Yet when Henson removed his glove and offered his hand, Peary turned and walked away—perhaps, the all-too-generous Henson wrote later, because “a gust of wind blew something into his eye.” A few days previously, on March 31, Peary had sent the expert navigator Bob Bartlett, a Newfoundlander, back to base camp on the north coast of Ellesmere Island—despite his protests. Before leaving, Bartlett—the last of the party who, besides Peary, could take astronomical readings—situated the expedition at latitude 87°46´ north or 134 miles (215 kilometres) from the Pole.
During the next five days, Henson had led the two-dog-team charge. And Peary, disabled by the years-ago loss of eight toes, rode on the second sledge. On April 5, Peary took a reading and declared the party to be within thirty-five miles (fifty-six kilometres) of the Pole. Next morning, Henson “dashed out early,” drove hard and eventually stopped and built two igloos.
When Peary arrived, Henson said, “We are now at the Pole, are we not?” And Peary said, “I do not suppose we can swear that we are exactly at the Pole.” Yet the next day, as Henson innocently reported, “when the flag was hoisted over the geographical centre of the earth, it was located just behind our igloos.”
During the return journey, Henson wrote, the dazed Peary proved “practically a dead weight.” On April 27, when the men reached the Roosevelt, Bartlett rushed out to greet him: “I congratulate you, sir, on the discovery of the Pole.” Peary responded without enthusiasm: “How did you guess it?’
He then withdrew to his cabin and stayed there. No cheering. No celebrating. “From the time we were at the Pole,” Henson wrote later, “Commander Peary barely spoke to me. Probably he did not speak to me four times on the whole return journey to the ship . . . On board the ship he addressed me a very few times . . . [And he said] not a word about the North Pole or anything connected with it.” Peary would appear to have been in a terrible funk—hardly the mood of a man who had achieved success in a life-long quest.
Four years later, in 1913, Minik Wallace signed on with the American Crocker Land Expedition, which set out to confirm the existence of a huge island Robert Peary claimed he had seen from the northern reaches of Ellesmere Island. On March 11, 1914, Wallace, three Americans and six other Inuit eventually set off from Etah on the 1,900 kilometres journey to “Crocker Land.” In freezing-cold conditions, they reached and climbed the 4,700-foot Beitstadt Glacier. One of the Americans suffered frostbite and had to be evacuated. By April 11, only two Americans and two Inuit continued to advance.
Now came another instance of Fata Morgana—the kind of elaborate mirage that, almost one century earlier, had ruined Captain John Ross. Organizer Donald Baxter MacMillan saw, as he said later, “hills, valleys, snow-capped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon.” Piugaattoq, an Inuit hunter with twenty years of experience of the area, told him this was an illusion. MacMillan insisted on chasing the mirage for five days, trekking across two hundred kilometres of threatening sea ice before he admitted that the Inuk was right and turned back. Robert Peary had invented “Crocker Land.” His contemptible ruse had failed because in response to the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, George Crocker turned to rebuilding his devastated hometown.
In 1916, having sought to return south several times, Minik Wallace took passage in the George B. Cluett, bound for New York. For a while, he was a curiosity quoted in newspapers. Minik described his seven years in Greenland with good humour, while admitting that he felt like a man without a home: “I still have the impression that it would have been better for me had I never been brought to civilization and educated. It leaves me between two extremes, where it would seem that I can get nowhere. It would have been better if I had never been educated . . . It’s like rotting in a cellar to go back there after living in a civilized country.”
Minik took a job working in a lumber camp in New Hampshire, and became friends with a fellow worker, a local man named Afton Hall. When winter shut the camp down, Minik accepted Hall’s invitation to live with his family on a nearby farm, where he could help out. But then, in autumn 1918, an influenza pandemic swept the area. It killed members of Hall’s family and also many itinerant workers who worked seasonally in the lumber camps—among them Minik Wallace, who at twenty-eight died of bronchial pneumonia. He was buried in the Indian Stream Cemetery in Pittsburg, New Hampshire.
Decades later, author Kenn Harper took up the campaign to retrieve the remains of Minik’s father, Qisuk, and the other three Inuit who had died in New York, and to accord them a proper burial. In 1993, thanks to his advocacy, and also the backing of the Cape York Inuit and William Wallace’s great-granddaughter, the American Museum of Natural History sent the remains to Qaanaaq, formerly Thule, where they were buried with due ceremony. The Cape York meteorites, brought south by Robert Peary, are still on display at the New York City museum.
As for Frederick Cook, he and Peary embodied different attitudes towards the Inuit. Cook was compassionate and gentlemanly; Peary, who was harsh and abrasive, fathered two Inuit sons and abandoned them both. By 1911, Peary had discredited Cook as a fraud, and had convinced Congress to honour him, Peary, as the first man to have attained the Pole.
During the second half of the twentieth century, most Arctic historians concluded that neither Peary nor Cook reached the North Pole. And yet, as we entered the twenty-first century, some people began to wonder: What if Frederick Cook really did reach the Pole? What if, as he claimed, he had pointed at low-lying clouds to reassure his frightened travelling companions that they remained always within reach of land? Later, the two young hunters would recall how Cook had “jumped and danced like an angacock (witch doctor)” when he looked at his “sun glass” and realized that they were only a day’s march from the Big Nail. In True North, published in 2005, author Bruce Henderson argues that Cook’s story rings true. Cook, a master of Inuit travel methods, completed several remarkable sledge journeys. And his unprecedented reports, including one of a westward ice-drift, have since been vindicated.
Henderson also rebuts fraud charges levelled against the doctor-explorer by his enemies, and repudiates allegations—this will surprise some—that Cook made false claims about climbing Mount McKinley in Alaska. He offers telling evidence that a fellow climber was bribed to offer false testimony. He reveals that the first verified summiteer supported Cook’s description of the climb. And he shows that Cook never claimed that a photo taken on Mount McKinley had been taken at the summit. If Henderson is correct, then Peary not only abused the Greenlandic Inuit and betrayed Minik Wallace but, having failed to reach the North Pole, destroyed the man who first succeeded.
31.
Rasmussen Establishes Unity of Inuit Culture
The colourful Greenlandic town of Ilulissat, formerly known as Jacobshavn, faces east towards Disko Island, where in 1845 John Franklin took on fresh water and supplies. At Disko, according to letters sent home to England, Franklin banned swearing and drunkenness. He discharged 5 men and sent them home on supply ships, so reducing his expedition numbers to 129, including himself.
With a population of 4,500, Ilulissat is home to 6,000 sled dogs, many of them noisily in evidence along a boardwalk that leads to spectacular vistas of ice. From a hilltop vantage point at the end of the boardwalk, visitors can look out over the Ilulissat Icefjord, an ice-river that is the largest producer of icebergs in the northern hemisphere. It spawned the iceberg that sank the Titanic, and before that, in the nineteenth century, produced the Middle Ice that gave whalers and explorers so much misery.
The third-largest town in Greenland, Ilulissat is also the most visitor-friendly, and features a multitude of shops. The major in-town attraction is the three-storey Rasmussen museum, originally a vicarage in which Knud Rasmussen was born (in 1879) and spent the first twelve years of his life. Hailed as “the father of Eskimology,” Rasmussen was brave, adventurous, intelligent, efficient, charismatic and persevering. In the history of polar exploration, he is a singular fi
gure: the greatest polar ethnographer of all time. In Ilulissat, numerous exhibits celebrate the man, at once an explorer, a cultural anthropologist and a storyteller who demonstrated, on his Fifth Thule Expedition, that Inuit culture extends from eastern Greenland to Alaska, and also encompasses Siberia.
Born in 1879, Knud Rasmussen grew up in this house (then a vicarage) in Ilulissat, Greenland. Today, the house is a museum devoted to Rasmussen, the greatest polar ethnographer of all time.
Photo by Sheena Fraser McGoogan.
The son of a Danish missionary and an Inuit-Danish mother, Rasmussen grew up among the Kalaallit (Greenlandic Inuit). As a child he learned to speak Kalaallisut, which is closely related to the Inuktitut spoken by most Canadian Inuit. This would enable him eventually to add to the stock of Inuit stories pertaining to the Franklin expedition. But first, at age seven, he took to driving a dog sledge. “My playmates were native Greenlanders,” he wrote later. “From the earliest boyhood I played and worked with the hunters, so even the hardships of the most strenuous sledge-trips became pleasant routine for me.”
While still a boy, and like his older contemporary Roald Amundsen, he found a hero in explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who had set out from Ilulissat on one of his expeditions. Later, Rasmussen went to Denmark for his education, attending school in the town of Lynge, thirty kilometres north of Copenhagen. At nineteen and twenty, he dabbled without success in acting and singing opera, but then he gravitated to ethnology and the outdoors. In 1902, at age twenty-three, with three fellow Danes, he undertook the so-called Danish Literary Expedition to travel around Greenland studying Inuit culture.
He started by travelling to Kristiania (Oslo) to seek help from Fridtjof Nansen in cutting through red tape. That celebrated explorer recognized Rasmussen’s potential and told him: “Of course, your work does not end with a description of West Greenland and the Smith Sound Eskimos—you must go on to Cumberland and Alaska, and you have benefits like no other researcher before you.”
Because Rasmussen was part Inuit and spoke Kalaallisut, he achieved unprecedented access to Inuit stories and traditions. Ranging throughout the far north Rasmussen would collect stories of fantastical trips to the moon, biographer Stephen Bown tells us—tales “of flesh-eating giants and bears the size of mountains, of evil storm birds and ravenous, human-hunting dogs.” As a “butterfly ethnographer,” Bown notes, Rasmussen evoked “the rich inner world” of a people who stretch across the entire Canadian Arctic.
As a young man, Rasmussen organized the Danish Literary Expedition. With three fellow Danes, he travelled around Greenland studying Inuit culture.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
He also detailed one remarkable migration. In 1903, Rasmussen interviewed, for the first time, Merqusaq—one of the last remaining Inuit to have emigrated to Greenland from Baffin Island half a century before. Merqusaq, who had lost one eye, had been born around 1850 in the vicinity of Pond Inlet at the north end of Baffin Island. His extended family of about forty people had arrived there a decade before from Tenudiakbeek or Cumberland Sound, the same whale-rich area that had produced Eenoolooapik and Tookoolito. Pursued by enemies, and led by his uncle Qitlaq, his people crossed Lancaster Sound northward in 1851.
Two years later, at Dundas Harbour on the south coast of Devon Island, they encountered Edward Inglefield, who was searching for John Franklin. Inglefield told them he had seen Inuit on the coast of Greenland, after which, Merqusaq said, Qitlaq “could never settle to anything again.” By 1858, when McClintock passed this way, the charismatic shaman had taken his people still farther north. Despite some defections, Qitlaq then led his family across Smith Sound to Greenland, where in the early 1860s they settled near Etah. Here they met the polar Inuit who had saved Elisha Kent Kane, and who introduced them to the kayak, in which they soon became expert.
Qitlaq died while leading twenty people in an attempted return to Baffin Island. Back on what is now the Canadian side of Davis Strait, his followers were starving when Merqusaq, by then a young married man, came under surprise attack by two men who had gone rogue and become cannibals. One of them gouged out his right eye before he was driven off. Merqusaq and his four closest relatives, fearful of further aggression, fled and eventually made it back to Greenland, where they settled permanently among the polar Inuit. Merqusaq’s granddaughter, Navarana, married Peter Freuchen, Rasmussen’s friend and fellow traveller.
Merqusaq lived with those two during his last years, and Rasmussen would report that, “although old now and somewhat bowed from rheumatism, he continues his journeys of several hundred miles a year on arduous fishing and hunting expeditions.” The ethnographer would quote the renowned hunter: “Look at my body: it is covered with deep scars; those are the marks of bears’ claws. Death has been near me many times . . . but as long as I can hold a walrus and kill a bear, I shall still be glad to live.” Merqusaq died in 1916.
Meanwhile, back in Denmark after his first expedition, Rasmussen gave lectures and wrote The People of the Polar North (1908), which combined a travel narrative with a study of Inuit folklore. In 1910, Rasmussen and Freuchen built the Thule Trading Station at Cape York (Uummannaq), Greenland. From this fur-trading outpost, between 1912 and 1933. Rasmussen organized and launched a series of seven expeditions known as the Thule Expeditions.
On the first of these, Rasmussen and Freuchen set out to test Robert Peary’s claim that a channel divided “Peary Land” from Greenland. By travelling a thousand kilometres over the ice, they proved that this alleged waterway does not exist. Clements Markham, president of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, hailed this journey as the “finest ever performed by [men using] dogs.” Freuchen would write of it in Vagrant Viking (1953) and I Sailed with Rasmussen (1958).
Starting in 1916, Rasmussen spent two years leading seven men on the Second Thule Expedition, which mapped part of Greenland’s northern coast, and fuelled his book Greenland by the Polar Sea (1921). In 1919, he led the Third Thule Expedition in depot-laying for Amundsen’s polar drift in the Maud. And on the fourth sortie in the series, he spent several months collecting ethnographic data on Greenland’s east coast. All this set the stage for the epochal Fifth Thule Expedition (1921–1924).
On March 10, 1923, from the northern reaches of Hudson Bay, Rasmussen embarked on the longest dogsled expedition in polar history. With two Inuit companions, twenty-four dogs and two narrow sleds, each piled high with a thousand pounds of gear, the Greenlandic Dane set out on the final leg of a 32,000-kilometre trek that would, in his words, “attack the great primary problem of the origins of the Eskimo race.”
Rasmussen had just spent eighteen months exploring parts of Canada west of Hudson Bay. Now, he would spend sixteen months journeying to the east coast of Siberia, where the Russians would deny further access. No matter. On this expedition, Rasmussen became the first explorer to travel through the Northwest Passage by dogsled. The undertaking generated ten volumes of ethnographic, archaeological and biological data, and later inspired the 2006 movie The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. Rasmussen demonstrated that the Inuit, scattered now from Greenland to western Canada and beyond, even into Siberia, constitute a single people.
After leading a seven-person team in doing interviews and excavations on Baffin Island, Rasmussen spent sixteen months with two Inuit hunters, crossing the Arctic to Nome, Alaska. He tells that story in his classic work Across Arctic America (1927). Rasmussen also published numerous articles about his expeditions, and one of them has become especially interesting in light of the 2016 discovery of Terror.
In a 1931 book, The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture, Rasmussen wrote of interviewing “an old man named Iggiararjuk” who came from Pelly Bay, and told him of a meeting with some of Franklin’s men, probably in the vicinity of Terror Bay, northwest of Gjoa Haven.
My father Mangaq was with Tetqatsaq and Qablut on a seal hunt on the west side of King William’s Land when they heard shouts, and discovered three white men
who stood on the shore waving to them. This was in spring; there was already open water along the land, and it was not possible to get in to them before low tide. The white men were very thin, hollow-cheeked, and looked ill. They were dressed in white man’s clothes, had no dogs and were travelling with sledges which they drew themselves.
They bought seal meat and blubber, and paid with a knife. There was great joy on both sides at this bargain, and the white men cooked the meat at once with the aid of the blubber, and ate it. Later one of the strangers went along to my father’s tent camp before returning to their own little tent, which was not of animal skins but of something that was white like snow. At that time there were already caribou on King William’s Land, but the strangers only seemed to hunt wildfowl; in particular there were many eider ducks and ptarmigan then.
The earth was not yet alive and the swans had not come to the country. Father and his people would willingly have helped the white men, but could not understand them; they tried to explain themselves by signs, and in fact learned to know a lot by this means. They had once been many, they said; now they were only few, and they had left their ship out in the pack-ice. They pointed to the south, and it was understood that they wanted to go home overland. They were not met again, and no one knows where they went to.
Rasmussen interviewed several other older men, who added what he called “interesting details of the lost expedition.” Faced with testimony that Louie Kamookak has referred to as “mixed stories,” Rasmussen combined accounts and presented them in the words of one man, Qaqortingneq. He elicited a story that appears to derive mainly from Franklin’s second ship, the Terror. Thanks to a tip from Gjoa Haven resident Sammy Kogvik, who had chanced upon a mast protruding from the winter ice of Terror Bay, that vessel was located in 2016—and has yet to be thoroughly investigated. Rasmussen wrote that two brothers were once out sealing in that vicinity. “It was in spring, at the time when the snow melts away round the breathing holes of the seals. Far out on the ice they saw something black, a large black mass that could be no animal. They looked more closely and found that it was a great ship. They ran home at once and told their fellow villagers of it, and next day they all went out to it. They saw nobody, the ship was deserted, and so they made up their minds to plunder it of everything they could get hold of. But none of them had ever met white men, and they had no idea what all the things they saw could be used for.”
Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage Page 30