Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Ephraim slipped between the skins with Solomon, the two of them embracing to keep warm. In the morning he said, “We will wait here until my people find us and then you will no longer have to warm yourself in bed against a bag of bones.”

  “How will your people know we’re here?”

  “The first man made by the Great Being was a failure,” Ephraim said, “he was imperfect, and therefore was cast aside and called kubla-na or kod-lu-na, which means white man. Then the Great Being made a second try and the result was the perfect man, or Inuit, as the people call themselves. They will find us and they will hide me here until I die.”

  “You mean you aren’t taking me home again?”

  “You can have the dogs. The sled. One of the rifles and half of the ammunition. When my people come they will also load you down with seal meat.”

  “How will I find my way home?”

  “I taught you what I know. How to read the stars and how to hunt.

  An Eskimo boy could do it.”

  “I’m not an Eskimo.”

  “I can get two of the people to lead you back as far as the tree line.”

  “I should have killed you while I had the chance.”

  Ephraim unstrapped a leather bag from the sled, dug into it, and extracted an ancient pistol. “Here,” he said, tossing it to Solomon. “Go ahead.”

  HMS Erebus was engraved on the pistol butt.

  Six

  Moses, still searching for his salmon fly, had to acknowledge that he didn’t need the Silver Doctor. He could buy another one next time he was on the Restigouche. But, on the other hand, if he continued to hunt for it for another hour—say, until eleven A.M.—it would be too late to start work. The day shot, he then might as well retreat to The Caboose to check out his mail and maybe hang in for a drink. Just one, mind you. So he lifted a large cardboard carton out of the hall closet and emptied it on the living-room floor. Out spilled a Hardy reel, his missing cigar cutter, a Regal fly-tying vice, years of correspondence with the Arctic Society, and his collection of notebooks, documents, and maps that dealt with the Franklin expedition.

  Moses had been a member of the Arctic Society until his disgraceful behaviour at a meeting in 1969 had led to his being declared persona non grata.

  The first item he retrieved from his Franklin papers was an interview, published in The Yellowknifer, with a granddaughter of Jock Roberts. Roberts had sailed into the Arctic in 1857 with Captain Francis Leopold M’Clintock. M’Clintock was seeking survivors of the lost Sir John Franklin expedition, a search that engaged the attention of the British Admiralty, the President of the United States, the Czar of Russia and, above all, Lady Jane Franklin. A ballad, popular in London at the time, ran:

  In Baffin’s Bay where the whale-fish blow,

  The fate of Franklin no man may know.

  The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell,

  Lord Franklin along with his sailors do dwell.

  Poor Franklin.

  In 1845, only days before he set sail for the Polar Sea in quest of the Northwest Passage, the fifty-nine-year-old veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar was stricken with a premonition of the icy grave that awaited him. While he was napping on a sofa, Lady Franklin, thinking to warm him, spread over his legs the British Ensign which she was embroidering. Franklin promptly leapt to his feet. “There’s a flag thrown over me! Don’t you know they lay the Union Jack over a corpse?”

  A complement of 134 officers and men and two stout, three-masted vessels of the bomb-ketch type were put at Franklin’s disposal. Both ships, rigged as barks, were fortified for their Arctic ordeal, their planking doubled, their bows and sterns bolstered to a thickness of eight feet. Crowds flocked to the dock when the Erebus and the Terror were scheduled to depart from the Thames. The officers were turned out smartly in tailcoats, round jackets, monkey jackets and greatcoats. For the voyage to circumnavigate the globe through the Northwest Passage they also took with them doublebreasted waistcoats, stick-up collars, black silk neck handkerchiefs, and other fashionable items becoming to gentlemen at sea. Stout, jowly Franklin read his crew a sermon, taking the text from the seventeenth chapter of 1 Kings, wherein Elijah the Tishbite told how he hid himself by the brook Cherith, that was before Jordan, and how the ravens were commanded to feed him there, bringing him bread and flesh in the morning and again in the evening.

  Among the supplies that had been loaded on to the ships were thousands of cans filled with preserved meat, soups, vegetables, flour, chocolate, tea, tobacco and, as proof against scurvy, lemon juice. Even so, some of the more fastidious members of the ships’ company thought it prudent to look to their needs. One officer, for instance, took on board assorted bonbons especially ordered from Fortnum & Mason. And then on the dark night before they sailed out of Stromness Harbour, in the Orkneys, their last home port, there was the curious case of the assistant surgeon of the Erebus boarding with a cabin boy wearing a silk top hat, the two of them lugging sacks of personal provisions. Six coils of stuffed derma, four dozen kosher salamis, a keg of schmaltz herring and uncounted jars of chicken fat, their pockets bulging with garlic cloves. The assistant surgeon and the cabin boy were jabbering in some guttural tongue, which the third lieutenant, whose watch it was, took to be a German dialect. On inquiry, however, the cabin boy insisted it was a patois that he and the assistant surgeon had picked up on a voyage to the South Seas.

  Concern for Franklin did not surface until 1847. The Admiralty sent out three relief expeditions, unavailingly. By 1850, fleets of ships were searching the Arctic. One of them found three graves marked by head-boards. They were the tombs of two sailors from the Erebus and one from the Terror. The three men had been buried in 1846.

  The quest for Franklin continued. In 1854, John Rae, surveying the Boothia Peninsula, met with a band of Eskimos who told him that Franklin’s party had starved to death after the loss of their ships, leaving accounts of their suffering in the mutilated corpses of some who had evidently furnished food for their unfortunate companions. Rae’s story was published in the Toronto Globe.

  The fact that a Christian would accept the word of the natives on such an insidious matter inflamed not only Lady Franklin, but also other Britons, among them Charles Dickens. The source of these stories, Dickens wrote, was a covetous, treacherous and cruel people, with a proven taste for blood and blubber. Members of the Franklin expedition represented the “flower of the trained English navy,” and, therefore “it is in the highest degree improbable that such men would, or could, in any extremity of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by this horrible means.”

  Three years later Jock Roberts joined the continuing search, sailing with M’Clintock on the Fox. In April 1859 M’Clintock reached King William Island, where he found a lifeboat from the Erebus on the western shore, some sixty-five miles from the last position of Franklin’s ships. It lay partially out of its cradle on a sledge and had neither oars nor paddle. M’Clintock calculated the total weight of the sledge to be 1,400 pounds, a ridiculously heavy burden for sailors ridden with scurvy and close to starvation. The only provisions in sight were 40 pounds of tea, a quantity of chocolate, and a small jar of animal fat, probably walrus, that surprisingly enough tasted of chicken and burnt onions. For the rest, the boat was laden with an amazing amount of dead weight. Towels, scented soap, sponges, silver spoons and forks, twenty-six pieces of plate with Sir John Franklin’s crest, and six books, all of them scriptural or devotional works. Two skeletons lay in the boat, both of them without their skulls. The skeleton in the bow, M’Clintock wrote, obviously considerate of Lady Franklin’s feelings, had been disturbed “by large and powerful animals, probably wolves.”

  A BORN JACKDAW, Jock Roberts had brought back mementos from his long and arduous voyage with M’Clintock. A silk handkerchief, two buttons from an officer’s greatcoat, a hair-comb and, most baffling, a black satin skullcap with curious symbols embroidered on it both inside and out. Clearly the skullcap was not standard Royal Navy i
ssue and was unlikely to have belonged to any member of the expedition. So it was immediately assumed that it had been left behind by native scavengers of the site and was probably the property of a shaman. This, however, led to the intriguing conjecture that, contrary to popular belief, there was at least one wandering band of Eskimos sufficiently advanced to have a rudimentary form of a written language. Then one day Jock Roberts, hard-pressed for cash to support his drinking habit, took the satin skullcap to the curator of the northern museum in Edmonton, rambled on at length about its origins, and speculated that such a rare Eskimo artifact was worth plenty. The curator, who happened to be a doctor of divinity, denounced Roberts as a lying drunkard. “Don’t take us for fools here,” he said. “These so-called symbols embroidered into the fabric are not Eskimo, but Hebrew. For your information the inscription on the outside says, ‘Observe the Sabbath, to keep it Holy’ and inside we have what I take to be the rightful owner’s name. ‘Yitzchak ben Eliezer.’ I suggest that you return it to him immediately. Good day to you, sir.”

  That was not the end of it, however. For the skullcap, soon to be celebrated as “The Jock Roberts Yarmulke”, was not the only Hebraic artifact to be found in the Arctic. Another was discovered by Waldo Logan of Boston, captain of the whaling barque Determination, who landed at Pelly Bay in 1869. Logan was met by a friendly band of Netsilik Eskimos. One of them, In-nook-poo-zhee-jook by name, claimed to have found a second lifeboat on King William Island with a large number of skeletons strewn about. Some of the bones had been severed with a saw and many of the skulls had been punctured the easier to suck out the brains. He had taken a book back with him from the site for his children to play with and it was the remnants of this book, later established to be a siddur or Hebrew prayer book, that Logan would bring out of the Arctic.

  Logan, an observant man, noted that the parkas worn by this band of Netsiliks differed in one significant detail from the usual. Four fringes hung from the outermost skin of each one, the fringes made up of twelve silken strands. One of their number, Ugjuugalaaq, told him, “We were on King William Island to hunt seals when we met a small party of whites pulling a boat on a sledge. They all looked starved and cold. Except for the young man called Tulugaq, and his older friend, Doktuk, none of them wore furs.”

  Here, in Life With The Esquimaux, A Narrative of an Arctic Quest in Search of Survivors of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition, Logan noted in parenthesis that tulugaq meant raven in Inuktituk.

  “We camped together for four days and shared a seal with the whites. Tulugaq was short and strongly built with a black beard and was most concerned about Doktuk who seemed very sick.”

  Ugjuugalaaq was careful not to say anything about Tulugaq’s struggle to the death with the officer who dressed like a woman or about the miracles wrought by him. Neither did he mention the death of Doktuk, who was buried beneath a wooden head-board that read:

  Sacred

  to the memory of

  Isaac Grant, MD

  assistant-surgeon

  HMS Erebus

  Died Nov. 12, 1847

  My God, my God, why hast thou

  forsaken me? why art thou so

  far from helping me, and from the

  words of my roaring?

  Psalm 22

  A hundred years later academics were still squabbling over the enigma of the Hebraic artifacts, ventilating their theories in learned essays that appeared in The Beaver, Canadian Heritage, and The Journal of Arctic Studies.

  Professor Knowlton Hardy, president of the Arctic Society, put forward his hypothesis at the meeting in the spring of 1969 that led to Moses’s expulsion. The so-called Jock Roberts Yarmulke, he said, was not a bona fide Franklin clue but a red herring. Or, he added, looking directly at Moses, more properly, perhaps, a schmaltz herring. It was inconceivable that it had ever belonged to any member of the Franklin expedition or even a native. Most likely it had been the property of a Jew on board an American whaler.

  “Possibly,” Moses said, “the keeper of the ship’s ledgers.” Then, improvising on a bellyful of Scotch, he advanced a proposition of his own. One or more members of the Franklin expedition had been of Jewish extraction and the artifacts had been among their personal possessions.

  “Fiddlesticks!” Hardy said.

  Moses, acknowledging Hardy with a lopsided smile, pointed out that more bizarre objects than a yarmulke, or a siddur, had belonged to certain of the officers or crew. This was proven by understandably unpublished but meticulously itemized accounts (available to serious scholars at Admiralty House) of articles found in searches of Beechey and King William Islands. They included a filigreed black suspender belt, several pairs of frothy garters, some silk panties, three corsets, two female wigs, and four diaphanous petticoats.

  “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this drivel,” Hardy shouted, slamming his fist against the table. The latter items, he protested, catalogued with such a typical drunken smirk by Berger—casting doubts on the sexual proclivities of brave officers and men—impugning the honour of the dead—were in fact absolutely innocent. They would have been the property of either Lieutenant Philip Norton or Purser John Hoare. Both of them had been to the Arctic with Parry, on the HMS Hecla, and had distinguished themselves on the boards of the Royal Arctic Theatre that had been set up in Winter Harbour in 1819. Norton had played a saucy young lady in a number of farces and harlequinades and Hoare’s interpretation of Viola had earned him five curtain calls as well as the sobriquet Dolly. “As for Jews having signed on with Franklin,” Hardy charged, “nonsense!”

  “And why not?” Moses asked.

  “Let me be direct with you, Berger. It is a well-known fact that Jews who immigrated to this great country in the nineteenth century did not risk the Arctic Circle, but tended to settle in cities where there was the most opportunity for trade and advancement.”

  Rising uncertainly to his feet, Moses drifted over to Hardy’s place at the U-shaped table, picked up a jug of water, and attempted to empty it over his head. Hardy, leaping free, knocked it out of his hand.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1969 a scientific expedition was flown out to the Isaac Grant gravesite on King William Island. The expedition, led by Professor Hardy, included a forensic scientist and an anthropologist, as well as a support group of technicians armed with the latest in mobile X-ray equipment. They lifted the body of Isaac Grant, undisturbed for more than a century, out of its resting place and defrosted it. Grant had been buried in a narrow plank coffin. But his body, unlike the other three previously exhumed, was wrapped in a curious shroud. The anthropologist pronounced the shroud disconcertingly similar to the sort of shawl that had once been the everyday outer garment of ancient nomads and farmers in the Near East. The shroud or shawl was made of fine woven wool with occasional black bands, its corners pierced and reinforced to take knotted tassels or fringes. When photographs of the shawl, taken from every possible angle, were later distributed among Arctic buffs, Moses Berger pounced. He wrote to the Arctic Society, identifying the garment as a talith, the traditional prayer shawl common to the Ashkenazi Jews of Northern Europe.

  Professor Hardy was outraged. Moses’s letter seemed to confirm his outlandish theory that one or maybe even more members of the Franklin expedition had been Jewish. However, an examination of the startling documents buried with Grant belied that notion. There was, for instance, a letter from a vicar, addressed to the Reverend Isaac Grant, praising him for his diligent work on behalf of a mission to the savages of the Gold Coast, and beseeching other Christians to heed his plea for charitable contributions. Other documents and letters, tied with ribbon, were even more impressive. There was a letter, uncharacteristically effusive, commending Grant for his medical acumen, signed by Mr. Gladstone. Another letter, this one from Sir Charles Napier, celebrated his unequalled skills as a bone-setter, and thanked him for mending a leg that had been broken by a French musket ball. Other letters, signed by still more dignitaries, recommended Grant as a devout Chr
istian and a surgeon blessed with unsurpassed talents. Confirming these panegyrics, Grant’s medical degree, also buried with him, showed that he had graduated from the College of Surgeons in Edinburgh summa cum laude in 1838. Folded between two of the letters was an old theatre bill from Manchester, announcing:

  JUST ARRIVED

  Canadian North American

  INDIANS!

  Headed by Two Chiefs

  Alongside Grant’s corpse, secured to his trouser belt, was what appeared to be a ceremonial Indian hatchet or tomahawk. On close examination the blade was seen to be impressed with the logo of its Birmingham manufacturer.

  The deep scars on Grant’s back proved that he had been flogged more than once, but Franklin was known to consider the practice abhorrent. Furthermore, such punishment seemed inconsistent with the sterling character described in the letters buried with the assistant-surgeon.

  Finally, there was consternation.

  A researcher who had the wit to write to the College of Surgeons in Edinburgh discovered they had no record of a student named Isaac Grant, never mind one who had graduated summa cum laude. The archives of the British Medical Registry had no intelligence of a surgeon with that name and a search at Somerset House yielded no Grant born on October 5, 1807.