The Long Exile

by Melanie McGrath

  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.

  If the Flemish map had been available to Cabot he might not have bothered to look for the Passage. In any case, he did not find it, but the fact that he had tried piqued the interest of others, not least of whom was Henry Hudson, and over the years the search took on the quality of a mythic quest. Taking advantage of the large naval fleet Britain had acquired during the Napoleonic Wars and did not quite know what to do with once the wars were over, the Royal Society in London sent John Ross to the Arctic in 1818 and 1829. In 1819 and 1821 Captain William Edward Parry set off in the same direction and, in 1824, Parry and his acquaintance George Lyon led competing expeditions. A year after that, John Franklin went out on the first of his three attempts over twenty years, which ended only when he died, in mysterious circumstances, in the Arctic in 1845.

  On 3 May 1850, a 410-ton vessel, the Resolute, flagship of the British Seaborne Squadron under the command of Captain Horatio Austin, left England to search for Franklin and his men. The Resolute was accompanied by the Assistance, Pioneer and Intrepid. The expedition encountered drifting floes near Cornwallis Island and decided to overwinter on an ice field between Cornwallis and Griffiths islands. The ships floated out on 8 August 1851 and sailed the length of Lancaster Sound looking for signs that Franklin and his crew had passed by, but they found nothing and were forced to sail back to England a week or so later. The following year, Resolute and her crew returned under Henry Kellett to Lancaster Sound and overwintered at Dealey Island, but she became stuck in ice and had to be abandoned. After the ice broke up, the ship, true to her name, drifted on the currents for a lonely nine hundred miles, until she at last reached the east coast of Baffin Island, where she was picked up by a whaler captained by James Buddington. The captain sailed her to New London, Connecticut, and sold her to the U.S. government for US$40,000. As a gesture of good will, the Americans refitted the Resolute and returned her to England in 1855. Queen Victoria later presented the White House with a desk carved from the Resolute's timbers, which still sits in the Oval Office and serves as the President's desk today, and when the Edisto and Wyandot arrived on the southern coast of Cornwallis all those years later, they named the area of shale beach and low rock Resolute Bay after that doughty little ghost ship who had protested her exile and found her way back home.

  Three Inukjuak families disembarked from the d'Iberville at Resolute Bay in summer 1953, including Simeonie Amagoalik, his wife Sarah and their son Paul, who had been born on the C. D. Howe. Simeonie and Jaybeddie Amagoalik had been separated from their brother Thomasie who had already been dropped at Craig Harbour. Accompanying them were Jaybeddie Amagoalik from Pond Inlet and his family. A party from the icebreaker's crew went ashore and sang “O Canada” with their shins buried in the shale while others unloaded the families' raggedy tents and pots and pans. Then the migrants began to unwrap their tents and look for stones with which to secure them, while an angry northwest wind blew up round them. Henry Larsen gave a few instructions to the crew of the d'Iberville, shook a few hands, saluted the new detachment's flag, clambered back into the d'Ibervilles skiff and was gone.

  On his first visit to Resolute Bay, Larsen had arranged for Ross Gibson to stay at the meteorological station until such time as he could set himself up at the air force base. The manager of the met station had laid out a camp bed for the policeman among a drift of old oil cans and there the constable stored his uniform, his gun and his personal effects. A while later he returned to the bleak spot where the Inuit were busy erecting their tents. The wind whipped his skin, which was already raw and flaky. The first job as camp bossfor that is how he now saw himselfwas to check the supplies which had been left on the beach under a tarpaulin during the d'Ibervilles first visit. Before doing that, though, he wanted to take a look at the new police whaleboat which sat along the beach on timber stays, so he trudged off, his arm shielding his face from the worst of the snow, his legs sinking deep in the sharp, loose shale. It was not until his second turn round the boat that he noticed the space where the propeller should have been. He made his way back across the shale to the native camp. Already, the stones had begun pricking the Inuit through their kamiks and they complained that in a day or two there would be nothing left of the soles and the women would have to sew in a new set. It would be hard to keep the natives in traditional clothing, as Henry Larsen had insisted. They would have to bag a good few seal.

  The next day, the problem of the boat remained. Gibson would have to beg a craft of some sort from the air base. It would not look good but he did not see he had a choice. Few of the Inuit seemed to have kayaks and, in any case, the ice looked too risky for kayaking. If they were to catch any walrus or seal they would need a boat. Fortunately, the air base had just the thing, it was free, and they seemed willing to lend it, and, later that day, Ross Gibson set off in it with a party of hunters. They motored along the coast for a while, taking note of the shape of the coastline and the inlets for future hunting expeditions, then they headed into the bay Larsen had marked on the map, expecting to find the walrus the superintendent had promised were there
. But the bay was empty. A summer storm had hit the coast about a week before and the walrus had headed south for their winter grounds.

  By then, the C. D. Howe was already well on her way to Quebec. On board was Doug Wilkinson, a film-maker hired by the Canadian Broadcast Company to film the historic landings of Inuit in the High Arctic. Years later, Wilkinson remembered the scene in Resolute like this:

  There was stuff piled everywhere …the whole thing was a smozzle from beginning to end …Everyone thought the Eskimo could live in their land anywhere. No one gave much thought to what really went into what it took to get the kind of knowledge to exist in an Arctic land as a hunter. As far as Alex Stevenson … was concerned … certainly as far as lim Cantley and the rest of the people in Arctic Services were concerned, all you had to do was get hold of the RCMP and the Department of Transport to arrange for these people to be on the boat at a certain time, walk them off the other end and everything would be fine… There was no forethought put into it at all. You know, they just thought, well, all we have to do is get in touch with these people and they're going to go… [There was] no planning at all. There was absolutely nothing. I don't know how they ever expected those people to live.

  Some time later that afternoon, the hunting party arrived back at Resolute Bay. A freezing wind blew across the camp. “I'll tell you,” Ross Gibson said, years later. “If I could have walked back to Ottawa the next day, I think I would have gone.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  PADDY AQIATUSUK surveyed the scene. Already the long voyage seemed curiously abstract; it lived in his mind as something he dreamed. The real sense of how far they had come hit him only now, as he took in the landscape of Ellesmere Island, which was like nothing he had ever seen. The view before him was, even by Arctic standards, ethereal and other-worldly. He and the other migrants were completely hemmed in. To the west of the spot where they had landed hung shields of granite laced with grey-green ice. To the east lay the clapboard houses of the Craig Harbour police detachment and beyond them, what looked like a glacier. The waters of Jones Sound shivered and, though it was still summer, clumps of pebble-dashed ice slewed in and out of the foam. A thin and bitter wind whipped in from the east on which Paddy Aqiatusuk could smell nothing. He looked to the north and saw a curtain of crumbly cliffs and, behind them, a regiment of ice-glazed peaks below scudding blue clouds before his attention was drawn to the tiny blades of shale digging through his boots, shale which contained no bone or hair or fragment of fur, no root or leaf or finger of lichen, no remnant of some summer past, nor hint of any to come.

  Ellesmere is the world's ninth largest island, an area about the same size as Great Britain. It is also the most mountainous of the Arctic islands, home to the highest and longest alpine ranges in the eastern North American continent. Three-quarters of Ellesmere Island is an impenetrable mass of frozen crags, deep fiords and terrible, green-ice valleys topped in the northern interior by forbidding, age-old ice caps up to a half-mile deep. Combined, Ellesmere's glaciers cover 40 per cent of its surface area. In the north the ice caps stretch all the way to the mountains beside the sea, gouging great fiords as they push into the Arctic Ocean. In the south the caps are patchier, and confined to inland peaks. The southeast corner of the island is, comparatively speaking, the least unfriendly. There are a few lakes there, and the fiords are less forbidding. Run-off allows some vegetation to grow in the sheltered, south-facing spots. The Hazen Plateau gives out to a series of rounded peaks around Discovery Harbour before rising again to form the steep cliffs and scree slopes along the coasts of Archer, Conybeare and Chandler fiords, tributary channels of Lady Franklin Bay. The southwest is more rugged. Around Greely Fiord and its tributaries, Borup, Otto and Hare fiords, the cliffs rise as high as three thousand feet.

  If it were not for the North Water of Smith Sound which runs between Ellesmere and northwestern Greenland, then there would probably be no life at all on southern Ellesmere. The North Water has its beginnings southwest of Iceland, where the cold East Greenland Current meets the warm Atlantic Gulf Stream and becomes the Irminger Current, which flows in a southerly direction to the southern tip of Greenland, rounds the horn then flows upwards as the West Greenland Current and becomes, at Smith Sound, the North Water, colliding with the colder waters of the Arctic Ocean and carving out areas of permanently open water, or polynyas, sometimes called Arctic oases, off the northeast coast of Ellesmere Island from Eureka to the Hazen Plateau. From Smith Sound the current swings southwest to cup Ellesmere's southern coast, where there is another, shore-fast polynya at Makinson Inlet, before it culminates in a three to five mile stretch of turbulent water, the Hell Gate polynya, off Ellesmere's southwest coast. Even though they are surrounded almost all year round by ice, the polynyas themselves never quite freeze over and in their slowly swishing waters phytoplankton and zooplankton flourish. At Hell Gate, the plankton attracts Arctic char which bring in harp, bearded and ringed seal as well as migratory walrus, narwhal and beluga whales. Polar bears are regular visitors. The clear water raises the temperature and the levels of precipitation at Hell Gate and allows a few plant species to survive in stunted form. Arctic poppies living on Ellesmere take twenty years to reach adult size and what few Arctic char survive there are a quarter of a century old before they are mature enough to breed. The vegetation on the land side of the polynyas sustains a thin population of Arctic mammals: a few hares, a sprinkling of small, white Peary caribou and a few thousand musk ox. Greenlandic Inuit call the area Uming-maknuna or Musk Ox Land, which makes it sound more fruitful than it is. The musk ox populations are confined to those areas where scrubby heathland vegetation grows. No one knows how many caribou or hares there are, partly because their populations are very widely scattered, divided, as are the musk ox, into northern and southern groupings separated by the central ice caps. The formidable frozen zone of Ellesmere's interior has permitted only very limited study and there had been none at all by 1953. What was known from the expeditions of explorers and whalers in the region was that the turbulent currents were made worse by winds. They are heaviest in winter but blow all year round; the prevailing easterlies cross the huge Greenlandic ice caps and pick up frigid air. They produce such dreadful windchill that on Ellesmere Island the temperature in the wind can feel thirty degrees lower than the ambient reading.

  In 1882 the U.S. Lady Franklin Bay expedition to northern Ellesmere recorded gusts of more than ninety miles per hour. Thirty years later, the Danish Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen was in the area when:

  I received so violent a blow in the back that I was unable to get up for a moment, but when at last I succeeded in rising to my knees, I saw that all the many sledges which a moment ago had driven in a long string one behind the other, were swept together into one huge pile … As it was quite impossible to stand upright, not to mention driving, we let ourselves be blown up on land with sledges and dogs, until we found some little shelter in a clough by a broad tongue of ice where the sledges could be anchored and the dogs tethered. Hardly was this done when the Fohn, with the roar of a hurricane, swept down upon us from the mountains and the inland-ice and made us suspect that the world itself was going under.

  The high winds break open the ice and send the liberated sea into whirling whitecaps. One feature of the ice around Ellesmere is its mobility. The pack ice rarely stabilises before February. Before then it is in constant motion, floes smashing together, rafting one upon the other, grinding and jamming together.

  Ellesmere Island had been claimed for Canada, near to where Paddy Aqiatusuk and the other Inuit were brought to shore, by the captain of the Arctic, J. E. Bernier, only fifty years previously. Early human populations used Ellesmere as a bridge into Greenland, coming up from the south and west, crossing on to Ellesmere from across the Cardigan Strait in the west and up past Coburg Island in the east. They travelled principally on the ice foot, a belt of ice formed between the high and low water marks of the tides. The ice on the foot is stable and relatively
smooth. Later, when polar explorers came to Ellesmere Island, they named this characteristic feature “The Highway to the Pole.” A thousand years ago or more, Thule settled there for a while, but moved south when the Little Ice Age of the fifteenth century blew in. A tiny group of survivors persisted in the extreme northwest of Greenland and it was these the Baffin Islanders came across in the mid-nineteenth century. Some years later, the American explorer, Robert E. Peary, stumbled on them, named them the Polar Eskimo and hired a few as guides on his expeditions to the North Pole.

  Paddy Aqiatusuk knew none ofthis.ifo first thought was to presume there had been some mistake. The qalunaat had brought them to the wrong place. He decided to confront the detachment policemen. Until then, the priority had to be to establish the tents. The wind was icy.

  The men hauled the group's possessions from where the d'lber-vtile's cargo barge had dumped them, tethering their dogs, and rolling out their canvas while the women and children hastily unravelled the guy ropes.

  An RCMP Peterhead appeared from the gloom and headed towards them. An Inuk man leaped out into shallows and made fast the boat, followed by two policemen, one huge and massy, the other thin and reedy, and the trio made their way to the shore. The large policeman scanned the group setting up camp on the beach.

  “Which one of you is Fatty?” the big fellow asked in Inuktitut.