The Lost Ones – Ian Cameron, 1961 ★½

Adventure Served Cold

The world has become much smaller in the last sixty years. Satellites, smartphones, and the internet make global exploration more easily done in a comfy chair than on a boat or plane.

But imagine as recently as 1960 searching after someone lost on a distant Arctic island off northern Canada. What to do? In the case before us today, you get on a boat, a plane, and a dogsled in search of a fabled whales’ graveyard – if the Vikings don’t catch you first.

What The Lost Ones offers in imagination is more than offset by what it lacks in believability.

The story features a trio of adventurers: Keith Rogers, our narrator, is an experienced Arctic traveler. Captain Ross is a crusty old soldier who presses Rogers to help find his son, who stole a helicopter and flew deep into the Arctic Circle in search of treasure. Professor Somerville is a scientist on hand to explain what everything means. Like this:

“Seems to me it all adds up to one thing: a tribe of Blond Eskimoes live on Prince Patrick Island and want to keep the place to themselves.”

Prince Patrick Island is both setting for much of The Lost Ones and its most singular character. Nothing quite stirs Ian Cameron’s writerly powers like describing its many fantastical and desolate wonders:

When we felt we needed a breath of air, we crawled to the mouth of the igloo, and lay gazing at a scene which had lost its usual component parts of land and sea and sky, and had shrunk to a single kaleidoscopic melee, in which snow and ice and clouds were merged into one frenetic whirlwind blown streaming off the roof of the world.

Prince Patrick Island is a real place on the northern edge of the Arctic Archipelago. Too cold for human habitation, in the novel it features volcanoes, moss, herds of migrating caribou, and lots of ice and snow. According to Wikipedia, Prince Patrick Island did have a manned weather station from 1948 through 1997; but in this novel the island is completely uninhabited. The way the book works, you need it to be.

Prince Patrick Island, the uninhabited northwest extremity of Canada and the world's 55th largest island. Average temperature in February is 36 degrees Fahrenheit - below zero.
Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/32017847322473067/.

What’s wrong with The Lost Ones, exactly? For one thing, it lacks a compelling story. Much of the novel’s first half is centered around discussion about that rumored graveyard, where all the world’s whales gather to die. There were once stories about elephants doing something similar in Africa; so why not whales? In case that doesn’t convince you, someone found a 300-year-old parchment mentioning this graveyard.

“Hasn’t it ever occurred to you, Keith, that the whales in the graveyard could be literally worth their weight in gold?”

The silly plot is dragged down further by a threadbare cast of characters. Captain Ross’s son, Donald, is a reckless treasure-hunter and his father a bit of an obsessive jerk in his quest to find his boy, but are otherwise colorless. Somerville and narrator Rogers have no discernible personality at all, except a determination to press on whatever the odds.

The oddest thing about The Lost Ones is the time in which it is set. As an exploration adventure involving a large, unmapped island, you expect a time frame in the 19^th or maybe early 20^th century. Instead, Cameron has it happen in the then-present-day, with the adventurers availing themselves of a Sea Otter seaplane for much of their travel.

Such a scenario requires some ham-handed juggling by the author. For example the Sea Otter is destroyed after an encounter with an angry polar bear. Otherwise, if our trio could simply fly over Prince Patrick Island, they might wrap up the plot in half the time and fuss.

Walt Disney Studios apparently reached the same conclusion in 1974 when they made a movie based on this novel, The Island At The Top Of The World. In it, the adventure happens in 1907. Instead of a plane, a dirigible-style airship is employed.

Poster art for the 1974 movie The Island At The Top Of The World jazzes up the source material with an airship, a volcano, and a Viking warrior set to attack. The movie did get an Oscar nomination for art direction despite missing at the box office.
Image from https://d23.com/a-to-z/island-at-the-top-of-the-world-the-film/.

This works better for the Jules Verne/H. Rider Haggard adventure-yarn atmosphere it clearly emulates as well as all the credulous talk of lost Vikings and a whales’ graveyard. Still, the film proved a flop and is pretty much forgotten now.

Ian Cameron, a pen name of Donald G. Payne, was a prolific and successful author. His novel The Children became the cult film Walkabout. He also wrote a terrific account of the siege of Malta during World War II, Red Duster, White Ensign.

As a writer, Payne knew how to make his prose sing. In The Lost Ones, he immerses you in a wild, tragic setting reminiscent of the dusty Australian outback in Walkabout, only a world removed:

…the splendid desolation of the Labrador and Baffin Island coastline never fails to delight me: mile after hundred mile of majestic cliffs, fringed by snow-white isles, with the wide rip flowing darkly between like ink split into the sea. It is a coast which makes one conscious of the grandeur of nature and the littleness of man, and I can’t help feeling that a voyage along it would do a power of good to all the self-important business men who spend their lives in cities making money.

A caribou herd on the move in the Canadian Northwest Territories, their numbers terribly decimated over the years by what scientists say is the impact of global warming. The best prose in The Lost Ones details their rugged fight for survival.
 Image from https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/2021/03/09/illegal-hunting-of-caribou-herds-along-northwest-territories-winter-roads-running-rampant/

Whether it is caribou trodding across the ice, their rustling horns suggesting “a whisper of aspen leaves” as they pass; or the lilt and sway of a husky-driven sedge on its runners, Cameron is a masterful prose stylist. It’s a shame the storycraft is so off.

The set-up is intriguing, but it takes too much time to develop. For all the talk of Vikings, the actual encounter is brief and unsatisfying.

The whales’ graveyard is more fantastic, fed by an underground river and guarded by orcas. Yes, killer whales, which we are told are “the most ferocious of all created animals.” They leap from the water, jaws aslobber, a descriptor Cameron employs often and ominously but doesn’t seem unnatural given orcas do live underwater.

The story centers on the adventurers’ capture and escape, the latter of which is accomplished by Frejya, a member of the Viking tribe with whom Rogers is able to communicate. Frejya loves Donald and helps him and the others escape her people, about which Donald’s father is less than appreciative given his racist disdain for Eskimos or Vikings or whatever the heck Frejya is supposed to be.

The cover of the 1974 tie-in novel for the Disney movie. Naturally, when eight-year-old me saw this cover, I had to have it. Nearly half a century later, I got around to reading it.
Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1719771.Island_At_The_Top_Of_The_World

This bigotry is a rather modern and bracing element that could have made for a more involving story. An exchange between Rogers and Somerville suggests as much:

“He’s lucky to find his son at all,” I grunted. “He oughtn’t mind sharing him.”

“But he will mind.”

Yet like every other idea raised in The Lost Ones, it is dropped without so much as a shrug. Ross isn’t called to account for his clutchy prejudices any more than his son is for putting Poppa and Freyja through the wringer with his graveyard hunting. Indeed, the latter winds up being a huge success.

The Lost Ones is a book for another age, not just in that it seems aimed at a young-adult market but is of a time when dropping in on a settlement of culturally-isolated people for profit and exploitation was something to celebrate rather than bemoan. Was the author putting on his 1960 audience by somehow satirizing their smug Western expectations? Thinking so doesn’t improve the reading experience any. Rather, it feels as outdated now as when it was first published.