Farley Mowat

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Farley McGill Mowat OC, BA, D.Litt (born May 12, 1921 in Belleville, Ontario) is a conservationist and one of Canada's most widely-read authors. Many of his most popular works have been memoirs of his childhood, his war service, and his work as a naturalist. His works have been translated into 52 languages and he has sold more than 14 million copies of his books. Adding to that, a movie about his experiences with wolves, titled Never Cry Wolf, was released to widespread popularity in 1983.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society ship Farley Mowat was named in honor of him, and he frequently visits it in order to assist it on its mission.

Contents 1 Childhood 2 War Service 3 Literary career 4 Order of Canada 5 Criticism 6 Writings by Farley Mowat 7 External links 8 Notes

[edit] Childhood

Great-grand-nephew of Ontario premier Sir Oliver Mowat, Farley Mowat was born in 1921 in Belleville, Ontario. His father, Angus Mowat, had fought at Vimy Ridge, became a librarian, and enjoyed minor success as a novelist. Farley began writing informally while his family lived in Windsor, 1930–33.

At the height of the Great Depression, the family relocated to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. As a boy, Mowat was fascinated by nature and animals. With his dog, Mutt (the hero of The Dog Who Wouldn't Be, 1957), Mowat explored the Saskatchewan countryside. He also kept a rattlesnake, a squirrel, two owls, a Florida alligator, several cats, and hundreds of insects as pets. With some of his friends, Mowat created the Beaver Club of Amateur Naturalists, and kept a museum in the Mowat basement, which included the joined skull of a two-headed calf, some stuffed birds, and a bear cub. This museum eventually had to be moved after an invasion by moths and beetles.

At the age of 13, Mowat founded a nature newsletter, Nature Lore, and had a weekly column on birds in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. He used the money he gained from his writing to feed ducks and geese who would have otherwise died because they didn't migrate south for the winter. About this time, Mowat made his first trip to the Arctic with an uncle.

[edit] War Service

During the Second World War, Mowat was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant into the Second Battalion, Hastings and Prince Edwards Regiment, affectionately known as the Hasty Ps. He later went overseas as a reinforcement officer for that regiment, joining the Canadian Army in the United Kingdom. On 10 July 1943, he was a subaltern in command of a rifle platoon, and participated in the initial landings of Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily.^[1]

Mowat served throughout the campaign as a platoon commander, and moved to Italy in September 1943, seeing further combat until December 1943. During the Moro River campaign, he suffered from battle stress, heightened after an incident on Christmas Day outside of Ortona, Italy when he was left weeping at the feet of an unconscious friend who had an enemy bullet in his head. He then accepted a job as Intelligence Officer at battalion headquarters, later moving to Brigade Headquarters. He stayed in Italy as a D-Day Dodger in the 1st Canadian Infantry Division for most of the war, eventually being promoted to the rank of captain.

He moved with the Division to Northwest Europe in early 1945. There, he worked as an intelligence agent in The Netherlands and went through enemy lines to start unofficial negotiations about food drops with General Blaskowitz. The food drops, under the codename Operation Manna, saved thousands of Dutch lives.

He also formed the 1st Canadian Army Museum Collection Team, according to his book My Father's Son, and arranged for the transport to Canada of several tons of German military equipment, including a V2 rocket and several armoured vehicles. (It is believed that some of these vehicles are on display today at the Canadian Forces Base Borden tank museum.)

Mowat was discharged at the conclusion of the Second World War in 1945 as a Captain, and was considered for promotion to Major, though he turned down the offer as it was incumbent on him volunteering to stay in the military until "no longer needed", which Mowat assumed to mean duty with the Canadian Army Occupation Force (CAOF) but might also have meant the conclusion of the war with Japan.^[2]

[edit] Literary career

Returning to Canada after the war, Mowat studied biology at the University of Toronto. During a field trip to the Arctic, Mowat became outraged at the plight of the Inuit people (which he attributed to misunderstanding by whites). His outrage led him to publish his first book, People of the Deer (1952). This book made Mowat into a literary celebrity and was largely responsible for a shift in the Canadian government's Inuit policy: the government began shipping meat and dry goods to a people they had previously denied existed.

This work was followed by a Governor General's Award-winning children's book, Lost in the Barrens (1956), which was about two children — one white, one Cree — lost in the Arctic. The children are able to combine their skills to survive for part of the winter, but ultimately, they almost die before being saved by an Inuit boy whose knowledge of the Arctic supplements their skills.

Mowat followed up these works with a series of personal memoirs. The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (1957) and Owls in the Family (1961) are hilarious memoirs about his childhood. The Regiment (1955) is a skillful and — unusual for military regimental histories of that era — highly readable account of the regiment he had served in during the Second World War.^[3]

Having been trained as a biologist, Mowat took a Canadian government job as biologist in the Arctic. At the time, the government was concerned that the size of caribou herds was shrinking, and they suspected that wolves were eating the caribou, so the best way to protect the caribou would be to kill wolves. Flying into the heart of the wilderness on a small plane, Farley set up an observation camp near a local wolf population. After months of observation, Mowat concluded that, contrary to the ranchers' claims, the wolves mainly ate field mice and only ate old or sick caribou — by killing off the weakest of the caribou, wolves actually strengthened the caribou herd. The white men in the area were, according to Mowat, using the wolves as scapegoats for the decline of the animals, for which they themselves were responsible. Mowat set forth his findings in his 1963 book, Never Cry Wolf, a book which was widely read around the world, and which was one of the major reasons why the Soviet Union banned the killing of wolves.

Mowat then went through a phase of being very interested in Viking voyages to Canada, which resulted in the books West Viking (1965) and The Curse of the Viking Grave (1968).

Mowat then moved to Burgeo, Newfoundland, where he lived for 8 years. He published three books describing his evolving view of his Newfoundland neighbours: in The Rock Within the Sea (1968), he presents Newfoundlanders as a heroic people uncorrupted by modern technology; The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (1969) reflects his disillusionment with Newfoundlanders; and, completing his disillusionment, A Whale for the Killing (1972) presents the shooting of a trapped whale as an inhumane tragedy.

Mowat published a denunciation of "the destruction of animal life in the north Atlantic" entitled Sea of Slaughter in 1984. In 1985, as a part of the promotional tour for this book, Mowat accepted an invitation to speak at a university in Chico, California. However, U.S. customs officials at Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto denied Mowat entry to the United States. They wouldn't tell him why specifically, but did tell him that it was because of a security file about him that indicated he should be denied entry "for violating any one of 33 statutes" (which ranged from being a member of the Communist Party to being a member of several other radical groups). The result was a media circus, which brought worldwide attention to Mowat. The negative publicity eventually forced the Reagan Administration to decide that Mowat was free to visit the U.S., but Mowat, peeved by being initially refused, declined to visit the U.S. Mowat speculated on the reasons why he was refused entry to the U.S. in his 1985 book, My Discovery of America.

Then, Mowat became very interested in Dian Fossey, the American ethologist who studied gorillas and who was brutally murdered in Rwanda in 1985. Mowat published two books about Fossey: Virunga: The Passion of Dian Fossey (1987) and Woman in the Mists (1987) (an allusion to Fossey's book Gorilla in the Mists (1983)).

In the 1990s and 2000s, Mowat's works have mainly consisted of recombinations of themes he had previously dealt with. Thus, he returns to his childhood in My Father's Son (1992) and Born Naked (1993). He returns to the Canadian Arctic in High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey (2002) (an account of a 1966 trek in northern Canada) and No Man's River (2004) (an account of an Arctic adventure he took in 1947). In Rescue the Earth: Conversations (1990), Mowat continued his work as an environmental advocate. In The Farfarers (2000), Mowat returned to the theme of pre-Columbian interactions between Europe and North America.

Mowat currently lives in Port Hope, Ontario and spends summers on a farm in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

[edit] Order of Canada

In 1981, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

[edit] Criticism

Mowat has encountered criticism in the media, especially after he was in the forefront of protest against American cruise missile testing in Canada. His activism famously led Ronald Reagan's administration to deny him entry from Canada to the U.S. for a routine speaking engagement; but the resultant public outcry in the U.S. eventually forced the Reagan administration to back down.

The Toronto Star has written that Mowat's memoirs are at least partially fictional. In a 1968 interview with CBC Radio, Farley admitted that he doesn't let the facts get in the way of the truth (Canada Reads). Once, when Mowat said that he has spent two summers and a winter studying wolves, the Toronto Star wrote that Mowat had only spent 90 hours studying the wolves. This hurt Mowat's reputation badly.

An article in the May, 1996 issue of Saturday Night written by John Goddard lays out a somewhat more in-depth criticism of Farley's celebrated works, especially Never Cry Wolf. As a result of these kinds of persistent and recurring claims, it's difficult to say with authority whether some of Farley's books, billed by many as non-fiction, are just that.

[edit] Writings by Farley Mowat

• People of the Deer (1952; revised 1975) ISBN 0-89190-818-8
• The Regiment (1955)
• Lost in the Barrens (1956) ISBN 0-553-27525-9
• The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (1957) ISBN 0-553-27928-9
• Coppermine Journey: An Account of a Great Adventure (1958)
• Grey Seas Under: The Perilous Rescue Missions of a North Atlantic Salvage Tug (1959)
• The Desperate People (1959; revised 1999)
• Ordeal by Ice (1960)
• Owls in the Family (1961)
• The Serpent's Coil: An Incredible Story of Hurricane-Battered ships the Heroic Men Who Fought to Save Them (1961)
• The Black Joke (1962)
• Never Cry Wolf (1963) filmed in 1983
• West Viking (1965)
• The Curse of the Viking Grave (1966) ISBN 0-553-27525-9
• Canada North (1967)
• The Polar Passion (1967)
• This Rock Within the Sea: A Heritage Lost (1968)
• The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (1969) ISBN 0-553-27788-X
• Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia (1970)
• World of Farley Mowat (1970)
• A Whale for the Killing (1972)
• Tundra: Selections from the Great Accounts of Arctic Land Voyages (1973)
• Wake of the Great Sealers (1973)
• The Snow Walker (1975) ISBN 0-7704-2209-8 short story Walk Well, My Brother filmed in 2003
• Canada North Now: The Great Betrayal (1976)
• And No Birds Sang (1979)
• Sea of Slaughter (1984)
• My Discovery of America (1985) ISBN 0-87113-050-5
• Virunga: The Passion of Dian Fossey (1987)
• Woman in the Mists: The Story of Dian Fossey (1987)
• The New Founde Land (1989)
• My Father's Son (1993)
• Born Naked (1994) ISBN 0-395-73528-9
• Aftermath: Travels in a Post-War World (1995)
• Rescue the Earth!: Conversations with the Green Crusaders (1998)
• The Farfarers: Before the Norse (1998 - Reprint 2000) ISBN 1-883642-56-6
• The Alban Quest The Search for a Lost Tribe (1999)
• Walking on the land (2000) ISBN 1-58642-024-0
• High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey (2002) ISBN 1-58642-061-5
• No Man's River (2004)

[edit] External links

• Order of Canada Citation
• Farley Mowat at the Internet Movie Database
• Northern Exposure (Salon.com)
• Canada Reads profile

[edit] Notes

1. ^ And No Birds Sang, p. 7
2. ^ My Father's Son, p. 359
3. ^ Regimental histories written in the 1950s and 1960s tended to be focused at military readers and often used much jargon. Mowat's book is remarkable for flowing like a novel (with a novelist's eye for capturing emotional detail) while still chronicling the important historical facts of the regiments' service.