Forty years of photographs
Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Dec 04/00) - Since the first explorers landed on the Arctic shores, countless written records have been kept about the North and its people.
Many of these visitors, throughout have kept meticulous journals, later published, often divulging as much information about themselves as they did about those they encountered.
Archaeologist John Bockstoce, with his newly published book Arctic Discoveries: Images from Voyages of Four Decades in the North, is no exception.
Bockstoce first travelled to these vast, icebound lands and waters fresh out of high school. Flowers Cove, Nfld., was his first stop.
"I fell in love with the area...in the heady thrill of being on my own in a remote region. It was incredibly exciting to gaze across the Strait of Belle Isle at the Labrador coast, low and blue in the morning haze. With the voyages of the first European discoverers fresh in my mind, it seemed a heroic place.
"It wasn't very far north, but it felt like a frontier, and I was as happy as if I had been standing on the Northern tip of Greenland. That day...the North reached out and grabbed me, and to this day, I am glad to say, it has never released its grip," wrote Bockstoce.
His travels over the next 40 years would span from the very western-most tips of Alaska, through the Northwest Passage, taking him eventually to Ellesmere Island, Greenland, Norway and back to Labrador. In Canada, Bockstoce also stopped on many islands throughout the upper Western, central and Eastern Arctic.
Bockstoce's experiences while in the North include extensive excavations near the Bering Strait, and he served for 10 seasons as a member of an Inuit whaling crew at Point Hope, Alaska, and making three voyages through the Northwest Passage.
Bockstoce has already published a plethora of books about the history of the North, as well as monographs and dozens of major articles.
This time around, the author chose to present a photographic essay in a slim, extremely accessible volume of no more than 122 pages.
What results is a crytalline distillation, a bird's- eye view, of lands that captured the author seemingly forever.
"To date this voyage has taken me more than 50,000 miles in boats in the North. It is a voyage begun, but not ended, I am glad to say," are his last words to the reader.
The forceful photographs, culled from a body of images that dates back to 1962, shows the wide span of the North in all of its glory: ice, land, sky and water leap off the pages.
The text enhances the images, and describes vividly the context of each one.
A vast store of knowledge informs the rather sparse writing, allowing the reader to confidently skip along, trusting the author, admiring images, comparing regions, getting at taste of places most of us will never visit.
A good one-third of the book is devoted to the Canadian Arctic and its historical and natural landmarks.
From Hershel Island to Baffin Island, ice floes, land masses and people are remembered, and Iglulik gets a specific mention.
Bockstoce worked with an NBC documentary team in the winter of 1970 in Iglulik.
While there, he went seal hunting with Jean Baptiste Illupalik. Illupalik's picture graces the page.
This book, looking for all the world like a coffee table trophy, presents a tranquil and enchanting tour through the magical, icy waters of the North. Yet its inherent threats are duly noted:
"...here were big seas, rolling across thousands of miles and full of heaving, bruised sea ice and icebergs driven by powerful weather systems and ocean currents...I felt both menace and challenge."
