The Farfarers

by Farley Mowat

  There were ten men and four women in that big boat, and they stayed with our people all the rest of that year and on into the beginning of the following summer. Some of us learned their tongue, and they ours. They told us they came from so far to the south and east it took them from the beginning of spring to the end of summer to make the journey, even in their swift-sailing boat. So we called them Far Ones; and they were the first strangers ever to come amongst us.

  They had no wish to remain in our land—only to stay long enough to gather walrus tusks and other things they valued, most of which had little worth to us. We did not begrudge them what they wanted. They were peaceable folk.

  When winter came, we helped them bring their big boat ashore and overturn it on stone walls they built for the purpose. Nowadays children play amongst the old walls that once helped shelter the Far Ones. Their houses were truly big; but draftier and colder than the tents or snow houses we live in.

  The Far Ones came every year thereafter—sometimes as many as a dozen boatloads. We shared the country and our lives with them. It is certain that some of us carry their blood in our veins. I must be one such, for dreams come to me of places I have never been. It may be I am seeing the Far Ones’ homelands.

  They came amongst us for the space of three lifetimes; then one summer they failed to return. That was long ago. Now lichens cover the fallen stones of their great houses and the fireplaces where they boiled good oil until it was no longer fit to eat.

  Aieee . . . they have been gone a long while . . . but we still keep watch to the southeast. Some day the Far Ones may come again.

  THE HIGH ARCTIC WORLD TO THE WEST DIFFERED fundamentally from Crona in one important respect. It was already inhabited when valuta men arrived there.

  Until a few years ago historians believed only Eskimos had ever lived in the far north. This view was not shared by the Eskimos themselves. They have always insisted that when their forebears arrived in the central and eastern Arctic they found it occupied by a strange race of people whom they called Tunit.

  According to the Eskimos (Inuit, those in the eastern Arctic wish to be called), Tunit were big and strong.1 Nevertheless, they were unable to defend their land. They are contemptuously depicted in Inuit stories as people who preferred to leave rather than fight.

  This account of them given to Knud Rasmussen by an Igloolik man is typical.

  The Tunit were strong people, and yet were driven from their place by others [Inuit] who were more numerous . . . but so greatly did they love their country that, when they were leaving Uglit, there was a man who, out of desperate love for his place, struck the rocks with his harpoon and made the stones fly like bits of ice.

  The pacific nature of the Tunit is emphasized in many Inuit folk tales. There are no accounts of Tunit attacking Inuit, whereas Inuit attacked Tunit with or without provocation. Inuit legends tell us that their ancestors eventually drove the Tunit “away.”

  By the time modern Europeans arrived on the scene, Tunit existed only in Inuit memory. Even that tenuous vestige of them was then dispatched to limbo by ethnologists who proclaimed them to be no more than fabulous creations of Inuit mythology.

  In recent years it has been established that the Tunit were, in fact, flesh-and-blood people, bearers of what is technically known as the Late Dorset culture; and that (as the Inuit have always insisted) Tunit occupied much of eastern and central Arctic and subarctic North America until displaced by ancestors of the Eskimo only a few hundred years ago.2

  Nomadic hunters first entered the high Arctic regions of North America before 2000 B.C., in a climate much warmer than now. Whether they came from the east or west is not absolutely certain. It is generally assumed they came from the west, entering northern Canada along the strip of tundra lying between the Brooks Range and the Beaufort Sea.

  They were primarily terrestrial hunters whose chief prey was caribou. However, before travelling very far eastward of the Mackenzie River they encountered another large mammal which proved to be equally rewarding. This was the musk ox.

  Musk ox tend to be sedentary creatures. When threatened, they often crowd together in outward-facing herds, keeping potential predators at bay with their sharp horns. This static defence is effective against wolves or bears but makes the creatures vulnerable to human hunters able to wound and kill from a distance.

  Whether or not the immigrants had previous knowledge of musk ox (somebody hunted the species to extinction in Siberia), they recognized a good thing when they saw it. They hunted the shaggy beasts so diligently as to effectively eliminate them from many regions. The hunters then pulled up stakes and moved on westward into the ever-widening wedge of tundra Vilhjalmur Stefansson would come to call the arctic prairie, for this was prime musk ox country.

  Eating their way methodically eastward, the musk ox hunters reached the shores of Ellesmere Island by as early as 2000 B.C. From there it was only a short further step to Greenland.

  In those relatively balmy times, tundra prairie dotted with musk ox stretched right around the north Greenland coast from Kane Basin to Scoresby Sound. Within a few centuries, the forebears of the Tunit had reached the northeast shores of Greenland.

  They had now hunted their way right across the top of North America and, although few in number, had decimated musk ox populations everywhere they went, forcing them to return to an earlier reliance on caribou.

  But caribou were scarce in northern Greenland. To make matters worse, the climate began to worsen catastrophically. By c. 1800 B.C. the people in the far north of Greenland were freezing, and the larder was fast emptying. They had no choice but to move south. Some eventually found their way right around the southern coasts of the island continent, shifting from land hunting to sea hunting as they went. Instead of musk ox and caribou, seal became their staff of life.

  By about 1000 B.C. the Arctic was undergoing what some climatologists call the Little Ice Age. Glaciers swelled in size and oozed closer to the coasts. Pack ice thickened and flowed southward so heavily as to effectively barricade most of Greenland’s shores. Descendants of the musk ox hunters living on the North American continent proper withdrew farther and farther south, some as far as Newfoundland. There could be no similar retreat for those in Greenland. Only empty ocean lay south of Cape Farewell.

  By around 500 B.C. conditions in Greenland seem to have become so extreme that human life could no longer endure there. Nor could it survive in any of the high, and most of the central, islands of the Canadian Arctic archipelago.

  Not until the fifth or sixth centuries A.D. did a warming climate allow the descendants of the ancient musk ox people (hereinafter called Tunit) to return to the far north. By then the whole of Greenland and most of the high Arctic islands had been devoid of humankind for at least a thousand years.

  A few Late Dorset sites have been found in Greenland’s Thule district, but it does not appear that the Tunit recolonized Greenland to any notable extent. However, they did vigorously reoccupy much of the Canadian Arctic, while continuing to maintain themselves as far south as Newfoundland; in Ungava; on the shores of the Canadian Sea (Hudson Bay, James Bay, and Foxe Basin); and on the tundra plains of the Arctic mainland. Here, they prospered until the invading Thule, ancestors of the Inuit, reduced them to a shadow people.

  Archaeological investigations, especially those carried out by Elmer Harp, Moreau Maxwell, Peter Schledermann, Callum Thomson, James Tuck, and Robert McGhee, have restored substance to the Tunit shadows.

  We now know that they dressed in tailored clothing made of caribou and sea-mammal skins but, instead of Eskimo-style pullover hoods, their parkas were fitted with three-sided fur collars.

  Although there is no certain evidence for the use of dog sleds, we know the Tunit had dogs. Perhaps these carried side packs or pulled small travois as the dogs of the Caribou Eskimos were still doing in Keewatin when I travelled among them in the late 1940s.

  Tunit probably devised snow houses that became the prototypes of
those used by modern Inuit. They may also have invented the kayak. Certainly they must have possessed first-rate boats.

  They were amongst the most accomplished stone knappers of all time. Their complex tool kits, made of flint, chert, and suchlike materials, were executed with such economy that the miniaturized results are known to archaeologists as microliths.

  These are most of the few things we do know about them. We do not know what they looked like. Some think they may have been Eskimoan in appearance; others that they resembled North American Indians. Some of the carved representations they have left us seem vaguely European.

  We do not know what they believed. Their language remains totally unknown. As we shall see, contemporary descriptions of them are rare, and many of those that do exist have not been recognized for what they are. We do not know how they dealt with death or even what they did with their dead. Although a great many of their sites have now been excavated, few Tunit skeletal remains (some of them dubious) have been found.

  We do, however, know one indisputable fact about them. They were gifted artists. Carvings are amongst the most numerous artefacts recovered from their habitation sites. Generally small, superbly conceived and executed in bone and ivory, most are images of animals, but not a few have human elements or represent human beings.

  Were these exquisite little carvings amulets? Did they have religious significance? Did they owe their existence simply to artistic exuberance and the joy of living? Were some of them portrayals of real people? As early as 1951, Henry Collins, one of the most experienced of the early post-war archaeologists to work in the eastern Arctic, noted that “Dorset bone carvings” seemed to portray two different kinds of human faces: one of them broad, with oblique eyes and a short, wide nose; the other long and narrow, with a long nose.3

  Valuta men must have encountered Tunit almost as soon as they reached the high Arctic grounds. How did the two people react to one another? Neither seem to have been bellicose by nature and both were living essentially the same sort of lives, factors that would have favoured mutual accommodation. Albans could have had no conceivable interest in antagonizing, or trying to displace, the Tunit. On the contrary, it would have been greatly to their advantage to establish and maintain good relations with the indigenes, not only to guarantee their own security, but also because the Tunit possessed a vast store of local knowledge that would have been invaluable to the newcomers.

  Good relationships work both ways. Tunit could have benefited from Alban skills and technical knowledge, as these pertained to boat building and sailing, for example.

  There was also the matter of trade. Usable metals, specifically copper and iron, were extremely scarce in early Tunit times. Valuta seekers probably possessed no surplus either, but would surely have been able to spare some iron and copper as trade goods. A paucity of metals of provable European provenance in Tunit sites does not, as some archaeologists have suggested, prove that they were never present. Tunit owners of metal knife blades, hunting points, and other objects would have treasured and guarded them through the generations until they literally wasted away from use. And one can imagine the intensity of the search that would have followed if, by evil chance, a metal implement was misplaced or lost. And if its owners were unable to find it, what are the odds of it ever being found by an archaeologist? Especially since, as we know to have been the case, Tunit sites were thoroughly scavenged for metal by their Thule and Inuit successors.4

  Although no living Tunit or Alban remains to testify as to how well (or otherwise) the two people got along, there are no indications of conflict, and there is convincing evidence that they coexisted. Every Arctic site occupied for any length of time by valuta seekers is strewn with a litter of Tunit debris. Carbon-14 and other dating techniques applied to this material have established that at least some of the sites occupied by valuta men must have been occupied simultaneously by Tunit.

  I consider it a foregone conclusion that extensive mingling took place between Tunit and Albans. It can be supposed that, as was the case in historic times when many immigrant Europeans took Indian and Inuit wives, Alban valuta men did the same with Tunit women.

  Tom Lee wrote to me in 1971, expressing his opinion on the matter.

  There were a number of Dorsets around at that time and the longhouses drew them like magnets. If the Dorsets had been hostile, the longhouse builders would surely have been killed or driven out. I think we can take it that these Europeans got along with the natives at least as well as Europeans throughout the Arctic did in later times. They may have done better because of being much closer in cultural affinities and in their way of life.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE WESTERN GROUNDS

  August in the high Arctic was well advanced before the ship named Farfarer took her departure from the clan station at Kane Basin. Heavily laden with seal tar, walrus hides, kegs of ivory, white bear skins, and the woolly hides of musk ox, she was homeward bound after an absence of more than a year.

  Her people were impatient for they had a long way to go to Swan Fiord. The vessel slipped quickly down the west Greenland coast and when Disko Island hove in sight her skipper elected to forgo the sheltered inside passage. To shorten the distance he held along the bold outer shore of the island. He did this even though aware that the current spell of fine weather could not last much longer. Home was beckoning irresistibly.

  Farfarer was not halfway along Disko’s forbidding western cliffs when mares’ tales began switching in the high dome of blue overhead, a sure harbinger of bad weather. The breeze, which had been light and from the nor’west, began to strengthen and swing into the nor’east. The mares’ tails faded and an ominous darkness began to spread across the sky. The steersman’s grip on the tiller tightened. He was an old hand. He could read the signs.

  So could the skipper. A polar nor’easter was brewing. “Haul her to port,” he ordered. “Hold her up, man! We’ll run for shelter south of the island before the devil’s wind really begins to blow!”

  As the vessel’s head came around, the crew sheeted-in the great sail. Farfarer heeled hard to starboard, the wind-lop slopping over her lee gunwale. Then, before anyone could slack the main sheet, a ferocious gust blasted over Disko’s cliffs and dealt the vessel such a blow-me-down that she rolled her lee rail under. Two men with drawn knives sprang to cut the sheet. Before they could do so, Farfarer acted to save herself from overturning. With a gunshot crack, her mast went over the side, taking sail, rigging, and yard with it.

  By the time her crew dragged the tangled mass of gear back aboard, the nor’easter was full upon them, whipping the rising surface of the sea to foam and driving the dismasted ship willy-nilly southwestward into Baffin Bay.

  Soaked to the skin, men huddled in whatever shelter they could find . . . when they were not bailing. The skipper kept the helm. Crouched over the tiller, he suppressed the urge to glance over his shoulder at the great greybeards rolling up astern. Any one of them was big enough to engulf his ship.

  The nor’easter howled for three days, during which Farfarer ran helplessly before it. On the fourth day the wind gradually dropped out.

  As the massive sea began to flatten, a maze of glacier-crowned mountains could be glimpsed through the storm scud to starboard. The cloud blew away, the sun broke through, and Farfarer’s people beheld towering glaciers as majestic as any in Crona. Breaking out the sweeps, they began rowing towards this unknown land in search of a sheltered cove where Farfarer could lie while her storm damage was being repaired. As they closed with the coast, they were observed with stolid indifference by a horde of tuskers.

  They beached Farfarer upon a strip of gravel between two protecting headlands. While the women prepared the first decent meal in a week, men hurried to repair the mast by fishing the broken parts together with strips of soaked rawhide. As the wet hide dried, it shrank until it became almost as hard as iron. The join was waterproofed with seal tar.

  Re-rigged, the ship was soon re
ady to resume her voyage. There was no question as to which direction she should steer. Crona must lie due east; and, as it turned out, the great island was much closer than anticipated. Half a day’s sail after sinking the mountains of the new land astern, the lookout raised the distant glitter of the Sukkertoppen Ice Cap.

  Farfarer had regained the known world. The remainder of her voyage home to Swan Fiord was routine—or as near to it as any voyage in high latitudes could ever be.

  WHETHER OR NOT THE FIRST SIGHTING WAS MADE this way, discovery of Baffin Island would have been inevitable within a short time of the arrival of European voyagers on the west Greenland coast. Although Davis Strait is some 230 miles broad, the mountain and glacial massifs on the opposing coasts are so high (more than eight thousand feet on the Sukkertoppen Ice Cap, and seven thousand feet on the opposing Cape Dyer peninsula) that in clear weather the “loom” effects are sometimes intervisible. In any case, a vessel crossing between them need only be out of sight of land for half a day.

  The discovery seems not to have had much initial impact upon valuta seekers. A new world to the west was an unknown quantity, while the high Arctic had by now become a reasonably familiar and exceedingly rewarding place. The far north would continue to preoccupy valuta men for another half century.

  Then they abandoned it rather suddenly.

  Several factors seem to have determined their abrupt departure. One might have been a dramatic, if short-term, deterioration in the climate which began late in the eighth century and temporarily restored the seasonal dominance of the polar pack.1

  Certainly another was the appearance on European markets of a new product—a distillate made from fir, pine, and larch stumps and roots. Stockholm tar, as this substance came to be known, began to replace seal tar in many marine usages. In consequence, the latter declined in value until, by the ninth century, it was hardly worth transporting all the way from the high Arctic to European markets.