The Franklin Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Blair Latta

  INDIANS?

  Stranger still, Crozier told Too-shoo-art-thariu that “before the other men from the two ships had died, they had battled with Indians (Etkerlins).”23 This was a particularly odd story, for the reason that there are no “Indians” in the Arctic. It has been suggested that this part of the story was a confused remembrance of a brief skirmish between George Back’s expedition and some Inuit; but, these were not Indians either. But how else to explain this odd story of Indians in the Arctic?

  One possibility would be to assume it was Crozier who used the word (Etkerlins) in describing what had happened. Further, he may have done so because the tribe with which he had fought was not Inuit, but had no name he could use. Thus, he told Too-shoo-art-thariu that his men had battled Indians only to let his host know that they had not battled Inuit, but something else for which there was no name.

  It is of course a remarkable suggestion, and yet, the fact of the story remains. Crozier claimed to have battled Indians on King William Island where there are no Indians. How else can we explain this except to suppose that Crozier was trying to distinguish between the Inuit and a people for which there was no name he could use — for the reason that they were previously unknown?

  THE HARDWOOD BOX

  After spending a winter with Too-shoo-art-thariu, Crozier and the two surviving men set out in the company of another Inuk guide. This time they really were headed for the Great Fish River, taking along a kayak to travel down the waterway. What happened to them after that? As we have seen, Tookoolitoo’s friend Seegar told Hall that the Inuit of Chesterfield Inlet had seen Crozier and one other man in their area. If true, this indicates that one of Crozier’s companions died during the journey. Beyond this we have no testimony to guide us. Crozier vanishes somewhere to the south.

  Yet, in 1948, a possible clue to Crozier’s fate was discovered by author Farley Mowat at Lake Angikuni in central Keewatin, “near a famous junction where the Eskimo trade routes between Churchill and the Arctic coasts converge.”24 Here Mowat happened upon “a very ancient cairn, not of normal Eskimo construction, and containing fragments of a hardwood box with dove-tailed corners.” Mowat knew of no explorers who had been in the area and so concluded that “the possibility remains that this mute monument was built by Crozier, before he vanished utterly.”

  Woodman, too, was unable to discover any explorer who had visited Lake Angikuni, who might have built the ancient cairn. He did however find something else of interest. The geologist, J.W.Tyrrell, had passed through the area in 1893. Though there is no evidence Tyrrell visited Lake Angikuni, he did stop at nearby Selwyn Lake. Here the explorer discovered a grave “at the head of which stood a plain wooden cross.” Tyrrell suggested, “It was, doubtless, the grave of some Christian Indian who had been taught by the priests at Fond-du-lac.”25 Could this instead have been the grave either of Crozier or of his one remaining companion? Did Crozier build the cairn at Lake Angikuni, perhaps shortly before he died? If so, what was in the hardwood box?

  THE VANISHING VILLAGE

  There is an intriguing postscript to this story. For, aside from being possibly the southernmost point to which we have traced Crozier after his flight from King William Island, Lake Angikuni is also the location of an Arctic mystery which is second only to the Franklin expedition itself in terms of questions, and first in terms of controversy. The story told about Lake Angikuni comes with a “buyer beware” warning. John Robert Colombo, in his Mysterious Canada, commented, “It never dies, despite the fact that it has been debunked time and time again.”26 And yet, this “Angikuni connection” is simply too intriguing to dismiss without due consideration.

  On November 28, 1930, Emmett E. Kelleher, a special news correspondent at The Pas, Manitoba, sent a chilling story out to various newspapers across Canada and the U.S. The article appeared the following day and immediately created a sensation. According to Kelleher, the story had been told to him by a trapper named Joe Labelle. Kelleher wrote: “Far up in the heart of one of the most lonely places on earth — in the Lake Angikuni country, 500 miles southwest of the port of Churchill, on Hudson Bay — a whole tribe of Eskimos has vanished. Somewhere, somehow, the endless desolation of Canada’s northern Barren Lands has swallowed up 25 men, women and children. It is one of the most puzzling mysteries that has ever come down out of the Arctic.”27

  Kelleher went on to describe how a trapper named Joe Labelle first happened upon an abandoned Inuit village of cariboo-skin tents. The inhabitants had left behind all their possessions, including their clothes and rifles. Labelle found some starving dogs, all skin and bone. He estimated that the village had held twenty-five people, but the rust on a rifle told him they had been gone at least twelve months. “There was no sign of violence, no sign of trouble. The place was simply empty.” As he wandered through the ghost village, Labelle grew more and more uneasy, recalling (according to Kelleher) “the Eskimos’ ‘evil spirit’ Tornark, who has an ugly man’s face with two long tusks sticking up from each side of the nose.”

  Colombo characterized the whole thing as “Joe Labelle’s tall tale” and “Kelleher’s journalistic hoax”, insisting that “within two months of its publication the RCMP had debunked the tale.” After Kelleher’s story appeared, public interest encouraged the local RCMP to look into the matter. The conclusion of Sergeant J. Nelson of The Pas was that the whole thing was a hoax of some kind. Joe Labelle was a real trapper, but there was no proof he had worked near Lake Angikuni. Nor had anyone else reported an abandoned village. A key part of Sergeant Nelson’s argument centred on the photograph of the “vanishing village of the dead” which had been used to illustrate the story. This photograph, showing four cariboo-skin tents sitting apparently eerily forsaken, was actually a picture taken by a local RCMP officer, which Kelleher had borrowed. And yet this proved very little. It should hardly surprise us that, since Joe Labelle hadn’t carried a camera with him, Kelleher decided the story would get better distribution with an accompanying illustration.

  In the end, only Joe Labelle and Emmett Kelleher knew whether the story was true or not. Yet, in the present context, we can’t help but find an eerie significance to the tale, not seen by those who read Kelleher’s strange story at the time. The original story was told without any connection to the lost Franklin expedition. Now we have found possible evidence tracing Crozier and one man to Lake Angikuni. One body was buried at nearby Selwyn Lake. A cairn was left at Lake Angikuni with a box placed inside. And then what? Did Crozier die on the shore of Lake Angikuni? Might he have died and been buried by the ancestors of the Inuit who later vanished from Labelle’s village? What happened to the twenty-five Inuit who had lived in the village? Labelle said, “The whole thing looked as if it had been left just that way by people who intended to come back. But they hadn’t come back.”

  All this is mere idle speculation. And yet, there was one detail to Labelle’s story that only now, to us, seems strangely suggestive. Labelle told Kelleher, “And then I found one of the most puzzling things of all. It was an Eskimo grave, with a cairn built of stones. For some reason the grave had been opened. The stones had been pulled off of one side and there was nothing inside the cairn at all. I had no way of telling when it had been opened, or what had been done with the body it had once contained. I couldn’t figure out why it had been desecrated.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The Tunnit

  By the pricking of my thumbs,

  Something wicked this way comes.

  William Shakespeare,

  Macbeth

  LIKE A MAN

  Among the Inuit, it was said that before their ancestors came to the Arctic the land of the midnight sun was home to a race called the Tunnit (or Tunit, or Tunrit). Theirs was a gentle race made up of giants, who the Inuit drove away in a furious prolonged confrontation. So common and compelling are these stories that anthropologists have little doubt but that the Tunnit did exist. The only question is: who were they?

  An
thropologists theorize that the Tunnit legends are a remembrance of the meeting between the Dorset culture and the Thule culture that replaced it 1000 years ago. The Thule culture directly preceded the present Inuit culture now inhabiting the Arctic, and the Thule are believed to have been ancestors to the Inuit. The Dorset, on the other hand, are thought to have been a separate race and culture which arose from the Paleo-Eskimos who first entered the Arctic from Siberia approximately 4000 years ago.

  In spite of the remarkable preservative properties of the dry, cold Arctic, very little evidence remains of the Dorset culture to allow us to piece together a picture of their society. As a result, there is considerable disagreement in the literature. For example, Robert McGee wrote, in Ancient Canada, “Many of the technological items that were used by the later Inuit occupants of the area, which we generally consider necessary to the Arctic hunting way of life, seem to have been unknown to these early immigrants. For example, they do not seem to have used boats . . . nor is there any evidence that they used the domed snow house that provided winter protection to the later Inuit.”1 But Farley Mowat, in Westviking, stated, “[The Dorset] used skin-covered boats. They may have built snow-houses.”2

  The Arctic environment offered precious few materials for the fashioning of the sort of artifacts which might be found by modern archaeologists. Their summer houses have been found scattered across the eastern Arctic and as far north as Ellesmere Island, but as for what the Dorset actually looked like, we have little to go on.

  For some time it was believed that the Dorset were actually a very small race, but this theory has fallen out of favour. “The idea,” wrote Farley Mowat, “which has been proposed and maintained by recent authors, that the Dorsets were a pygmy race, seems to have originated in part from the small size and delicate nature of their artifacts.”3 The few bones which have been recovered do not suggest that the Dorset were much larger (if at all) than the Inuit. And yet, the Tunnit, who are said to represent the Dorset in the stories of the Inuit, were clearly described as a race of giants. Are these legends merely an exaggerated remembrance of a race which, in reality, could only have been at most slightly larger than the Inuit?

  Stranger still, the Vikings also apparently encountered this giant race. As Farley Mowat wrote, “This is found in the Floamanna Saga in connection with the story of Thorgisl Orrabeinsfostri, who was shipwrecked far to the north of the Greenland settlements, apparently on Baffin Island, about 997. Thorgisl met natives who are described as giants.”4 We might suppose that the Inuit thought the Dorset were “giants”, but it becomes harder to imagine the Vikings thinking the same thing. But, if not the Dorset, then who were these giant Tunnit?

  Throughout the eastern Arctic are found large, crudely constructed statues made up of heavy stones. These stone figures are sometimes ten feet tall, and shaped to look human when seen against the horizon. In Inuktituut, the language of the Inuit, these stone statues are called the “Inukshuit”, meaning “like a man”. No one knows who constructed these statues, nor when. Their purpose likewise remains a mystery. Nonetheless, theories abound. Anthropologists hypothesize that the statues were intended to frighten caribou into corridors where they could be more easily hunted. Alternately, it is speculated that the Inukshuit served the same purpose as the later, simpler cairns, acting as landmarks to guide the Arctic peoples in their yearly migrations over the barren, white islands. The Thule, ancestral to the Inuit, are thought to be the most likely candidate to be Inukshuit-builders.

  The Inuit, though, had a different story to tell. To them, the Inukshuit had been built at the time of the great conflict between the Tunnit and the Inuit’s Thule ancestors. The great stone statues were said to commemorate that battle, perhaps serving to represent the giants who were defeated. On the other hand, John Robert Colombo noted, “It is the opinion of the contemporary Inuit that they [the Inukshuit] were constructed in the distant past by the Tunit.”5 These stone constructions are tantalizing in their lonely silence, dotting the Arctic landscape in vast numbers, undeniable in their solid reality. Their secret is closely guarded — are they meant to represent a race of giants, a race “like a man”, but not being a man? Or were they constructed by that giant race itself?

  But the Inuit had other things to tell about the people who had come before. The Inuit ethnographer Peter Freuchen spent many years living among the Arctic people, recording their stories and trying to understand them in a way which few had done before. His only equal in this area was said to be Knud Rasmussen, the great Danish-Inuit explorer and ethnologist. In his Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimos, he recorded this story about the people who had preceded the Inuit: “The first people were much stronger than people are now. Thus, they could with their magic make their houses fly, and a snow shovel could move by itself and shovel snow. People lived on earth, and when they wanted new nourishment they just sat in their houses and let them fly to new places. But one day a man complained over the noise the houses made when they flew through the air. And his words were powerful, and houses lost their ability to fly at that moment. And since then houses have been stationary.” Freuchen was also told: “At that time new snow would burn like fire, and often fire fell down from the sky.”6

  SKULLS WITH HOLES

  The Tunnit (or Tunrit) are closely linked with King William Island. According to Paul Fenimore Cooper, in Island of the Lost, “A thousand years or so ago — according to legend — a race of giants, the Tunrit came to the island . . . These Tunrit were a strange people, big and sturdy, yet stupid and easygoing . . . Their strength was great. One of them could single-handedly pick up a bear and throw it over his shoulder or pull a walrus from the sea. . . . Often when in a rage, they struck their harpoons so forcibly against the rocks as to make a shower of stone splinters.”7 But King William Island, it seemed, wasn’t big enough for Inuit and Tunrit together. “It was the Tunrit’s amiability and stupidity that proved their downfall,” Cooper continued. “At first they let the Eskimos live on the island side by side with them in peace. But quarrels soon arose, and before long the newcomers [Inuit] took to hunting the giants down like game.” Most remarkable is the manner in which the Inuit were said to have dispatched those Tunnit whom they caught. According to Cooper, “These doomed ones were tracked until caught asleep; then the Eskimos quickly killed them by drilling holes in their foreheads.”

  This story of holes in Tunnit foreheads seems oddly similar to another claim made by Cooper: that the Tunnit themselves were in the habit of making holes in heads, but for another reason. “They had a certain skill in the treatment of the sick (wrote Cooper); when one of them had a bad headache, a hole was drilled in his head, and relief gained by letting blood and matter ooze out.”8 The practice of relieving pressure around the brain by drilling a hole in the skull is called “trepanning”. It is not especially unlikely that an Arctic race might have used this method on occasion to treat the sick. On the other hand, in conjunction with the story about Inuit killing Tunnit by drilling head-holes, we might ask ourselves whether both stories aren’t perhaps distorted memories of something else again.

  All of this takes on a strange significance when we recall that Charles Francis Hall was told about skulls with holes on King William Island. In the tent at Terror Bay, the floor apparently had been littered with bodies and bones. Teeketa told Hall: “A great many skulls . . . Some bones had been severed with a saw. Some skulls with holes in them.”9 Another Inuk related how he had discovered a second boat slightly westward of the one discovered by Hobson and McClintock. Near this boat, there had also stood a tent with bones. “The Innuit say there was and is now a pile of skulls with other bones on the outside of where the tent was — the skulls having holes in them by which they say the brains must have been taken out to prolong the lives of the living.” Hall continued, “As this is told me . . . everyone in igloo sad — and silence only now and then broken by low weird voices.”10 McClintock himself did not find skulls with holes but, on the other hand,
he was unable to find the skulls for the two bodies discovered in the boat. They were unaccountably missing.

  Roderic Owen suggested: “Posterity might have appreciated it more had he [Hall] brought back some of the bones — such as skulls with holes in them.”11 Unfortunately, McClintock and Hobson found only the three bodies during their visit to King William Island, and Hall’s four-day search produced only a few more. Later searchers such as Schwatka and Gibson added more skeletons to the tally, although at times it is likely the searchers were merely rediscovering the bones previously discovered by those who had searched before. In all those years, no one reported any holes drilled in a bleached skull.

  But then in 1987, Jeff MacInnis and Mike Beedell did indeed discover such a grisly artifact during their traversing of the Northwest Passage by catamaran. The skull however was found, not on King William Island, but on the west coast of Boothia Peninsula across the water from Cape Felix. MacInnis wrote, “I was quietly reading a book in the lee of a boulder when Mike startled me by thrusting a human skull at me. On an exploratory hike, he’d found old fire pits containing charred bone fragments and the skull, which was of considerable age and in which a hole had been smashed on one side.”12 Unfortunately, MacInnis felt a skull taken along on their perilous journey could only be harmful — superstitiously-speaking — and so the skull was left behind. But a photograph of the skull was taken by Beedell and included in MacInnis’ book, Polar Passage, with the caption: “A haunting reminder of past tragedies in the harsh Arctic. This is most likely the skull from an early explorer. The hole on the side is probably the result of a cannibalism bludgeoning.”