The Long Exile

by Melanie McGrath

  Ayunqnaq, he says, it can't be helped. Reluctantly he agrees to move north to Ellesmere Island.

  On the morning of 23 May 1953, Constable Ross Gibson telegraphs RCMP headquarters in Ottawa with the names of the seven “volunteer” families who will make the 1,500 mile journey to the High Arctic in July. Then he pulls on his boots and goes out into the blinding snow. Aqiatusuk is right. Some things cannot be helped.

  On the morning of 25 July the C. D. Howe anchors offshore and sends her cargo barges out across the water to the little wooden pier at the mouth of the Innuksuak River, where Inuit are already gathered to help bring the cargo ashore. That evening there will be races and acrobatics and cat's cradle competitions. There will be a special supper of hardtacks and sardines and pieces of candy. In the morning the Inuit will be carried on board ship for their annual medical check-ups. Thirty-three of them will remain. Among them will be:

  Paddy Aqiatusuk, his wife Mary, son Larry Audlaluk, stepsons Elijah and Samwillie and stepdaughters Minnie and Anna, Paddy's fifty-one-year-old brother Phillipoosie Novalinga and his family, Paddy's son Joadamie Aqiatusuk and his family, Thomasie Amagoalik, who has been living in Phillipoosie's camp, his wife Mary and sons Allie, Salluviniq and Charlie, Thomasie's brothers Simeonie and Jaybed-die Amagoalik and their families, plus Daniel Salluviniq and his family and Alex Patsauq, whose son Markoosie is coughing blood.

  The arrangements for this monumental move are hasty and primitive. Margery Hinds is asked to inspect the families' clothes and equipment but nothing is done with her report stating that in most cases they are inadequate. Since the provisions and equipment supply list has been drawn up by James Cantley with no knowledge of the number of people moving, nor their ages, sex and sizes, there is nothing to be done in any case. Each migrant is supposed to be given a thorough medical examination on board before they leave, to ensure they are fit to travel, but the C. D. Howe's X-ray machine has broken down and there is no time to fix it. There are problems accommodating the Inuit's dogs and equipment, much of which is left on deck, covered by a tarpaulin. A rough storm might send dogs and equipment overboard. The Inuit quarters under the foredeck are already nearly full with sick people, in particular consumptives, on their way to sanatoria in the south, so there are insufficient beds and no division at all between the sick and healthy. Cantley has signed off on the purchase of some mattresses which will be put on the floor in the Inuit quarters to supplement the bunks, where they will pick up the damp and the cold. It will all just have to do. R. A. J. Phillips of the Department is on board at the time and later writes a report on his impressions. At Inukjuak he observes “too many white people around offering confusing and conflicting directions to the Eskimo” and adds that “there is far more racial discrimination than I had realised. There was a half-concealed air of patronage which is particularly nauseating.”

  Ross Gibson is surprised to find himself on board, as guardian of the new migrants. His role, he discovers, is to iron out any creases in the preparations (where to begin!) and also to keep an eye on Paddy Aqiatusuk. Unexpected though this is, and not wholly welcome, it does at least get him away from Corporal Webster.

  The initial plan is for the C. D. Howe to sail across Hudson Bay to Churchill, Manitoba, where the ship will be met by Alex Stevenson, the officer in charge of the Eastern Arctic Patrol's northern leg. Stevenson is a veteran of the annual supply and is this year under orders from his boss, James Cantley, to inspect the tents, clothing, rifles and ammunition of the emigres. It is not clear what Stevenson is supposed to do if he finds these lacking. After Churchill, the C. D. Howe will make her way up to Clyde River on the east coast of Baffin Island, stopping at the usual supply drop-offs. At Clyde she will rendezvous with the icebreaker, d'Iberville, under the stewardship of Henry Larsen. The d'Iberville will carry the migrants north to Pond Inlet, or Mitimatalik, where she will pick up another three families. The Pond Inlet people, the Ingluligmiut, are more accustomed to the kind of extreme conditions in the High Arctic and Henry Larsen is hoping they will be able to assist the Inukjuamiut in settling there.

  In response to uncertainties about the wildlife population on Ellesmere, Henry Larsen proposes to divide the migrants into three groups, land one group at Craig Harbour and one at Alexandra Fiord on Ellesmere Island and the third at Resolute Bay on Corn-wallis Island about four hundred miles to the west. Each group of Inukjuamiut will then be allotted one Pond Inlet family to help them settle. The Inuit are not consulted, and have no idea that they are to be split into groups.

  The following day, 26 July 1953, the C. D. Howe weighs anchor and begins to swing out into the waters of the Hudson Bay with Paddy Aqiatusuk and much of his extended family on board.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THEY HAVE BEEN steaming along for a couple of hours in deep cloud when the sun suddenly slides out from under cover and the sea spins curls of foam across the silver surface of the waves, and when the clouds finally melt away, Inukjuak and everything they knew has disappeared, replaced on all sides by a blank swell, the only sounds the ship's engine, the slap of waves and the coarse lisping of the wind. Between them and the next stop at Churchill, Manitoba, lie four hundred miles of rough water.

  The Hudson Bay coastline is 7,600 miles round. The first white man to map the area, Henry Hudson, did not realise he had entered a bay at all. In 1610 he found himself in what is now the Hudson Strait and ordered his ship, the Discovery, to turn south. He was looking for a short cut from the Atlantic into the Pacific which would take ships from Europe on to China and India, the infamous Northwest Passage. Almost as soon as the Discovery entered the bay waters, she became marooned on a sandbank and was only released some hours later by a mysterious wash of water from the west. Guessing that this water must have come from an opening between the two great oceans, Hudson felt greatly encouraged. He had no way of knowing that the wash was caused by the interaction between the bay's currents and the strong western tide. Hudson believed that if he took a course to the southwest, he would be able to locate a navigable channel or navigation giving out to the Pacific, and from there sail all the way to China. He set a course, tacking farther and farther south until, sighting land at what is now James Bay at the southern edge of what is now Hudson Bay, he ordered his crew to sail along the coastline and look for the channel out to the southern sea. For days the ship zigzagged about within sight of land but without finding the elusive channel. The navigation season was nearing its end, Hudson's expedition was several thousand miles from home and they were no nearer to finding the Northwest Passage. The sea was becoming slushy and food supplies were beginning to run low. There was nothing for it but to overwinter in the ice. By the time spring arrived, the crew were at a low ebb. They had been able to trade for meat and a few supplies with the local Indians, but many of them had the beginnings of scurvy and they were thin and drawn. Hudson was keen to continue his explorations but by now the crew was desperate to return home. When Hudson insisted they carry on, they mutinied, bundling Hudson into a lifeboat with his small son and seven supporters and leaving them to their fate. The remaining crew of the Discovery then set a course back the way they had come, so near starvation now that they were reduced to chewing candles and sucking on gull's bones soaked in vinegar. Eventually, they got themselves out of the bay and within a few weeks arrived safely back in England. Hudson and his party were not so lucky. Exactly what became of them no one knows for sure, but there is one clue. Years after the mutiny, a Hudson Bay Company factor met with some Inuit in the Hudson Strait, who told him that the first white man they had ever seen had been washed up on their shores in a small and battered boat. He was dead but there was a live white boy in the boat with him. The Inuit brought the boat in and tried to communicate with the boy, but he seemed frightened and did not speak their language. Not knowing what else to do, they decided to tie the boy up in a dog harness, leave him outside their tent and let nature work on him awhile. When he died, they took his body out to the rocks and burie
d it.

  As late as the 1950s, many white sailors still considered it bad luck to sail in Hudson Bay and whatever their feeling for dark, inauspicious tales, no one disputes the fact that Hudson Bay provides some uniquely hazardous problems for those crossing it. The bay's enclosed waters are cut off from the ocean currents which moderate sea temperatures and the waters of the bay are often colder than those of the Arctic Ocean a thousand miles farther north. The waters keep the ambient temperature cool. Out in mid-channel, sailors have recorded air temperatures of-63°C. For all but twelve to fourteen weeks in the year, the mouth of the bay is blocked by ice. Fierce winter winds race on to the beaches and eskers, chopping the shore-fast ice into huge floes. The floating pack breaks up late and lingers in fragments, which jam into pressure ridges. Long after the spring sun has melted the snow on shore and ground willow and saxifrage are sprouting from the dark, sun-warmed earth; the ice still lies thickly across Hudson Bay itself. As summer lengthens, great leads of open water emerge, providing highways not only for ships but also for icebergs drifting down from Davis Strait. Bergs and bergy bits edge into Hudson Bay through the clearways and threaten to overturn the sturdiest icebreaker. When autumn arrives, water vapour rises from the sea and meets the land in thick curds of fog, which then lurk along the low, flat coastline waiting to punish any overconfident mariner trying to make his way to shore. As autumn turns into winter, which it does very fast, the temperature sinks and Hudson Bay stiffens and resumes its wintry solitude.

  The western tides, which persuaded Henry Hudson that there was a channel out to the Pacific and, indirectly, led to his death, are notorious now for their scale. Winds are usually high and it is often difficult to navigate by compass because the area is swept by magnetic storms and the seabed is rich in iron ore. The northerly reaches are so close to the magnetic North Pole that compass needles reel around like drunken sailors. Nearly four centuries after Henry Hudson first entered it, the bay which bears his name is the same stew of ice and treachery that it always was. Four hundred years of shipwrecks line its shores now, not least of which is that of the C. D. Howes predecessor, the Nascopie. In 1953, when the C. D. Howe was making her way across the bay with Paddy Aqia-tusuk and his family on board, the bay waters were still for the most part uncharted.

  Paddy Aqiatusuk knows enough about the bay from his trips to the Hope, Sleeper and Belcher islands to be anticipating a rough sail and so it proves. For hour after hour the ship rocks and pitches and the Inuit passengers, most of whom have never been at sea out of sight of land, cling to their bunks and mattresses and try not to look afraid. Many are taken by seasickness and stand miserably beside the washbasins with their stomachs churning. The layout of the Inuit quarters does not allow for privacy. Bunks are set out in such close rows that it is impossible to sit upright on them. The extra mattresses take up whatever floor space there might once have been in the sleeping quarters and the single common room is filled by a huge refectory table and some bolted-down chairs on which the Inuit are served inedible meals of porridge, and potatoes with gravy. On the other side of the bunks and mattresses is the sick bay, divided from the main dormitories by nothing more than a curtain, and full, on this trip, of tubercular Inuit. Between the sick bay and the dormitories is a communal washing area, shared between the sick and the healthy. The position of the quarters beneath the foredeck does not help. The heaving and the pitching of the ship is heaviest here, which is why the cabins for the ship's white passengers are at the other end of the ship, in the stern.

  Hour dissolves into endless hour and Hudson Bay creeps by without their ever seeming to go anywhere. The ship rocks and moans. At the end of the first day the damp nags like an ancient toothache and the digestive whirrs and creeks of the engine make it impossible to sleep. By the evening of the second day the Inuit are divided into those who have accustomed themselves to the awful pitching and those, the majority, who are forced to pass their hours running from mattress to washbasin in order to be sick.

  The following morning a crewman tells them to pack their bags and come up on deck. They stand in foggy air and watch the low buildings and fortifications of Churchill, Manitoba, coming into view. Already it is clear to Paddy Aqiatusuk that they are in another country. The land in front of them looks nothing like the Ungava tundra. The sky has grown in size so that the clouds seem not to fit it and the land, a honeycomb of polygonal granite stones, pocked by rocky pools and pieces of crumbling machinery, lies almost flush to the sea. Sitting on a promontory is an ancient-looking fort and a little way inland, a stand of stunted black spruce leans violently in the direction of the prevailing westerlies.

  On 28 July, two days after setting off from Inukjuak, the C. D. Howe drops anchor. Someone comes up on deck and begins throwing meat into the dogs' cages and the appetising aroma of animal fat drifts towards the foredeck where Paddy Aqiatusuk stands, bringing with it a fond reminder of muktuk, white whale skin, and igunaq, fermented walrus meat. The C. D. Howe's deck crane begins to swing the Inuit tents, pots and sleeping skins into a cargo barge alongside. The Inuit will be set on shore and the tubercular patients ferried to the local clinic and from there dispatched south to sanatoria. The others will set up camp for a few days while the C. D. Howe unloads the settlement's supplies and the medical officer conducts his annual checks of the locals. Those families travelling on to the far north will then be allowed back on board.

  Aqiatusuk and his family are set down on the far bank of the Churchill River at a distance from the settlement. From this new vantage point, Churchill appears closed in and crowded. Over the other side of the river sits the old fort and along the shore beside there is a scattering of prefabs and huts. A little farther away there stands a giant cement rectangle with a series of cranes and wide-girthed chains. A few tundra swans preen themselves on its crossbeams. This is the great grain silo, the brainchild of Robert Flaherty's sponsor, Sir William Mackenzie, whose idea it had been forty years previously to ship Canadian wheat across Hudson Bay. The final section of Sir William's transcontinental railroad reached Churchill in 1931 and more than twenty years later it is still running. The journey, through thick boreal tundra from Winnipeg, 1,100 miles to the south, takes two days and two nights and the train runs twice weekly in the summer, but the wheat route has been all but abandoned, the navigation across Hudson Bay proving too difficult and expensive, and the grain silo sits empty, a monument to another, more optimistic age.

  Paddy Aqiatusuk and his stepsons set up the tents while Mary and the other women spread out their willow mats, then go down to the beach to look for driftwood to make a fire.

  Over the days that follow, they watch the cargo barges moving ceaselessly between ship and shore, offloading crates and other supplies, the crew assisted by Indians and Inuit. Supply is the C. D. Howes primary function, and it is regulated by the Hudson Bay traders, policemen, missionaries and, less often, teachers and nursing staff making up the white populations of the larger settlements who fill in the supply requests. In many settlements across the eastern Arctic supplies often run out months before the next shipment is due. The problem is always most acute towards the end of the supply year in lune and luly, which coincides with exceptionally lean times on the land. Hungry Inuit often come in to the settlements during the early summer to spend their credits, only to discover there is no food left in the store to buy. Predicting a settlement's annual supply requirements is an inexact science, dependant on knowing fox-fur cycles and being able to predict fox prices in advance, which it is almost impossible to do. Officials are encouraged to underestimate rather than order what might turn out to be unwanted surplus. As a result of this ordering system, Departmental officials and other qalunaat travelling on the Eastern Arctic Patrol often get the impression that the Inuit in the places they land are half starved. If they had travelled to the Arctic at any other time, they would have understood that this was generally not the case. In general, the qalunaat on these trips are rather isolated from the Inuit and they
like it that way. From their camp across the river, Paddy Aqiatusuk can see white men emerging from the passenger cabins, lowering themselves into Peterheads travelling to shore and disappearing into the administrative buildings, only to reappear with other whites and make their way back to the ship for captain's supper. When darkness finally falls, the Indian and Inuit fires flare into life along the shorelines and the delectable smell of barbecuing meat drifts across the river along with the sounds of dancing and drums. First thing in the morning, lines of Inuit and Indians are already waiting on shore to be ferried out to the C. D. Howe for their annual medicals.

  The Inuit call the C. D. Howe “the place where you take your clothes off.” They dread their annual medical inspections and often have to be strong-armed by missionaries or policemen into attending. Qalunaat have brought with them a panoply of diseases to which the Inuit have virtually no immunity. Polio, tuberculosis, influenza, diphtheria, measles and whooping cough are rife among the Inuit living along Canada's Arctic coast. The medicals are designed to detect any outbreaks of disease and limit their spread. The chief medical officer on each Eastern Arctic Patrol is responsible for isolating those suffering from an infectious illness and keeping them on board ship from where they are taken to clinics and sanatoria in the south. On board, the Inuit have their tongues depressed to search for signs of diphtheria, their eyes inspected and chests X-rayed to show up the symptoms of TB and their skin, joints and muscles prodded for anything else. The children are inoculated, then checked for scabies, lice and fleas. If any are found their young hosts will be swabbed down with disinfectant and their heads shaved. If anything more serious is spotted, they are taken away, more often than not with no opportunity to say goodbye to their parents or families. The C. D. Howe is often carrying so many Inuit consumptives that northern administrators label her the Shakespeare ship: “TB or not TB.”