Journey (27 page)

Lord Luton introduced the Trevor Blythe fragments from his proposed poem sequence
Borealis
with this appropriate disclaimer: “We must remember that these are the introductory attempts of a young poet striving to find his way. He had already proved at Oxford that he
could write the traditional three-verse rhymed lyric, and his sonnets won him prizes, but later he felt obligated, and properly so, to experiment with forms, length of line, rhyme and blank verse. What he would have kept and what discarded we cannot conjecture; but obviously some of his attempts succeed much better than others.

“He began under the influence of the standard elegy, sixteen lines of fairly competent unrhymed iambic pentameter”:

Hark! From the distant village tolls the bell

Summoning to prayer all those who feel the need

Of more than mortal sustenance. These rites

Can be discharged by those who hear the cry

Of brass on brass to speed the well-worn prayer
,

To bless the child newborn or ease the gray

And palsied head to its eternal rest
.

I hear a sterner call: the road un trod
,

The heathen who has never seen the light
,

The passage through dark seas uncharted still
,

The desert that they claim no man can pass
,

The virgin mountain peaks ne'er stepped upon
,

The lure of gold still hiding in the ground
,

The call, the call from some untended Grail:

“Find me! Rescue me before I tarnish!

And yours shall be the shout of triumph…”

“The long middle portion of the poem,” explained Luton, “had not been attempted, and although Blythe must have contemplated how it would develop, he left no notes. However, he did leave on two pages unattached to the longer poem, but obviously intended to be a part, a lyrical passage celebrating his adventures on the Mackenzie during the days when all was proceeding on schedule.”

Broad Mackenzie helped to speed us

Caribou came down to feed us

Arctic winds could not defeat us

Ravens came to guide and greet us
.

Endless nights were not oppressive

For our minds flared forth in wonder

Never mean nor small-possessive

As we talked our world asunder
.

Blizzards whistled in but spared us

Challenge tempted us and dared us
.

Borealis explodes in the night

Leaping and twisting in tortured forms

Conflagrations of shimmering light

Heavens ablaze in celestial storms
.

Arcs in the sky

Tumble and tremble

Teasing the eye

With forms they resemble
.

There leaps a bridge to the moon

Here drops a chasm to hell

Soars high that silver balloon

Borealis ablaze and all's well
.

Patterns tremendous

Clashes stupendous

Behold that vast fire as it rages

Then fades to pastel as it ages

And drifts from the sky all too soon

Borealis asleep and all's well
.

Spring days bring cheer

No cold to fear

New sun to warm

Nothing to harm

Arctic gods sat on our shoulder

Whisp'ring to us “Bolder, bolder!”

We became the lords of winter

Brushing off the icy splinter

Dangling from our frozen portal

Till the cry came “You are mortal.”

“At this point,” Luton wrote, “Trevor was prepared to deal with the death of his friend and companion, Philip, but only eight unsatisfactory lines in an unusual meter remain of what he certainly planned as an extended threnody”:

Mighty Mackenzie, enraged at our boldness
,

Drew from the lakes she hid high in her mountains

Torrents of water locked up in the coldness

Sent it cascading in perilous fountains
.

Ice blocks as big as an emperor's palace

Gouged out whole forests and left the trees bending

Lurking to snatch at young men unattending

Eager to drown them in hideous malice
.

“Obviously dissatisfied with the meter though pleased with the words, he crossed them out, pencilling the caution: ‘Graver, much graver rhythm!' Then he turned to the closing, the lines that had won praise from Harry Carpenter”:

…the fault was mine
.

I visualized the Grail a shining light
,

Perceptible from any vale in which

I and my helpers struggled. It would be

A constant beacon, milestone in the sky
,

Signalling far

Calling to goal
.

I did not comprehend that it could function

Only by flashing back light from me. Its gleam

Existed, but in partnership with mine
,

And I had launched the search a blind man
,

Nothing within myself to guide the way
,

No silver in my soul to match the blaze

Of what I sought, nor did I test the peaks

That would forever bar me from my goal

Till I broke through with force and fortitude

To conquer them and in my victory

Conquer myself as well
.

I see my fellow seekers lost in darkness

And know that I have failed to lead the way
.

Mountains engirt us, rivers swirl, we lose

Our trail and cry: “Reluctant Paladins we
,

Who seek our Golden Grail by fleeing from it.”

TREVOR BLYTHE

The Arctic Circle

Belated spring 1898

The major part of this small and valued publication reappeared later in Luton's highly regarded
An Englishman in the Far Corners
, published in 1928, by which time he had become ninth Marquess of Deal, aloof and white-haired but still slim and erect.

 

T
his short novel came into being because of a photograph I first saw years ago. It captivated me from the moment I came upon it, and it now appears inside the front cover of this book.

It was taken in the studio of a professional photographer working in the tiny Northwest frontier town of Edmonton during the frenzied gold rush of August 1897. I had been doing casual research on the Alaskan portion of that rush, and had, at that time, no interest whatever in the preposterous madness in Edmonton, whose historical importance was unknown to me. But this photograph was so evocative of the thousands of amateurs streaming north that it registered profoundly, becoming for me the symbol of that period.

It is a little masterpiece, still in first-class condition, and shows a young woman gold-seeker, perhaps thirty years old, dressed in heavy boots, a kind of hunting uniform with shoulders excessively puffed out, and the sauciest cap you ever saw. Her sensible-looking, no-nonsense head is tilted slightly, and she stares at us with a resolute, almost defiant set to her lower jaw, her mouth pulled in at the corners. Her hair has been bobbed, I believe, in preparation for the long trek north. And her image has haunted my memory during all the years since I first saw her.

I was unable to learn her name or place of origin, for she might
have been either a Canadian from some place like Ontario or an American from Michigan or one of her sister states. I could not even determine by what route she tried to reach Dawson, but I have always supposed she tried the overland one, and if she did, I fancy she may have died during the first terrible autumn when, miles from Edmonton, she awakened to the terrifying fact that she was never going to make it to Dawson and that she was too far from Edmonton to scurry back. She may have starved to death on the bank of some turbulent mountain stream she was powerless to ford.

On the other hand, her portrait is that of a determined young woman, a realist, and there is a chance, I think, that when the realities of this great delusion became clear she turned her back on the folly and returned to Edmonton, from where she quickly departed for her former home in Michigan or Ontario. Or, being the resolute woman she seems, she could well have gone down the Mackenzie, over the mountain divide, and on to her destination.

In the original version of
Journey
, I had no place for a heroine, but she went every step of the way with me nonetheless. She was my guide, my muse, my touchstone, and was so indelible that she kept fighting her way back onto my pages.

—

Journey
is a narrative which depicts the courage that men and women can exhibit when dealing with adversity, even that which they have brought upon themselves. The realization of this tale has been a unique, revelatory experience for me, for I, too, learned about dreams and determination.

Although it now stands as a fully conceived novel in its own right, with which I am well pleased,
Journey
had its genesis as part of another work. Therefore, how the story of five men's tragic journey across Canada to the Klondike gold fields came to be written and then published deserves explanation.

It starts with my lifelong interest in Canada which began with a summer spent on Lake Muskoka in 1929. Canoeing into the wilderness north of there, I caught a glimpse of the essential Canada: open, majestic, wild, challenging, and filled with fine people and a commanding life. It was an unequaled introduction to a land of manifold beauties.

I followed it up through the years whenever an opportunity presented itself, with visits to various parts of the country: Halifax, the
coast of Newfoundland, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, never in an orderly way, and perhaps more enjoyable because of the arbitrary nature of my travel. However, my main interest stemmed from my belief that every incident in Quebec's struggle for recognition of its distinct language and culture would one day be repeated in the southern United States, with Spanish in our country replacing the role of French in Canada. Canada thus became of vital interest, and I followed with a microscope the twists and turns of how this nation of two languages sought to apply intelligent answers to the problem.

I remember two incidents which epitomized the situation for the visiting observer. At a sports meeting in Montreal, where everyone on the panel had already demonstrated his command of English, an agitated member of the audience rose, pointed out that the meeting was being held in Quebec and was therefore obliged to obey Quebec's new language law, and warned that if the words of the speakers were not also translated into French, he would summon the police. Cowed by his threat, we sat through an afternoon of speech-translation-speech-translation when everyone present knew that this was both unnecessary and an irritation.

Later, on the same trip, I was in Toronto talking with businessmen of that city, one of the finest in North America, about how they had opted to close down their Montreal headquarters and seek refuge in Toronto, even though they had been happy in Quebec and did not want to leave. This seemed so preposterous that I asked for an explanation, and they informed me that under Quebec's language law all businesses in that province now had to keep their records in French, and the extra work this required had made conducting business there impossible.

After these two introductions to the friction between the two language groups, and with my conviction that sooner or later a similar movement for language rights would germinate in our Hispanic communities, I followed with the closest attention the implementation of official bilingualism in Canada and became, as a result, moderately informed on life north of the border.

Yet, like many Americans, who are poorly informed about Canada, I tended to perceive Canada for the most part through its expatriates: those Canadians who have met with outstanding success in the United States—Saul Bellow, John Kenneth Galbraith, Peter Jennings, Senator Sam Hayakawa—and whose achievements have led to a great respect in America for Canadians as a whole. I have admired,
too, the successes of those who chose to remain and work in Canada, not least my fellow writers Pierre Berton, Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler and Morley Callaghan.

I did have one other contact with Canada, but it was personal. Once at a countryside picnic in Pennsylvania, where the Micheners of the world convened to celebrate the glories of their supposedly distinguished past, I met by accident my cousin the Right Honourable Roland Michener, the governor general of Canada, and we locals felt a bit puffed up.

My interest in things Canadian never diminished, and whenever I came upon someone in my travels who was familiar with the country, I engaged in long conversations about political changes, life in the western provinces and especially adventures in the arctic. So it was inevitable that when I began seriously to contemplate a novel on Alaska, I would spend considerable time pondering how to fit in a Canadian contribution. And, of course, there was always the vivid memory of that woman gold-seeker in Edmonton.

—

When I began constructing the intellectual outline of my novel
Alaska
, I had three special desires beyond the obvious ones that would have to be treated in any fictional work on that region. I wanted to help the American public to think intelligently about the arctic, where large portions of future international history might well focus; I wanted to remind my readers that Russia had held Alaska for a longer period, 127 years (1741 through 1867 inclusive), than the United States had held it, 122 years (1867 through 1988); and I particularly desired to acquaint Americans with the role that neighboring Canada had played and still does play in Alaskan history.

The reasons for these desires are easy to explain. I had found my first good luck in writing by dealing in a fresh way with the South Pacific and had always wanted to complete the cycle with work on the North Pacific. In the years after 1946, when I finished
Tales of the South Pacific
, scores of correspondents had urged me to write about either the North Pacific or Alaska or both, but I refrained because I was afraid I did not know enough. However, the urge to tackle such an enticing subject was ever-present, and I visited the area repeatedly to check my understandings in case I should later wish to try.

My interest in Russian Alaska is duplicated by many American historians and geographers who have knowledge of either the history
of Russian, or of British and American, attempts to explore that part of the world. As a young man I had studied the eastward expansion of the Russian Empire to the Pacific with the same avidity that I studied American and Canadian expansion westward to the same ocean. I was moderately well informed about the steps Russia had taken to extend her empire eastward and I had been allowed to travel to many of her Asian frontiers, but not, alas, into Siberia itself. But if books can provide the portrait of a land, and as a writer I had to think so, I had acquired a powerful understanding of and admiration for the great, halting, confused and finally triumphant Russian push to the east. What I did not know very well, and I was dismayed to realize this, were the Alaska-Yukon border region and the events that had occurred there, particularly during the years of the gold rush. In fact, I knew of only three incidents that might be usable in a novel, and that was pretty thin gruel for the kind of book I hoped to write.

I was aware, as were most Americans with knowledge of our history, that the great gold rush of 1897–1899 occurred mainly on Canadian soil and that the Canadian police had saved the day when the American presence in the region had not yet been fully established. Many Americans, like me, regretted the fact that the boundary between the two nations had not been just a few miles farther to the east, which would have placed Dawson City and the Klondike on American soil, but we accepted its position as an unfortunate mistake that could not be corrected.

On the subject of boundaries, I had also read many years ago about the hilarious contretemps that occurred in connection with the important Hudson's Bay post at Fort Yukon, that strategic settlement just off the Arctic Circle where the great Yukon River stops flowing north and takes a ninety-degree turn to the west for its long run into the Bering Sea. When American surveyors got around to checking boundaries in 1869, they learned that this big Canadian post was not in Canada but in Alaska! An amiable agreement was worked out, with never a harsh word, whereby the Hudson's Bay people would move their trading store the proper number of miles to the east, which would put it safely on Canadian soil. In fact, the agreement was so amicably reached that American military personnel helped the Canadians not only to make the move but also to build a new trading post at a site called Rampart.

Unfortunately, the Canadian-American team moved the site the proper number of miles not as the crow flies but along the bank of
the Porcupine River, which wandered this way and that, so that when the Canadians had finished making the move and were installed in their new trading post, the next team of surveyors found that they were
still
on American soil. In some disgust the Canadians abandoned their new home, which would be remembered as Old Rampart, and moved a substantial distance into Canada, where they named their post Rampart House. It had been a trivial affair with amusing interest, but hardly the kind of material on which to base the entire episode I wanted to write.

Of much greater significance was an incident I could use, one which glows in history because of the restraint with which both Canada and the United States behaved. In the years 1877 and 1878 conditions in America's new territory of Alaska were in dismal shape, primarily because no responsible form of government had been established for the vast territory. Matters deteriorated so precipitously that the few American settlers in Sitka, once the Russian capital and now the American, feared that rebellious Tlingit Indians were about to invade and slaughter all white people.

Justification for their fear has never been established, but in 1879 distraught citizens, unable to obtain protection from their own government, made a dangerous canoe trip south to the Canadian military outpost at Prince Rupert, imploring the naval command there to dispatch a warship to save Alaska on behalf of an American government that seemed about to lose it.

A daring Canadian officer made a snap decision to aid his American cousins, and on 1 March 1879 the Canadian warship
Osprey
steamed into Sitka Sound. This show of force dampened the Tlingit uprising, if indeed it had ever existed, and for nearly two months this Canadian vessel represented organized government in Alaska. When an American ship arrived belatedly, the
Osprey
courteously saluted and retired, taking with her the gratitude of the American colonists, who would forever after insist that “when the Americans would do nothing to protect us, Canadians saved the day.”

That was the totality of what I had to work with regarding Canada's role on the Alaskan frontier, and it wasn't much, but when I started my serious research I came upon an American source which said cryptically that a Canadian writer named Pierre Breton, who from the entry I judged to have long been dead, had written a book about the gold rush, published in the United States as
The Klondike Fever
, and I asked a research librarian upon whom I often depended
to see if she could track it down. In less than five minutes she called back: “The author is very much alive. He is one of Canada's most respected writers. Six libraries in our district have copies of his book, which was published in 1958. And incidentally, his name is
Berton
.”

Since I could walk to the library nearest my home, I soon had a copy of this excellent work, one written with a powerful sense of organization and emphasis and in a congenial style, but as I read it in great gulps I realized that Berton was telling me what I already knew about the joint American-Canadian experience in the gold fields. I was not wasting my time reading the book, because Berton was continually throwing up bits of compelling information I had not previously known, but I was not getting much material about the strictly Canadian role in the gold rush. Then, in chapter six, I came upon a section dealing with the comic-tragic stampede out of the Canadian frontier town of Edmonton.