Farley Mowat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the Sea Shepherd ship, see RV Farley Mowat.

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 books. A movie about his experiences with wolves, titled Never Cry Wolf, was released to widespread popularity in 1983.

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

Contents

[edit] Childhood

Great grandnephew of Ontario premier Sir Oliver Mowat, Farley Mowat was born in 1921 in Belleville, Ontario. His father, Angus Mowat, had fought at the Battle of 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 (Owls in the Family 1962), 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. His friends were children at the Dundurn Indian Reserve. In 1935, at age 15, Mowat made his first trip to the Arctic with his great-uncle Frank, an amateur birder.[1]

[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.[2]

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.[3]

[edit] Literary career

 This section needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007)

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 Ihalmiut, a Caribou Inuit band, which he attributed to misunderstanding by whites. His outrage led him to publish his first novel, People of the Deer (1952). This book made Mowat into a literary celebrity and contributed to the shift in the Canadian government's Inuit policy: the government began shipping meat and dry goods to a people they 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 teenagers — 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 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.[4] The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (1957) and Owls in the Family (1961) are hilarious memoirs about his childhood.

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 trappers in the area were, according to Mowat, using the wolves as scapegoats for the decline of the animals, for which they themselves were responsible; one Inuit trapper, who helped Mowat in his observations, estimated that he personally killed three hundred caribou per year to feed his dogs and himself. 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 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 Westviking (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 a few Newfoundlanders; and, completing his disillusionment, A Whale for the Killing (1972) presents the shooting of a trapped and doomed whale as an inhumane tragedy. He was also co-author for the 1981 film version with Peter Strauss and Richard Widmark.

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. He returns to his World War II military service in My Father's Son (1992), and to his childhood in 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 amongst the Ihalmiut 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. In Bay of Spirits: A Love Story (2006) he returns to stories from his travels to St. Pierre and the southwest coast of Newfoundland in the early 1960's. These events have already led to This Rock Within the Sea: A Heritage Lost (1968), The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (1969), and A Whale for the Killing (1972). However, the 2006 effort adds many new personal details as well as fresh accounts of sailing the southwest coast and meeting its inhabitants that were not included in the previous works from this time period in his life.

In 2007, Mowat became actively involved with the Green Party of Canada, adding his name to the party's fundraising letters. He 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 controversy 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 had 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.

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. In an interview during the flap over the article, Mowat admitted that his books are "thinly-veiled fiction".[citation needed] As a result of these persistent and recurring claims, it is difficult to say with authority whether some of Farley's books, billed by many as non-fiction, are just that.

L. David Mech, an internationally recognized wolf expert who has researched wolves since 1958 in places such as Minnesota, Canada, Italy, Alaska, Yellowstone National Park, and on Isle Royale, stated that Mowat is not a scientist and that in all his studies, he had never encountered a wolf pack which regularly subsisted on small prey as shown in Mowat's book.[5]

[edit] Affiliations

Mowat is a strong supporter of the Green Party of Canada, and close friends of leader Elizabeth May. The party sent a direct mail fundraising appeal in his name in June 2007. In 2007 Farley also became a Patron of the Nova Scotia Nature Trust by donating over 200 acres of his land in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to the Nature Trust.

[edit] Writings by Farley Mowat

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Farley Mowat. The Why and Wherefore. amazon.com. Retrieved on 2007-12-24.
  2. ^ And No Birds Sang, p. 7
  3. ^ My Father's Son, p. 359
  4. ^ 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.
  5. ^ Shedd, Warner (2000). Owls Aren't Wise and Bats Aren't Blind: A Naturalist Debunks Our Favorite Fallacies About Wildlife, pp.336. ISBN 0609605291.