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sands. Edgar Christian remained touchingly optimistic in his diary. “We can keep on till caribou come
North and then what feasting we can have,” he wrote on 26 March. But Hornby died on 17 April, and
Adlard on 3 May. Christian himself finally succumbed to hunger at the beginning of June, just days
before the caribou were due to return. Two years later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police discovered
Christian's diary and the three bodies. Christian had laid Hornby and Adlard side by side and covered
them as best he could. His own body had fallen from its bunk and broken on the floor. The silver watch
in the breast pocket of his shirt had stopped at 6:45.
When Paul heard a dramatized radio production of Christian's diary, this extraordinary story struck
a chord. He had just seen John Mills's portrayal of the doomed explorer Robert Scott in the stirring
adventure movie
Scott of the Antarctic
. Scott embarked with a small band of followers for a daring ad-
venture at the opposite end of the world. He had hoped to conquer the South Pole for England, but his
expedition, too, was disastrous. When he and his men arrived at the Pole in January 1909, they were
horrified to see a Norwegian flag already flying there, courtesy of their arch-rival, Roald Amundsen.
The air at the Pole danced with tiny crystals of ice, “diamond dust”, which cast bright rings of light
in halos around the sun. But Scott's mood was black. “Great God!” he wrote in his diary. “This is an
awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”
3
There was worse to come. On the return journey, Scott and his men gradually succumbed to the
appalling weather. First one perished; then another famously walked out to his death in a blizzard.
Finally, Scott and his remaining two companions starved to death, trapped in their tents by another
blizzard, just eleven miles from a food depot.
4
Like young Edgar Christian, the polar adventurers left diaries and letters from which
Scott of the
Antarctic
quoted liberally. Scott's was particularly rousing. “Had we lived,” John Mills's Scott intoned
stentoriously at the end of the movie, “I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and
courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.”
Scott and Hornby embodied the tragic heroes of fairy tales. Something about their stories tugged
at the young Paul Hoffman. The two became confused in his head. He pictured Scott vainly seeking
out caribou while icebergs crashed around him in the Canadian lakes. His eight-year-old mind retained
only the haziest of details from these tales, but the romance of the planet's icy extremes took firm hold.
One day, he'd decided, he would go north for himself.
So, in his sophomore year at McMaster, he began to ask around. The Arctic, he was saying. How
can I get to the Arctic? For that, it turned out, he needed to approach the Geological Survey of Canada,
an august, government-funded institution that sends geologists prying and poking at rocks in the re-
motest, most inaccessible locations. Paul took himself off to Ottawa, to sign up. Two months later he
had won a place at a Survey field camp on the borders of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territor-
ies, just a short canoe ride from where John Hornby had suffered that last bitter winter.
Paul nearly blew it. Only three days after he arrived, he was horsing around, practising shot-put
and discus using the rocks from thereabouts. One false move later, he had sent a discus of Yellowknife
slate slicing through the tent belonging to the field party's leader. Fortunately, its owner was not yet
in residence. A hasty but meticulous stitching job and a surreptitious switching of the tents got Paul
off the hook and allowed him to stay for the rest of the season. That was all it took. The Arctic drew
Paul as nothing ever had before. He was to return almost every year for the next three decades, until
his contact with the Arctic—and the Survey—was unexpectedly and bitterly severed.
In some ways the appeal of the North was immediate and obvious. Fieldwork in the high Arctic
had the three things that mattered to Paul more than anything. His work was an intellectual pursuit, it
involved strenuous physical labour, and it happened in a place that was as beautiful as Paul had ever
