A Discovery of Strangers (13 page)

Though as seaman I served all the officers of the Expedition, I of course never quartered with them. For the first sixteen months, and even during the difficult time when the Orkneymen at Fort Chipewyan, July, 1820, refused to accompany the Expedition farther for reasons they anticipated of danger (which later proved correct), I knew nothing of bad blood between Mr. Back and Mr. Hood.

Nor suspected it, though I served both. Until October, 1820, I verify that I knew they had since our departure from England on May 23, 1819, worked companionably together. In fact, the last week of August, 1820, Lieutenant Franklin dispatched the two with a single guide and canoe to ascertain the distance and size of the Coppermine River.

That week of August was when the Indians refused to guide us farther (as it proved, wisely, for in early September winter was fully begun) and we began to build Fort Enterprise in the post-and-beam fashion of Canadian voyageurs, in whose company I slept. I would have preferred to sleep by myself, or with a companionable woman or even a dog at my feet, either one of which warms you wonderfully. But Lieutenant Franklin would allow none of that, which the traders of the country do as a 150-year custom. He performed matins strictly every evening, and divine service every Sabbath wherever we might be. At Winter Lake he attempted to use the occasion of the partial eclipse of
the sun (foretold in his calendar) to prove again the superiority of Christian knowledge, and to again impress the Yellowknives with the necessity of minding the Supreme Being, who orders the operations of nature, and therefore of paying strict attention to their moral duties by obedience to His will as revealed to us. By which he meant providing provision for us. But clouds obscuring the possible eclipse all day, the desired effect was not achieved.

Moreover, the interpreter St. Germain told me that the old man, Keskarrah, who had an extraordinary influence on the band, had expressed grave doubt regarding the event. If Lieutenant Franklin could foresee the passing darkness of the sun, how was it he did not understand the approach of winter? Winter was now so much more powerful than any daily sun, he said, it was obvious the sun would very quickly be forced below the earth into total darkness. I urged St. Germain to relay this conversation to the officers, but I don’t believe he did, and it was not for me to report servant talk. And the sun did lie lower and lower on the horizon until it disappeared altogether and we lived in an endless darkness for over a month (by the chronometer), relieved only by stars and moon and the aurora, or firelight. I think foretelling an eclipse is not as impressive in arctic regions as in the tropics, where day and night alternate most regularly.

Though I slept in separate quarters with the voyageurs (three of whom had their women with them for household service — and one so large she might have warmed several of us had we been allowed near her, but her husband would have none of that), any dissension between the four officers could not be kept long from me. Nevertheless, Mr. Back and Mr. Hood were so secretive that it was only on our removal from the tents into
log quarters that I noticed problems. The first hint was that Lieutenant Franklin, very oddly, ordered me to place Mr. Back’s bedding and kit in his own (the larger) bedroom and Mr. Hood’s with Doctor Richardson in the smaller. That happened between September 30, when sleet drove the mud off the roof of the officers’ quarters, despite its already being frozen hard, and October 7, when the lakes sealed over for the winter, and the repaired roof also. The young officers, who had shared one tent, now had the common mess between them, and a senior officer each to note their nightly perambulations, if any.

At first I thought it was their drawing. Since sailing from Stromness, June 16, 1819, I had noted their (I thought then friendly) rivalry, Back being more adept at landscapes, while Hood caught the grace and countenance of human figures, even animals, better. In fact, they returned from their Coppermine River journey with a co-operative sketch, where Back drew the landscape around Dogrib Rock for background and Hood an excellent white wolf turning to snarl in the foreground. (The picture is in Sir John’s first book.) But their rivalry had nothing to do with their Expedition duties or possible promotion. It was the usual matter of white men in primitive lands: a woman of the country.

As Sir John writes in his book, the young woman was certainly the beauty of her tribe, and that not only for a sailor long at sea. Though the Yellowknives often treat their women with great kindness, generally they hold them in the same low estimation as the neighbouring Chipewyans (south) or Dogribs (west), to the point of considering them a kind of property that the stronger may tear from the weaker by threat or fight or killing, though the latter is seldom necessary. The women
appear unconcerned by such conflicts, since the winner can usually provide better for them and their young offspring. The loser slinks about until he finds a husband weaker than himself to assault and rob of his wife or, failing that, disembowels a dog and persuades his friends to raid a distant Dogrib camp where he may more easily (Dogribs are much milder people than Yellowknives) steal another woman, hopefully a good worker and possible son-bearer. Such theft and marriage is, I was told, common, for they believe it impossible for a man to live without a wife in their country (and after three winters there I believe them), and the more powerful have two, or three. The Yellowknife Matonabbee, who guided Samuel Hearne to the Coppermine River fifty years before us, is reported to have had nine wives, though perhaps not all at once. The number depends on the hunter’s ability to provide for and defend them, and when necessary several men will also share one wife, if no mature woman is available to be stolen and they agree not to fight over her.

Sir John noted in his book the endless hospitality we received from the Cree Indians of the Hudson Bay forests. I would say the Yellowknives of the far north were even more considerate and humane, especially in our great distress later where their delicacy and care cannot be overstated. During the winter we lived with them I saw many examples of tender attachment between couples, particularly between the old map-drawer and his wife, whose ulcerated face Doctor Richardson treated at that time. I call them old because their land ages people very rapidly; they were at most forty-five, since their two daughters who lived with them were, so St. Germain told me, twelve and fifteen years old. The younger would, within the
year, be married if someone could persuade Keskarrah (who was feared for his powers) to surrender her.

But it was the older daughter who set Midshipman Back and Hood against each other, and it became the greater problem because of both her shaman father and her husband. For she was already married as the Yellowknives see “marriage”; that is, she had already lived with two men, and the third who had her when we arrived was, excepting only St. Germain, our best hunter, a muscled, handsome specimen of young Indian who could easily have maintained two wives if he had not wanted one so difficult to keep as Keskarrah’s daughter. Not only was she strong and skilled in woman’s work, but she also had an independence of mind amazing in a female. Upon the growing illness of her mother, she simply left Broadface and returned to her father’s lodge, where he continued to visit her when not hunting. She was not yet sixteen years old, but already a full, mature beauty, the belle of her tribe. Our name for her was Greenstockings.

I asked St. Germain: “A woman can simply walk out of her husband’s lodge?”

St. Germain shrugged. “Man has strong arms, woman strong head, she can.”

When I first realized a woman was in the case, I thought it was the girl, her younger sister. She had that perfect, unused copper skin and enormous black eyes that Indian females display on the verge of womanhood, before the burdens they carry and the endless labour of their lives destroy them into wrinkles and scars. Worn faces are all one usually sees in that cold country, their sagging shapes covered by layers of worn hide, but we all saw the girl as good as naked on an island in Winter Lake
when the Yellowknives bellowed their grief over the death of two hunters by destroying all their property, including their clothing. (Such is their custom of mourning, and the harshness of the country provides enough tragedy to keep them more than destitute.) No slender beauty could affect Lieutenant Franklin, who is beyond any possible reproach in his behaviour towards women, his thoughts concerned with nothing but the performance of his Christian duty and service to His Majesty’s Government. The same is true of Doctor Richardson. In four years I never saw him except he had his medical kit or notebook in his hand. If he knew the female species existed, he gave little indication of it, even when he examined them for medical purposes, as he was sometimes required. Some women came to him openly suckling infants, or bared their most privy parts seemingly without shame. If it were not for the cold, I suppose Yellowknives would wear no more clothing than the inhabitants of Fiji.

You require my account as my duty, which I perform gladly, and will express here in plain honest confidence to your Lordships what I saw that winter, 1820–21. I have spoken to no one of this, not to Lieutenant Franklin, who might have asked it of me but did not, nor to Doctor Richardson, though in October, 1821, we spent those hard days alone together on the barrens and I was finally able to carry him on my back, back into Fort Enterprise. And I didn’t speak of this to St. Germain either, though in that winter he became almost a friend, explaining frankly much about the Yellowknives and their land that would otherwise have remained a mystery to me. He was a mixed-blood, very shrewd and observant, and it is unfortunate he cannot give his account of these matters, which cannot be spoken of without frankness, for which I pray your Lordships’ pardon.

Perhaps if Mr. Back had seen the girl as closely as I did on the island, he would have left Greenstockings to Mr. Hood. The girl was untouched, sleek as a weasel, with that quicksilver shift of leg and buttock that penetrates any man’s loins. She was tiny and perfectly shaped, I thought ideal for Mr. Back. The sight of him dancing with the hefty métisses of Cumberland House and Fort Chipewyan we men always found comical, since they were half a foot taller than he and outweighed him by three or four stone. In their arms he appeared more to be climbing aboard than dancing with them, but he was extraordinarily strong and of such Napoleonic disposition (in five years as a French prisoner I believe he swallowed their Great Nation delusions as well as their language) that he considered any female taller than himself (every one over the age of twelve) a Russia to be assailed, boarded and subdued.

I suggest that Mr. Back took so little notice of the girl and pursued Greenstockings (no Indian woman needs to be pursued; she is simply, if possible, taken) because Mr. Hood, gentle and tender-hearted, forced him into seeing her as a romance because he did, and Mr. Back had to prove he could play the wooing hero as easily as the male bravado more usual in the north. I believe Greenstockings would have accommodated both without compunction, though she might have found Mr. Hood more unusual, a tall, slender man with the pale face of a saint, but very strong — so physically and spiritually strong that his innocence, which would have been amazing in a priest, had for nine of his twenty-three years survived the dedicated debauchery of life at sea with the Royal Navy.

But neither of them had the smallest notion of how, in the manner of the country, they could gain Greenstockings’ favour.
Very quickly Mr. Back attempted to overcome her apparent reluctance by force (I think the darkness in that land removes much of the anticipation from slow, tender wooing), and she responded in good Yellowknife fashion and slit his leg for him. Mr. Hood — who in innocence had suspected nothing until Mr. Back returned cursing with his trousers so strategically parted — Mr. Hood instantly challenged Mr. Back to a duel for the honour of the lady he thought his own.

Bless me — whose honour? The woman was beautiful, especially to young men who have laboured through the endless bush and rocks and rivers and winters of Canada, but she remained a hide-covered Indian. Mr. Hood did not consider that the “lady”, who played with knives every day of her life, could have parted Mr. Back quite differently if she had chosen, or that confining herself to a long opening of near cloth rather than flesh meant she considered this exchange an initial part of a proper courtship where blood, when it flowed — as it probably would — would simply confirm conquest.

And a duel, your Lordships. If Mr. Hood was blind to understand his “lady”, his own honour blinded him to the fact that no matter what weapons they might agree upon except pencils, Mr. Back would kill him.

Mr. Back could not believe his ears. Mr. Hood stood before him, rigid in furious challenge. Finally he laughed disdainfully and said he supposed Mr. Hood must then choose the weapons also. Mr. Hood clicked his heels and saluted. What he intended that to mean I don’t know, but it did underline the formality of his action, though by gentlemen’s rules, since he had issued the challenge, Mr. Back had the right to choose weapons. But Mr. Hood was too little worldly wise to know how
deeply Mr. Back had insulted him with his disdainful reply. He instantly declared,

“Pistols.”

And then they each approached me, separately, to second them.

A fine situation indeed. The Royal Navy forbids duelling, especially between junior officers, so if they approached Lieutenant Franklin or Doctor Richardson they would be immediately ordered to stop. In either case, the Expedition itself was at stake: in such a small party, in a very difficult land, each officer must perform essential duties if we were to hope for any success. But both had lost their clear sense of duty, and so I, the servant, was the only Englishman left to decide: I must act as second to both, and also as referee in a fight to the death between English officers over an Indian woman — well! — if they had been Yellowknives, one of them would have recognized his fatal disadvantage and withdrawn.