Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Wilkins, Sir George Hubert (1888–1958), Australian polar explorer, born at Mount Bryan East, South Australia. He served as second in command and photographer to the Canadian Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879–1962) on the latter's third expedition to the Canadian Arctic in 1913. He left it in 1917 to join the Australian Flying Corps then fighting in France during the First World War (1914–18), being seconded to the military historical section as an official photographer. In 1919 he was navigator of a Blackburn Kangaroo aircraft on a flight from England to Australia and in 1920–1 was appointed second in command and naturalist to the British Imperial Antarctic expedition under Sir Ernest Shackleton. Between 1926 and 1928 he commanded an Arctic expedition sponsored by the Detroit News during which, with a co-pilot, he flew 3,360 kilometres (2,100 mls.) across the Arctic from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Spitsbergen, a feat for which he was knighted. The following year he led the Hearst Antarctic expedition and in 1931 an expedition in the conventionally powered submarine Nautilus, attempting to reach the North Pole under the ice. However, defects in the submarine obliged him to return after reaching a latitude of 82° 15′ N. An account of the voyage is given in his book Under the North Pole. Between 1933 and 1939 he managed the four Lincoln Ellsworth Antarctic expeditions and 1942–52 he was consultant to the US Army military planning division. After his death his ashes were scattered at the North Pole from the nuclear-powered USS Skate when it became, in 1959, the first submarine to surface there.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson , 1879-1962, Arctic explorer, b. Canada, of Icelandic parents, educated at the Univ. of North Dakota, the State Univ. of Iowa, and Harvard. He led several expeditions of exploration and of ethnological and archaeological investigation in the Arctic. For supplies he relied heavily on local resources, and he adopted the Eskimo way of living, thus successfully demonstrating his theory that the rigors of existence in the Arctic are much reduced by the use of such techniques. He made two expeditions (1906-7, 1908-12) to the delta of the Mackenzie River. Later he undertook (1913-18) the most prolonged polar exploration in history by remaining N of the Arctic Circle for an unbroken period of more than five years while exploring the Canadian and Alaskan sectors of the Arctic. In 1952, Stefansson Island, at the tip of Victoria Island, was named for him. He was the curator of the Stefansson Collection at Dartmouth College, to which he gave his library of polar material. His many books include My Life with the Eskimo (1913), The Friendly Arctic (1915, new enl. ed. 1943), Iceland (1939), Greenland (1942), and Northwest to Fortune (1958). He edited Great Adventures and Explorations (1947).