Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

by McGoogan, Ken

  This stylized woodcut map of the estuary of the Churchill River, originally published by the Hakluyt Society in 1897, depicts the Jens Munk expedition soon after it arrived in 1619 to spend the winter. Here we see Munk’s two ships on the west side of the harbour. In this bucolic representation, complete with two well-built houses, a few men are logging, two are returning from a hunt with dead caribou slung over their shoulders and several are preparing to bury one of their comrades—a dark omen of what is to come. According to the Historical Atlas of Manitoba, this is the first large-scale map of a Manitoba locale. In 1783, after a French fleet destroyed the nearby Prince of Wales Fort, Samuel Hearne built Fort Churchill at this spot.

  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  The trouble began in earnest on January 10, when the priest and the remaining surgeon “took to their beds after having been ill for some time. That same day my head cook perished. And then a violent illness spread among the men, growing worse each day. It was a peculiar malady, in which the sick men were usually attacked by dysentery about three weeks before they died.”

  The healthy men, dwindling in numbers, continued to hunt and provide for the rest. But by January 21, thirteen men were down with the sickness, among them the sole remaining surgeon, “who was mortally ill by then.” Munk pleaded with that man “if there was not some medicine in his chest that would cure the men, or at least comfort them. He replied that he had already used every medicine he had with him, and that without God’s assistance he was helpless.”

  Two days later, one of the mates died after a five-month illness. That same day, “the priest sat up in his berth and preached a sermon, the last one he was ever to deliver in this world.” Munk pleaded with the dying surgeon for advice, but received the same answer as before. By February 16, Munk writes, only seven men “were healthy enough to fetch wood and water and do whatever else had to be done on board.” The following day, the death count reached twenty.

  In his journal, Munk records death after death. The cold grew so severe that nobody could go ashore to fetch food or water. A kettle burst when the water inside turned to ice. Munk and his men had never experienced such a winter. Occasionally, someone would go ashore and shoot a few ptarmigan, providing a welcome addition to the larder. Some of the men “could not eat the meat,” Munk writes, “because their mouths were so swollen and inflamed with scurvy, but they drank the broth that was distributed amongst them.”

  Late March brought better weather, but “most of the crew were so sick that they were both melancholy to listen to and miserable to behold.” By now the illness was raging so violently “that most of those who were still alive were too sick even to bury the dead.” Munk examined the contents of the surgeon’s chest but could make no sense of what he found: “I would also stake my life on the opinion that even the surgeon did not know how those medicines were to be used, for all the labels were written in Latin, and whenever he wished to read one, he had to call the priest to translate it for him.”

  Munk writes that his “greatest sorrow and misery” started as March ended, “and soon I was like a wild and lonely bird. I was obliged to prepare and serve drink to the sick men myself, and to give them anything else I thought might nourish or comfort them.” On April 3 the weather turned so bitterly cold that nobody could get out of bed: “nor did I have any men left to command, for they were all lying under the hand of God.” By now, so few were healthy “that we could scarcely muster a burial party.”

  By Good Friday, besides Munk himself, only four men “were strong enough to sit up in their berths to hear the homily” marking the occasion. By this time, Munk writes, “I too was quite miserable and felt abandoned by the entire world, as you may imagine.” Later in April, the weather improved enough that some men could crawl out of their berths and warm themselves in the sun: “But they were so weak that many of them fainted, and we found it almost impossible to get them back into bed.”

  Men continued to die, sometimes two or three a day. The living were now “so weak that we could no longer carry the dead bodies to their graves but had to drag them on the small sled that was used for hauling wood.” By May 10, eleven men remained alive, all of them sick, including Munk. When two more men died, Munk writes, “only God can know the torments we suffered before we got them to their graves. Those were the last bodies that we buried.” Those who died now remained unburied on the ship.

  By late May, seven men lived on. Munk writes: “We lay there day after day looking mournfully at each other, hoping that the snow would melt and that the ice would drift away. The illness that had fallen upon us was rare and extraordinary, with most peculiar symptoms. The limbs and joints were miserably drawn together, and there were great pains in the loins as if a thousand knives had been thrust there. At the same time the body was discoloured as when someone has a black eye, and all the limbs were powerless. The mouth, too, was in miserable condition, as all the teeth were loose, so that it was impossible to eat.”

  Soon only four men remained alive, “and we just lay there unable to do a thing. Our appetites and digestions were sound, but our teeth were so loose that we could not eat.” Dead bodies lay scattered around the ship. Two men went ashore and did not return. Munk managed to crawl out of his berth and spent a night on deck, “wrapped in the clothing of those who were already dead.”

  The next day, to his astonishment, he saw the two men who had gone ashore upright and walking around. They came across the ice and helped him ashore. Now, for some time, these three “dwelt under a bush on shore, where we built a fire each day.” Whenever they found any greenery, they would dig it up and suck the juice out of its main root. Slowly, incredibly, the three began to recover. They went back aboard ship and found everyone dead. They retrieved a gun and returned to shore, where they shot and ate birds.

  Gradually, the three survivors recovered. They reboarded the Unicorn and threw decomposing bodies overboard “because the smell was so bad that we couldn’t stand it.” Then, battling a plague of black flies, they stocked the smaller Lamprey with what food they would need to reach home. Finally, on July 16, Munk writes, “We set sail, in the name of God, from our harbour.”

  Such was the navigational skill of Jens Munk that, after battling fog, ice and gale-force winds, he guided the ship through the swirling currents of Hudson Strait and then across the stormy Atlantic. He and his two remaining men reached Norway in late September and their home port of Copenhagen on Christmas Day.

  Most accounts of this disaster express wonder that cold and scurvy could take such a toll, wiping out sixty-two of sixty-five men. But an article by Delbert Young, published decades ago in the Beaver magazine, points to poorly cooked or raw polar-bear meat as the likely culprit. Soon after reaching land near present-day Churchill, Manitoba, Munk reported that at every high tide, white beluga whales entered the estuary. His men caught one and dragged it ashore.

  Next day, as noted above, a “large white bear” turned up to feed on the whale. Munk shot and killed it. His men relished the bear meat. Again, Munk had ordered the cook “just to boil it slightly, and then to keep it in vinegar for a night.” He had the meat for his own table roasted, and wrote that “it was of good taste and did not disagree with us.”

  As Delbert Young notes, Churchill sits at the heart of polar-bear country. Probably, the sailors ate a fair bit of polar-bear meat. During his long career, Munk had seen men die of scurvy and knew how to treat that disease. He noted that it attacked some of his sailors, loosening their teeth and bruising their skin. But when men began to die in great numbers, he was baffled. His chief cook died early in January, and from then on “violent sickness . . . prevailed more and more.”

  After a wide-ranging analysis, Young identifies the probable killer as trichinosis—a parasitical disease, unidentified until the twentieth century, which is endemic in polar bears. Infected meat, undercooked, deposits embryo larvae in a person’s stomach. These tiny parasites embed themselves in the intestines. They reproduc
e, enter the bloodstream and, within weeks, encyst themselves in muscle tissue throughout the body. They cause the terrible symptoms Munk describes and, left untreated, can culminate in death four to six weeks after ingestion. Could trichinosis, induced by raw polar-bear meat, have later played a role in killing some of Franklin’s men? To this we shall return.

  After his disastrous misadventure in the North Country, incredibly, Jens Munk began planning another expedition to the same area, this time to establish a fur-trade colony. Not surprisingly, he found it impossible to attract financial backers or crew. He turned to naval activities, commanded fleets to protect Danish shipping and eventually served as an admiral in the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) that engulfed Central Europe.

  3.

  What Thanadelthur Made Possible

  Half a century after the Jens Munk debacle, on May 2, 1670, England’s King Charles II waved his magic wand and granted an exclusive trading monopoly over the Hudson Bay drainage basin to “the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay.” His seven-thousand-word Royal Charter outlined the Company’s rights and duties, which included an obligation to search for the Northwest Passage.

  By the early 1700s, when the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) began building Prince of Wales Fort at Churchill, Manitoba, three aboriginal peoples had for centuries been contending to control the mammal-rich hunting grounds to the west and north. These were the Cree, the Dene and the Inuit.

  Roughly speaking, allowing for diversity as a result of intermarriages and adoptions, as well as occasional Assiniboine and Ojibway interlopers, some two thousand Swampy Cree made up the vast majority of the “Homeguard Indians” who had settled in the vicinity of HBC trading posts. These Algonquian-speaking people were Western Cree, as distinct from the Eastern Cree, who lived east of Hudson Bay. They were skilful hunters and discerning traders who demanded muskets that worked in winter, and enjoyed playing French traders against British ones. By the 1760s, the Western Cree numbered thirty thousand and ranged westward from Churchill to Lake Athabasca, which is located on the northern border between Saskatchewan and Alberta.

  The lands north and west of this vast, Algonquian-speaking territory were dominated by the so-called “Northern Indians.” These Dene, as they called themselves, spoke Athapaskan and had long been rivals and enemies of the Cree. They hunted and fished through most of present-day Northwest Territories, edging into what is now Nunavut.

  Subgroups of the Dene were known then as Dogrib and Slavey (sometimes considered one) and Chipewyan, whose name derives from an Algonquian-Cree word referring to the wearing of beaver-skin shirts with backs that narrowed to a point at the bottom, as on a contemporary tailcoat. The Yellowknife or “Copper Indians,” so called because they used copper tools, were a regional subgroup of the Chipewyan, who contested territories traditionally controlled by the Inuit.

  Like the Cree, the Dene responded to the demands of the environment by functioning mainly as autonomous extended families. Local bands might include six to thirty hunters, or 30 to 140 persons. Such groupings were often culturally diverse as a result of intermarriages, adoptions and the practice of stealing wives.

  In the treeless, frozen lands that lay still farther north, the Inuit extended across the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland. These “Esquimaux,” as they were called, constituted a single people, as Knud Rasmussen would demonstrate early in the twentieth century. They could understand each other because they spoke related languages: Yup’ik in the west, Inuktitut in the east and Kalaallisut in Greenland. The Inuit hunted caribou, but also fish and sea mammals such as seals, walruses and beluga whales.

  The Inuit, armed only with harpoons and knives, found hunting walruses especially challenging in winter, when the crafty creatures made a habit of escaping down ice holes.

  The Inuit sometimes came south to Churchill seeking wood and metal. But they did not enjoy friendly relations with the Dene, who were beginning to acquire European muskets and jealously guarded their role as fur traders. Such was the background against which, in the eighteenth century, two radically different Chipewyan-Dene individuals would play crucial roles in the European search for the Northwest Passage and what they called the “Far-Off Metal River,” which today is known as the Coppermine. The first was a woman named Thanadelthur.

  In the spring of 1713, a party of well-armed Cree attacked some Chipewyan-Dene and took three young women captive. That autumn, two of the females escaped and hurried westward, hoping to rejoin their people. They survived one winter, but then got lost. In the autumn of 1714, cold and hungry, and with one of them sick, they decided to retreat in the direction of a well-known Hudson’s Bay Company post located a couple of hundred kilometres south of Churchill. This was York Fort, which would become York Factory when a chief factor was stationed there. One of the women died en route.

  Five days later, on November 24, the other encountered some HBC men in the wilds. Seventeen-year-old Thanadelthur accompanied these men to York Fort. Governor James Knight, now in his seventies, and formerly the commander of a merchant fleet, quickly realized that she might prove useful. Because the Homeguard Cree were armed with more muskets, Chipewyan fur traders had ceased coming to HBC trading posts. Knight wanted to expand trade into the northwest, and was looking for an interpreter who could make peace between the two peoples.

  The highly intelligent Thanadelthur could communicate readily with both Cree and Dene. Over the next few months, she also picked up English. And in June 1715, Knight sent her west on a peacemaking mission with William Stuart, an efficient HBC man, and 150 Homeguard Cree.

  Knight commissioned Thanadelthur to inform the Chipewyan that the HBC would soon build a major fur-trading post at Churchill. In addition, because the governor was obsessed with rumours that deposits of copper and “yellow metal,” or gold, existed far to the west, she was to inquire, off-handedly, about minerals. Setting out westward, the travellers ran into problems. The hunting was so poor that, as winter came on, the expedition had to separate into smaller groups.

  The multilingual Thanadelthur used her eloquence to create peace between traditional enemies. Ambassadress of Peace: A Chipewyan Woman Makes Peace with the Crees, 1715, oil on board, painted by Francis Arbuckle, 1952.

  Courtesy of HBC Corporate Collection (ART-00036).

  One party of peacemakers encountered and massacred nine Chipewyans, though later the killers claimed self-defence. When Thanadelthur and Stuart came upon the scene, they were horrified. The young woman, determining that some surviving Chipewyan had headed west, told the innocent Cree with whom she had arrived to wait and, with a few men, set off in pursuit of the survivors. She came upon a few hundred Chipewyan who were gathering to seek revenge. Now she demonstrated her eloquence. Thanadelthur talked for hours and eventually persuaded the Chipewyan to return with her to meet the waiting Cree. They came. The two groups smoked the pipe of peace, and a few Chipewyan returned with Thanadelthur to York Fort, arriving in May 1716.

  James Knight was thrilled with how, by “her perpetual talking,” Thanadelthur had established peace between those ancient enemies, the Homeguard Cree and the Chipewyan-Dene. This informal treaty would open the far northwest to Knight himself. Later in the year, Thanadelthur welcomed the governor’s idea of travelling to announce the building of an HBC post at Churchill, and so to solidify the new understanding. Then, around Christmas, she took sick. After a lingering illness, to Knight’s dismay, she died on February 5, 1717.

  In his Company journal, Knight wrote lamenting the loss of Thanadelthur’s high spirit, firm resolution and great courage. But he carried on. The Chipewyan warriors she had brought to York Fort had carried knives and copper ornaments. As interpreter, Thanadelthur had relayed their understanding that copper and “yellow metal” could be found along “a far-off metal river.”

  Knight went ahead with plans to establish a trading post at the mouth of the Churchill River, to trade with the Chipewyan and possibly the Inuit. He spent a win
ter there, after constructing a rough, wooden fur-trading post near the former winter quarters of Jens Munk, a few kilometres upriver from where the HBC would later build Prince of Wales Fort.

  Knight had long been intrigued by fanciful European maps that showed a northwest passage, identified as “the Strait” or “Straits of Anián,” crossing the continent from north of California to the northeast corner of Hudson Bay. With Thanadelthur, he had asked the visiting Chipewyan-Dene to draw a map of the drainage basin of Hudson Bay. They produced one identifying seventeen rivers. The northernmost river, Knight believed, was the eastern mouth of the Strait of Anián, or the entrance to the Northwest Passage.

  In September 1718, Knight sailed to England, bent on mounting an expedition to find the Strait of Anián and the gold and copper of the Far-Off Metal River. Having become a free agent, Knight negotiated the support of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The governing committee agreed to send him to seek the elusive strait and passage through Hudson Bay at a latitude north of 64°. He would also expand trade, investigate the feasibility of establishing a whaling industry and discover the source of those nuggets of copper he had produced as evidence of the existence of precious metals at the mouth of a distant river.

  On June 4, 1719, the aging but irrepressible Knight sailed from Gravesend, southeast of London on the River Thames. He left with forty men and two ships, the frigate Albany and the sloop Discovery. Knight and his men sailed into Hudson Bay and were never seen again by white men.

  Three years later, in 1722, an HBC captain named John Scroggs made a perfunctory search of the northern reaches of Hudson Bay. He found some wreckage on Marble Island, twenty-five kilometres off the west coast near Chesterfield Inlet, and concluded that both of Knight’s ships had sunk and “every man was killed by the Eskimos.”