The Last of the Gentlemen Adventurers: Coming of Age in the Arctic

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Praise for The Last of the Gentlemen Adventurers:

‘This is a great book about life at remote bases in Canada’s far north as seen by a young English boy who went there by himself to see the world and got more than he could ever have bargained for. Beautifully written’ SIR RANULPH FIENNES

‘A beautifully unadorned, homespun tale, with a lack of self-consciousness rare in travel literature … Maurice recalls this faraway time without recourse to judgment of the alien world that embraced him, and no doubt his ease with, and openness to, the world were qualities that the Inuit were quick to discern in him … The book’s greatest asset … is [a] kind of purity. I was charmed’ BENEDICT ALLEN, Independent on Sunday

‘Maybe [Beauclerk Maurice] was exceptional, but the charm of his book lies in its modesty: he makes no claims for himself. His concern was to make a record of some amazing adventures and a vanishing way of life; these are woven into an eye-opening narrative that is suffused with kindliness and an attitude to growing up more restrained but more humane than that prevailing today. A gentleman adventurer, indeed’

Times Educational Supplement

‘Unlike many of its contemporaries, The Last of the Gentlemen Adventurers is not a tale of machismo by bearded explorers. In 392 pages of unadorned prose, it manages to live up to its title and simultaneously throw new light on the polar regions … [Maurice] writes sparsely, preferring to let the landscape and people speak for themselves. His story weaves Inuit history, culture and beliefs, while all the time aware of the impact of the white man on the surroundings … An important memoir of a time not so long ago, when the world was unexplored … One to keep on your shelf and dip into again and again’

Sunday Business Post

Dedication

For a much-loved husband and father whose adventurous start to paid employment has inspired us all to take up life’s challenges.

The stories that follow have filled many happy family times together and we hope this book will ensure that others also can share in a young boy’s dream.

Pat, Jane, Sally and Victoria Maurice

WHITE ESKIMO

FOREWORD

by Lawrence Millman

EDWARD BEAUCLERK MAURICE almost did not go to the Arctic. His Hudson’s Bay Company recruiter, George Binney, thought the seventeen-year-old boy’s dark looks suggested ‘Eastern blood’, and in his not necessarily unbiased opinion, recruits with even a smattering of Asian, Semitic or Indian blood (Binney was at least egalitarian in his prejudices) did not have the right stuff to be fur traders in the Canadian North. If Maurice’s headmaster hadn’t assured Binney that the boy’s brother was ‘conspicuously fair’, Edward probably would have emigrated to New Zealand with the rest of his family, and bookshelves would have been deprived of this remarkable memoir.

Yet if it wasn’t for Binney, Maurice wouldn’t even have been considered for employment with the Hudson’s Bay Company. For the HBC – to use its popular abbreviation – traditionally looked to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland for recruits. The Company’s thinking went something like this: a Scotsman, preferably a poor one, would be thrifty; he would be accustomed to uncomplaining servitude; he would be used to a rotten climate; and, as a Celt, he would be not unlike the primitive people with whom he’d be trading. But Binney felt the Company needed educated recruits, what today might be called managerial types, if it was to keep apace with modern times. So he turned his attention to England and to public schools like the one in Sussex that Maurice was attending.

A more unlikely candidate for the northern wilds would be difficult to imagine. Maurice was naïve even for his age, his childhood had been quite sheltered, and his experience of rotten climates seems to have been limited to the draughty corridors of his school. An HBC evaluation refers to him as being ‘inclined more to indoor rather than outdoor work’. But sometimes the least likely person turns out to be the most likely one. After all, Robert Peary was a mama’s boy and his North Pole adversary, Frederick Cook, worked as a milkman.

Maurice started out as an apprentice clerk at the Pangnirtung Post on Baffin Island. Nowadays Pang, as it’s called, is a mecca for Arctic tourists, with hotels, souvenir shops, and even an interpretive centre. But in 1930 it was hardly more than a huddle of clapboard houses surrounded by Eskimo (the then current name for the Inuit) tents. As befits such a high-latitude settlement, there were no trees other than those of the dwarf variety. A lad who’d arrived here from England’s green and pleasant land might reasonably feel that he’d fetched up very close to the bleak end of the world (the actual end of the world was the HBC’s Payne Bay Post, where it took trader Charles Duncan two years to receive a telegram notifying him that his father had died). But not Maurice: he was exhilarated.

According to the oft-repeated joke, the initials ‘HBC’ stand for ‘Here Before Christ’. But the Hudson’s Bay Company didn’t actually establish its first post in the Canadian Arctic until 1908 (the first non-Arctic post, Rupert House, dates from 1670). This relatively recent arrival in North America’s attic can be attributed to two factors: (1) the over-harvesting of fur-bearing animals, especially beavers, down south and (2) the new global demand for fur from a more northerly animal. The northerly animal in question was the white fox (Alopex lagopus).

Before the HBC came, the Baffin Eskimos used the fur of the white fox primarily to wipe their babies’ bottoms. They must have thought the White Man’s obsession with this fur a little peculiar, at least until they became obsessed with it themselves. For a white fox pelt was virtually the only item they could trade for rifles, bolts of cloth, tools, sugar and tea. In a decent fox year, an Eskimo trapper would have enough trade goods to fill his tent; in a bad fox year, he would owe his soul to the Company store. Either way, that trapper would be at odds with his own past. In the words of anthropologist Diamond Jenness, ‘the commercial world of the White Man caught the Eskimo in its mesh, destroyed their self-sufficiency and independence and made them economically its slaves.’

The Company took a paternalistic attitude toward the Eskimos, the better to increase its profits. George Binney (yes, the same George Binney who was worried about Maurice’s dark looks) summed up this attitude in The Eskimo Book of Knowledge, the official HBC guide for Eskimo trappers, when he wrote: ‘Our trader has learned to bestow the care of a father upon you and your children.’ The implication is that father, or the Company, knows best, and the Eskimo knows least.

But Maurice did not regard the Eskimos as an inferior race in immediate need of White parenting. Quite the contrary. In his relations with them, he seemed to be the child and they the parents. In fact, he was so young and inexperienced that they called him ‘The Boy’, but they could have just as easily called him ‘The Bumbler’, since he seemed to have a special talent for getting lost or falling off cliffs. However, he was an excellent learner, and all his HBC evaluations praise his ability to speak Inuktitut, the polysynthetic Eskimo language. Here, too, Maurice distinguished himself from most other traders, who usually didn’t bother to learn anything other than a pidgin version of the language. His facility with Inuktitut also earned him high marks from the Eskimos and probably was one of the reasons why they ended up giving him a new, unequivocally adult name – Issumatak (‘He Who Thinks’).

During his Arctic hitch, one HBC man reputedly browsed through a catalogue that featured women’s underwear and then wrote away for ‘the lady on the far right of page 73’. Most traders were not reduced to such extreme measures, since they typically took what’s known as ‘a country wife’. Duncan Pryde, who worked for the HBC in the 1950s and 1960s, sired offspring from this type of union wherever he was posted, declaring that ‘every community should have a little Pryde’. Lest you consider the man a cad, I should note that his Eskimo friends would have thought there was something wrong with him if he hadn’t fathered these offspring.

Maurice seemed disinclined to take a country wife himself, although there was no shortage of applicants. His background, he wrote, was the reason for this: ‘My upbringing, both at home and at school, had run along very strict lines of morality.’ But as he acquired what could be called a new background, he also began to acquire a very different sense of morality, one that was closer to an Eskimo’s than to an upper-middle-class English person’s. Meanwhile, he was falling in love, albeit with a culture rather than a woman, and when he at last decided to take a wife, you could say that he was consummating his relationship with that culture.

In the spring of 1934, he was put in charge of the Frobisher Bay Post at Ward Inlet. This post was considerably more isolated than Pangnirtung and likewise had no doctor or nurse. Soon he was dealing with an epidemic, which, although never officially diagnosed (there isn’t even a mention of it in the usually thorough HBC records), was probably a virulent form of influenza. The stress of being forced to treat the sick and the dying more or less by himself seems to have taken its toll, and by August he was back in Pangnirtung with a condition described by the local medical officer as ‘an affection of the heart’. I suspect the reason he doesn’t refer to this ailment in his book is that it was insignificant beside the deaths of those he had come to know and love.

Maurice’s narrative ends with his departure from Frobisher Bay, but his life with the Eskimos did not end there. After a year’s furlough in England, he returned to the Arctic to manage, respectively, the Sugluk Post in northern Quebec and the Southampton Island Post. At the latter post another epidemic struck. This new epidemic was almost certainly mumps – an indication that White Men were giving the Eskimos their diseases as well as their trade goods. At one point Maurice wrote in his journal that ‘every single man, woman & child in the place is now sick’. At least five of them died. But it could have been a lot worse. Thirty-five years earlier, the Sadlermiut, a Southampton Island tribe that had had almost no contact with the outside world, were wiped out completely by an epidemic of dysentery introduced by a single Scottish whaler.

In 1939, Maurice left the Arctic to serve in World War II. When the war was over, he did not go back to the geography that had claimed his heart and that now persisted in sending its ghosts his way. Nor did he ever go back except in the writing of this book. He died in 2003 at the age of ninety, and in his last year he worried that the use of the word ‘Eskimo’ in his soon-to-be-published book might be construed as patronizing. For he had nothing but admiration for the people now commonly referred to as Inuit (the pejorative term for them in the 1930s was ‘Husky’, not ‘Eskimo’). ‘They have taught me so much,’ he remarked in one of his final letters, and this book is a testimony to those teachings.

If Maurice were to visit Pangnirtung today, he might see a cruise ship anchored offshore and its passengers eagerly looking to buy something, a soapskin carving or maybe foxskin booties, for their mantelpieces. At Ward Inlet, he would find a few scattered boards, all that remains of the old HBC post. In Iqaluit, the capital of the new Inuit territory of Nunavut, he might see one or two descendants of his Frobisher Bay friends shivering on the streets, members of the town’s burgeoning homeless population. The irony of a formerly nomadic people becoming once again, after a fashion, nomadic would not escape him. Nor would the fact that Iqaluit, despite its relatively small size (pop. 6,500), suffers from a number of modern urban maladies – drugs, muggings, auto thefts, gang fights. Picking up the local newspaper, the Nunatsiaq News, he might read about an eighteen-year-old arrested for dealing heroin and realize with a start that the boy was the grandson of a hunter he knew in another lifetime.

By now our visitor would have seen enough to know that what he had written is in fact an evocation of a lost world.

LAWRENCE MILLMAN

Cambridge, MassachusettsDecember 2004

‘… and when my fiord has no seals and

the flame of the lamps burns low,

I will visit my friendly Spirit

in his igloo behind the wind …’

From the drum song of Padluapik,the Medicine Man

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Map

Praise

Dedication

Foreword

Part One: The Boy

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Part Two: Issumatak

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Epilogue

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

The Boy

I

AT TEN O’CLOCK in the morning of 2 June 1930 about forty young men gathered round a noticeboard set up on Euston station, which bore the message ‘BOAT TRAIN, DUCHESS OF BEDFORD LIVERPOOL. HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY PARTY’.

The other travellers hurrying to and fro across the concourse, impelled to haste by the alarming pantings, snufflings and whistlings coming from the impatient engines, hardly spared us a glance, despite the flavour of distant adventure in that simple notice. For in those days, London was still the centre of a great empire and it was commonplace for parties to be seen gathering at railway stations, or at other places of departure, to begin their long journeys to far-away places. Tea planters for India and Ceylon. Rubber planters for Malaya. Mining engineers for South Africa. Administrators for the Indian and other civil services. Policemen for the African colonies. Farm workers to seek their fortunes in Australia, New Zealand or Canada. Traders for the South Seas. Servicemen for all quarters of the globe and wanderers just seeking sunshine or adventure.

We were to be apprenticed to the fur trade ‘somewhere in Canada’. In age we were between sixteen and twenty-three. In occupation there were schoolboys, farm labourers, office workers, factory workers, estate workers, forestry people and even two seamen.

We had been told of the wonderful opportunities that awaited us, but what our informants had not known was that the worst depression the world would experience for many years was fast developing. Already the feverish post-war boom was collapsing. The sudden loss of confidence and the general insecurity of the world markets was soon to undermine the fur trade. Before some of us had finally reached our new homes, the whole department responsible for our engagement had been disbanded, with its members released to swell the ever growing ranks of the unemployed. Never again would a party such as ours gather in London.

An oriental philosopher once wrote that no matter how near or far the destination, every journey must somewhere have a starting point. My journey began in the June of the halcyon summer of 1913, to which so many thousands of women were to look back with aching nostalgia for all the rest of their years.

The shadow fell across my mother’s life sooner than it did for the others. Six weeks before I was born, in the evening of a long midsummer’s day, my father was brought home spread-eagled over a broken gate, dead of a terrible gunshot wound to the head.

Controversy, seemingly inseparable from the human state even in such tragic circumstances, broke out at once. The vicar refused my grandmother’s request that her son’s body should be brought into the parish church to await burial, on the grounds that he might have committed suicide. The coroner would have to give him earthly clearance from this suspicion before the church could grant him asylum. The clergyman had mistakenly supposed his parishioner, my grandmother, to be a meek and pious woman, an error he was never to repeat. He was astonished by the ferocity with which she defended her son’s right to rest in the church, and reluctantly gave way.

So my father, poised as it were on the very threshold of eternity, was brought for the last time into the cool, dim, silent shadow of the ancient building, perhaps there to find the peace he had been seeking. The following day the coroner decided that death had been due to misadventure, thus calming the vicar’s disquiet and giving at least some hope of an onward journey to heaven. For those that were left on earth, and in particular for my mother, the problems were just beginning.

Aged twenty-three, with three children already and a fourth expected, her outlook was bleak indeed, for there was no provision at that time for disasters such as this. No help could be expected from the state, since there was no social security or child allowances. Those who fell by the wayside, whether it was their own fault or not, had to pick themselves up or, as a last desperate measure, appeal to the workhouse guardians for relief.

My grandmother then decided she was in need of a housekeeping companion and that her daughter-in-law could fill this position. There would be no pay as such, but food for the young widow and her children would be provided, sparingly as it turned out, and even more sparingly, clothes. Children’s garments could be made from oddments, sewn, knitted and handed down. As for my mother, now that she was a widow and would wear black for the rest of her life as Queen Victoria had done, she could inherit the old lady’s cast-offs, suitably trimmed to size and shape.

This was how my family came to live in a large, cold Victorian house in a small township on the north Somersetshire coast. My mother brought with her all that she possessed in the world. A few items of bedroom furniture. A dressing table and a little jewellery, a few books and a Colt revolver with six rounds of ammunition. What desperate resolve prompted her to bring these last two items I do not know, nor did I ever inquire.

The year after our arrival, 1914, the Great War broke out. Perhaps the atmosphere of emergency and the heavy emotional demands made upon most of the young women of her generation helped my mother resign herself, at least temporarily, to living the routine of her elderly mother-in-law.

As children we were happy enough, fitting ourselves, as children do, into the circumstances that surrounded us, but mother had to suppress much of her natural jollity, acting as a buffer between her often noisy children at the top of the house and the solemn, easily disturbed downstairs of our grandmother.

Grandmother did not believe in the classless society. Indeed, so convinced was she of her own social superiority that there was not one single person in that Somersetshire township who could justifiably be invited to take tea with her. Ranged behind her in defence of her position were several dukes and other aristocrats, closely followed by admirals, generals and the like, some of whom gazed down at us from the walls of the stairways and downstairs rooms. This meant that there was very little social life to enliven the dull days for mother.

A room at the top of the house was set aside to be used as a school, and armed with a selection of rather aged textbooks, the young widow began the education of her children, my eldest brother being already over four years old. The knowledge contained in these textbooks was rigorously drummed into our heads, for mother was aware of the necessity of obtaining an education of a higher standard than that offered by the free schools, if one was to prosper, and the only way to do this would be by gaining scholarships or similar awards.

One day a visitor called who had heard about a well-known boarding school that had been established with the sole aim of educating suitable children whose parents did not have the available funds. A great number of good people contributed money to the school, and if their contribution was sufficiently large, they were allowed to place an approved child there. I think mother must have written to every single benefactor in order to gain places for her children, and she eventually succeeded in obtaining one for each of us, three boys at the boys’ school and our sister at the girls’ establishment.

The schooling provided was sound, practical and aimed at producing adaptable adults, able to use such common sense as they possessed. Aware of the undoubted benefits of such an education, I would like to be able to record that this was a happy period of my life. Alas, this was not so. From the very start, the school was like some sort of prison. On my second day I quite unwittingly broke some obscure rule, for which the housemaster, no doubt a brilliant mathematician, but lacking in any noticeably human attributes, accorded me a public beating. A suitably sour start to a relationship which was to lack warmth for the next seven years.

As time went by, my mother began to think increasingly of escape from the situation which had trapped her for so long. The atmosphere in the old lady’s house was not a happy one and my mother longed to go to the other side of the world and start afresh. We had no money, but could work hard and New Zealand sounded like a land of opportunity.

My brother blazed the trail by setting off just after the General Strike of 1926, helping to stoke the boilers of an ancient coal burner as it steamed across the Pacific Ocean. He was to work on farms in New Zealand, and two years later my other brother followed him. The three of us who were left at home were to wait until I had finished school, then set off together.

As the time loomed near, however, my prospective life as a farmworker lost its appeal for me. We wrote letters to everybody we could think of to see if they could squeeze me in somewhere else, but the reply was always the same – too young and no qualifications. Christmas 1929 came and went with the problem no nearer solution, but early in the New Year, a chance happening at school provided a possible answer.

A week or two after the start of term, a visitor arrived to take up a long-standing invitation to spend a weekend at the school as a guest of the headmaster. He was the archdeacon in charge of the missionaries working in the Canadian Arctic territories. The news that the clerical visitor was to give a Saturday-night talk was received with some resignation by the boys, but the archdeacon, whose diocese spread from the tree line right away up to the last few humps of ice at the North Pole, had brought reels of film with him and caught our interest and attention immediately when his operator put the first one in backwards. It was the run of a visit by some Hudson’s Bay officials to a post above the Arctic Circle. A solitary white building crouched beneath towering black cliffs. A door flew suddenly open and two portly city executive types marched smartly out backwards, skilfully negotiated a short but steep slope then performed an incredibly agile backward leap into a motor boat waiting at the water’s edge.