Death on the Barrens: A True Story of Courage and Tragedy in the Canadian Arctic Review

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Death on the Barrens: A True Story of Courage and Tragedy in the Canadian Arctic ReviewI like stories of courage in the wilderness, fortitude in the face of adversity, and determination winning against great odds. I've read about Shackelford's incredible success in bringing his crew to safety after being marooned in Antarctica, a truly unbelievable feat; I've read Jon Krakauer's heartbreaking tale of the young man who died in a bus in the wilds of Alaska. This book does not come close to the pure nature of both of those expeditions; I hesitated even to give it four stars, for many reasons, but it is well-written.
George Grinnell, at the time a young man fresh from an exclusive school and with some experience canoeing in the wilderness, joins the expedition of Art Moffatt, an older (to Grinnell) explorer (Moffatt was 36) who is planning to canoe the Barren Grounds near Churchill on the Arctic Circle and down Dubawnt River to a Hudson Bay station. There were five young men plus Moffatt making up the team; all seemed to get along reasonably well, but I did not get the feeling that anything was allowed for; no limitations on food or equipment was made; no accounting, aside from Moffatt's mathematical calculations about how much would be needed for the trip, for use; and the calculations must have very early on gone by the wayside as whenever Moffatt wanted to declare a 'holiday' - which he did with alarming frequency - the whole team parked for sometimes days at a time. I also did not get the notion that anything was done for a purpose, other than the mere journey itself; and the word 'hedonism' must have come to my mind dozens of times. The team seemed to treat this journey, through some of the most inhospitable, uninhabited territory in the world, as an extended class trip. Days of lying around camp, fishing and hunting, were interspersed with canoeing down rapids and over stormy lakes. When someone should have been keeping an eye on the calendar, and the length of time they were taking to get to where they were going, it seems as though no one was taking the trip at all seriously, especially the leader Moffatt, who had an obligation to try to get his charges to safety well before the onset of winter.
The book is full of very nicely done black-and-white watercolor scenes of the Barrens, and of the wildlife that populate it; the men seemed to eat well enough, with many descriptions of huge, beautiful fish and fat caribou caught and cooked; yet Grinnell says they were always hungry. Of course, when they were hiking, canoeing, or otherwise not lounging around camp, they were burning huge amounts of calories; but certainly they were not starving on the scale of the crew of the Franklin Expedition. The troubles they got into were clearly through lack of foresight, and Art Moffatt should have been more mindful of the perils of travelling in such a remote and treacherous area.
Grinnell gets repetitious, and a bit preachy; he constantly falls back on recounting Buddhist jokes, which aren't really jokes at all, and also makes many references to a childhood spent in a wealthy but disconnected family with parents that clearly cared about him but also seemed more concerned about lineage and place than character. He was apparently a young man in search of self, and he didn't get what he was looking for from this trip. Through the inattentions of a leader who should have been following a script and through the inexperience of youth, the entire expedition was put in enormous peril; it's a wonder, at the end (they were still paddling into September, which in the Arctic is a long way from summer), that any of them survived to come home.
Not the best of its kind I have ever read by far, but absorbing enough to make me want to find out what became of them all - and to be glad I wasn't there to experience it myself.Death on the Barrens: A True Story of Courage and Tragedy in the Canadian Arctic Overview

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