Echoing Silence: Essays on Arctic Narrative

Science as Poetic and Visual Narrative: J. Dewey Soper (1893–1982)

Science as Poetic and Visual Narrative: J. Dewey Soper (1893-1982) CONSTANCEMARTIN diagnosed with a probably fatal disease, tuberculosis. He can stay home in Britain and wait to die or he can accept an assignment to cross the ocean and search in the Far North for a missing man, the Canadian husband of a friend, lured by the secrets of a hidden place, an apparently lifeless area at the source of the Sick Heart River. Only the Hare Indians, who fear its power, know where it is. In the end Leithen, the hero, goes, finds what he is looking for, is cured of his disease, and, by his own wish, spends the rest of his life in the Arctic helping the Hare Indians, who have become his friends.1 ForJ. Dewey Soper, the natural scientist, explorer, writer and artist born in 1893, there are haunting similarities in Buchan's novel to his own real experience in the Far North. Soper was drawn to the Arctic in his early teens by reading the many books available at the time: the stories of the early Vikings, and of British and American explorers such as Frobisher, Baffin, Franklin, Parry, Ross, Kane, McClintock,and Hall were familiar to him. So too were the explorations in our own century of Nansen, Amundsen, Sverdrup, and Peary. Among the books that excited him were John Richardson's Arctic Search Expedition, Fridtjof Nansen's In Northern Mists, and Vilhjalmur Stefansson'sHunters of the Great North. In his own book, Canadian Arctic Recollections, written at the end of his long and productive career exploring the vast unmapped areas of southern Baffin Island and searching for the nesting grounds of the blue goose, he writes, "I seem to have been born with this longing for boreal latitudes" (Soper, 1981,xii). In his late twenties,while studying biology and English at the University of Alberta and already with a few ornithological publications to his n John Buchan's Sick Heart River the hero has been I 62 credit, Soper longed for opportunity to reach the Far North. This materialized when he was offered a summer assignment with the Victoria Memorial Museum (now known as the Canadian Museum of Nature) to travel on the government's annual patrol boat to the Arctic. His instructions were to gather specimens of birds and plants for the museum's collection. This was the beginning of Soper's favourite time in his long career. Leaving the University to learn on the job, Soper spent between 1923-1931, a total of eight years, exploring over 30,000 miles of southern Baffin Island on four separate expeditions of one and two years duration. After 1931 his work with the government in the natural sciences continued, but he was never able to return to the Far North—a disappointment that he addressed late in life, in his seventies and eighties, by gathering together his logs, field notes, and photographs and writing CanadianArctic Recollections , as well as by painting over two hundred watercolours of the Inuit and his Arctic adventures. Written and rendered in tranquility, the two studies look back with a mixture of scientific fact and romantic nostalgia on the most treasured experience of his life. Soper was well prepared for work in the North. From the age of thirteen, he tells us in his unpublished autobiography, he developed a ''Very pronounced yearning for a knowledge of wildlife ... an insistent desire to know more and more about native birds and mammals—a love for these things that was never to be extinguished ... it was like a divine excitement in the blood" (1969, 5). He grew up roaming the woods near his family's farm in rural Ontario, learning to identify the wildlife of the area. One might say he was a natural natural scientist, for beginning with these years, he kept meticulous records of his observations, a habit which in his lifetime yielded over one hundred publications on the flora, fauna, and especially the bird life of Canada. The Arctic of the 1920s was still a land with vast tracts of unmapped territory and Inuit people followingthe traditions and customs of centuries of forebears. It wasa time of tupiks, dog sledding, and igloos. It was also a time of wearing caribou-skin clothing and carefully storing supplies in caches. In many ways it seemed the land depicted in the beautiful illustrated narratives of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century explorers, a place to try the hardiness of the adventurous...