Читать книгу Sisters of the Ice - R. Bruce Macdonald - Страница 8

Herschel Isle, it’s the whaling life for me We first got there in August, not a whale was to be seen We soon got froze in a sheltering cove the Captain called Pauline ’Twas a long, cold, bitter winter that most began to loathe But not me, I’m made for Herschel Island

—Remy Rodden, “Herschel Island Whaling Song”

Herschel Island lies in the Beaufort Sea about five kilometres (three miles) off the Yukon coast. The western Arctic Inuit, known as Inuvialuit, call it Qikiqtaryuk, which means “big island.” Herschel was the name given by the first known British explorer of the island, Captain John Franklin of the British Royal Navy, in honour of what he regarded to be the “most distinguished scientific family” of his time.⁶

William, Caroline and John Herschel were famous for their work in astronomy.

Frederick William Herschel (1730–1822), known as William Herschel, had a prolific career as an astronomer and invented many different types of telescopes. His initial work was on identifying double stars, that is, stars close together, and he is credited with discovering the planet Uranus, which for a time was named for him. He also discovered infrared rotation and studied the rotation of Mars.

Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750–1848) was the younger sister of William Herschel. She contracted typhus as a child and never grew taller than four feet three inches. She also became blind in her left eye. Caroline trained to become a singer and then a seamstress but ended up being William’s assistant, polishing lenses and taking notes, before beginning her own exploration of the heavens. This was her calling and she discovered several comets, one of which ended up being named for her. She is credited with being the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist. In 1828 she became the first woman awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1935 she and Mary Somerville were the first women ever admitted as honorary members of that same society. Three years later Caroline became an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy and on her ninety-sixth birthday the king of Prussia presented her with a Gold Medal for Science.

Sir John Frederick William Herschel (1792–1871) was the son of William Herschel. He was also an astronomer, polymath, botanist, inventor and photographer. His photography work led him to invent the blueprint. He named the four moons of Uranus and the seven moons of Saturn.

By the late 1800s the whaling fleet had discovered the riches of the western Canadian Arctic. Arriving in the Beaufort Sea in late August the whalers would harvest the numerous bowhead whales and then lay up in Pauline Cove at Herschel Island for the winter. At its peak in 1894–95 the whaling fleet was composed of fifteen whaling ships and around five hundred men. The ships were mostly American vessels but they held crew from all over the world including those from England, Ireland, Scotland, Holland, the Caribbean and Hawaii. The whalers had decimated the northern Pacific whale population, so they continued on through the Bering Strait and into the Beaufort Sea. Even though it was a Canadian island there were no customs and immigration services or police stationed there and it was up to the whalers’ captains to keep their crews in check. Despite rampant racism in the south the Arctic whalers promoted their crew to positions of authority based on their abilities, not on their skin colour or country of origin, so life aboard was a much more multicultural affair than elsewhere in Canada.

Map of the eastern Canadian Arctic with Herschel Island marked off the Yukon coast.

When these ships arrived at Herschel for the long, cold, dark winter they soon met the local inhabitants of the island, the Inuvialuit of Canada’s western Arctic and the Russian and Alaskan Inuit who gathered at Herschel to trade and to socialize with their cousins. Archaeologists have discovered evidence that Inuit have lived on the island from as early as 1200 AD. The whalers soon hired them to provide their crews with fresh meat, usually caribou and fish. In return the whalers supplied them with western foodstuffs such as hardtack, flour, coffee, tea and jam. In short order the Inuit developed a reliance on these food staples and quickly went from being a nomadic hunter-gatherer society to setting up communities closer to the whalers so that they could continue to trade for these goods.

Fred Bruemmer describes it in The Beaver magazine in 1980:

Then the whalers came. To the Eskimos they were fascinating and infinitely rich. Their ships were laden with treasure. The whalers needed hundreds of tons of meat to feed their crews. They paid for it with trade goods, with useful articles such as guns, pots, knives, and hatchets, but also with less essential items such as chewing gum, suspenders, cigars, canned milk and often, despite official interdicts, with liquor.⁷

The whaling ships’ castoffs were also a rich treasure trove for the Inuit. Broken metal objects were treasured since they could be turned into tools; broken oars could be repurposed as tent poles; ripped sails could be used as tarpaulins. The whalers also gave their most valued Inuit companions their old whale boats—open-hulled vessels that could hold bales of fur or be used for small-scale whaling.

Whaling Ships iced in at Herschel Island. Oil-on-canvas painting by John Bertonccini, circa 1894, titled Winter Quarters at Herschel Island.

While many of the Inuit were still using bows, arrows and spears when they first met the western whalers, some had already acquired rifles from trading with Russian whalers farther west. The whalers at Herschel had much-coveted repeating rifles and in short order many Inuit became excellent marksmen. Some even ended up as deadly snipers in World Wars I and II. The ability to hunt more effectively coupled with the demand for fresh meat from the whalers had a detrimental effect on the wildlife. “Whole herds of caribou were slaughtered in order to feed the whaling crews, as were seals, swans, geese and ducks. On the average, each ship required at least 10,000 pounds of meat per season. In some years, nearly 200,000 pounds of meat, mainly caribou, were brought to the ships, and this consisted primarily of saddles and haunches.”⁸

Soon, the whalers also introduced the Inuit to alcohol. Some even went so far as to teach them how to make stills. This had an unsurprising effect, changing the fabric of life for the Inuit in a negative way.

The whalers also brought diseases to the Arctic that the Inuit had no natural immunity to. Tuberculosis and smallpox ravaged their numbers. In 1910, of the one hundred Inuvialuit living at Herschel Island, ninety died of measles. Whole families and communities were wiped out. “The whalers brought diseases to which the hitherto isolated Eskimos had no immunity. Syphilis and consumption, two common sailors’ afflictions, spread with devastating speed. In 1902 measles broke out and on Herschel, said Reverend Whittaker, ‘funerals followed day after day.’ When the disease had run its course, there were but a ‘handful’ of people, Nuligak recalled. Within two decades, 90 percent of the Mackenzie Eskimos were dead.”⁹ By some estimates, the population of Indigenous Mackenzie Inuit dropped from as high as 2,500 to fewer than 150 by 1910.¹⁰

Whalers at Herschel Island, with many posing atop a storage building.

Diamond Jenness was known as the “father of Eskimo Archaeology” and he worked in many capacities in the north, including the Canadian Arctic Expedition. He stated that the Inuvialuit numbered “about 2,000 in 1830, but by 1930 the descendants of these people numbered only twelve, the rest having succumbed to diseases imported from the south.”¹¹

Epidemics did not only reduce the population. They were also responsible for the loss of oral traditions and other cultural knowledge.¹² “Into the vacuum created by the demise of the Mackenzie people flowed Inuit from as far west as Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, and even Yuit and Chukchi from Siberia. Traders and trappers came from the stratum—the dregs of San Francisco’s slums and a Count Bulow, a remote cousin of the chancellor of the German Reich—settled in the region and ‘went native.’”¹³

The people trading with the Inuit soon offered more than just the basics that the whalers had first offered. The great variety of trade goods is perhaps best indicated by Russell’s … observation in 1894 of a group of Inuit on the mainland just south of Herschel Island: One of the men wore a new sombrero with a very broad brim. Others had miscellaneous odds and ends combined with their native costumes, with the effect on the beholder of having discarded a portion of their apparel and substituted an incongruous textile fabric to mark the loss. Several wore tight-fitting, red flannel drawers over their deerskin trousers.¹⁴

Whalers flensing a whale alongside their ship.

The whalers’ desire for women also left a lasting impact on the Inuvialuit. Some of the Inuit men rented out their wives. It was a common practice in Inuit culture for wives to be shared. In some cases the whalers took on what they called country wives and set up ashore in shacks with them for the winter. Many children were born as a result of these relationships and some Inuvialuit families can trace their lineage through the whalers’ surnames including the Carpenters, Wolkis, Pokiaks and Thrashers. Thrasher was actually the name of one of the whaling ships. The father in question was a whaler named Walker but for some reason the ship’s name was used instead.

Promotional poster for the movie Eskimo.

In the 1930s there was much intrigue about the Arctic. MGM optioned a book by Danish author and explorer Peter Freuchen called Eskimo. Freuchen was cast as the captain of the whaling ship Nanuk. The 1933 film was originally entitled Eskimo and then was re-released as Mala the Magnificent and then, to try to increase box office receipts, as Eskimo Wife-Traders. The studio advertised the film with tag lines such as “Eskimo Wife Traders—Weird Tale of the Arctic” and “Men Who Share Their Wives—But Kill if One is Stolen.” Filmed mainly in Alaska aboard one of C.T. Pedersen’s former ships, Nanuk, the mostly Indigenous Alaskan cast spoke Inupiat with the film showing intertitles in English. Recording the staccato nature of the Inupiat language, which makes heavy use of the “kh” sound, caused many problems as it overwhelmed the microphones.

Nuligak, who was christened Bob Cockney by the missionaries, was born in Inuvialuit territory in the MacKenzie River Delta. His book, I Nuligak, is considered to be the first autobiography by an Inuvialuk. He writes: “while many whalers were perhaps wild and depraved, Nuligak in his reminiscences remembers them more as friends than as fiends. ‘The whalers’ knew a hundred different ways of amusing themselves. They had different kinds of musical instruments … White men and Inuit played games together, as well as hunting side by side. We played baseball and wrestled. We danced in the Eskimo fashion to the sound of many drums.”¹⁵

Inuit women aboard a whaling ship at Herschel Island , circa 1890s. Peter Freuchen, shown here in 1921, was a Danish author and explorer.

Peter Freuchen went on his first expedition in Greenland when he was twenty years old. He later made many other expeditions with Knud Rasmussen and lived with the Inuit, learning their language and eventually marrying an Inuk woman with whom he had two children.

He and Rasmussen built the northernmost trading post in the world in 1910 at Cape York, Greenland, from which they made seven expeditions until 1933. Between 1921 and 1924 he and Rasmussen charted through the Canadian Arctic. On one of the Greenland excursions they travelled by dogsled on a thousand-kilometre (620-mile) journey across the inland ice. Famously, he was frozen into a cave he had dug to escape the cold and, lacking any tools, he formed his feces into the shape of a dagger. When it had frozen solid he used it to claw up the side of the ice chamber to safety. The ordeal froze his leg and gangrene set in.

Without any anaesthetic or alcohol (he was a teetotaller), Freuchen used a pair of shears and a hammer to amputate his toes. He would later have his leg amputated by a doctor on a trip to a Hudson’s Bay Company post.

Back in Denmark, during World War II, Freuchen was openly critical of the Nazi occupation of his country. He would proclaim that he was Jewish to any who made an anti-Semitic comment in his presence and, standing his full six-foot-seven height, he dared anyone to defy him. The Germans arrested and jailed him. They went so far as to confiscate his peg leg to stop him from escaping but he got away anyway. He eventually moved to the United States where he worked in the movie industry and became a lecturer and the author of over two dozen books. In 1956 he won sixty-four thousand dollars on the quiz show The $64,000 Question, on the subject “The Seven Seas.”

Freuchen’s grandson, Peter Ittinuar, was born in Nunavut and became the first Inuk to be elected as an MP in the House of Commons in Canada. He served from 1979 to 1984.

Captain Henry Larsen, the captain of the RCMP ship St. Roch, who spent years in that region, recalled, “To the Eskimos this was an entirely new world opening up and the whalers themselves were often simple people who were unaware of the lasting damage they were causing.”¹⁶ Larsen said many whalers “moved in with Eskimo women, and a period of wenching and homebrewing followed that is still remembered in the North.” A report to the Canadian government stated that there were fifteen huts ashore, warmly insulated, heated and “used in winter by officers who nearly all keep a woman.”¹⁷ Nuligak recounted, “There were drinking bouts almost every day.”

Gladys O’Kelly made a trip north and painted a vivid picture in The Beaver magazine about what the shelters actually looked like: “Native igloos cluster closely around the Company’s buildings at this post. They are made of frozen sod, wood gleaned from wreckage, and bits of old sails and skins. The smell of bad fish, seal and accumulated filth nearly overpowered me, and my husband well named the section Rotten Row.”¹⁸

While many of the whalers were seemingly out of control, there was also a strong contingent made up of the whaling captains and their wives and children. There are many reports of lavish dinner parties aboard the ships, as well as plays and music nights.

In 1893 the Anglican Church sent out Bishop Isaac Stringer and his wife, Sadie, to try and impose some moral order on the whalers. Around that time a Hudson’s Bay Company official described the scene: “The arrival of the whaling fleet at Herschel was the signal for a bacchanalian orgy that beggared description. Down the gangplanks surged a motley horde of mixed humanity till the sandspit was overrun with a drunken mob of dark-visaged Kanakas, bearded Russians, ebony-faced Negroes, and the off-scourings of the Barbary Coast. Rum flowed like water. Fighting, drinking, and debauchery became the order of the day.”¹⁹

Captain W.P.S. Porter (right center), also known as “Alphabetical” because of his many initials, poses with his crew on board the whaling ship SS Beluga in 1907.

The whaling captains were happy to have the extra help and the minister was well received. In 1894 he wrote to the federal government in Ottawa and pointed out that these foreigners were not only on Canadian land, paying no customs or import duties while trading and hunting whales in Canadian waters, but that they were also giving the local inhabitants guns and alcohol and taking country wives and making babies. There was no response from Ottawa. “No royalty was paid on whales taken, which by the First World War amounted to over $13 million in total value, nor was duty paid on goods traded with the Inuit, which came to another $1.5 million.”²⁰

The Hudson’s Bay Company viewed the whalers of Herschel Island as unwelcome competition since the whalers offered to trade goods with the Inuit in return for not only meat but also fur and ivory. They reported the untaxed goods entering Canada with the whalers. “Many locals were attracted to Herschel Island by the cheap goods offered by the whalers in return for fresh meat. For example, even after they started paying duty, the whalers were selling one hundred pounds of flour for $2 while it would cost $30 at the Hudson’s Bay Company store at Fort McPherson.”²¹ A report by the Royal North-West Mounted Police also took note, reporting that “the value of the trade was considerable. The whaling captains estimated that between 1891 and 1907 whales had been caught to the value of $13,450,000 and $1,400,000 worth of trade had been conducted with the Inuit and Indians who came from the interior to trade. The American captains G.W. Porter, G.B. Leavitt, J.A. Tilton and J.A. Wing reported this to Insp. A.M. Jarvis of the R.N.W.M.P. in 1907.” ²²