Authors: Melanie McGrath
For hours, the
d'Iberville
inched along the eastern coast of Elles-mere, past Cape Dunsterville into the dense, moving pack near Cape Isabella. A little farther ahead the captain set the ship's position. They waited for the fog to ease. After making sure its blades had not yet frozen up, Larsen scouted from here by helicopter. Up ahead lay the Bache Peninsula, with Alexandra Fiord at its tip. From the vantage of the air, they could just see the old buildings of the abandoned post shining like wet teeth but the pack had blocked off the access point from every direction and with so much ice about the waters were too turbulent to bring the
d'Iberville
close to shore. Just after midnight, the helicopter returned to ship. They would take the
d'Iberville
into the coast at Cape Isabella.
Blocked by the ice from making a direct pass to the north, the icebreaker ploughed slowly southward in loose pack ice before turning north through a promising lead towards the open water, but the crew were unable to get a cargo barge through the ice and had to ferry supplies to shore by helicopter. By evening, the
d'Iberville
had emptied its supplies and begun to turn south once more but she had lost time and there was now no prospect of her meeting the C.
D. Howe
at Clyde River as Larsen had originally planned. The policeman radioed Paul Fournier, captain of the C.
D. Howe
, and explained the situation and the two ships agreed to rendezvous at Craig Harbour. There the C.
D. Howe
would drop off Paddy, Joada-mie Aqiatusuk and Phillipoosie Novalinga and their families. The
d'Iberville
would take the remaining “volunteers” along the east coast of Ellesmere Island to Alexandra Fiord, where it would drop Thomasie Amagoalik and his family along with Samwillie Aqiatusuk and a Pond Inlet family. From there the icebreaker would continue on to Resolute Bay with Simeonie Amagoalik, Daniel Sal-luviniq, Alex Patsauq and their families along with the last family from Pond Inlet.
Paul Fournier set the C.
D. Howe
on a course for Pond Inlet. The settlement stood at the tip of a finger inlet on the northeast coast of Baffin Island, sheltered from the driving currents in Lancaster Sound by the icy dot of Bylot Island. Opposite Bylot, on the coast of Baffin, huge glaciers begin their slow, inexorable slide into the sea, calving blue icebergs which creep south on the currents towards the coast of Labrador. The currents keep the water in the area relatively warm and Bylot is the northernmost haven for the many migratory birds which settle there in the summer. A permanent breeze blows the artichoke smell of guano across from Bylot's roosteries to Baffin Island. In late August 1953, the place was still alive with snow buntings and thick-billed murres and every kind of northern gull. Along the shoreline a few snowgeese ran with their wings set against the breeze, strengthening their muscles for the long flight south. The frail summer had already begun to sicken and the sky pressed down on the land like a dead hand.
On Henry Larsen's instructions, the Pond Inlet detachment had gone out to camps around Pond Inlet earlier in the year and persuaded three families to move north. The Pond Inlet people, or Ingluligmiut as they called themselves, had never travelled as far north as Ellesmere or Cornwallis, but Henry Larsen was right to assume that they had more of an understanding of High Arctic conditions than the Inukjuamiut. Cornwallis and Ellesmere islands lie in the great polar desert and receive very little snow and this would make it difficult for the Inukjuamiut to build snowhouses. The Pond Inlet people knew how to build winter shelters from sod bricks and turf and Larsen was hoping they would pass these skills on. They were also familiar with polar bear hunting and they trained their dogs to help them corner the bears. They regularly hunted narwhal and even bowhead whales and they knew how to catch seals with nets laid under the ice. They were familiar with the winter dark period, though at Pond Inlet it was not as severe as on Ellesmere or Cornwallis. It had been easier to recruit the Pond Inlet
families than it had been to recruit those in Inukjuak, because the people from Pond Inlet knew about the High Arctic, even if they had not been there, and because they were offered better terms. Like the Inukjuamiut, the three Ingluligmiut families had been promised a good life in the far north, plus all the government help they needed, and they too had been told that they could return to Pond Inlet whenever they wanted, but they had also understood that they would be paid for their work in helping the Inukjuamiut to settle.
The three Pond Inlet families were waiting for the arrival of the C.
D. Howe
on the Baffin shore. They had balanced a primus stove on the stones and appeared to be heating water for tea. Ross Gibson later noted in his report that their caribou-skin parkas were not as ragged as those of the Inukjuamiut and he put this down to their being better hunters. In fact, there were more caribou in northern Baffin than in Ungava so the Ingluligmiut were able to renew their clothes more often. The
Howe
dropped anchor and some of the crew went below to sort the cargo tagged for Pond Inlet while Simon Akpaliapik, his wife Tatigak; Samuel Anukudluk, his wife Qau-mayuk; and laybeddie Amagoalik (no relation to the laybeddie Ama-goalik of Inukjuak), his wife Kanoinoo and their families, were ushered on board and taken to the Inuit quarters.
It is well known that Baffin Islanders love to travel and they have a long tradition of it. About a hundred years before, a Baffin Islander called Qillaq had led a party of Inuit from Cumberland Sound all the way to Ellesmere Island and from there on to northwestern Greenland, saying he had been told in a vision to find Inuit living there. Some said Qillaq was a brave shaman, others that he was not a visionary at all, and would not have left his home on Broughton Island if he had not had a dispute with his hunting partner during a hunting trip and crushed the man's skull with a rock. Afraid of what Ikierapring's relatives might do to revenge his death, Qillaq had decided to flee his home and find somewhere else to settle. There were other versions of the story. In 1903, one of Qillaq's friends,
Merqusaq, told the Danish Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen that Qil-laq had met with two white men many years before, probably Francis Leopold McClintock and Edward Augustus Inglefield, who were sailing around Baffin Island to look for the disappeared Arctic explorer, Sir John Franklin. The white men told Qillaq that there were Inuit living to the north of Baffin, and it was probably this information that became incorporated into Qillaq's “vision.” Qillaq and his friend Oqe mustered a group of thirty-eight Inuit on ten sledges and the group began their journey north in late winter, as the light was returning. As the summer approached, the ice thinned and they were unable to sledge along the sea ice; they found themselves travelling across immense glaciers and having to harness as many as twenty dogs on each sled. They lashed thongs around the runners so that they would not take off too fast as they descended and attached sealskin ropes to the back of the sledge on which they hauled to provide a counterweight. At the northern tip of Bylot Island they found driftwood. All winter they worked to build an
umiak
and when the sea ice melted they used the boat to take them as far as the Wollaston Islands. There, it was said, the spirits led them to a cache of rum, salted meat and flour left by the
qalunaat
ship,
The North Star
, many years before. In those days, Inuit did not eat bannock bread, so they had no use for the flour. They tried the salted meat and spat it out but the rum kept them going as far as Tal-luritut, the island that looks like a tattooed chin and which white people called Devon. Many
tornasuit
or bad spirits lived on Tallu-ritut and they tried to block the group's way. Oqe grew homesick and depressed and began to talk about how much he missed whale meat. He accused his friend Qillaq of making up the story of the people in the north and announced his intention to return to Baffin Island, with any of the party who were of the same mind. Qillaq said that Oqe was envious and wanted to be leader. Twenty-four people turned back and fourteen went on, including Oqe's own son, Minik.
Winter returned and Qillaq's group set up camp. This third winter was hard and there was not enough game on Talluritut. Dogs got
eaten and a few families starved. When spring came, most of Qillaq's followers left and returned home, disenchanted. But Qillaq pressed on with a few of the most loyal, and the diminished group set off across Jones Sound and on to Ellesmere Island. There they passed another winter and in spring of the fourth year they found themselves near the Bache Peninsula where they saw the first signs of human life. The group set off to find the strangers, stopping only to hunt. For a number of months game had been difficult to come by, and Qillaq appealed to the spirits to tell him why all the animals had become invisible. The spirits answered that Qillaq's daughter-in-law, Ivaloq, had given birth to a stillborn baby but had kept it secret and this, said Qillaq, was the reason for the poor hunt. He ordered his son Itsukusuk to shut Ivaloq up in a snowhouse without furs so that she would either freeze to death or die of hunger and the animals would once again allow themselves to be hunted. This the son did. Immediately afterwards they came across a large herd of caribou near what is now Etah on the northwest coast of Greenland and shortly after that there was a cry of “Sleds sleds!” from a lookout in the group and they saw two
komatiks
approaching and men running beside them. The men were Arrutsak and Agina and they were living at Pitoravik, near Etah. These Inuit and their band had lived alone for many generations. They had no idea that other Inuit lived to the south of them. They were amazed and pleased to see Qillaq and his group and made them very welcome, so much so that Itsukusuk was able to sneak off in the midst of the celebrations unseen by Qillaq, and rescue Ivaloq from her snowhouse. The Greenlanders' lives were very different from that of the Baffin Islanders. They had no
kayaks
or bows and arrows, and they spoke an unfamiliar dialect. For many generations they had been so cut off that they had gradually forgotten that other, real people existed. There were about forty of them and they had always assumed they were the only human beings.
For several years, Qillaq and his family and followers tried to live among these polar Inuit. Qillaq showed them how to make
kayaks
from sealskin and bone and how to shoot caribou with bows and
arrows. They swapped wives and had each other s babies, but eventually the Baffin Islanders became homesick and, after years away, they packed their things and began the long journey south.
The Ingluligmiut were imagining their own trip north would follow in similar fashion. They were looking forward to leaving Baffin Island, mostly because it gave them a reason to come back home again. They had no idea, as they boarded the C.
D. Howe
, that most were leaving their homeland for ever.
The flaw in Henry Larsen's plan to unite the two groups became immediately apparent. The Ingluligmiut and the Inukjuamiut spoke wildly different Inuktitut dialects and their communications were no better than the crude, fragmented sign language which served for dialogue between most
qalunaat
and most Inuit. For Paddy Aqia-tusuk this revelation was very unsettling. All his life, he had been led to believe that Inuit were one. The idea was embedded in the word Inuit, which means “true people.” Almost everyone he had ever met was related in some way to everyone else he knew. For the first time in his life, he now found himself confronting Inuit as strangers. The situation impressed on him just how far he had come but it also made him feel like going home. He had imagined life on Ellesmere would be not so different to living out at one of the more remote camps along the Ungava coast. There the camp dwellers were isolated, but they knew the land and every so often they would get visits from people they knew from other camps, or they would go out on visits themselves. It had somehow never occurred to Paddy that, not only would he be wholly unfamiliar with the land, but he would not know all the people in it either and it dawned on him just how isolated, lonely and vulnerable that would make him and his family feel.
Ross Gibson watched the Pond Inlet families board. The farther north they travelled and the tougher conditions became, the more respect he felt for the Inuit living in the settlements and camps. This was a common view among the whites stationed in the Arctic. Like them, Gibson had been raised with a pioneer's view of the land. He
still thought of it as something to be ventured across and mastered. The harder you had to fight for this mastery, the more it made a man of you. The Inuit had always measured a man's worth another way, by how well he provided for his family. For the Inuit, living in the Barrenlands was less a matter of mastery than it was a question of avoiding unnecessary risk. This they did by a careful observation of nature, an acquisition of knowledge and a willingness to wait patiently until nature provided an opportunity to act. Survival had nothing to do with battling against the natural world and everything to do with understanding and respecting it.
As the C.
D. Howe
weighed anchor, the new families settled on to mattresses at one end of the Inuit quarters and warily eyed the Inukjuamiut. Aqiatusuk made some attempts to draw Akpaliapik into conversation but the differences in their language made the exchange awkward. Both groups put their efforts into preparing for their arrival. After more than a month at sea the Inukjuamiut were desperate to reach their destination and were very glad when the C.
D. Howe
finally crept through Lady Ann Strait in early September and began steaming into Iones Sound. Ahead, waiting at anchor, the
d'Iberville
sat against a backdrop of terrific, toothy mountains and raw crumbling cliffs.
The late change of plan meant that the decision to split the families into three groups had not been relayed to the families themselves. Alex Stevenson convened a meeting of the whites involved in the move and informed them of the arrangements. He read out the list of which families were to go where, intending to send Paddy and Mary Aqiatusuk to one location and Mary's seventeen-year-old son Samwillie to another, also to separate brothers Simeonie and Thomasie Amagoalik. Even to Ross Gibson, who was still so new to the Arctic, this sounded preposterous and cruel. To separate an Inuk from his family was like cutting off his leg. You could hand him a pair of crutches or fashion him a wooden substitute, but he would still wake in the night clinging to the space where the real leg had once been. Samwillie had no wife and was dependent on his mother
and half-sisters to ensure he stayed warm and well fed. Without his family, he would have no one to sew his clothes or cook his food, which, in Arctic conditions, would quickly make his life unliveable. And Thomasie Amagoalik was widely known to be psychologically fragile. Without his brother, he too would struggle to survive.