Stefansson, ambassador of the North

Vilhjalmur Stefansson (November 3, 1879-August 26, 1962), an anthropologist, explorer, book collector, and writer, was an authority on polar regions. At one time a student for the Unitarian ministry, he spent his life as an evangelist for the North. His message was that the Arctic was not a peripheral frozen wasteland populated by savages, but the center of the earth?the "Polar Mediterranean," he called it?where America, Europe, and Asia come together. He challenged the stereotype of the "Eskimo" as a primitive, inferior race, holding them up instead as models of successful adaptation and teachers from whom we have much to learn.