“He’s a strong guy … a real Bernier!” exclaimed Jean-Baptiste Bernier, the proud grandfather. He and the boy’s father, Thomas Bernier, were confident the lad would grow up to be a sea captain.
Which flag did he plant? The Canadian Red Ensign, of course, the flag adopted organically by Canada in the 1860s. Like a true patriot of his time, Captain Bernier flew the Union Jack from his residence at 27 Fraser Street in Quebec City, with a commanding view over the river and valley below.
Joseph Elzéar was educated in L’Islet by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic order founded in France by Jean-Baptiste de La Salle. He sailed to Cuba with his parents aboard his father’s ship, the double-masted Zillah. Contracted in 1854 to support the Crimean War, the family went to live on Malta and Bernier sailed supply routes as far as the Black Sea, all recorded in a logbook kept by Joseph’s formidable mother, Henriette-Célina Paradis.
At the age of 14 the young world-traveller became a cabin boy on the Saint-Joseph, a two-masted brigantine built and commanded by his father, the young man observing and learning every step of the way. By age 17 he was ready to serve as ship’s captain—the youngest in the Empire. His first voyage as captain was to haul a cargo of timber across the Atlantic to Teignmouth, England.
When at age 18 he married a local girl, Rose de Lima Caron, in 1870, they sailed for Italy and were almost lost in a storm that injured and traumatized the young bride. It took time for her to accept the danger of her husband’s work and he took several land-based jobs to assuage her unease. (As time passed, she resumed sailing with him.)
In 1872, Bernier completed advanced navigation studies at Quebec and went on to make a brilliant career sailing out of Quebec, Portland, Boston, and New York. In 1880 he survived his first shipwreck off the coast of Ireland, saving the entire crew of the Quorn.
He conceived of a great expedition to reach the North Pole. Tales of Arctic exploration fascinated many people at the time, from Sir Edward Parry’s attempts after 1819 to the fateful Franklin Expedition of 1845–’46 and the Polaris expedition by an American, Charles-Francis Hall, which was funded by the U.S. Congress—a fact that filled too few Canadians with alarm. The most famous claimant to reaching the North Pole was American Robert Peary, who kept making headlines in the 1890s as successive voyages took him closer and closer to the Pole.
There followed dozens of polar expeditions by numerous countries, but none by Canada.
Canada’s ability to extend its reach over the North Pole was bound up with asserting sovereignty over the Arctic Islands, ceded to the Dominion of Canada by Great Britain in 1880. But as usual in a long Canadian tradition, the government did little to secure Canada’s interests—no steps to affirm its sovereignty and jurisdiction over the vast Northland.
To understand sovereignty, it helps to compare a modern academic definition with the traditional understanding. Here is a definition from a recent Ph.D. thesis:
“State Sovereignty as Non-domination. Indigenous scholars use concepts of grounded normativity and rooted constitutionalism to centre relations to land and all beings in balance. Feminist relational approaches provide a version of state sovereignty that critiques the domination aspect of classical liberal sovereignty.”
Unfortunately, this definition is quite useless beyond the faculty lounge. If Canada truly practised “grounded normativity” and “relational approaches,” then Canada’s Arctic would promptly be taken over by American, Russian, or Chinese hard power.
Sovereignty requires control and pragmatic indigenous people know it, which is why they assert “title” over ever more Canadian territory, so that they can profit from exploiting the land and its resources as do other Canadians.
At 5 foot 4, Bernier was not a tall man. But he was a big man, 212 pounds, with “command presence” and charisma. He began building support and lobbying the powerful to back his polar scheme. He invested $21,000 of his own money and got support from many individuals and societies like the Société de Géographie de Québec.
With the help of one prison inmate “who was serving the maximum sentence for having been a forger,” Bernier later wrote, “I drew a large map of the lands and seas of the North, recording all the knowledge of the time about this region and indicating the routes followed by all the explorers who had ventured there.”
His chart was ready at the end of 1896 and he took it to show Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, who was sceptical at first. Laurier did not want to provoke the ire of the United States.
Interest and support for Arctic sovereignty grew among the public and in Parliament, especially with Canada’s defeat in the Alaska boundary negotiations in 1903, in which she failed to get sea access for the Yukon Territory.
Between 1906 and 1925, Bernier made 12 more Arctic voyages that constituted his life’s work. He reached locations on Pond Inlet, Parry’s Rock, Winter Harbour, and Arctic Bay. Parry’s Rock Wintering Site, on Melville Island, is a national historic site.
He endured eight Arctic winters, raising the flag and installing plaques or stone markers or little cairns in innumerable remote places. He issued licences and collected fees from fishermen and whalers in the name of the Crown—another mundane activity that nonetheless made the point that Canada was sovereign.
“I was persuaded that this mission was of much greater importance to Canada than an expedition to the North Pole,” he wrote of the 1906 voyage.
He also methodically collected documents left behind by British explorers and delivered them to Canadian Archives—another demonstration that Canada’s sovereignty was built on British activity and achievement.
Bernier had two Inuit interpreters or witnesses on this first voyage. As he wrote, they were part of the Canadian fabric; they were interesting company, good hunters and fishermen, and on their return home they could spread news of the expedition among fellow Inuit.
“I wanted them to tell their friends what they had seen to the west,” Bernier wrote. He also made Canada’s presence known by delivering food to Inuit encampments along the way.
“I had tears in my eyes just now,” he wrote. “I could have cried. It was a tragic moment. Another man might have acted differently. For me, orders are orders.”
His last Arctic voyage as commander was completed in 1925. He was showered with many honours, and valued above all his Knighthood from Pope Pius XI, who named him to the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre in 1933. He died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve, 1934. In modern times Canada has named two icebreakers after him, put his face on stamps, and illustrated his voyages in the 2013 passport. But is J.E. Bernier a household name?
His self-discipline held for 256 voyages all over the world, in command of 107 ships, spanning some 650,000 kilometres, the equivalent of going around the world 21 times. But we may note above all his love of the sea and of Canada, whose claims to the Far North he secured for all time. Or did he?
