CANADA: In Line of Duty

In line of ordinary duty, eight Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen and an 80-ton auxiliary schooner made the first west-to-east water voyage through America’s cold, difficult, twisting Northwest Passage. Landing on the Atlantic coast last week, two and a quarter years after they left the Pacific, the men neither expected, asked for, nor got leave. Sergeant Henry Larsen, their leader, brushed off compliments on his extraordinary feat with the remark that other trips had been harder.

The crew of the St. Roch set out in June 1940 to: 1) take the schooner from Vancouver to Halifax for patrol duty in the Atlantic; 2) supply the permanent Mounted Police arctic posts along the way; 3) take the Eskimo census. Before they reached Sydney, N.S., the tough team and the tough ship had backtracked Explorer Roald Amundsen’s famous three-year east-to-west trip across America’s top. They had added valuable information to the world’s expandingly accurate geography, survived the Arctic’s most treacherous dangers, dutifully performed their assigned tasks.

After leaving Vancouver, the St. Roch rounded Alaska, entered Beaufort Sea, touched Baillie Island, went on to Cambridge Bay. She turned back to winter in Walker Bay, on the midwest coast of giant, icebound Victoria Island, went on in the spring.

In August 1941, the St. Roch and her crew nosed their indomitable way from Cambridge Bay into the unknown water wasteland of Pasley Bay. Dropping anchor in a storm to save themselves from reefs, they were caught for eleven months when open water turned suddenly to eight feet of ice. “We struck a very bad season,” said Sergeant Larsen, whose idea of a good season would frighten most men to death. The men blasted huge ice floes and icebergs threatening the uniquely tough hull of the St. Roch, which was copper sheathed and overlaid with ice-resisting Australian ironbark. The St. Roch stayed upright and whole when ice crashing by lifted her straight up out of the water.

But except for the vivid moments of danger, Pasley was dull. No liquor was drunk, no poker allowed. The men did the ship’s chores, studied Eskimo dialects, read. The library was ample, largely stories of tropic exploration to while away the dark, endlessly cold nights. Larsen mostly read his collection of all the printed books and papers of all the explorers who had tried to find the Northwest Passage.

Death Comes. One morning, after a tinned-food breakfast, Constable Albert Chartrand died of a heart attack. To give him a Catholic burial, Sergeant Larsen and Constable Pat Hunt, dogmaster over the ship’s twelve huskies, trekked 1,100 miles in two months to find a priest. Back with them to hold the funeral, over the vast distance where only six groups of white men had been in 110 years, came 37-year-old Father Gustav Henry of Brittany, a missionary to the Eskimos. Back, too, came scores of his converted Eskimos, to protect him from harm.

That summer the St. Roch weighed anchor, ran into the worst part of the trip. In Franklin Strait, said Skipper Larsen, “we drifted back & forth for nearly a month before we finally got clear. More than once we gave up hope of ever getting out.”

Plainer Sailing. For the rest, the trip was arctic normal.

The men found owl, gull, squirrel, seal, walrus, whale, caribou to eat.

They took turns on census treks, the longest of which was 61 days in weather never milder than 48 below.

They grew no beards or mustaches; they cut each other’s hair.

At Pond Inlet, they picked up Constable Jack Doyle to replace Chartrand.

In September 1942, the St. Roch, looking little the worse for wear, came down the coast past Labrador to Newfoundland. The crew had gained weight, and no man, except the dead Chartrand, had been ill of so much as a cold.