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

After this entertaining start, the film’s chief interest centred on the activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Incorporated by Charles II in 1670 as the ‘Gentlemen Adventurers trading into Hudson’s Bay’ and led by Prince Rupert, they had been inspired by the thought of getting into Hudson’s Bay and establishing trading posts ahead of the French. In this they had been successful, so they later extended their field of operation over the whole of Canada and later still to the islands north of the mainland. The remote Arctic establishments could only be supplied by sea and it was the voyage of the tough little Nascopie that the archdeacon had recorded on film. There were hunting scenes, trading scenes, pictures taken under the midnight sun, of polar bears and walrus, of far-away places and people, enough to titillate the imagination of any schoolboy. Moreover, from what our speaker said, it was fairly obvious that this great company employed young people who did not have any special qualifications. I summoned up my courage to confront the authorities and request further details. An interview was arranged with the archdeacon himself. It was to take place in the headmaster’s study on the Monday morning.

The missionary was looking out of the window at the boys scuttling about in the quad on that wet and windy February morning when I crept into the holy of holies. I thought that he looked rather surprised when he saw me. He said:

‘You wanted to see me I believe?’

‘Yes sir,’ I replied, not knowing quite how to develop the conversation.

‘How can I help you?’

‘I wanted to ask about the Hudson’s Bay Company and what age the apprentices have to be,’ I blurted out. The archdeacon looked at me in silence for what seemed to be a very long time. It was fairly obvious that he did not consider me to be the stuff of which ‘Gentlemen Adventurers’ are made. Then he said slowly:

‘I think they do sometimes take boys of sixteen if they are suitable, mostly they are rather older. Why do you ask? Are you thinking of applying?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. I knew that I should expand my answers but somehow dried up in the face of what seemed to be disapproval. The missionary sensed my nervousness.

‘What makes you think you would like the life up there?’ he asked. ‘It’s not an easy place to live in you know. Many of the posts are just one man among the Eskimos and Indians and no other post near enough even to visit.’

The slight softening of the archdeacon’s attitude released my tongue sufficiently for me to explain our dilemma. He listened in silence. When I had finished he actually smiled.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can understand your anxiety to help your mother and I can probably help you with the company, but you should understand what it is you are doing. What about your exams? Have you taken School Certificate yet? Even if the company ignores such things, you may need some qualifications later in your life.’

‘I should take School Certificate this summer, but that would mean waiting until next year. Things would be very bad at home by then.’

‘Do you know anything about northern Canada apart from what you heard in my talk?’

‘Only what I have read in books.’

‘It’s a very lonely life as I have said. The supply ship comes up once a year. At a small post it may only stay for a few hours and that is the only contact with the outside world until the next year. There is just a small house and a store. You will have to forget about cinemas, theatres, dance halls and everything like that. The ship brings up a small amount of fresh food but after that has gone you have to hunt for yourself. There are just six posts on Baffin Island, which is three or four times the size of England, and about fifteen Europeans. The weather is generally cold, except for a week or two in the summer. Sometimes in the winter the temperature goes down to forty below zero. Some posts have a wireless receiving set but they don’t work very well because of the distance from the stations.’

The archdeacon made this little speech as though determined to counteract the favourable impression created by his film show.

‘What about doctors?’ I asked, more from nerves than for any other reason.

‘On Baffin Island there is just one doctor. Usually if people become ill they have to do the best they can with their medicine chest.’

I was more careful with my next question.

‘What sort of animals do they hunt?’

‘Seals,’ he replied without enthusiasm. ‘Some deer. Ducks. Polar bears. Fish of course, salmon trout mainly and cod further south. Walrus and the larger seals for feeding the dogs.’

It seemed pointless to ask any further questions. After all the months of searching for a way out of our dilemma, the providential arrival of the archdeacon with his news that the Hudson’s Bay Company would probably take me on right away decided the issue.

‘I would like to go for an interview if it can be arranged.’

‘Very well. I will see what I can do. In any case, you will have time in the next week or two to think about it all.’

So ended my first meeting with the Archdeacon of the Arctic.

Within a few days I was summoned to an interview in London. From my point of view it was a great success. They gave me a closely printed contract to take away and study. I never did find out what it actually said for it was written in legal jargon well above my head. Everyone was very friendly, they gave me £1 for expenses and even suggested that I should go to the cinema before returning to school. Perhaps they were thinking of the years that I might have to spend without cinemas.

The second interview was more intimidating. I had to wait half an hour in an ante-room before I was called in to the departmental manager’s office. It was a splendid office with a thick red carpet and leather armchairs. The manager gave me a very earnest talk. There wasn’t any Mr Hudson’s Bay, he said, so that every hard-working apprentice had a thick carpet and leather chaired suite within his sights, or at the very least a chief trader’s certificate to hang on the wall, if he could survive forty years in the backwoods.

Eventually the talking was over and they produced the official contract, now with all the details filled in. I was to bind myself for five years to the company, serving wherever they might decide to send me. They would keep me and pay me 10 s. (50p) per week, though should I rise above the apprentice level during the period, some modest increase in salary could be expected.

The terms did not appear unduly harsh. The money did seem to be a little on the short side even for those depressed days, but that was a fairly common complaint at the time, so I signed the document and even light-heartedly agreed to become a competent bookkeeper and typist during the few weeks of waiting before they shipped me off to Canada. Such is the foolish optimism of youth.

One immediate benefit arising from my decision became quickly obvious. I was no longer an inconspicuous monitor of my school. An aura compounded of snow, ice, dogs and polar bears separated me from my fellow boys, even those who had reached the dizzy heights of the First XV. To my astonishment, this also actually clouded the vision of some of the masters. I exploited this situation to the full so that my last few weeks were the happiest of my years at the school.

My housemaster, for some reason or another, was the last to hear of my new status, and when he called me in to go over my end-of-term report he appeared to think that I was still just an ordinary schoolboy. It seemed that my progress in scripture had only been rated as ‘fair’. He did not feel it to be satisfactory that the word ‘fair’ should appear on the report of one of his monitors and he might feel it necessary to demote me.

I quickly set his mind at rest by telling him my news. A curious expression came over his face when he heard that I was off to the wilds, rather as though I had opened some door in his mind that had been closed for a very long time. He wrote to me in the Arctic several times and I later heard that my replies had been read out at prayers, a signal mark of distinction.

At the end of term a special train came to the school station to pick up the boys travelling to London or beyond. The train left just after 6 a.m. in order to avoid the morning rush, so it was very early one spring morning that I discarded my school uniform and, puffed up with sufficient false pride to still any lurking doubts, set off to prepare myself for my life among the Eskimos.

Some years previously, an old great-uncle of ours had died, leaving my siblings and me £52 each. As I was shortly to become an earner in my own right, I dipped into this money to equip myself for my new life and at once purchased a colourful shirt, riding breeches and a horsy jacket. This gave me, on such occasions as I actually appeared in public in my new outfit, a sufficiently bizarre appearance to cause one of the more spiteful of our neighbours to remark: ‘He looks quite colonial already, doesn’t he?’

My mother, still under forty years old, had hardly dared to even think about the day when she would finally be released to live again, and now suddenly it was within sight. Already she and my sister were filling up the forms necessary to obtain an assisted passage to New Zealand, where they would join my brothers.

Shortly after my arrival home, an important-looking letter came from the Hudson’s Bay Company. It reminded me rather sternly that I had undertaken to achieve competence in bookkeeping and typing before leaving England, and warned me that I would have to produce certificates to avoid being left behind on the quayside. A visit one afternoon to an established business college in the town indicated that this was not going to be as easy as it sounded. They smiled pityingly and showed us the door. We journeyed round all the other colleges in the town. The answer was always the same. They did not undertake to turn out typists and bookkeepers in a matter of weeks. Finally, to my horror, mother unearthed a girls’ college willing to attempt the impossible task.

My frantic efforts to spare myself this frightful indignity were unavailing. In these days of the easy mixing of young people of both sexes it is hard to credit the conditions that prevailed seventy years ago. At school no females were allowed. Even the maids, unless they were grey-haired, had to operate out of sight of the boys. Consequently, unless there was a good social life at home, boys and young men were awkward in their relationships with girls, even singly. Now I was to be put in with a whole college of them!

Like some rare oddity, I was placed at a desk facing two rows of girls and was so busy watching for slights and suspecting all kinds of indignities that I never got to know any of them. I was to become aware before leaving that these girls had a much better idea of natural behaviour than I did.

The women in charge of the place had pulled a few strings, and a few days before my departure presented me with an official-looking but vague document. This declared me to be indoctrinated, both as to the keeping of books and typewriting, though not accepting any responsibility for the outcome of my activities.

After the presentation, one of the other pupils, a small plain girl whose nose was slightly flattened as though having been pressed against a window pane too long, rushed forward and pushed a small package into my hand. It was from them all, she said, to wish me well in whatever outlandish part of the world it was to which I was going.

This sudden expression of goodwill from my contemporaries, and girls at that, quite overcame me. The unexpected kindness never faded from my mind and the gift, a small silver propelling pencil, remained one of my prize possessions for many years.

The Hudson’s Bay Company apparently expected me to transform myself from a schoolboy into a practical handyman in the few weeks available between leaving school and the departure for Canada. They sent a list of the more important arts which it would be wise for me to cultivate. Apart from the bookkeeping and typing, it was desirable, they wrote, to gain a knowledge of the combustion engine, some idea of first aid and experience of simple cooking.

The far northern districts of Canada, being so isolated, were totally dependent on sea travel by motor boat for summer hunting. There were no mechanics as such, so it was important that as many people as possible should be capable of keeping the engines running. The lack of doctors meant that the post staff would have to deal with accidents and illness and a knowledge of basic first aid was vital. Apparently, few Eskimo women had any idea of cooking, so we would have to do our share of preparing the meals.

As the list of necessary accomplishments grew, doubts began to creep into my mind. Had this apparently ideal solution to our problem blinded me to the reality of the situation in which I was going to find myself? Not even my mother, always prepared to believe the best about me, would have claimed any practical virtues for me. Yet it seemed that it was practical people who were wanted. Of what use would it have been to be top of the German class when the motor boat broke down? How could a sound knowledge of history stop me from being sick when someone came to see me with a bone sticking out of their arm and blood everywhere? Would the promise that the form master had assured me I had shown in English give me any confidence to prepare a meal for the weary traveller?

These fears subsided when the final documents arrived for my mother and sister to sign for their passage to New Zealand. Amid the excitement at the prospect of an early release, my natural optimism reasserted itself. When the last day came, it seemed unlikely that we should ever spend time together in England again, so the three of us took a picnic and hired a boat to laze down a river through the quiet Somerset countryside, where we had passed many happy hours in days gone by.

That night I said goodbye to my grandmother. She seemed much affected. She said that she wished that she had had more money so that we could have stayed in England and not gone so far away, but the family fortunes had dwindled and there was nothing she could do. She gave me a little package wrapped up in tissue paper. It contained two spoons and a fork, silver with her family crest stamped on the handles. This was to remind me of all those people who had stared down on my childhood, and how well some of them had acquitted themselves.

Mother and I set off for London early the next morning, my sister having already gone back to her job in Bristol. We stayed at an old-fashioned hotel, and went to a theatre, and after breakfast the next morning made our way quietly to the ten o’clock rendezvous at Euston station. I remember thinking back to our first parting, on the day that mother had taken me down to start school. The tears had streamed down my face then and she had tried to console me by saying that it would only be a few weeks before the holidays. This time the tears streamed down her face as we began to move, and I did not know what to say.

Five years suddenly seemed a very, very long time.

*

I remember little about the voyage across the Atlantic. Being a summer passage, it was calm and uneventful I suppose, with little to do except eat, sleep and play deck games until we reached the St Lawrence river and had our first glimpse of our future homeland. We had a brief run ashore at Quebec, just enough to say that we had set foot in Canada, then the next day docked at Montreal, where our posts would be assigned.

Our accommodation on the ship had seemed almost luxurious, so our temporary home in the city was something of a let-down. The public rooms were sparsely furnished with trestle tables and wooden chairs and there was little attempt to reach any standard of comfort, but the people who ran the place were good-hearted souls, who kept our spirits up with an ample supply of good plain food.

The Hudson’s Bay Company offices in Montreal were in McGill Street, and though half our number had taken the train westward, there seemed to be quite a crowd of us milling about in the comparatively small office space. We met the men in charge of our areas and most of the apprentices were told where they would be going. Another boy, Ian Smith, and I were ‘odd men out’ for whom a home would be found during the course of the summer travels.

To relieve the congestion, a party of us were sent down to the docks to work on the Nascopie, the ship that the archdeacon had told us about at school, now loading up for her annual trip with the year’s supply for the distant posts.

After the majestic liner which had carried us so smoothly across the Atlantic, the Nascopie seemed very small and insignificant. Her decks only just rose above the level of the wharf, whereas the liner had towered up above the dockside. Her paintwork was dark and workmanlike whereas the Duchess had gleamed and dazzled in white. None the less, many of us were, in the years to come, to form an affection for the little ship which no ocean liner could ever have inspired. Sometimes she was naughty. In rough weather there were few tricks that were beyond her, particularly when coming down the Labrador coast with only a few light bales of furs in her holds. She would then creak and groan in the most alarming manner, but survived the worst hammerings the North Atlantic and the Arctic seas could serve up, to return each year, like a faithful friend, to keep us company for a few hours or a day or so in our northern solitude.

More than once the Nascopie took on a double duty, when lesser craft than she gave up the unequal struggle against fog and ice. The old ship had been built during or just before the First World War, and was one of the finest steel icebreakers ever constructed. During the war, she was employed smashing the ice in the White Sea, and according to all reports was well ahead of the Russians in this field. Once, in a convoy in heavy ice, the huge Russian icebreaker leading the convoy got stuck. The Nascopie bustled up alongside and hailed the Russian.

‘Shall I go ahead, sir?’ shouted the captain.

‘How the devil can you go ahead when I’m stuck?’ roared back the Russian.

‘Shall I try?’

‘Oh, go to hell if you want to,’ snapped the Russian.

The Nascopie broke through the ice jam to lead the convoy into harbour, and for good measure, on the way home, she sank a submarine. Small wonder that she grew on us almost as though she were human.

On that first Monday morning, however, we were not greatly impressed. In fact by the time we had finished carrying the heavy mail boxes – and it is extraordinary how heavily a year’s mail can weigh – we were not sorry to see the last of her for the day.

We soon made friends around our temporary home. One Saturday night, a French Canadian family held a wedding reception in the building. Two or three of us were hanging about so they invited us to join the party. During the evening, we were approached by a rather unsteady-looking man who, after casting a glance at a priest standing near by, said in a deep but penetrating whisper: ‘H.B.C. eh? Do you know what that means? “Here before Christ,” that’s what it means!’

He told us that he had been trading with the company for over thirty years. Ian asked him if he had retired and the man roared with laughter.

‘Retired?’ he shouted. ‘I’m never going to retire. They’ll find me one day somewhere along the trail and I hope they’ll leave me there.’ He waved his arm round the room then went on.

‘This sort of thing’s not for me. I only came because she happens to be a niece. I’ll not be down this way again. Victor’s my name. They’ll know me up the river. I don’t have much in this world but I’m free. I go where I like when I like and I’m off home in the morning.’ He waved his arm and marched off towards the table where the food was set out. I was often to think about Victor in the years to come, his boisterous good health, his obvious contentment with the life he had chosen, and his best clothes, which looked as if they had not been worn for many a long day.

We met three sisters at the wedding too who had come from Three Rivers and had made the trip down with their father and mother. They were good fun and Ian Smith and I and another chap took them out for a picnic the next day, as they spent the weekend in the city. It was the first time that I had ever been out with a girl other than my sister, and one of them, Laurette, said she would write to me. I rashly promised to write and send her a fur from wherever I was. She did write too but alas did not receive the promised fur.

By the end of the next week, so far as we could see, the Nascopie was just about fully laden. We were not surprised to be told to pack up again in preparation for moving on. Then at the last minute, because of the shortage of accommodation on the ship, Ian, myself and three others were told that we were to take passage on another freighter, which was going up as far north as the Labrador coast and Ungava Bay. Somewhere up there we should join up again with the Nascopie. This meant that we should be sailing a few days later.

The evening before we parted we all clubbed together to buy some beer and had a small party – at least we sang songs and were generally very noisy. Now that we knew that we were to be northerners, an air of easy comradeship settled over the gathering and it seemed likely that we should have much to do with each other over the next few years. Such is the remoteness of life in the Arctic that I was only to see three of the dozen or so present after that season.

The five of us that were to be left behind went down to the docks to see the rest of our party depart. Prepared for laughter and banter, we had not expected the sailing of the little ship to be so stirring. The vessel was bedecked in pennants, apart from the Red Ensign at the stern and the Blue Peter at the mainmast. A detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, in their scarlet uniforms, was drawn up on the deck for inspection by a high-ranking officer. There were priests, government officials, traders, doctors and scientists. In her holds, we knew, were the supplies for a territory ten times the size of England. We shook hands with our friends. Some of the ladies farewelling their nearest and dearest cried, while another group was singing.

Then the siren sounded out in long blasts, the propellor churned the water and she was away. A nearby harbour tug blew her a rousing farewell and more and more sirens sounded their good wishes. Black smoke belched from her funnel and as she moved out into the stream we could see clearly all the things lashed to her decks. Boats. Canoes. Drums of gasoline. All sorts of queer-shaped things covered with tarpaulins.

Ian and I watched her manoeuvre into midstream and then head out of the harbour, the white pennant of the Royal Mail slapping in the wind at the top of her mast. Down river, the Canadian navy, in the form of two destroyers, dipped flags in salute as she steamed by. Just beside me somebody’s friend had forgotten a last message, bawling out ‘Happy Christmas’ in the forlorn hope of being heard on the ship. We began to understand why they had told us that to think about the Arctic without thinking about the Hudson’s Bay Company was like writing a book about sea without mentioning ships.

A few days after the departure of the Nascopie, the remaining five of us set off quietly for the docks, taking with us all our worldly possessions. By ten o’clock that morning we were assembled in a rather gloomy shed at the city end of the wharf, where the van had unloaded us. The ship on which we were to take passage, the Ungava, was alongside the far end of the wharf, so we had a fair way to go with all our baggage.

One of our party could hardly move, so heavily laden was he with cases and packages, and his crab-like motion attracted the attention of a passing wharfie.

‘Why didn’t you bring your bed, boy?’ the man guffawed. ‘Where the devil are you off to with all that load?’