shipmates. Canadian Arctic Expedition Background The Canadian Arctic Expedition was the brainchild of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a US-based, Canadian-born anthropologist of Icelandic extraction who had spent most of the years between 1906 and 1912 studying Inuit life in the remote Arctic Canada. His fieldwork had resulted in the first detailed information on the life and culture of the Copper Inuit, the so-called "blond Eskimos". Stefansson had returned home with plans for another expedition to continue his Arctic studies, and obtained promises of financial backing totalling US$45,000 (around US$750,000 in 2010) from the National Geographic Society (NGS) in Washington and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. However, he wanted to extend his plans to include geographical exploration in the Beaufort Sea, then a blank space on the world's maps. For these expanded aims he needed more money, and approached the Canadian government for assistance. The area known as the "High Arctic" was subject to claims of sovereignty not only from Canada, but also from Norway and the United States. The Canadian government was concerned that an American-financed expedition would give the United States a legal claim to any new land discovered in the Beaufort Sea, so when the Canadian prime minister Robert Borden met Stefansson in Ottawa in February 1913 he offered to assume financial responsibility for the entire expedition. Borden's government was hopeful that the expedition would strengthen Canada's claim to sovereignty over the Arctic islands. The American sponsors agreed to withdraw, subject to an NGS condition that the Society could reclaim its rights to the expedition if Stefansson failed to depart by June 1913. This created a narrow deadline and hurried preparations for the journey north, although Stefansson maintained in his 1921 account that "forethought appeared to have anticipated every eventuality". Objectives and strategy The Canadian government's financial involvement represented a shift in the expedition's emphasis, towards geographical exploration rather than the original purpose of ethnological and scientific studies. In a letter to the Canadian Victoria Daily Times, Stefansson set out these separate aims. The main object was to explore the "area of a million or so square miles that is represented by white patches on our map, lying between Alaska and the North Pole". The expedition also aimed to be the most comprehensive scientific study of the Arctic ever attempted. While a Northern Party searched for new lands, a mainly land-based Southern Party under zoologist Rudolph