by Paul Watson
“The religion of these people is based upon a constant fight against evil, invisible spirits who interfere in their daily life in a variety of ways, but especially by means of sickness and bad hunting,” he wrote. “To protect themselves against all these perils they have only their amulets in combination with their taboo and their magic formulas.”
LOUIE KAMOOKAK was born a little over a generation after Rasmussen visited King William Island. Inuit life was still very hard when Mary gave birth to her second of ten children on August 26, 1959, in a tent pitched on the windswept Boothia tundra. Survival was never certain. Mary’s first husband had died, and now, laboring to bring a new life into the world, she risked her own. After remarrying, she had traveled from King William Island to Boothia to visit her mother. Louie was born that summer, at a sealing camp near Spence Bay, which is now called Taloyoak. It was a bad year for hunting. Caribou were scarce, which meant the newborn’s parents were struggling to feed themselves when he arrived. The baby was another hungry mouth. His mother was too sick to breast-feed, so Louie started life sucking up the broth from boiled caribou meat. He needed a special strength to survive, a force of will he would have to call on again and again. What name would suit such a resolute boy, wailing against the Arctic’s indifference?
A mother might learn the name of her baby in a dream, when ancestors whispered. She could also get help from an elder like Hummahuk, who knew the ancient ways of shaping a child’s destiny. To give a singer a good start in life, she rubbed a baby with the skin of a loon. If there was any concern the child might grow up to be a lightweight, she stuck a big, heavy rock on the afterbirth. Hummahuk would then have a say in choosing the infant’s name. But by the end of the 1950s, southerners were pressuring Inuit to give up their traditions. Missionaries traveling the Canadian Arctic called them to a Christian god. Father Henry, a Catholic priest, baptized the newborn and suggested he be named Louie. His parents obeyed. They chose their son’s second name, Qayuttinuaq, from a relative on his mother’s side, a shaman who wrote songs for drum dances. He asked that it be so. By making the boy his namesake, he was expressing a wish: that the child would grow to be at least as good, but hopefully better than himself before he died. To government officials who decided Inuit fate from the south, none of that mattered. They would know the boy by a number, not a name.
White authority—the doctors, nurses, teachers, administrators, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police from the south—had trouble pronouncing and remembering Inuit names. The Mounties suggested fingerprinting as a solution. That was deemed too complicated, not to mention unsettling for Inuit, who would wonder what they had done wrong to be standing in front of the cops, having their fingers rolled in dark ink and pressed on white paper. Following the military’s example, a medical officer in Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island, decided in 1935 that handing out dog tags was a better answer. Six years later, Canadian federal authorities made it official: All Inuit must be registered, and each Inuk was assigned a four-digit number. Known as Eskimo Numbers, or E-numbers for short, they were stamped on pressed-fiber disks about the size of a quarter. Those were called Eskimo Identification Tags. Lest the Inuit miss the weighty importance of their numbers, their tags bore the regal imprimatur of Canada’s coat of arms, with a crowned lion above another lion and a unicorn wielding lances, on a wreath of roses, thistles, shamrocks, and lilies. Each Inuk got one, along with a cheap chain so they could wear the tags around their necks or wrists.
Inuit had to carry their ID tags only when they came in contact with white officialdom, such as doctors and nurses who made annual stops on a medical ship to check for tuberculosis and treat other ailments. A mother would get out her tag, and put one on each of her kids, so the qalunaaq could address them by number. For the thousands who lived under the system for about three decades, until it was abolished in the early 1970s, the E-number was a shadow identity, a kind of ghost-self stirred to life whenever white people showed up. So many times had Louie heard authorities call the number they knew as his, so many times had he stated it, that it became deeply etched into his psyche. When I asked, it came to him as quickly, and clearly, as the date of his birth, a hurtful absurdity spoken without a hint of bitterness. Free of the humiliation now, he could even smile as he recited the identity stamped on a tag that once dangled from a chain around his neck as though he were someone’s wandering pet.
“E-4826,” he said.
That was how Canada’s government knew the child destined to help rewrite history.
Inuit put up with the indignities of rule from the south just as they tolerated many other threats they couldn’t control. Stand your ground if you can, give way if you must, is often the Inuit way. Parents teach it to their children when they speak of tunngaq, ghosts. Stay away as long as possible, they learn, but if spirits come, try not to fear them. Some may be there to help. Others are evil and can cause great harm. Those spirits are amayuqruq, which roughly translates as “taken away.” Their preferred prey are younger children.
Louie may have felt one’s terrifying grasp in the cold of early summer—a night that seared itself in Louie’s memory. As he remembers it, the extended Kamookak family was huddled against a bitter wind in two igloos, joined by a tunnel shaped from blocks of snow. It was just big enough to crawl through, with grandparents on one side and the rest of the family on the other. He has relived the most chilling seconds countless times in a recurring nightmare: Everyone is in the neighboring igloo, in the light, but the boy is alone, sleeping in the blackness of night. Then it grabs him.
“There was something pulling me and it was dark. And my head was on fire.”
For years that was all he knew. Something unseen, a dark presence, had snatched hold of him and pulled, something with a touch so hot that he felt aflame. It took Louie years to work up the courage to speak to anyone about that night. In his late teens, he told his parents about it. They recalled a similar night, when they were camped out with his mother’s uncle. Louie was an infant, too young to walk.
“They were sleeping in an igloo and I was in a tent. It was in the summer. And I was sleeping between my mom and my dad. My mom’s uncle was sleeping on the side, behind my father. They heard him shout, and then I started crying, and I was halfway out the entrance of the tent. They said something pulled me out—some kind of spirit. They said in the past sometimes kids would disappear.”
The explanation only left him with new questions. One whispered insistently: If a spirit came for him that night, whose was it?
As he grew, the boy also learned about curses, especially one particular to King William Island. Elders have long warned that it came with the hideous deaths of Franklin and his men. Some believed Louie’s grandfather, on his mother’s side, fell victim to it.
WILLIAM “PADDY” GIBSON, an Irish transplant to the Arctic, was born in Kells Parish, County Meath, about forty miles from Dublin. In World War I, he served in the Imperial Overseas Forces of the British Army. After a brief stint in the Royal Irish Constabulary, he spent five years in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, working mainly on the Western Arctic’s Herschel Island, just off Yukon’s Beaufort Sea coast. Then he moved east to become trading-post manager for the Hudson’s Bay Company on King William Island’s south coast, overlooking Simpson Strait, a narrow gap between the island and the northern coast of mainland Canada. By 1927, he was running the new trading post at Gjoa Haven. Gibson’s arrival marked a turning point for the Inuit, when a nomadic people began to settle. They were brought into a trading economy that almost always favored the qalunaaq buyer over the Inuk seller. Paddy Gibson got around, logging six thousand miles a year by dogsled. He knew the land and its people well and fused with the place, like a ship beset. To Inuit, he was an odd, sometimes frightening presence.
“The first white man I encountered was a man by the name of Gibson. I was terrified of him,” Emily Haloktalik recalled years later.
Inuit hunters used to gather each spring outside the door of Gibson
’s small house, which still stands as the original building on King William Island. They brought stacks of frozen carcasses of Arctic foxes, their winter fur still snow white. Buyers prized the pelts for their downy softness to make glamorous hats, stoles, mufflers, and coats. Taken dead from traps, the bodies were stacked on wooden qamutik sleds pulled by dog teams to the trading post. Louie’s grandmother, Irene, was with the other women, on the cold ground, skinning stiff, dead foxes and cleaning the pelts, when she met Gibson. He was soon sleeping with her, but they never married. She wasn’t the fur trader’s only Inuk companion. In his own travels, Kamookak met other Inuit who were Gibson’s progeny, including a son in Cambridge Bay and a daughter in Kugluktuk. They bonded over stories of the dogsledding fur trader who spawned an Irish–Inuit bloodline.
“Gibson didn’t have any wives up here,” Kamookak told me, chuckling at the thought. “Just kids. Gibson just got around. Having kids here and there.”
As the fur trader worked his routes, he followed in the tracks of European explorers, including those of the dying members of the Franklin Expedition. In 1931, Gibson set out from Gjoa Haven on his own expedition to see if he could figure out what happened to Franklin and his men. On the Todd Islands, four islets near the southern coast of King William Island, he found the partial remains of at least four skeletons. He picked out obvious signs that they were once Royal Navy seamen.
“Two of these were found embedded in the soft sand of a low spit running out from the most southerly islet in the group,” Gibson reported in The Beaver, then a popular magazine published by the Hudson’s Bay Company. “One was almost intact and lying in an extended natural position, evidently that of a slight young man. The teeth of both jaws were complete and remarkable in their flawless perfection.
“These skeletons had been well preserved in the moist sand and patches of the blue naval broadcloth held together and were taken away by us. Digging in the vicinity of the other remains—which were very incomplete—the vivid colour only of the broadcloth was discernible, the fabric having entirely disintegrated.”
High tides often washed up the low spit where Gibson was standing, and he thought more human remains might be buried there beneath sand deposited over more than a century. A very experienced Arctic traveler, he concluded that the Franklin survivors were confused and followed the King William Island shoreline too far east, where the distance to the North American mainland broadens to a huge gap of several miles. Farther west, from where the men apparently came, the crossing over Simpson Strait is just two miles. Gibson gained a deep understanding of Inuit accounts of the dying sailors’ movements, which he didn’t take at face value. They convinced him of a key fact, one that would take decades, and hard work from his Inuk grandson, to prove. Gibson’s own analysis of Inuit stories that one of Franklin’s vessels ended up far south of where both were abandoned in 1848, at the top of Victoria Strait, was prescient.
“They discovered the ship, which was possibly the Erebus, for she was larger and more strongly built than her consort, would appear to have drifted out of the heavy ice in Victoria Strait during the late summer or fall of the same year in which her crew abandoned her. That would mean that it occupied the vessel approximately three years to drift at a slow rate to the open water south of that belt of heavy ice which was the prime factor in the destruction of the expedition.
“It is an ironic contemplation that had the crews only remained with their ships for another few months, one of them at least was actually to escape undamaged to those same ice-free coastal waters for which Franklin was striving three years previously when he was fatefully beset. Carried south by the current the vessel was brought to a stationary position near the mainland where the natives found her, by the freezing over of the sea again at the onset of winter.”
On another search two years later, Gibson was fascinated by a marker, left by earlier explorers, which the last remnants of the lost Franklin Expedition might have been seeking in the desperate push south. In the High Arctic desert, dead reckoning can be tough when the horizon disappears. A winter sky melds into ice-covered sea and land in a uniform palette of gray. One long, flat stretch can seem the same as the last. Ice fog and other phenomena deceive sharp eyes, let alone those dulled by hunger or sickness. It’s so easy to get lost that Inuit learned long ago the necessity of building their own landmarks to save lives. They stack flat slabs of rock into towers that perform a variety of functions, such as pointing travelers on the right path, marking cached food, even acting as decoys to confuse caribou. What Inuit call an inuksuk, which roughly means “to act in the capacity of a human,” northern explorers called a cairn, from the Gaelic for “heap of stones.”
Under the white light of a full moon in January, Gibson came off the frozen Simpson Strait on a January night, his dog team hauling toward Cape Herschel on King William Island’s southwest corner, when he saw the dark outline of a cairn on the crown of the ridge.
“Following preparations for camping, and while my Eskimo companion set about building the snow hut, I climbed the ridge to inspect the conspicuous landmark without even a neighboring boulder to lessen the contrast of its loneliness.”
Gibson had found a cairn built a century earlier by two fellow Hudson’s Bay Company explorers, Thomas Simpson and Peter Dease. Together they completed the map of North America’s northern coast from the Coppermine River to Chantrey Inlet. That same inlet was the spot Franklin Expedition survivors were aiming for, just across from the southern tip of King William Island, as they tried to reach the mouth of Back’s Great Fish River. The explorers’ report described two straits (which they named after themselves) that were sheltered from sea ice. The cairn’s north side stood about four feet high, “while the south side is reduced to a mass of tumbled rock,” Gibson recalled from his visit. McClintock had found it in the same state in 1859 and speculated that Inuit had pulled the stones down to search for something inside, perhaps a note in a canister from Franklin’s men.
Standing next to the crumbling monument, Gibson imagined “the perishing crews of HMS Erebus and Terror” must have passed it “on their death march to Back’s Great Fish River and the Hudson’s Bay territories during the year 1848.” He also lamented that “an untimely death cut short a promising career” for Simpson. The explorer allegedly killed himself with a double-barreled rifle after murdering two Métis on the American prairie. Witnesses told investigators that Simpson was deranged and suspected the men were plotting to shoot him as the group headed for New York, where he planned to catch a ship back to London. Simpson was apparently worried that Dease would steal credit for their discoveries, and frustrated because the Hudson’s Bay Company had rejected his pitch to lead an expedition to finish mapping the coast. The company’s governor doubted he was fit for sole command.
Nine years after paying homage at the cairn, Gibson himself would die at the hands of the Arctic that had become his home. On February 22, 1942, he boarded a Noorduyn Norseman IV, a Canadian-made, single-engine bush plane, in Yellowknife. The Canadian Airways flight was bound for the Victoria Island hamlet of Cambridge Bay, around 530 miles northwest. From there, Gibson planned to travel another 230 miles by dogsled, hauling supplies for the trading post and mail for the RCMP. Norsemans were early workhorses of the region. They were mostly used by Mounties, mining companies, and other pioneers working in the rugged, unforgiving North, where a Norseman could land on water, ice, or a reasonably flat stretch of dirt to drop off workers, equipment, and supplies.
With rounded wings constructed from wood covered in fabric, they were a fire hazard. The aircraft carrying Gibson was just over four years old, the fourteenth off the Montreal assembly line. The pilot and his mechanic were the only others on board for just another routine Arctic flight by the seat of a bush pilot’s pants. Until this Norseman caught fire.
Descending toward the wilds, flames and smoke spreading fast, the pilot needed a relatively level, open place to land. It had to be far enough from the forest of
stunted, bristly trees poking up like large pipe cleaners from the virgin snow that he wouldn’t clip the wings and break up in a ball of fire. But this was no time to be choosy. At some point in the crisis, a load of ammunition exploded, riddling the aircraft with bullets. By chance or choice, the pilot set the aircraft down on Dumas Lake, 270 miles north of Yellowknife. The small lake was named after Pierre Dumas, a member of Franklin’s disastrous first overland expedition.
Franklin’s guides were voyageurs, the French Canadians who formed the backbone of the fur trade as expert paddlers and outdoorsmen. They knew the woods as well as the native people who inhabited them. Dumas was one of sixteen voyageurs who had joined the expedition at Cumberland House, the last trading post in Saskatchewan, before Franklin set off into the Barren Lands, destined for the Arctic coast. So Gibson, an Irishman who had taken his own stab at solving the Franklin mystery, came to his end on the ice and snow of a lake that honors one of the Royal Navy explorers’ first Arctic guides. It was a connection arcing across one century to another, one among many in the epic hunt for the lost Franklin Expedition. Another link, this one to the supernatural, may have been what took his life in the first place.
Gibson was the only one of the three men aboard the downed plane who didn’t survive. The pilot managed to pull his burned body from the wreckage before the fire reduced it to a scorched frame. With no shelter and nothing to salvage, the pilot and his mechanic had to get by, in the dead of winter at –40 degrees Fahrenheit, on wits alone. Rescuers found them nine days later. Gibson’s obituary, which ran in the southern establishment’s preferred newspaper, The Globe and Mail, briefly described his work in the Arctic. It also noted he was a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, a member of the Masonic Order, and he had four surviving sisters, three in Toronto and one in Ireland. There wasn’t a word, not even a hint, of his Inuit family. Up in the Arctic, a fellow fur trader talked of a curse killing his comrade.