The Long Exile (18 page)

When Alex Stevenson broke the news to the Inuit, Paddy Aqia-tusuk went quite wild. Stevenson tried to reason with him, arguing that splitting the group would exert less pressure on the stocks of game, but nothing seemed to wash with Aqiatusuk. Had not the Inuit been promised they were going to a place where there were no limits to the game? And how were they supposed to catch it if hunters were separated from their families? He was particularly agitated about Samwillie. The possibility of a mutiny seemed likely. To avert it Samwillie's name was quietly shifted to the same list as his stepfather and the discussion was brought to a close. The families would be divided and Simeonie and Thomasie would be separated. Discussing the matter further was just putting off the inevitable. The sea was growing icier by the day and the
d'Iberville
and the C.
D. Howe
both had long voyages ahead. The logistics of the move had already been decided. It would all work out fine, Stevenson insisted. He was confident that he knew best.

A short while later, the belongings of the families of Paddy and loadamie Aqiatusuk, Phillipoosie Novalinga and Simon Akpaliapik were lowered into the
Howes
cargo barge along with their sled dogs. The barge moved towards the detachment and turned westwards up the coast away from Craig Harbour police detachment where the shore-bound ice was less dense. Up on deck, the women began to cry and their children followed. Their distress set the dogs howling and, for what seemed like an eternity, the sobs of women and animals echoed across the waters of the sound until they finally found dry land and melted into the rock. The barge came back for Paddy Aqiatusuk, his wife Mary and their children Minnie, Samwillie, Anna, Elijah and Larry, along with loadamie Aqiatusuk, his wife, Ekoomak and daughter Lizzie, Paddy's brother Phillipoosie Novalinga,
his wife Annie, son Pauloosie, and daughter Elisapee, and took them ashore at a stretch of shale beach just west of the police department. Simon Akpaliapik from Pond Inlet, his wife Tatigak, daughters Ruth and Tookahsee and baby son Inutsiak were also landed on the beach. Then the cargo barge made its way back to the
C. D. Howe.

T
HE REMAINING
two groups of Inuit were bundled into a tiny, red-lit room in the
d'lberville's
cargo hold, after which the icebreaker weighed anchor and turned east.

The
d'Iberville
ground on through the pack ice and turned north along the east coast of Ellesmere. At Smith Sound, she encountered unexpected ice conditions. An iceberg forest had blown down from the north and was sliding along with the pack ice in the currents. The floe was so tightly squeezed that no water was visible between the plates of ice and the
d'Iberville
was quickly locked in to the pack, leaving her with no choice but to go with the floe. In the cargo hold, the Inuit lay on their mattresses in the red light, listening to the dreadful squealing and booming of the ice as the icebreaker split the pack. The ship made progress in inches, pushing and grinding against the floe. Squally sleet began rapping against the
d'Ibervilles
sides. To the Inuit, it sounded like the knocking hands of desperate spirits.

Henry Larsen gave instructions for the ship's helicopter to go on ahead to scout out a possible route through the pack to Alexandra Fiord, forty miles to the north. He was particularly keen to position Inuit at Alexandra or at least on the Bache Peninsula which had long been of considerable strategic importance to Canada. From the tip of the peninsula to the northwest coast of Greenland was a journey of only thirty miles. For most of the year the channel between the
two countries was frozen and it acted as an ice bridge for Green-landic Inuit wanting to hunt polar bear and musk ox on northern Ellesmere in the region of Hazen Lake. The weather conditions at Bache were so severe that a formal border post would never be established there, but Larsen felt that the presence of Canadian Inuit in the area would at least discourage the Greenlanders. Their presence would also serve as an effective rebuttal if ever Denmark, Greenland or the United States made a claim for Ellesmere. In any case, in Larsen's mind, Bache was not such a bad spot to leave a few souls. The Meares expedition of 1870 had discovered a valley between two glaciers at Bache and had reported seeing Arctic poppies and even moths there, and during the short life of the police detachment there, twenty years before, the detachment constable had once or twice reported the presence of game.

But Alexandra Fiord was completely inaccessible and the helicopter pilot returned to ship without finding any clear channel through the ice. They drifted for five hours in the driving sleet and blanket fog waiting for a lead to open up but none did. Finally, Larsen was forced to give the order to turn the
d'Iberville
south before she became dangerously iced in. The ship steamed south at three knots in visibility of less than half a mile. Larsen ordered the helicopter out again and the pilot reported that the pack looked solid all the way through Smith Sound as far as Naires Strait. There was absolutely no way they would be able to land at Alexandra Fiord, or anywhere near it. The plan to establish an Inuit camp there would have to be abandoned. Larsen radioed Glenn Sargent at the Craig Harbour police detachment and told him to expect some extra Inuit families. Later that day, the
d'Iberville
reached Iones Sound and put off Thomasie Amagoalik and his family along with the Anukudluk family from Pond Inlet. Now only one group of Inuit were left on board. By evening, the icebreaker had turned and begun to edge back out of Iones Sound, bound for Resolute Bay. The Alexandra Fiord experiment was over before it had even begun.

A few years later, a memo passed from one office to another in
the Department in Ottawa, observing that the game, reported to be in the area around Alexandra Fiord by the policemen stationed at the detachment in the 1930s, had disappeared, either wiped out in a bad spell of weather or gone north to Hazen Lake. The area was completely devoid of animal life. If the ice conditions had been different on that day in September 1953, and the
d'Iberville
had been able to drop off her human cargo at Alexandra Fiord, the families of Thomasie Amagoalik and Samuel Anukudluk would almost certainly have starved to death.

The journey to Resolute Bay was less eventful. By the following morning, 5 September 1953, the
d'Iberville
had already passed Co-burg Island and she was steaming towards Lancaster Sound when Ross Gibson went up on deck to admire the cone of rock marked Princess Charlotte Monument on his map. Up ahead, the sun caught the glacier-capped mountains of east Devon Island and crimped their edges with rosy morning light. The clean air coming off the mountains made Ross feel loose and exhilarated. A pod of beluga appeared alongside the ship and there were still a few gulls overhead, even at this latitude. He waited until the
d'Iberville
turned across Cape Warrender and left the hilly terrain of Devon Island behind before going back down below to check the list of supplies the
d'Iberville
had dropped off on her pass through Resolute Bay a few weeks earlier. He noticed, among other things, that a new police launch had been ordered and was waiting for them at the campsite. As soon as they had set up camp, Gibson intended to take a party of hunters out walrus hunting. Henry Larsen had pointed out on a map a small inlet on the southern coast of Cornwallis Island to the west of Resolute Bay, where, he said, there were walrus to be found in their dozens, dozing on the beach. He had seen them there during the supply visit. Personally, Ross Gibson hated walrus meatit was strong and fishy-tastingand he knew that even the Inuit preferred to feed it to their dogs whenever they had the choice, but it would help their morale to begin to build their winter cache.
Gibson meant to run a tight ship on shore. He knew that Henry Larsen would have an eye on the new detachment and he also knew that Corporal Sargent and Constable Fryer at Craig Harbour had all the advantages; they had been around Ellesmere Island for a number of months and had an established detachment with a special constable. And there were two of them. All the same, Gibson intended to make Resolute the more successful camp. He planned to be fair and helpful to his “natives,” but he would never cease to remind them of the single most important fact of their existence at Resolute Bay, which was that they were in the High Arctic to live off the land, and live off the land they must.

At seven o'clock on the evening of Sunday, 6 September, the
d'Iberville
dropped anchor three miles off Resolute Bay. It was a very bright, calm end to a long late summer day. A few large floes were making their way southwards in the current, accompanied by a group of ravens which spiralled up and down on the air currents around them. At the sea's edge, an arc of shale clutched the bay and rose slowly to meet the tuff. At one end of this arc lay a building marked on maps as the meteorological and radio station. Farther along the shoreline stood the ionosphere building, and in the distance, about four miles inland, there was a faint disturbance in the air marking the site of the RCAF base. The landscape was quite unlike the spectacular, feral cliffs of Ellesmere. It seemed gentler and more quiescent.

Cornwallis is a tiny, wind-torn island at the southwestern corner of the Queen Elizabeth Islands which stretch from Baffin almost to the North Pole. No one, including Henry Larsen, had ever had much good to say about the place, which was little more than a heap of flattened gravel from which the blasting Arctic wind had scooped a single, southern bay. Its weather was unpredictable, even by the chaotic climatic standards of the High Arctic. Winter blizzards brought frequent whiteouts and in the summer, storms threw fists of hail across the land and stirred up deep and instant fogs which
could last for days. The coastline was a series of poor harbours and treacherous beachings. The coastal waters were often ice-bound and choppy and the shore was often obscured by bruise-coloured cloud. Its exposure to the polar winds meant that little grew on Cornwallis. You might find a clump of rock tripe or lousewort clinging to some sheltered southern slope but nothing of any size was able to find a purchase or protect itself from the parched bluster from the north and, as a consequence of this, caribou and musk ox were rare visitors. There were ptarmigan and Arctic hare and in spring and winter polar bears sometimes arrived from the south, but that was about it.

Six years before, in 1947, an icebreaker had slipped into the waters of Resolute Bay. The U.S.-registered
Edisto
had been escorting the cargo ship
Wyandot
towards Winter Harbour on Melville Island to establish a joint U.S.-Canadian weather station there when heavy ice had driven both ships back to Cornwallis. The navigation season was nearly over and the captains of both ships doubted they would make it to Winter Harbour before ice-up so they landed their cargo in Resolute and gave instructions to the crew to begin building the weather station there. Two years after that, the RCAF base arrived.

Before the unexpected appearance of the
Edisto
and the
Wyandot
in Cornwallis, no one had taken much notice of the place. The Thule had left it about four hundred years previously and the first white explorers who had come across the island in the nineteenth century could not see any reason to stay. When William Edward Parry passed by in 1819, looking for the Northwest Passage, he noted the long shale beaches and low, rolling plains in his log book but sailed on without even checking to see whether or not the beaches belonged to an island or were a part of some larger mainland peninsula. Hedging his bets, he named the place Cornwallis Land after his patron, Admiral the Honourable Sir William Cornwallis, and continued on his way in search of the passage.

The Arctic seemed to spawn bad ideas in white men, of which
the relocation of Inukjuamiut was only the latest. The idea of a northern seaway from the Atlantic to the Pacific had begun in 1497, when a Venetian adventurer known as John Cabot managed to convince Henry VII that by sailing westwards at high latitudes he would discover a short route to the spice and silk markets of the Orient. Cabot's reasoning has been obscured by the years. He may well have been familiar with the stories of the Greek trader Pytheas, who claimed he had travelled to a distant northern land he called Ultima Thule, the last place. Pytheas' ship was prevented from sailing farther, he later wrote, by some extraordinary natural phenomenon which had caused the earth, sea and air to pinch together, and he had had to turn back, but the experience had convinced him that Ultima Thule was the end of the known world and a passage into a new one. How far Cabot took his cue from Pytheas it is impossible to say but it is probably fair to presume that he wanted there to be a Northwest Passage so much that he made the idea up.

The first map of Ultima Thule was not drawn until seventy years later by the Flemish explorer Gerdus Mercator. The Flemish map showed a vast territory swarming with white bears and unicorns. He drew the North Pole as a tremendous mountain surrounded by open sea. Four northward-flowing and seasonally frozen channels divided the circumpolar continent and came together in a gigantic whirlpool round the polar mountain before draining into the interior of the earth. Close by but separated from the mountain by a broad strait was another mountain made of iron and it was this, Mercator speculated, which attracted compasses. Mercator's version of Ultima Thule was not so much the end of the world or a passage into a new one as one giant drain.