Читать книгу The Last of the Gentlemen Adventurers: Coming of Age in the Arctic - Edward Maurice Beauclerk - Страница 12
ОглавлениеTHE LABRADOR COAST runs in a north-westerly direction, pointing at the top like an outstretched finger across Hudson Straights toward Resolution Island and Baffin Island. The Torngak Range, mountains of the devil, high and menacing, jut out into the straight above Ungava Bay. Straggling still further beyond the mainland, the islands Killineck and the Buttons jostle each other, desolate and barren as if the Almighty, coming to the end of a coastline with a few black and unproductive rocks left over, flung them in one despairing handful into that grey and uninviting sea.
The other end of the coast is less daunting, but still hostile to anyone used to the gentle countryside of southern England. It begins just above the Gulf of St Lawrence and curves round into the Straits of Belle Isle, the strip of water which separates Labrador from the island of Newfoundland. Here, before we had even really entered the northern seas, the elements served up a warning of what we might expect in the higher latitudes.
During the afternoon of the fourth day out from Montreal, the heavy clouds massed threateningly from the north. Slowly they grouped and crept across the darkening sky toward us, then suddenly, just before nightfall, launched their attack. The wind roared down at us, flinging gouts of rain like pieces of metal into the faces of those foolish enough to stray out on deck to see what was happening.
At the height of each gust, the old ship seemed to waver and stop, shuddering helplessly on the crest of the mounting waves, unable to force a passage through the strength of the storm. Then, as the gust slackened, the vessel slid down into the deep beyond, shaking itself free of the holding wind.
Those of us quartered in the after part of the ship were effectively marooned, since to reach the dining saloon and forward parts we had to cross over the barrels with a near certainty of being flung into the sea. The other apprentices did not seem to mind about this, because the pitching and tossing of the ship had removed their interest in food, but I felt deprived at having to content myself with a bar of chocolate for the evening meal.
Any feeling of superiority was quite dispelled during the night, however, for my bunk, which had not been fastened properly to the wall, gave way with the strain of the ship’s movement, flinging me down on to the deck with the mattress and spring on top of me. First aid had to be administered to a gash on my head, necessitating a rather unsightly, bloodstained bandage. My friends thought it much funnier and more undignified that I had fallen out of my bunk (as they soon persuaded themselves) than that they had suffered a bout of seasickness.
Within twenty-four hours the storm calmed almost as quickly as it had risen. We had turned the corner from Belle Isle and were now steaming along the Labrador coast, heading for our first port of call, a settlement called Cartwright.
The harbour was just inside the entrance to a fairly wide bay with an island slanted across the mouth in such a way as to make it almost landlocked. We thought at first that the captain had stopped the ship and dropped anchor to wait until the visibility improved, for all round the vessel there was a low mist stretching to the horizon. Then we noticed straight ahead of us, apparently suspended from the sky, the familiar flag of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Shortly afterwards the fog dispersed sufficiently for us to see that the captain had placed the ship directly in front of the post buildings.
The scenery was not inspiring: a long deep stretch of flat land which looked like marshland or swamp, as if there ought to have been a river delta just ahead of us. We could see no river though, just the flats with some low hills in the distance and, further still, blending almost into the clouds along the horizon but breaking through here and there as a peak or crag, the higher hills of the interior. Just below the buildings, at a jetty pushed out into the bay for about fifty yards or so, a nondescript group of people appeared to be waiting for the Ungava to start unloading.
Dotted across the flats were numerous shack-like erections, with larger single-storey buildings here and there, such as a school and a hospital. The whole outlook was as grey and dull as the day itself, but we soon found that we were not there just as tourists. The group we had seen waiting at the end of the jetty was to come aboard and work in the holds, while we were to go ashore to handle the supplies as they came off the lighters.
Our job was to carry the goods down the full length of the jetty and then across to the store, which was situated beyond the dwelling house. It was hard work and a very long way to those not used to carrying heavy weights, which seemed to be most of us. Under my first sack of flour I nearly sank to my knees, but managed to hold up, much to the disappointment, I am sure, of the first mate, who was standing near by with a grin all over his face waiting for one of us to make a fool of himself. Adding considerably to our discomfort was the fact that the place was infested with vicious mosquitoes, which descended upon us in veritable clouds to sample the blood of the newcomers, so that our first day’s work on the Labrador coast was misery endured rather than a brave step forward.
The apprentice at Cartwright had come out from Scotland two years previously and he warned us not to expect any home comforts. On the evening of his arrival, he had asked the manager where his bedroom was. He had been taken down to the store, shown a mattress squeezed in behind the counter and told that that was his bedroom. He warned us too that a greenhorn in the Arctic was fair game for everyone, especially the old-timers. During his first winter, he had slightly frozen his big toe and had in due course lost the nail. An apparently knowledgeable colleague at the post told him that he must strap the black nail back on to his toe for at least three months, after which time it would have grown back on again. According to our friend he had done this at very great discomfort and not until several weeks later did he discover that his leg had been pulled. I think most of us thought ourselves too clever to be caught out like that, but it was not easy to resist the insistent advice of experienced people, however bizarre it seemed.
The unloading took about twenty-four hours, working quite late into the night and resuming again at daybreak. The mosquitoes attacked relentlessly, but our loads seemed to get less heavy as our muscles became more and more used to the strain, although we were all glad when the last case had been safely deposited in the store. The Ungava did not sail at once, so we had an opportunity to look round our first Hudson’s Bay Company post.
We visited some of the shacks dotted about on the flats. It was rather like stepping back in time, for these homes could well have belonged to a much earlier era. The first thing that met the eye were the outsize texts hanging near the entrance and at other strategic points inside. ‘THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH’, ‘GOD IS LOVE’, ‘JUDGE NOT THAT YE BE NOT JUDGED’ and other sombre messages set the tone. The occupants sat in their homes, prim and formal, surrounded by their possessions as though they were relics of the Victorian peasantry somehow strayed into the twentieth century. They appeared to be of European descent, with perhaps some intermingling of Indian blood and possibly Innuit as well. They understood some English, but could not be drawn into anything but the most conventional conversation.
During the morning of our departure from Cartwright, the man in charge of our group summoned me to his cabin and told me that I was to become the apprentice at a post called Fort Chimo, a small but long-established settlement situated at the head of Ungava Bay. He advised me to seek the advice of a passenger who had just joined us to travel along the coast and who had spent several years at Chimo. Ian Smith was to go to a nearby post, so he joined me in seeking out this man, Bill Ford by name.
We found Bill asleep in his cabin and at first he did not seem to be too pleased at having his rest interrupted, but he mellowed when he discovered we had brought a couple of bottles of beer with us. He sat drinking the beer and dangling his legs over the bunk.
‘Years ago,’ he said, ‘Chimo was almost a small township. The post staff was much larger than it is nowadays. They had people to make barrels, carpenters, interpreters. There were opposition trading companies, a school, a hospital and government officials.’
‘How did the company people get on with the opposition?’ asked Ian.
‘They didn’t have very much to do with each other,’ replied Bill, ‘they didn’t fraternize. If anything went wrong for one of them, the other was always very bucked about it. I remember once that during a gale a boat belonging to the French company Revillon Frères broke away from her moorings. It was a big boat too, about five tons, and the company chaps gathered along the river bank to cheer as she drifted past. The thing went right out to sea and it was several days before they got her back again, with a hole stove in her bow just above the waterline where she had hit a rock.
‘There aren’t many opposition posts left now though. There hasn’t been enough trade for more than one company for the past few years at Chimo and rumour has it that Revillon Frères will be pulling out before long.’
I asked him about the natives in Ungava Bay.
‘The Eskimos live around the shores,’ Bill replied, ‘and the Indians have their camps inland. They’re quite friendly and don’t really come into contact with each other very much. There’s never been any trouble as far as I know. Round the bay, where the Eskimos live, the land is very flat – sometimes I used to wish that the hills were a little higher. The wind comes down from the interior and whistles round the houses during the winter. We had some fair old blizzards. In a real blizzard, you have no idea where you are, the wind can keep changing and you can’t see a thing. One of the Chimo missionaries got caught once coming back from a visit to his flock. He and his Eskimo driver dug themselves into the snow, after struggling as far as they could. They were miserable in what was little better than a hole in the ground for two days. On the third day they were amazed to hear the sound of church bells coming from near by and they struggled out of their holes to find that they had camped almost alongside the missionary’s own house. The bells they had heard was his assistant ringing for the morning service.’
We soon found that Bill Ford, who had spent most of the previous winter alone, inland from Cartwright, needed little persuasion to launch off into his stories of the Labrador coast and Ungava Bay. Sometimes it was quite difficult to stop him, but both Ian and I felt that he never did try to make fools of us, a pastime to which many old-time northerners were willing to devote a considerable amount of time.
We made several stops during our voyage along the Labrador coast. At Makkovik, my star did not at first seem to be in the ascendant. Wearing a new beret, purchased under the French influence of the Montreal shops, I felt quite jaunty as I reached the bottom of the gangway and prepared to climb into the first boat ashore. Unfortunately, at that precise moment the fastening, or whatever it was that held the bottom step in place, broke. The step tilted up into a vertical position, allowing me to slide, quite gracefully they told me, into the water. My efforts to grasp something as I went down simply resulted in me pulling the step back down into position over my head. I was able to tell my friends later that although the water looked calm and inviting enough for a swim, it was really too cold to be enjoyable.
Later on during the afternoon, I rejoined the working party on shore and they kept up their ribaldry at my expense for the rest of the day. We finished the work before teatime and a pleasant surprise awaited us, for the post manager told us that his wife wanted us to go and have a meal with them instead of going back to the ship. His wife, a jolly, cheerful person, did not seem to mind how many of us came. She had cooked a huge dishful of cod steaks in batter and on the table was what looked like an old-time washbasin full of crisp chips. She just stood back and let us help ourselves, laughing with delight at our obvious appreciation. When the fish had all gone, the lady produced an outsize apple pie, then cake and bread and jam for any unfilled corner. She seemed much concerned about my plunge into the sea. Had I dried myself properly? What about my clothes? What was the Hudson’s Bay Company thinking of, bringing children up into the Arctic? I rejected the suggestion that I was a child at sixteen, but she shook her head and said that it was a hard life and a very lonely one.
After we had cleared up the mess and done the washing up, we gathered round an old piano that had been retrieved from a wreck along the coast. The manager played familiar tunes and we sang and laughed and played silly games until it was time to go back to the ship. When we tried to thank them for everything, they said that they hadn’t had such a happy evening for a long time and hoped that one day we might all come back.
Early the next morning we sailed from Makkovik to steam along the central part of the coastline. The scenery improved greatly. There were dozens of islands large and small, where the sea wound in and out in twisting passageways, curious-shaped cliffs and rocks, worn down by time and sea and weather. Birds of all coastal types abounded, from the hungry, cawing gull to the lively little arctic tern.
By the time we reached Hebron, a few days further down the coast, the land was even more impressive, as it rose high and rugged toward the desolate mountains. The weather was fine and sunny and a morning spent on deck was as good as anything an expensive cruise ship could offer.
I found Bill in a cozy spot one morning, behind some boxes, quite sheltered from the slight breeze. He smiled when he saw me.
‘So you tracked me down, eh?’ he said, but showed no reluctance to talk.
‘You wouldn’t think that a fine new ship was lying just beneath the water over there, would you? Not that she would be new now of course.’ He pointed over to the coast and continued.
‘The Bay Rupert. I don’t suppose you ever heard of her. The company had her built after the war. She was a fine ship, much larger than the Nascopie and everything brand spanking new. They put in special accommodation for bringing tourists up here. It was more like travelling on an Atlantic liner than coming up north.’
‘Did you ever sail in her?’ asked Ian.
‘I did indeed,’ said Bill. ‘I got off just before she went down. It seems that there’s a rock along the coast, somewhere hereabouts, which sticks up under the sea but doesn’t break water and there was no buoy there to mark the spot. We were coming along the inside passage in beautiful weather, just like today, with a pilot who was responsible for the navigation. The story was that one evening this man made out the course that they were to follow and the captain said that if he did as the pilot wanted, they would run smack into a rock about breakfast time next morning. Some people said that they had a great row about it, but that the course stayed as it was. The next morning, I was just getting out of my bunk when there was a terrific bump and, sure enough, the skipper was right. I’d never been shipwrecked before and it wasn’t anything like what I had thought it would be. We just got into the boats and they took us ashore, rather as if we were going for a day out, but the ship sank quite quickly and as the water isn’t very deep, it became a kind of treasure trove for all and sundry. Most of the homes along there have to thank the Bay Rupert for some item or another.’
‘What did they do to the pilot?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think that they actually did anything to anybody. There was a great deal of argument as to what had really happened and nobody seemed to know the whole story.’
‘It’s a good thing that it doesn’t happen very often up here,’ Ian said.
‘Oh, round about that time there was a jinx on the company,’ said Bill. ‘Another of the bay boats was lost, the Bay Chimo, but she didn’t sink, not at first anyway. She was trapped by the ice and it seems that she got frozen in during the winter, after they had abandoned her. Later on, she was sighted drifting about in the pack ice, like a sort of ghost ship, somewhere up in the Beaufort Sea, and for all I know she may still be held together by the ice of the Western Arctic!’
Almost as soon as we left Hebron the weather changed and during the night a thick fog closed about us. The captain groped his way at half speed, with frequent blasts of the fog horn, in case any of the wheat boats on their way to or from Churchill were in the vicinity.
We awoke in the morning to find the fog cleared and heard the rattle of the anchor chain going down, signifying our arrival at a post. When Ian and I went out on deck to see where we were, we did not at first believe that we had arrived anywhere. All we could see of the land was what resembled one humped black rock. Bill Ford put us right.
‘Port Burwell,’ he said, ‘and I hope that I never land here for my sins.’
We could see what he meant. This was one of the islands where the Labrador coast straggled off into the arctic seas. Bleak and inhospitable even on a summer’s day, one could well imagine that in the dark grey of the stormy winter the elements would combine to make life as unpleasant as possible.
For once there was little activity, and the dullness of the morning was only enlivened by the arrival of a boatload of Eskimos from the shore. They pulled alongside and one or two of their number came straight aboard the Ungava. The crew made them welcome, then the rest came pouring up the gangway, gabbling away to each other and beaming all over their brown faces. A few of the women wore red or green tartan shawls wrapped around their shoulders, but mainly they were clothed in parkas with deep hoods in which to carry their babies. Underneath they had on ordinary summer dresses made of coloured prints of various designs. Many of them looked as though they had got straight out of bed to come to the ship, and a few as though they had worn their clothes all night. The men all wore parkas with coloured braid round the edges; some had bright knitted head coverings, while one or two sported naval caps with gold straps. The chief man of the boat handled his craft very efficiently.
The stewards produced a large kettle of tea and a box of biscuits and another of the crew brought up a carton of mugs. In a moment the Eskimos were squatting all over the deck downing their tea. Some of the women had brought their babies in their parkas, and every now and then one of them would suddenly run to the side of the ship, to hold baby out over the sea to relieve itself.
They were a happy, cheerful lot and looked to me to fit somewhere between the American Indians and Chinese. When the tea was all drunk, they surged back down the gangway to their boat and chugged off, disappearing round a point of land a few moments later.
Ralph Parsons, the district manager for the whole of the Eastern Arctic, who had himself established most of the posts in the district, arrived in his own Peterhead boat about midday and the ship came to life. Ian and I were sent ashore with the first scowload and were surprised to find that the harbour was just on the other side of the point round which the Eskimos had passed. The little cove was only about a hundred yards in depth, but the opening was quite narrow, so there was good shelter from the open sea.
There was not a lot of cargo to handle as the Nascopie had already unloaded the main supplies, but the goods had to be carried up a long winding walkway as the store had been built on a rise some way back from the shoreline. By now we were becoming quite experienced stevedores and did not provide the ship’s personnel with many laughs. We were also much more speedy, finishing the work in time to go back aboard the ship for a meal.
A surprise awaited us. Ian, myself and another boy were to pack up and go ashore to await further instructions. One of the men who had come up from Chimo with Ralph Parsons gave us the explanation the next day. Ian would not be required as the outpost to which he was to have been sent had sufficient staff, and when the Chimo manager, a Scotsman, heard that I was supposed to join him, he became quite angry and said that he did not want any damned English schoolchildren. Not until much later did I discover that a year or two previously this man had been landed with an English apprentice from a public school who had gone off the rails. At the time, this brusque refusal of my services really upset me for it had never occurred to me that I might not be wanted anywhere.
It was quite obvious that we were not wanted at the Burwell post house either. A small house, built to accommodate two people, it now had to shelter twelve of us, and quite possibly this manager would also have refused us as his ‘guests’ had not Ralph Parsons come ashore to straighten things out. He directed that Ian and I should sleep on the kitchen floor in sleeping bags. Our thoughts went back to the poor apprentice at Cartwright with whom we had commiserated; at least he had had a mattress to lie on.
Next morning we started on our first shore job, painting the fish house. At that time, a considerable amount of dried fish used to be exported to the Catholic countries for food on Fridays and fast days, particularly to those countries which had a peasant population who could not afford to buy fresh fish. Just outside the harbour, round the southern shores of the island, codfish abounded, the Eskimos often gathering a dinghy full of fish in quite a short time. They sold the cod to the company, who employed women to cut them open, dry them and pack them in barrels for shipment overseas. This processing took place in the shed that Ian and I were about to paint. Neither of us had ever handled a paintbrush before, and it was perhaps unfortunate that the colour of the eaves, where we began, was bright red and not some duller colour which might have blended in better with our overalls.
In the evenings the post manager took me out jigging for cod. This simply meant fixing a double-sided hook to a long length of cord, pushing on a small piece of pork fat for bait, lowering it to the seabed, then pulling it up about a foot or so and jigging the line up and down until you hooked a fish. Sometimes we caught a large fish on each barb of the hook, and even on the poorest evening we collected twenty or thirty fish. All the best cod were thrown into the shed for servicing by the women; the rest we took up to the house or used for dog food.
Eventually most of the visitors left Burwell, until we were the last remaining guests, and actually able to sleep in beds. One day Mr Parsons told us that Ian was to stay at Burwell as the apprentice and I was to join the Nascopie when she arrived, to continue my journey northward in search of a home. Ian was sad about this. Burwell was not much of a place, serving more as a summer junction point between Hudson’s Bay, Baffin Land and the far northern islands than as a trading post. There was one consolation. He would be among the first to see the Nascopie the next year and would no doubt be able to get himself moved somewhere more interesting.
The Nascopie arrived one afternoon in late August. The captain intended to waste no time, for there was already a touch of autumn in the air. Once the year’s supplies had been landed, I was told not to delay in getting aboard with my belongings.
Ian helped me down to the jetty with my cases. We had become firm friends through the trials and tribulations of our summer’s journey and saying goodbye to him was harder than I thought it would be. I cannot imagine how he ever came to apply to the Hudson’s Bay Company for a job. He was a timid, gentle sort of person who hated to see suffering either among humans or animals, and it was no surprise to hear a couple of years later that it had not worked out and Ian had gone back to his old Scottish home. I did write to him but he never replied to my letters. Perhaps he just wanted to forget the whole incident.
We steamed away from the island well before dark, heading due north toward Davis Straits and Baffin Bay. At the very top of Baffin Island we were to turn west towards Pond Inlet, at that time the most northerly of the Hudson’s Bay Company posts.
Before the light faded altogether, I went to the stern of the Nascopie to watch the ship’s wake streaming behind us, just as Ian and I had done that first evening out on the St Lawrence River. There were no little townships drifting by, no comforting lights twinkling along the shore or summer lightning forking above rolling hills. Here was only steely grey, incredibly cold-looking sea surging behind us, tipped with long ribbons of hostile foam, while abeam of us the last of the Button Islands passed, black, jagged and with no redeeming feature. I wondered where those other apprentices who had gathered at Euston station that June morning were now and mourned the loss of my friend. Then the captain altered course slightly and a chill damp wind, probably from the northern ice fields, drove me back to my cabin.
The cabin was above a propeller, and as the ship rose and fell to the motion of the sea, so the shuddering vibration swelled and faded in an uneven rhythm. As by far the most junior person on the ship – for there were no other apprentices or post staff of any kind – it was reasonable to expect that the worst cabin should be allotted to me. Somehow, though, the shuddering noise served to increase my growing conviction that nobody really wanted me in this arctic world and the probability that a home would be found for me at the very last post, only because there was nowhere else left, did nothing for my self-esteem.
Our route between Baffin Island and Greenland was one which had been followed by seamen and navigators for more than three centuries, probing restlessly northward then westward among the islands, searching endlessly for the passage which would take them more easily to the riches of India.
Some people believe that the Vikings reached the shores of Baffin Island twelve hundred years ago, but if they did, the expeditions were not recorded and nothing has been discovered to suggest that they ever lived there. It was not until the idea of a short route through to the orient began to exercise men’s minds that serious exploration of this inhospitable area began.
As far back as 1497 Henry VII of England commissioned John Cabot to search for a passage, and the explorer is thought to have sailed along the Labrador coast. Forty years or so later, Jacques Cartier attempted to succeed where Cabot had failed but found only impenetrable ice. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who felt strongly that the journey was possible, inspired others to try by his writings, but was himself drowned while making the attempt in 1583.
Also in the sixteenth century, John Davis made a study of the strait which separates North America from Greenland and joins Baffin Bay to the Atlantic Ocean, though he did not try to push through to the west. The strait now bears his name, and possibly as a result of his findings, Martin Frobisher, a noted navigator of his day, believed that he could find the elusive passage. He became sidetracked when, turning westward too soon, he entered a deep bay in Southern Baffin Land, which took him nearly three hundred miles inland but ended in a range of steep hills. From this bay Frobisher saw some rocks that glittered in the sun. He thought it was gold, and although his find turned out to be iron pyrites, it did not discourage him from arranging two later expeditions to explore the other arms of the bay. He never did find the gold which he had thought to be there, but he did much useful work mapping the bay which was subsequently named after him.
Henry Hudson considered that the navigators of the sixteenth century had all sailed too far to the north, and to prove his theory decided to aim westward between the mainland and the southern coast of Baffin Island. At the western end of the straits, he came out into a wide sea. His crew, superstitious and apprehensive of some unexpected disaster, did not wish to go any further, but Hudson, confident that he was already in the western ocean, insisted that they continue on his course. The men’s fury when they discovered that he had led them into a wide bay which had no exit was such that they mutinied, and Hudson, together with his son and seven loyal members of his crew, was cast adrift in a small boat to perish in the icy waters of what became known as Hudson Bay.
We had had clear weather for the first two days and the ship, headed now into familiar northern waters, made good speed. The district manager, who was travelling with us and who hated to see anyone unoccupied, took me on as a temporary, very junior office boy, to sort out the files and account books of the posts which had already been visited. The other people still on board were mainly specialists in one line or another, who seemed quite keen to fill in my remaining spare moments with lectures on a variety of subjects. An anthropologist, an archaeologist, an ornithologist, two scientists, a representative of the Canadian government and two R.C.M. policemen were among those I can remember being on board. From some of them I gathered an amount of useful knowledge, but was never quite sure whether my leg was being pulled or not.
The archdeacon, who six months previously had introduced me to the Arctic, was making the rounds of his widely scattered missionaries and obviously felt under some obligation to take me under his wing. I think he had it in mind to give me a warning as to the possible moral dangers that lay ahead of me, but after two quite lengthy sessions, could get no further than giving me a bar of chocolate and some advice as to how to avoid becoming constipated during the winter months, because of the effort needed to visit the outside lavatory on cold draughty days.
The ice fields were not far away from us. Over towards Greenland, visibility ended in a long line of grey fog, behind which, they told me, the ice blocks were grinding their way steadily southward.
On the morning of the fourth day out, we steamed through a bank of fog and came almost immediately into a large field. The massive blocks crunched against the side of the vessel, but the Nascopie pushed them aside. Every now and then we came up against a solid pan which had not broken up into pieces and the captain had to force the ship through by reversing a little way, then rushing back at the ice at top speed. The solid iron bows with the full power of the engines behind them usually sufficed to smash a path through but we made slow speed.
Early in the afternoon, a lookout sighted black objects in the ice ahead of us. Out came the binoculars and the telescopes. ‘Walrus,’ said the more experienced northerners. Two of the passengers, unable to resist the temptation of trying to kill the inoffensive creatures, went below to fetch their rifles, but were restrained by the older hands, who told them that they would be wasting their time and ammunition, for without proper harpoons with which to secure the walrus the bodies would just sink to the bottom of the sea.
Reluctantly the would-be hunters held their fire. We came closer and saw that it was quite a large herd. A huge old bull, seemingly the leader, lifted his head to look round every now and then, obviously checking on the safety of the group. He must have seen us, but as our approach was not particularly noisy, he did not raise the alarm until the ship steamed up to the very point upon which the walrus were resting.
We had a wonderful view of the herd and those who had got their cameras out were well rewarded. The old bull who had been so vigilant during our approach took charge. As the Nascopie ground into the ice not so very far from them, the leader raised his head again to let out the most enormous bellow, so that they all scrambled and fought to get back into the water. The large bulls, with their great ivory tusks sticking downwards from their jaws and their fierce bewhiskered faces, were a fearsome lot. The cows with their young looked less belligerent, but together they made an awful noise, barging and pushing each other along. For a moment, they appeared to be contemplating an attack on the ship, but suddenly swept round to make off down a lane of open water.
About an hour later, as though we had not had our money’s worth for the day, a polar bear, large, grizzled and yellowish against the ice, came out from behind a mound on a small iceberg to stare gravely at us as we passed by. This time our hunters were not to be denied. Three of them rushed down to fetch weapons. By the time they had returned to the deck, the bear had moved off a short distance, wisely having his doubts as to our intentions. The fusillade that followed confirmed his doubts and the animal, now thoroughly alarmed by the noise, raised himself on to his hind legs and dived into the sea, finally disappearing among some nearby ice blocks. He had been wounded though, for we passed a streamer of his blood in a patch of open water. The archdeacon took the marksmen to task for having caused the creature unnecessary suffering.
We then had a spell of fine weather after leaving the Hudson Strait, and although the days were shortening and the breezes cooling as we came north, we had not realized that the summer had really ended until the fall burst unheralded upon us.
The archdeacon was conducting a Sunday-morning service in the Nascopie dining room, when the captain turned the ship westward to come out of Baffin Bay toward Pond Inlet. The vessel began to roll as we caught the wind sweeping down the channel through which so many of those early explorers had passed in their search for the passage.
Before the service was over, the storm had really blown up. The congregation swayed all over the place during the final hymn and the archdeacon called a halt to the proceedings when a group on the starboard side collapsed into a most undignified heap. I forced my way out on to the deck, but was nearly blinded by the hard sleet slapping into my face and the stinging spray driven by the violent wind. Sheets of spray streamed across the bows to mingle with the sleet while the ship alternately plunged down into the huge waves, then reared swiftly up toward the clouds, swinging from side to side as the sea took her.
The Sunday lunch was ready to be served and the chief steward was determined not to be beaten by a storm. They put up the sides of the table to keep the dishes from falling on to the floor and they damped the tablecloths to keep things as steady as possible. The chief officer stamped in on a fairly even keel. With great difficulty, one of the stewards managed to get a small amount of soup in a bowl on to the table, but almost at once the bowl leapt into the air, turned upside down and poured the hot soup into the officer’s lap.
There was really no time to even think about food as the ship pitched, rolled and corkscrewed. One moment we were clutching on to the table, the next being thrown against it, but we might have managed a little dry food had not our side of the table come apart and those of us to starboard, having lost our support, subsided into an untidy muddle on the deck, closely followed by a shower of plates, knives and cruets. As if to add insult to injury, the wall cupboard above us, which contained the reserve supply of sauces, seasoning and the likes, flew open and a shower of pickles, sauce bottles, salt cellars, sugar bowls, mustard pots and jugs crashed down upon us as we slithered about on the floor. Furniture, passengers, stewards, soup, sugar, salt, tomato sauce and even some milk scrunched and squelched over the deck, swirling about with the motion of the ship.
Some time later, when order had been partially restored, those of us who had recovered their composure and still had any interest in food ate sandwiches in the galley, but few attempted any liquid. Before we had time to finish our meagre repast, a bulkhead door, not properly fastened, was forced open by a huge wave. The sea poured in, sweeping pots and pans off the shelves, extinguishing the oven fire and thumping one of the cooks heavily against the side of the ship. This was the final blow that the storm had to deal us, for after that the wind began to slacken, and though the heavy swell continued for a day or two, we were able to resume our normal routine.
At Pond Inlet, our northernmost call, the scene was dramatic. The tiny buildings almost disappeared into the vastness of the surrounding hills, but there was a bustle of activity as soon as we dropped anchor for there were supplies to be unloaded, not only for the company, but also for the Roman Catholic and Anglican missions, both of which had establishments here.
My assistance did not seem to be required in dealing with the cargo so the ornithologist took me ashore for a walk and told me not only about the birds but also all about the general flora and fauna. His lecture was delivered in such a booming voice, however, that my head was spinning by the time we returned to the ship.
A gentler and most informative chat was had with the anthropologist. He told me much that was to prove useful about the Eskimos I was soon to be living among. I learned that the Innuit (the People), which is their own name for themselves, almost certainly came from central or northern Asia. The physical type, language and culture all tend to confirm this and that they migrated to North America via the Aleutian Islands, starting about 1000 BC. Reversing the usual direction of migration, they travelled steadily from west to east, moving along the northern coastline of the mainland, spreading out into the arctic islands, keeping close to the sea, until finally coming to a halt in Greenland, where the massive ice plateau of the interior blocked further movement.
The development of their culture and of their social life was greatly limited by the severity of the environment, which precluded any attempt at food production. Apart from the blue-berries which grew wild on the hills during a short season and a type of edible seaweed, there was no useful vegetation. Hunting of one kind or another was therefore essential at all times, and because they only had the simplest of equipment, cooperation between the hunters was vital.
He also told me about the Eskimo religion, which was based on the belief that everything and everybody had a spirit. A rock, a fish, a polar bear or a human being were all equal in this respect, and it was the activities of these spirits which controlled events and people. They could move about at will. If a person became ill, it might be thought that his spirit had deserted him, or it might be that an ill-disposed one had taken up residence within his body and would have to be conjured out.
This belief provided a continuity of life, softening the reality of death with which they were all too familiar. It was known that although the body became lifeless after death, the essential person remained close at hand, even if invisible. So firm was this conviction that the children, being guarded by the spirit of a dead relative, were allowed to wander into dangerous situations without causing any great anxiety, because their parents felt secure in the knowledge that the spirit would keep them safe.
The shamans, or angekok as they were called, supplied a link with the supernatural world by having the ability to transfer themselves, on suitable occasions, into the world of the spirits and by gaining control of one or more of them. Dependent upon the ability of their subject spirits, they would thus hope to have some control over the affairs of everyday life.
The angekok did not apparently depend on the miraculous. Generally, it was a shrewd, calculating type of man or woman who was most likely to become a shaman. In a real crisis, matters would have reached a fairly desperate state, from which they could not get much worse, before the angekok got to work. So, not infrequently, their incantations were followed by an improvement in the weather, or travelling conditions, or whatever it was that was bedevilling the camp.
As we set off once more, the manager of Pond Inlet, who was due to go out for a holiday, joined me in my cabin, considerably brightening the rest of the journey. When he told me that he had his entire worldly possessions with him, I expected to find the cabin filled with his luggage, instead of which it seemed that his belongings barely filled one small cardboard case, which lay at the bottom of his trunk.
My companion began at once to settle my future.
‘You’ll be going ashore at Pangnirtung,’ he said. ‘Geordie Gall will take care of you. He’s very strict though you know. Prayers every morning at eight, the youngest apprentice reads the lesson.’
I laughed at this and said that I was sure that he was pulling my leg. He became indignant.
‘Indeed I am not,’ he said. ‘You ask any of the other managers, they’ll all tell you the same thing. Geordie is a fine God-fearing man.’
‘Well, he must be very different from the other managers up here,’ I said.
‘And just what do you mean by that?’ asked Jimmy threateningly.
‘Oh, nothing,’ I replied.
‘You’ll have to be careful about swearing. Geordie doesn’t like it and you’ll be fined for using bad language.’
I really did not know whether to believe him or not, for he was very convincing, and the next day even produced two witnesses to corroborate his story.
The district manager confirmed his prediction that I would be going ashore at Pangnirtung the next morning. There was nothing very remarkable about this, however, as that post was the last port of call, and short of taking me back to Montreal there was nowhere else for me to go.
Cumberland Gulf, on the east coast of Baffin Island, was visited more than once by explorers hoping to find a sea passage through as far south as possible. They soon had their hopes dashed, but gathered an amount of information about the area. They were later followed by Scottish and American whalers, who for a long period formed the only link the Eskimos had with the outside world. A trading post was not established in the area until the 1920s. The site selected was in a fiord almost at the head of the sound which was reasonably centrally placed for all the camps in the vicinity.
We entered the gulf one morning at half speed, for there was a very dense fog and the captain’s wisdom in deciding to travel slowly was soon confirmed. Half-way through the morning, the fog began to lift, drifting away from above the Nascopie to reveal a cloudy uncertain sky, a small patch at first, then gradually clearing so that what looked like a darker cloud appeared almost directly ahead of us. Not happy about this odd-looking cloud, the captain altered course about ninety degrees, which was just as well for soon afterwards the fog dissolved altogether and the darker cloud turned out to be a rather solid headland.
Later on the sun came out and seemed to be spotlighting a high and distinctive hill, shaped like a huge man’s cap, which they told me marked the entrance to the fiord that was to be my new home. We passed this landmark early in the afternoon and came up the inlet to a point opposite a group of buildings, where we dropped anchor. A quarter of an hour must have elapsed before a boat put out from the shore and a queer party came aboard headed by a man wearing a brightly coloured shirt and a large sombrero hat. His movements were made with such extreme care and his expression was so pleasantly vacuous that it was obvious, even to me, that he was drunk. I thought to myself, so much for the morning prayers and all the rest, for this indeed was Geordie Gall, my new boss.
My grandmother, herself a devotee of the chaise-longue, frequently expressed her firm belief that it was better to wear out than to rust away. Comfortably enveloped in rugs and shawls and bounded by hot-water bottles, she rested her own ageing joints while exhorting others to ceaseless activity. At moments during my first three days at Pangnirtung, I had cause to remember this conviction of hers. Once the cargo started to come ashore, the goods came off in an endless chain. While the tide was high enough to unload along the water’s edge (there was no jetty), one boatload after another came bustling in from the ship. When the tide had dropped too far back over the rocks and mud for the boats to be able to come in from the shore, the boxes had to be carted up the bank to be piled near the shore. There was a short spell during each tide, at slack water, when it was possible to get some rest, but I was so exhausted that it never seemed more than a few minutes before someone was waking me up again.
The supplies lay scattered about over the flat at the top of the bank, where it was wise to tread carefully. There were cases of all shapes and sizes, bales, cartons, lumber for two small houses to be built for the company’s Eskimo employees. Supplies labelled for the Oxford University Arctic Exploration Society. Barrels of oil and gasoline, kegs of molasses. Lengths of steel for sledge runners. A bath loomed up in front of me and I very nearly fell in it. Sacks of coal and flour. Crates of cheese, drums of potatoes, kegs of oatmeal, bags of sugar. Innuit men and women struggled up the bank with vast loads, children with smaller burdens. White men bustled backwards and forwards importantly, missionaries appeared and disappeared, and sometimes even policemen. Always of course the dogs, snuffling round the cases and using them as lampposts.
Suddenly, it was finished, just as it had seemed unending. One of the mates came up the bank shouting that as he had brought the last load, he would accept a drink if anyone were to offer him one, and he went into the house where the last-minute conferences were in progress. The captain decided, however, to get away at once. Although darkness had fallen, the tide was with him, so he blew three blasts on his siren to summon all those who wished to sail. Everybody except Geordie, who had lost interest in the whole thing and was now fast asleep, rushed down to the boats.
We were not allowed to linger on the Nascopie. I said goodbye to my friends, including my cabin mate, who was beaming all over his face at having pulled my leg. The ship’s engines were turning over and as soon as all the post staff were back in the boat up went the gangway. The little ship swung round toward the gulf and swished past us in a swirl of foam as we aimed for the shore. A group on the deck of the Nascopie broke into a spirited rendering of ‘Will ye no come back again?’ A stern, authoritarian voice from the bridge shouted, ‘Not at this time of night.’ Last-minute witticisms were bawled backwards and forwards across the water until the captain turned about so that his vessel was stern on to us, blew another blast on his siren and with gathering speed vanished into the darkness.
Alan Scott, the other apprentice at Pangnirtung, had arrived the previous year and had obviously not expected that there would be an addition to the staff. I explained that the district manager had had no option but to leave me here before the ship headed south, but it was too late to go into all the details, so we made the boat secure, climbed the bank to the house and went thankfully to bed.
It was broad daylight when I awoke next morning, but the house was quiet, so I took the opportunity to have a look at my room. It was small and square with a plasterboard ceiling held in place with rough wooden slats. The boards had not been painted but the walls had been done, though some time ago by the look of them, for they were now a dingy sort of white. There was one window looking out over the fiord mouth. Apart from the bed, there was one piece of furniture in the room, some kind of multi-purpose unit. The top did duty as a stand for a washbowl, underneath were two drawers to house my clothes and there was a shelf for anything else at the bottom. The unit appeared to have been home-made, but did not seem to have been constructed to any plan so much as from the random inspiration of the maker, and it was tilted slightly forward, as though the front legs were slightly shorter than the rear ones. There was no other furniture, no chair or wardrobe, and nothing on the walls. The room had a musty, damp odour rather like that of an unused, unheated spare room we had had at home. The whole effect was dreary in the extreme and I could see that it was going to be necessary to do some brightening up before the start of the long winter.
A patch of colour in the doorway suddenly caught my eye. It was Geordie Gall’s bright striped shirt. He had drifted up from somewhere and was leaning against the jamb, clutching a bottle in his hand. He gazed at me in silence for a little while with a puzzled expression, as if wondering what to say to me now that he was here. It occurred to me that his shirt, although quite cheerful, did not really suit him. Embarrassed by the silence, I said, ‘Good morning.’
Geordie levered himself away from his support and waved his free arm in a broad gesture round the room.
‘Not the Grand Hotel, is it?’ he said, slurring his words. ‘Roof leaks like hell. Doesn’t rain in the winter though. Spring’s the time when the snow melts on top. You’ll have to get some oars then.’
He put the bottle to his lips and took a long swig, gazing sadly up at the offending ceiling as he did so. Belatedly he began to chuckle, perhaps at the thought of me sculling round the bedroom. Then a fly buzzed in near his face and he tried to knock it away with his hand but the effort caused him to lose balance. As he staggered backwards, he jerked the bottle in his other hand, so that some of the liquor slopped on to the floor. He forgot about me, looking angrily down at the pool on the linoleum.
‘Damn flies, what the hell are they buzzing about here for?’ he muttered to himself as he lurched out of the room.
I did not quite know what to make of the incident at the time, but afterwards realized that Geordie had really just come to introduce himself and welcome me to Pangnirtung. He was a Scotsman who had drifted over to Newfoundland and not having any real trade had moved from one job to another. Then, when the Hudson’s Bay Company opened up the posts in the northern islands, he joined the company and had been managing posts on Baffin Island ever since. He was normally a good-natured man with a liking for order in the post routine and good organizing ability. The Eskimos respected him, but his periodic bouts on the bottle meant that he was never likely to advance further in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s employment.
Geordie had no hair on the top of his head and the Eskimos, who liked to be able to call everybody by a name which distinguished them personally, christened him ‘Shiny Top’.
Shortly after my first visitor had gone, Alan Scott came in to say it was time to get up. He too was a Scotsman, coming from up Peterhead way, where he had been working on farms. He was a few years older than me and being a practical young man had picked up the ropes quickly. This was very fortunate for me as he went to considerable trouble to pass on the lessons he had learned during his first year as a northerner. Alan must have had great patience because I did not at that time readily assimilate knowledge of a practical nature, but he succeeded in teaching me the basic essentials of Arctic life and this stood me in good stead for all my years in the Arctic.
On my way to fetch water from the kitchen I studied the house. It was more or less a square, bungalow type of building with the two apprentices’ bedrooms at the far corner being separated by the office between them. From the office, a passageway led down the centre of the house, on one side of which was the manager’s bedroom, while on the other was an enclosed space which served as a combined store and bathroom, though to take a bath was a most complicated procedure. The guardroom was situated across the house at the end of the passageway. This name for the sitting room came from the frontier days, when the personnel of the post had to be ready to defend themselves, keeping their weapons at hand in case of attack. Fortunately there was no danger of attack at Pangnirtung. The ceiling and the walls of the guardroom were painted white with green slats, so the room was not quite so dull as the bedrooms. In one corner there was a large pot-bellied heating stove and from the other wall a door led into the kitchen.
An Eskimo girl by the name of Ooloo had a room at the end of the kitchen. She was supposed to be a sort of housekeeper and did the chores but only had the slightest knowledge of cooking. In fact she was what would nowadays be accepted as Geordie’s common-law wife. They had a baby son but were a most unlikely pair. They could not speak each other’s language beyond a word or two and perhaps this was just as well, for I found later when she got cross Ooloo could deliver a stream of abuse and insults which would have left Geordie in no doubt as to his shortcomings.
My upbringing, both at home and at school, had run along very strict lines of morality, so that anything that deviated from the straight and narrow was not to be contemplated and certainly not to be mentioned. In my grandmother’s house the assumption was that only the lower orders indulged in the sins of drunkenness and immorality, no matter what evidence there was to the contrary. Obviously I now had to emerge rapidly from the Victorian world which had hitherto enclosed me.
In time I was to realize that in fact Geordie and Ooloo’s relationship was quite proper among the Innuit, the only anomaly being that he was a foreigner. Marriages were not arranged between families, the young being free to choose as they wished. A girl might pair with several men before marriage, without any obligation on either side; indeed, she might cohabit with several young men at the same time. If the girl had a child, it was likely, but by no means certain, that the association would become permanent.
Hunters might have two wives, and it was quite common for a man to permit unrelated persons to have relations with his wife, usually, but not invariably, on a reciprocal basis. This was partly a practical arrangement, as the hunters frequently passed through different camps on their hunting expeditions, but it might also be the basis of a very useful friendship.
The Eskimos tended to become interdependent by utilizing each other’s skills. If a man was a good carver, he carved; others might have good organizing ability and be called upon to organize expeditions; some would be especially able at making hunting weapons or kayaks, while all who had any flair for hunting went after seals or deer. Each man had to be able in some direction and when there was overduplication it would be normal for a man to leave his group, deserting his wife and children to find another home where he would be more useful.
The effects of this attitude to coupling and marriage were that relationship could be claimed on a fairly wide basis. Apart from the immediate family, if a husband or wife had children not belonging to their present partner, such children would form a link between all the people on both sides of the family. This meant a greatly increased number of potential friends and of camps at which a hunter would have what might be termed residential qualifications, since the camps were organized on a strictly family basis. Family ties were flexible so that a hunter could move from one group to another. Provided that the new group was within the wide family circle, he would at once be accepted as a proper member of the community.
It was sometimes thought that the Eskimos practised some sort of communism, but this was not so, for the foundation of their society was the family grouping in the broadest sense, which resulted in collective responsibility and cooperation with the relatives with whom one was resident at the moment. Thus the whole camp shared the successes and failures, the good times and the bad.
There was a clear division of labour within each home. The men were the hunters and it was they who made the tools and the household goods and built the homes. The women cooked, dressed the skins, tended the oil lamps used for heating and cooking and made all the clothes, using their own tools. Sometimes exceptional women would stray into the men’s world, but the men, even though they might be totally incompetent as hunters, did not take on the women’s tasks.
The bleakness of my room, as well as the very changed conditions to which I had to adjust myself, had depressed me considerably, but my spirits started to revive as soon as I stepped outside. The house door faced up to the fiord, where the high black cliffs swept round in an arc, rising steadily to a point at which the inlet turned sharply northward. On the far shore, the hills fell slowly away again to a pleasant green valley, just opposite the house. From above this eastern valley, the sunshine spread across the water, picking out the kyaks and boats of the few Inuit who were taking advantage of the calm morning to go seal hunting. The panorama of the high and moody hills, the green valley, the sunshine sparkling on the sea and the kyaks flashing to and fro across the water, lifted my depression completely. Here was a timeless scene from long ago which had somehow managed to remain unchanged in a changing world.
The Pangnirtung fiord settlement of 1930 was one of the largest on Baffin Island. The Hudson’s Bay Company post, centrally situated among the buildings, consisted of a line of four houses spaced along the coastal flat just before the land dropped about thirty feet or so to the edge of the reef. There were two storehouses, a main dwelling and a secondary dwelling which had been used as an interpreter’s home. The woodwork was, as was usual for the Hudson’s Bay Company, painted white with green facings and a red roof. The buildings stood about ten yards apart but were linked together by two straight lines of whitewashed rocks that created the illusion of a purpose-made path. The inevitable flagpole was situated in a neat little square in front of our home and the Hudson’s Bay Company flag was flown on any suitable occasion.
About fifty yards beyond us, towards the mouth of the fiord, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had established their post of two buildings, a dwelling and a kind of storehouse. In front of their house was a little weather station, from the middle of which rose their flagpole, a much more impressive affair than ours, fittingly perhaps, because from it flew the Canadian flag, proclaiming ownership of this large arctic island.
Behind the Hudson’s Bay Company post, at the back of the flat, was the archdeacon’s mission house, which served both as a home and a church, and the sealskin tents of the Eskimos were spread over the intervening space. Some distance away, we had our ‘blubber’ sheds which housed the equipment for rendering oil and curing hides. In that year there were three Hudson’s Bay Company people, three R.C.M.P.s and one missionary, which represented one of the main concentrations of Baffin Island population.
Ooloo had been busy dishing out tea to the men and women gathered in front of the store waiting to start the morning’s work of organizing the year’s supplies. The people were dressed in a variety of garbs. Some wore sealskin anoraks, some woollen ones and others ordinary bush shirts. The women, who did not wish to miss the chance of earning a dollar or two, were there, carrying their babies on their backs.
Gradually we sorted the large pile of boxes into the proper places in the store. It was general practice at that time to keep two years’ supply of all the more vital commodities on hand, to allow for the possibility of the Nascopie not being able to get through the ice. There were large quantities of tea, flour and similar items, each package being marked with the year of delivery indicated by an outfit number.
The first northern trading voyage undertaken by the ‘Gentlemen Venturers trading into Hudson’s Bay’ was in 1668 and the original instructions to one Zachariah Gillam, master of the ketch Nonsuch which had been selected for the voyage, are still preserved. The orders were that the master should sail his vessel to such places as were chosen by the traders who had come with him. He was to find safe anchorage and wait there while the trading took place. As soon as a good quantity of furs, skins and the like had been gathered together, the Nonsuch was to return home. Two years later, when the first trading post was established, outfit number one was sent north to be put ashore in the bay and the annual voyages had been numbered from that year onwards (1670), so that every item arriving in my first year had the number 260 painted or stencilled on it.
By the end of the day, we had stacked most of the new delivery away in the stores in the appropriate spots, the drums of gasoline had been moved to line up with the old stock, the coal piled behind the post building, the ammunition packed into its own special section and a home found for all that remained. Next morning we were able to turn our attention to the timber, which lay in higgledy-piggledy confusion beside the main store and was destined to provide two shacks for the company’s two Innuit employees.
Meanwhile Ooloo had got the stove going in the guardroom and had stretched her culinary abilities to the extent of heating up a delicacy known as ‘boiled dinner’, which came out of a tin. The guardroom was simply furnished. The square table from which we ate our meal served for all other purposes. There were no easy chairs but several basic wooden ones. A rickety bookcase with a cupboard underneath occupied a corner by the stove. A rather splendid Victrola phonograph filled the opposite corner to the bookcase. It had been retrieved from one of the shipwrecks, so they told me, which perhaps accounted for the haphazard selection of records, six or seven of them, varying from Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a bloodthirsty ballad about a certain Turk named ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’.
An elaborate but not very effective radio set stood on the window ledge behind the Victrola. It seldom gave us any continuous session of entertainment without going off into hysterical oscillation. Alan was the only person who had enough patience to attempt to control the thing.
My most urgent need, those first days, was to get fitted out with a pair of sealskin boots. Ordinary shoes were not fitted to the rocky terrain, apart from being very uncomfortable. One of the Eskimos working for the company, Kilabuk by name, said that his wife would make me a pair. She duly appeared, measured my feet with a piece of string in the most casual manner possible and went home, returning the next morning with a pair of sealskin boots which fitted me perfectly. The upper parts, which came to the knee, were of ordinary skin with a few black patches sewn in to make a pattern, while the soles were cut from a larger, tougher skin from a big seal known as an ujuk. The boots were secured with drawstrings at the top which fastened below the knee. I paid her one dollar fifty cents, which included the cost of the materials.
Next day, Agiak, for that was her name, sent a message by her husband (who could speak some English) to say that she was going to wash my clothes and would make an arrangement with Ooloo to use the facilities of our kitchen one day a week. I was quite pleased about this for it had not been easy to keep my small stock of clothes clean, and although I had seized every opportunity, my inexpert efforts at laundering had resulted in my garments looking decidedly dingy. What did not please me very much was my discovery, a few weeks later, that the Eskimos had also decided that I was a child and had named me simply ‘The Boy’.
By the next afternoon, the ship-time sorting had been concluded and the workers lined up in the store to be paid off. As each one came up to the counter, Alan looked in the book in which the times had been recorded, to find the amount due then spread out the coins to represent the pay. These coins were imitation money, acting as dollars, half dollars and quarters, so that people could see exactly how much money they had to spend. The Eskimo would normally debate with his wife as to what they should buy, generally deciding upon food, tobacco, ammunition and perhaps something small for the children. If the women had any spare money of their own it usually went on print for a dress or some other item of clothing.
The Innuit could not earn very much during the summer season. Trapping did not start until the end of October, but before that time it was necessary to lay in good supplies of dog food, so that the hunters could devote as much time as possible to their traps during the six-month open season for foxes. This meant that they had to be allowed quite large amounts of credit, so they could obtain supplies of petrol, cartridges and other necessities for the summer seal and walrus hunting. Each hunter was assessed according to his past record and allowed to run up a debt of as many foxes as it seemed likely he would be able to catch fairly easily during the winter.
That afternoon, Alan took me down to the blubber house, scene of much of the activity after a whale drive. The place was as unromantic in appearance as in name. Inside one shed was a rendering machine into which the cut-up blubber was stuffed to be processed into oil which was then pumped from the machine to tanks outside. In another shed, the hides were stored at one end and meat which could be used to feed the dogs at the other. The hides had been shipped off on the Nascopie, but a pile of decomposing meat remained. This was my first encounter with high meat en masse and the smell was too much for me. I had to grasp my nose and retire in haste. I surmised that, as with Geordie’s and Ooloo’s relationship, this was another aspect of my new life that I would adjust to in time.
