travels with
that expedition, using Wilkins’s papers and other archival records.
(The author’s father, anthropologist Diamond Jenness, was a member of
that expedition himself, although personal knowledge and comment are
scrupulously avoided.) There are many excerpts from Wilkins’s diaries
and some 80 photographs taken by Wilkins and others, well placed at the
appropriate spots in the text. There are also a number of helpful maps.

The book succeeds admirably in giving us a sense of Arctic adventuring
(indeed, it was a pleasure to read in the choking heat of a southern
Ontario summer). It is less successful at explanation and analysis.
Unless one is familiar with the historical context and subsequent
controversies about Stefansson, one will be left perplexed about many of
the events and unaware of their significance. Jenness’s claim that
Wilkins made valuable scientific contributions scarcely seems justified
by a collection of Banks Island wildlife and a tide table. And
opportunities for discussion of the broader context are rarely seized.
For example, Wilkins meets many semi-legendary northern characters like
Captain Charles Klengenburg, but we are told very little about any of
them. As a result, the book will be of interest primarily to those who
are already well informed about the history of Arctic exploration and
are looking for a fresh infusion of vicarious adventuring.