But on numerous occasions he claimed that he hated cold and wind snow and ice
But, on numerous occasions, he claimed that he hated cold and wind, snow and ice. In this he was the opposite of another great scientist-explorer, his friend Thodore Monod, who has spent most of his life tramping the deserts of Africa. Without the driving force of Paul-Emile Victor’s passion for adventure, and his trail-blazing enthusiasm for on-the-spot Arctic research, there would have been no French expeditions to the polar regions in our time, and the Antarctic base of Dumont d’Urville would not have been set up in 1956. He was the pioneer of polar exploration in the 1930s, and created, in 1947, Expditions Polaires Franaises (EPF) to study, among other things, the ethnology of the Inuits.
Victor gained his first experiences as an adventurer when he sailed the seas as a deckhand. He obtained his first technical qualifications as an engineer at the Ecole Centrale in Lyons. He also took diplomas in science and – most importantly for someone who was to become a popular travel writer in literature. In Paris, he followed the lectures of Marcel Mauss at the Institut d’Ethnologie.
This, too, was important for his work, because his explorations were always conducted in the spirit of an enlightened ethnologist.His youthful ambition had been to undertake ethnological research in Polynesia, but this was not to be. For in 1934 he was offered his first great opportunity – an expedition to Greenland, under the tutelage of Commandant Jean-Baptiste Charcot on the Pourquoi-Pas. Charcot dropped him off on the Greenland coast with three other young researchers, where they were to work until the Pourquoi-Pas picked them up one year later. It was here, in the Angmagssalik region, that the intrepid quartet set up their first base, at Tassiussak, a small Eskimo community that had existed there in almost total isolation. From his experiences there, Victor produced in 1935 Douze mois sur la banquise (“Twelve months on the Great Ice Barrier”) which had an immense success when serialised in France-Soir and opened the way for Victor’s first public lecture at the Salle Pleyel.Victor returned to Greenland in 1936 accompanied by two of his former research companions and by the multi- talented Danish sculptor- archaeologist-novelist Eigel Knuth. This time, the four crossed the island on foot from west to east using husky-drawn sleds for their provisions. They left Victor alone, to stay for 14 months in a Greenland family, where he continued his researches in his usual energetic, hands-on manner, recording the daily life and culture of the Eskimos, in particular their native pastimes, games and toys, all illustrated by Victor’s excellent drawings.
He mastered their local dialect and learnt their songs which he wrote down phonetically. In 1988, these writings and drawings were exhibited at the Muse de l’Homme in Paris, and the journals were published the following year in a finely illustrated volume La Civilisation du phoque (“The Civilization of the Seal).During the Second World War, Victor was demobilised in 1940, and made his way to the United States, where he took double nationality and volunteered for the US Air Force, for which he wrote technical manuals to be used by the squadrons he trained for service is Alaska, where he commanded a research station at Nome.On his return to France in 1946, he organised the EPF. He was an inspiring lecturer and turned to all the modern media for his increasingly popular conferences, the money from which helped to fund EPF. Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951) and Silent Spring (1962) were the inspiration for his own ecological researches and crusades. He was one of the first European ecologists to alert governments to the dangers of air pollution and the chemical pollution of the Mediterranean.
