Canada’s vast Arctic wilderness has always been perceived as just beyond the last line of civilization and cultivation, a permanent frontier. The immensity of the land inhibited thoughts of occupation or proprietorship, and it took men such as Joseph Elzéar Bernier to determine its extent and its boundaries and, most importantly, to establish its sovereignty. Whereas eighteenth and nineteenth century wayfarers had struggled to find passages west, master mariner Bernier explored and mapped the Arctic as an end in itself. In 1909 he unveiled a plaque on Melville Island that proclaimed, to the world, the Arctic Islands of Canada.
 

Born at L’Islet, Quebec, on January 1, 1852, Bernier, at the age of three, embarked for the Mediterranean where he remembered the sacking of Sevastopol during the Crimean War (1854-56). Master of the 216-ton brigantine St. Joseph at age 17 – “the youngest skipper in the world” – he would command 105 ships and cross the Atlantic 269 times before he died.

Born into a family of mariners at L’Islet, Quebec, on New Year’s Day 1852, Bernier was bound for the sea as a cabin boy at 14 and was master of his own vessel at 17. His career involved commanding over 100 ships on many seas and crossing the Atlantic Ocean 269 times. Several years as a dockmaster for the Lauzon shipyard, managing the Dominion Ice Company, and serving as governor of the Quebec prison in the 1880s and 1890s allowed Bernier to plan and promote a strategy for polar navigation. He believed in a sector theory of Arctic sovereignty whereby a country facing the North Pole rightly should possess the islands within a triangle from the northern shore of its mainland to the apex at the pole.

Bernier campaigned for an expedition to the North Pole in 1902. As early as 1872, he acknowledged that Arctic region navigation had captured his imagination: “My knowledge of ice conditions in the St. Lawrence and in the North Atlantic, coupled with an experimental trend of thought, led me to read up the history of polar explorations in my spare time, and to study assiduously the problems of Arctic navigation. From 1872, my cabin library on shipboard consisted mainly of books on Arctic travel, and the latest Arctic maps were always in my chartroom.”

Both the North Pole and the Northwest Passage frustrated Bernier, but he made a considerable contribution toward the understanding of Arctic travel and the management of such external threats as whalers penetrating the Arctic Ocean from the east. Bernier navigated Hudson Bay in 1904-05 and, from 1906 to 1911, made official voyages on behalf of the Dominion government to assert Arctic sovereignty. As Captain of the three-masted steamer Arctic, by 1910 Bernier had left documentation declaring sovereignty on most of the Canadian islands up to the 80th parallel.

Enticed by the rumour of gold on Baffin Island, Bernier left government service and made private expeditions into the Arctic archipelago from 1912 to 1917. He patrolled the eastern Arctic for the government from 1922-25, charting new territories until he retired at the age of 73. Two years later he was called back to the Arctic to plot a polar route for grain ships using the port of Churchill on Hudson Bay. Bernier, one of the world's most talented explorers, died at Levis in 1934 at age 82.
 

The Arctic, a barquentine with a length of 165 feet, made 12 expeditions into the polar seas between 1904 and 1925. Captain Joseph Elzéar Bernier’s chief purpose for these expeditions was to establish Canadian sovereignty over all the islands he could reach north of the mainland between the 60th and 141st meridans of west longitude.

Other famous Arctic explorers received recognition for daring Arctic exploits, but much of their information was derivative and based on the navigation experience of J. E. Bernier. His reputation was built upon twelve Arctic expeditions in one of the most severe climates on earth. Bernier gave up his quest for the ever elusive North Pole for the establishment of Arctic sovereignty. He claimed, “I regarded this work of greater importance than any attempts to reach the pole so far as Canada was concerned.”

Although Bernier made mere inroads in the vast Arctic landscape, his stark flags were like the wands of a mystical sovereignty. It would later take the occupation of Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to convince the international community and skeptical native people that Canada actually extended to the North Pole. As a symbolic gesture, Bernier proclaimed the Arctic Islands as Canadian; this was somewhat surprising to Inuit peoples who had known several of the islands as home for generations. The definition of sovereignty, self-government, and land management is still undergoing negotiations with original peoples, but Bernier ensured that it would be Canada that would do the negotiations in the Arctic Islands.

Larry Turner