Joseph Elzéar Bernier (1852-1934)

Abstract

... Joseph Elzéar Bernier belonged to the fading era of wooden ships and iron men. His father and grandfather were sea captains and shipbuilders. He attended school in L'Islet until he was 14 and then went to sea. Three years later he became master of his vessel. After a hundred voyages to many ports he came ashore to accept the unlikely position of governor of the Quebec jail. This fitted into Bernier's scheme, for it gave him time to read and to study. Since 1872 he had been fascinated by arctic exploration, so now he absorbed all of the published accounts of British, American, Danish, and Norwegian expeditions. In 1898 he gave a lecture before the Quebec Geographical Society expounding on both how he might reach the North Pole by ship and dog-team and how he might sail through the Northwest Passage. This created a stir. He resigned from the jail and started campaigning. ... What appeared to be a key to the realization of his dreams in 1904 was the availability of a stoutly built 650-ton sailing ship with an auxiliary steam engine. This was the Gauss, named for a German astronomer and magnetician, built in Kiel in 1901 for a two-year Antarctic expedition that had been successfully completed. Bernier purchased her for the Canadian government at a bargain price of $75,000 and sailed her to Quebec, where she was renamed Arctic. But, alas, the government had surprising and disappointing plans for Bernier. Instead of heading his own expedition to the North Pole, he was to serve only as master of the Arctic for a year-long patrol of the Northwest Mounted Police into Hudson Bay to control foreign traders and whalers. However, this interlude gave Bernier experience in arctic travel and living, standing him in good stead for the future. His ship performed well, so he was now ready for whatever northern responsibilities he could assume. ... On his 1908-1909 expedition Bernier took the Arctic through half the length of M'Clure Strait. It was invitingly open and he might have realized his dream of sailing through the Northwest Passage, which Roald Amundsen had already done with a much smaller vessel by a more southerly route in 1903-1906, but Bernier lacked authorization to proceed and reluctantly turned back. On his next voyage he had the authorization, but this time M'Clure Strait was ice-choked. ... In 1912, ... he had left the service of the government to engage in a private gold-hunting and fur-trading venture around Pond Inlet, Baffin Island, ... In 1922 the Arctic was refurbished for the first of a series of annual government expeditions to the Eastern Arctic Archipelago. Bernier, who had found no Baffin gold and was now 70 years old, was glad to be placed in charge of his old ship again. The tasks of the expeditions were to maintain sovereignty among the arctic islands (showing the flag, as it were), establish new posts of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and reprovision and rotate the men at existing ones, see to the health and welfare of the resident Inuit, and conduct scientific investigations. ... In 1927 Bernier commanded two tugs towing a dredge and steel scow from Halifax to the Hudson Bay port of Churchill. That same year he was granted a government pension of $2,400 annually, plus a medal, rewarding him for what he had done to strengthen Canada's title to arctic islands whose potential value was still beyond anyone's dreams - except perhaps his own. On December 26, 1934, at the age of 82, Joseph Elzéar Bernier died. Despite having been thwarted in his early ambition of going to the North Pole or through the Northwest Passage, he had earned a niche in the history of Canadian arctic exploration.