The Shakespeare ship was as much a part of the problem as she was the cure. Wherever she went in the Arctic she left behind her epidemics of what the Inuit termed “ship sickness,” which could be anything from flu or pneumonia to measles and polio. The ship sicknesses were by no means trivial episodes in the history of the Arctic. In the western Arctic, where infections spread more rapidly than they did in the eastern archipelago, ship sicknesses had reduced the Inuit population from around twenty thousand at the beginning of the nineteenth century to around two thousand at its end. In 1902 a visit by the Scottish whaler, Active, wiped out the entire population of Southampton Island. Half a century on, ship sicknesses were rarely quite so dramatic, but it was very common for every settlement on the Howe's route to lose several children and elderly people every year to ship sickness, and for many more to be hauled off to the south.
Had Paddy Aqiatusuk known about the state of the C. D. Howe itself he might never have got back on board. The captain, Paul Fournier, was a competent seaman in ordinary conditions, but he had absolutely no experience of Arctic navigation. He was, in all senses of the phrase, completely out of his depth. His crew were mostly greenhorns, hired off the quay at Quebec. For some reason Fournier never made any ship's inspections, perhaps because he had a sense of what he would find, so drunken sailors were left to shoot craps games in the lifeboats while the watch slept in their bunks. Safety procedures were more or less ignored. In the darkroom, developing chemicals slopped around in tanks, creosote leaked from barrels in the hull and sailors used oil barrels as ash trays. None of the crew had been briefed on the itinerary or supplies, there had been no instructions on what was expected of the crew in port and no emergency drill or storm procedures were in place. Many of the qalunaat passengers were themselves too drunk to notice anything was wrong, but it was. The C. D. Howe was ill-run and its crew and captain completely green and they were about to enter some of the most dangerous waters on earth.
Her stay at Churchill over, the ship reloaded the Inuit and their belongings, weighed anchor and continued on her way. On 7 August 1953 she crossed the 6oth parallel, on the western coast of Hudson Bay, at the mouth of the McConnell River, where a grizzle of dwarfed black spruce finally gave out to the Barrenland tundra. From time to time Paddy Aqiatusuk was allowed up on deck to watch the Barrens sliding by, to smell the air, already so unfamiliar, and to see the light change colour. He had never imagined anywhere so vast, so superficially familiar to his homeland but so totally strange and there was a part of him that already felt too old for such novelty. As the ship crawled north, making short scheduled stops at the tiny settlements of Rankin Inlet and Chesterfield Inlet before turning through Roes Welcome Sound, Paddy sneaked off ship to talk to the local Inuit but their dialects were difficult to decipher and he could rarely make much sense of what they said. No one seemed to know Ellesmere Island. Few had even heard of it. He took whatever small item of trade he could from among his possessions and traded it for fresh meat, for there was none on board ship and an Inuk feels the lack of meat as strongly as he feels a lack of air or water. He returned to ship no wiser about this destination but with delicious packages of whale, caribou or seal, which he shared around among his own. Others, not bold enough to slip off ship and go ashore, took to stealing the pig fat and frozen walrus meat intended for the dogs.
They sailed on north, across a hard, antique world of naked rock and shale, under a sky as soft and luminous grey as sealskin, which billowed from time to time with storm clouds. There were fewer birds now, and those there mewed and keened as though lost and looking for company. Two and a half weeks out of Inukjuak they crossed the Arctic Circle at Repulse. At Salisbury Island they were followed for a while by a group of beluga but were forbidden to hunt any from on deck so they remained in their quarters, throwing up their daily diet of potatoes and porridge, foods that neither nourished nor sustained. It was getting noticeably darker now, and the Northern Lights sprayed the twilight sky in reds and greens. Pretty soon, they would be too far north even for those.
During the third week, they entered the Hudson Strait and Paddy Aqiatusuk mounted the stairs from the Inuit quarters and went on deck to look at the land. A few glaucous gulls stirred the air above the ship, hoping to find fish in the churn. Otherwise they were completely alone. To the north lay the low hills of Baffin Island's Meta Incognita Peninsula and to the south the Ungava Peninsula and everything Paddy had ever known. To comfort himself, Paddy recalled the stories Ross Gibson had told of the endless herds of caribou and the abundant fox on Ellesmere Island and added in a few of his own. He thought about the meat they would eat, the animals they would see, the narwhals, bowhead whales and polar bears his grandparents had spoken about when he was a child but which he had never seen. He thought about his stepson losephie, sad thoughts mostly, but also happy thoughts about the next time they would meet. Perhaps by then, Paddy would own a Peterhead and his stepson would be able to give up working for the qalunaat and return to his place in the family.
A day or two later, the C. D. Howe pulled into Frobisher Bay which Inuit call Iqaluit. From there she would continue north along the coast of Baffin Island to Cumberland Sound, where the waters once roiled with blue whales and bowheads, now all hunted out. She would then make two more scheduled stops in southern Baffin, at Pannirtuuq and Qikiqtarjuaq, before meeting the Canadian Department of Transport icebreaker, the d'Iberville, at Clyde River. There, the plan was to transfer all the migrants on to the d'Iberville. The C. D. Howe would then carry on its supply duties in northern Baffin before heading back down south to Quebec, while the d'Iberville dropped the migrants off at the two proposed Ellesmere Island camps at Craig Harbour and Alexandra Fiord and at the Resolute Bay site on Cornwallis Island.
While the Howe was steaming along southern Baffin, the d'Iberville was in Resolute Bay unloading supplies. As she was lying at anchor, Henry Larsen paid a visit to the chief of the Resolute Bay base, Air Commodore Robert Ripley. A few weeks before, Ripley had written a stern letter of complaint to the Department about its plans to move the Inuit. He did not think there was enough wildlife on Cornwallis and he was worried that the base would wind up having to bail the Inuit out or, worse still, that the Inuit might run into some kind of trouble the air base could not fix. On the same day as Larsen's visit, lames Cantley was stuck in his office in Ottawa listening to an RCAF Squadron Leader repeating the air force's gripe. Larsen knew the problem would not go away until he had given some personal reassurances to Ripley. During that meeting he promised the Air Commodore that the Inuit would be camped at some distance from the base and that they would be forbidden to travel there in any circumstances. If there were any problems at the camp, Constable Ross Gibson would have full authority to deal with them. Larsen said he was confident that the air base would not even know the Inuit were there.
After his meeting at the base, Larsen had taken off along the coast to look for a good spot for the campsite. It was midsummer and most of the snow and ice had melted into the muskeg, leaving brown pools of stagnant water. Here and there a few shreds of whitlow grass clung to the rubble of rock and Arctic lichen licked along its sunnier surfaces, but in most places the rock was bare of vegetation. Farther south, there were clouds of mosquitoes rising on the winds and Arctic bumble bees busying themselves at clumps of blossoming Arctic willow, but there was none of that here. The wind was full of ice crystals.
Down near the beach, about four miles from the air base, there were the remains of a Thule settlement. It was here that Larsen wanted the Inukjuamiut to settle. For hundreds of years, the Thule people had roamed across the High Arctic, setting up camps around the coastal area where whales congregated, but when the ice returned in the Little Ice Age during the fifteenth century, they had moved south or died out (no one knew which), leaving middens of bones, broken harpoons and chipped-granite arrowheads as well as stone polar bear traps and the bleached whale-rib frames of what were once their houses. The land they lived on was co
vered in ice and snow for ten months of every year, they had no access to wood nor, with the exception of one or two meteorites, to metal, yet they had moved across the huge stretches of the Arctic, building villages and settling the previously uninhabited terrain. Equipped only with sealskin and bone kayaks and bone harpoons tipped with meteorite iron, they had hunted bowhead whales all along the northern continental coast for a thousand years before the arrival of European whalers, oblivious to the existence of other, easier lives. To Henry Larsen, even the accomplishments of the great Arctic explorers were nothing when set beside the tremendous human feat of Arctic settlement, and the policeman had not forgotten that the Inuit currently making their way to the High Arctic on the C. D. Howe were the Thule people's descendants. For a little while, Larsen thought, before the air base made janitors and porters of them as it would surely do, the men and women of Inukjuak would get their chance to live alone and untroubled in the footsteps of their forebears.
The following day, the d'Iberville weighed anchor and began heading back east into Lancaster Sound. At dawn on 12 August, she rounded Cape Parker on Devon Island and made her way through Lady Ann Strait towards Craig Harbour and Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island. The ice here had only just melted, letting loose the flotilla of icebergs it had captured on the previous freeze-up. The ship moved through the strait slowly, through growlers and pieces of floe which drifted about in the soupy water. At the entrance to Iones Sound, the water turned noisily, then fell silent, and the ship suddenly found herself surrounded on both sides by glassy slabs and blue ice scree. There, ahead of them, lay the Craig Harbour RCMP detachment buildings, two small clapboard houses sitting on an ocean of shale. The only land lying between the d'Iberville and northern Siberia, 1,500 miles distant across the polar ice cap, was the mountainous ice capped terrain of Ellesmere Island. It was a forbidding place. Layers of peaks stretched back as far as the eye could see like a great army waiting the call to march. Ice mist glittered from the crags and drifted into the air and it would have been easy for anyone of a superstitious nature to suspect the island of being some kind of rocky anteroom to eternity, an in-between world where discarded spirits and the souls of never-born children curled up from the high peaks like mist and real life was just a dimming dream.
Henry Larsen spent a little while at Craig, briefing the two detachment police officers, Corporal Glenn Sargent and Constable Clay Fryer, who together would be responsible for the welfare of the group of Inuit going to Craig Harbour, just as Ross Gibson would be in charge of those at Resolute Bay. It had been almost impossible to discuss anything with the two men in detail on the radio. This far north, the signals phased in and out. One minute you could be holding a conversation and the next listening to an opera broadcast from Beijing or some fragment of Russian music. Larsen had worked with Sargent on the St Roch and trusted him. The corporal was a tough man but a true northerner and could be relied upon not to shy away from difficult decisions in hard conditions.
While Larsen briefed his subordinates, the crew of the d'Iberville unloaded her cargo. In three weeks' time the navigation season would be over and the d'Iberville still had to visit the old abandoned Alexandra Fiord police detachment on the east coast of Ellesmere to make it habitable, before her rendezvous with the C. D. Howe far to the south at Clyde River on Baffin Island. The d'Iberville left Craig Harbour with haste in a thick mist. She continued on round the heel of Ellesmere Island at Cape Norton Shaw until ice began to creep in round her hull and the sounds of grinding and moaning came through the mist like the roars of disturbed animals. Before her lay Smith Sound. The American Arctic explorer, Robert E. Peary, once wrote: “There is probably no place where ice navigation is so hazardous as Smith Sound …The negotiation of the three hundred and fifty miles … presents problems and difficulties which will test the experience and nerve of the ablest navigator and the powers of the strongest vessel that man can build.” They were heading directly into it.
For hours, the d'Iberville inched along the eastern coast of Elles-mere, past Cape Dunsterville into the dense, moving pack near Cape Isabella. A little farther ahead the captain set the ship's position. They waited for the fog to ease. After making sure its blades had not yet frozen up, Larsen scouted from here by helicopter. Up ahead lay the Bache Peninsula, with Alexandra Fiord at its tip. From the vantage of the air, they could just see the old buildings of the abandoned post shining like wet teeth but the pack had blocked off the access point from every direction and with so much ice about the waters were too turbulent to bring the d'Iberville close to shore. Just after midnight, the helicopter returned to ship. They would take the d'Iberville into the coast at Cape Isabella.
Blocked by the ice from making a direct pass to the north, the icebreaker ploughed slowly southward in loose pack ice before turning north through a promising lead towards the open water, but the crew were unable to get a cargo barge through the ice and had to ferry supplies to shore by helicopter. By evening, the d'Iberville had emptied its supplies and begun to turn south once more but she had lost time and there was now no prospect of her meeting the C. D. Howe at Clyde River as Larsen had originally planned. The policeman radioed Paul Fournier, captain of the C. D. Howe, and explained the situation and the two ships agreed to rendezvous at Craig Harbour. There the C. D. Howe would drop off Paddy, Joada-mie Aqiatusuk and Phillipoosie Novalinga and their families. The d'Iberville would take the remaining “volunteers” along the east coast of Ellesmere Island to Alexandra Fiord, where it would drop Thomasie Amagoalik and his family along with Samwillie Aqiatusuk and a Pond Inlet family. From there the icebreaker would continue on to Resolute Bay with Simeonie Amagoalik, Daniel Sal-luviniq, Alex Patsauq and their families along with the last family from Pond Inlet.
Paul Fournier set the C. D. Howe on a course for Pond Inlet. The settlement stood at the tip of a finger inlet on the northeast coast of Baffin Island, sheltered from the driving currents in Lancaster Sound by the icy dot of Bylot Island. Opposite Bylot, on the coast of Baffin, huge glaciers begin their slow, inexorable slide into the sea, calving blue icebergs which creep south on the currents towards the coast of Labrador. The currents keep the water in the area relatively warm and Bylot is the northernmost haven for the many migratory birds which settle there in the summer. A permanent breeze blows the artichoke smell of guano across from Bylot's roosteries to Baffin Island. In late August 1953, the place was still alive with snow buntings and thick-billed murres and every kind of northern gull. Along the shoreline a few snowgeese ran with their wings set against the breeze, strengthening their muscles for the long flight south. The frail summer had already begun to sicken and the sky pressed down on the land like a dead hand.
On Henry Larsen's instructions, the Pond Inlet detachment had gone out to camps around Pond Inlet earlier in the year and persuaded three families to move north. The Pond Inlet people, or Ingluligmiut as they called themselves, had never travelled as far north as Ellesmere or Cornwallis, but Henry Larsen was right to assume that they had more of an understanding of High Arctic conditions than the Inukjuamiut. Cornwallis and Ellesmere islands lie in the great polar desert and receive very little snow and this would make it difficult for the Inukjuamiut to build snowhouses. The Pond Inlet people knew how to build winter shelters from sod bricks and turf and Larsen was hoping they would pass these skills on. They were also familiar with polar bear hunting and they trained their dogs to help them corner the bears. They regularly hunted narwhal and even bowhead whales and they knew how to catch seals with nets laid under the ice. They were familiar with the winter dark period, though at Pond Inlet it was not as severe as on Ellesmere or Cornwallis. It had been easier to recruit the Pond Inlet families than it had been to recruit those in Inukjuak, because the people from Pond Inlet knew about the High Arctic, even if they had not been there, and because they were offered better terms. Like the Inukjuamiut, the three Ingluligmiut families had been promised a good life in the far north, plus all the government help they needed, and th
ey too had been told that they could return to Pond Inlet whenever they wanted, but they had also understood that they would be paid for their work in helping the Inukjuamiut to settle.
The three Pond Inlet families were waiting for the arrival of the C. D. Howe on the Baffin shore. They had balanced a primus stove on the stones and appeared to be heating water for tea. Ross Gibson later noted in his report that their caribou-skin parkas were not as ragged as those of the Inukjuamiut and he put this down to their being better hunters. In fact, there were more caribou in northern Baffin than in Ungava so the Ingluligmiut were able to renew their clothes more often. The Howe dropped anchor and some of the crew went below to sort the cargo tagged for Pond Inlet while Simon Akpaliapik, his wife Tatigak; Samuel Anukudluk, his wife Qau-mayuk; and laybeddie Amagoalik (no relation to the laybeddie Ama-goalik of Inukjuak), his wife Kanoinoo and their families, were ushered on board and taken to the Inuit quarters.
It is well known that Baffin Islanders love to travel and they have a long tradition of it. About a hundred years before, a Baffin Islander called Qillaq had led a party of Inuit from Cumberland Sound all the way to Ellesmere Island and from there on to northwestern Greenland, saying he had been told in a vision to find Inuit living there. Some said Qillaq was a brave shaman, others that he was not a visionary at all, and would not have left his home on Broughton Island if he had not had a dispute with his hunting partner during a hunting trip and crushed the man's skull with a rock. Afraid of what Ikierapring's relatives might do to revenge his death, Qillaq had decided to flee his home and find somewhere else to settle. There were other versions of the story. In 1903, one of Qillaq's friends, Merqusaq, told the Danish Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen that Qil-laq had met with two white men many years before, probably Francis Leopold McClintock and Edward Augustus Inglefield, who were sailing around Baffin Island to look for the disappeared Arctic explorer, Sir John Franklin. The white men told Qillaq that there were Inuit living to the north of Baffin, and it was probably this information that became incorporated into Qillaq's “vision.” Qillaq and his friend Oqe mustered a group of thirty-eight Inuit on ten sledges and the group began their journey north in late winter, as the light was returning. As the summer approached, the ice thinned and they were unable to sledge along the sea ice; they found themselves travelling across immense glaciers and having to harness as many as twenty dogs on each sled. They lashed thongs around the runners so that they would not take off too fast as they descended and attached sealskin ropes to the back of the sledge on which they hauled to provide a counterweight. At the northern tip of Bylot Island they found driftwood. All winter they worked to build an umiak and when the sea ice melted they used the boat to take them as far as the Wollaston Islands. There, it was said, the spirits led them to a cache of rum, salted meat and flour left by the qalunaat ship, The North Star, many years before. In those days, Inuit did not eat bannock bread, so they had no use for the flour. They tried the salted meat and spat it out but the rum kept them going as far as Tal-luritut, the island that looks like a tattooed chin and which white people called Devon. Many tornasuit or bad spirits lived on Tallu-ritut and they tried to block the group's way. Oqe grew homesick and depressed and began to talk about how much he missed whale meat. He accused his friend Qillaq of making up the story of the people in the north and announced his intention to return to Baffin Island, with any of the party who were of the same mind. Qillaq said that Oqe was envious and wanted to be leader. Twenty-four people turned back and fourteen went on, including Oqe's own son, Minik.
The Long Exile Page 12