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

Alan Scott, the other apprentice at Pangnirtung, had arrived the previous year and had obviously not expected that there would be an addition to the staff. I explained that the district manager had had no option but to leave me here before the ship headed south, but it was too late to go into all the details, so we made the boat secure, climbed the bank to the house and went thankfully to bed.

It was broad daylight when I awoke next morning, but the house was quiet, so I took the opportunity to have a look at my room. It was small and square with a plasterboard ceiling held in place with rough wooden slats. The boards had not been painted but the walls had been done, though some time ago by the look of them, for they were now a dingy sort of white. There was one window looking out over the fiord mouth. Apart from the bed, there was one piece of furniture in the room, some kind of multi-purpose unit. The top did duty as a stand for a washbowl, underneath were two drawers to house my clothes and there was a shelf for anything else at the bottom. The unit appeared to have been home-made, but did not seem to have been constructed to any plan so much as from the random inspiration of the maker, and it was tilted slightly forward, as though the front legs were slightly shorter than the rear ones. There was no other furniture, no chair or wardrobe, and nothing on the walls. The room had a musty, damp odour rather like that of an unused, unheated spare room we had had at home. The whole effect was dreary in the extreme and I could see that it was going to be necessary to do some brightening up before the start of the long winter.

A patch of colour in the doorway suddenly caught my eye. It was Geordie Gall’s bright striped shirt. He had drifted up from somewhere and was leaning against the jamb, clutching a bottle in his hand. He gazed at me in silence for a little while with a puzzled expression, as if wondering what to say to me now that he was here. It occurred to me that his shirt, although quite cheerful, did not really suit him. Embarrassed by the silence, I said, ‘Good morning.’

Geordie levered himself away from his support and waved his free arm in a broad gesture round the room.

‘Not the Grand Hotel, is it?’ he said, slurring his words. ‘Roof leaks like hell. Doesn’t rain in the winter though. Spring’s the time when the snow melts on top. You’ll have to get some oars then.’

He put the bottle to his lips and took a long swig, gazing sadly up at the offending ceiling as he did so. Belatedly he began to chuckle, perhaps at the thought of me sculling round the bedroom. Then a fly buzzed in near his face and he tried to knock it away with his hand but the effort caused him to lose balance. As he staggered backwards, he jerked the bottle in his other hand, so that some of the liquor slopped on to the floor. He forgot about me, looking angrily down at the pool on the linoleum.

‘Damn flies, what the hell are they buzzing about here for?’ he muttered to himself as he lurched out of the room.

I did not quite know what to make of the incident at the time, but afterwards realized that Geordie had really just come to introduce himself and welcome me to Pangnirtung. He was a Scotsman who had drifted over to Newfoundland and not having any real trade had moved from one job to another. Then, when the Hudson’s Bay Company opened up the posts in the northern islands, he joined the company and had been managing posts on Baffin Island ever since. He was normally a good-natured man with a liking for order in the post routine and good organizing ability. The Eskimos respected him, but his periodic bouts on the bottle meant that he was never likely to advance further in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s employment.

Geordie had no hair on the top of his head and the Eskimos, who liked to be able to call everybody by a name which distinguished them personally, christened him ‘Shiny Top’.

Shortly after my first visitor had gone, Alan Scott came in to say it was time to get up. He too was a Scotsman, coming from up Peterhead way, where he had been working on farms. He was a few years older than me and being a practical young man had picked up the ropes quickly. This was very fortunate for me as he went to considerable trouble to pass on the lessons he had learned during his first year as a northerner. Alan must have had great patience because I did not at that time readily assimilate knowledge of a practical nature, but he succeeded in teaching me the basic essentials of Arctic life and this stood me in good stead for all my years in the Arctic.

On my way to fetch water from the kitchen I studied the house. It was more or less a square, bungalow type of building with the two apprentices’ bedrooms at the far corner being separated by the office between them. From the office, a passageway led down the centre of the house, on one side of which was the manager’s bedroom, while on the other was an enclosed space which served as a combined store and bathroom, though to take a bath was a most complicated procedure. The guardroom was situated across the house at the end of the passageway. This name for the sitting room came from the frontier days, when the personnel of the post had to be ready to defend themselves, keeping their weapons at hand in case of attack. Fortunately there was no danger of attack at Pangnirtung. The ceiling and the walls of the guardroom were painted white with green slats, so the room was not quite so dull as the bedrooms. In one corner there was a large pot-bellied heating stove and from the other wall a door led into the kitchen.

An Eskimo girl by the name of Ooloo had a room at the end of the kitchen. She was supposed to be a sort of housekeeper and did the chores but only had the slightest knowledge of cooking. In fact she was what would nowadays be accepted as Geordie’s common-law wife. They had a baby son but were a most unlikely pair. They could not speak each other’s language beyond a word or two and perhaps this was just as well, for I found later when she got cross Ooloo could deliver a stream of abuse and insults which would have left Geordie in no doubt as to his shortcomings.

My upbringing, both at home and at school, had run along very strict lines of morality, so that anything that deviated from the straight and narrow was not to be contemplated and certainly not to be mentioned. In my grandmother’s house the assumption was that only the lower orders indulged in the sins of drunkenness and immorality, no matter what evidence there was to the contrary. Obviously I now had to emerge rapidly from the Victorian world which had hitherto enclosed me.

In time I was to realize that in fact Geordie and Ooloo’s relationship was quite proper among the Innuit, the only anomaly being that he was a foreigner. Marriages were not arranged between families, the young being free to choose as they wished. A girl might pair with several men before marriage, without any obligation on either side; indeed, she might cohabit with several young men at the same time. If the girl had a child, it was likely, but by no means certain, that the association would become permanent.

Hunters might have two wives, and it was quite common for a man to permit unrelated persons to have relations with his wife, usually, but not invariably, on a reciprocal basis. This was partly a practical arrangement, as the hunters frequently passed through different camps on their hunting expeditions, but it might also be the basis of a very useful friendship.

The Eskimos tended to become interdependent by utilizing each other’s skills. If a man was a good carver, he carved; others might have good organizing ability and be called upon to organize expeditions; some would be especially able at making hunting weapons or kayaks, while all who had any flair for hunting went after seals or deer. Each man had to be able in some direction and when there was overduplication it would be normal for a man to leave his group, deserting his wife and children to find another home where he would be more useful.

The effects of this attitude to coupling and marriage were that relationship could be claimed on a fairly wide basis. Apart from the immediate family, if a husband or wife had children not belonging to their present partner, such children would form a link between all the people on both sides of the family. This meant a greatly increased number of potential friends and of camps at which a hunter would have what might be termed residential qualifications, since the camps were organized on a strictly family basis. Family ties were flexible so that a hunter could move from one group to another. Provided that the new group was within the wide family circle, he would at once be accepted as a proper member of the community.

It was sometimes thought that the Eskimos practised some sort of communism, but this was not so, for the foundation of their society was the family grouping in the broadest sense, which resulted in collective responsibility and cooperation with the relatives with whom one was resident at the moment. Thus the whole camp shared the successes and failures, the good times and the bad.

There was a clear division of labour within each home. The men were the hunters and it was they who made the tools and the household goods and built the homes. The women cooked, dressed the skins, tended the oil lamps used for heating and cooking and made all the clothes, using their own tools. Sometimes exceptional women would stray into the men’s world, but the men, even though they might be totally incompetent as hunters, did not take on the women’s tasks.

The bleakness of my room, as well as the very changed conditions to which I had to adjust myself, had depressed me considerably, but my spirits started to revive as soon as I stepped outside. The house door faced up to the fiord, where the high black cliffs swept round in an arc, rising steadily to a point at which the inlet turned sharply northward. On the far shore, the hills fell slowly away again to a pleasant green valley, just opposite the house. From above this eastern valley, the sunshine spread across the water, picking out the kyaks and boats of the few Inuit who were taking advantage of the calm morning to go seal hunting. The panorama of the high and moody hills, the green valley, the sunshine sparkling on the sea and the kyaks flashing to and fro across the water, lifted my depression completely. Here was a timeless scene from long ago which had somehow managed to remain unchanged in a changing world.

The Pangnirtung fiord settlement of 1930 was one of the largest on Baffin Island. The Hudson’s Bay Company post, centrally situated among the buildings, consisted of a line of four houses spaced along the coastal flat just before the land dropped about thirty feet or so to the edge of the reef. There were two storehouses, a main dwelling and a secondary dwelling which had been used as an interpreter’s home. The woodwork was, as was usual for the Hudson’s Bay Company, painted white with green facings and a red roof. The buildings stood about ten yards apart but were linked together by two straight lines of whitewashed rocks that created the illusion of a purpose-made path. The inevitable flagpole was situated in a neat little square in front of our home and the Hudson’s Bay Company flag was flown on any suitable occasion.

About fifty yards beyond us, towards the mouth of the fiord, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had established their post of two buildings, a dwelling and a kind of storehouse. In front of their house was a little weather station, from the middle of which rose their flagpole, a much more impressive affair than ours, fittingly perhaps, because from it flew the Canadian flag, proclaiming ownership of this large arctic island.

Behind the Hudson’s Bay Company post, at the back of the flat, was the archdeacon’s mission house, which served both as a home and a church, and the sealskin tents of the Eskimos were spread over the intervening space. Some distance away, we had our ‘blubber’ sheds which housed the equipment for rendering oil and curing hides. In that year there were three Hudson’s Bay Company people, three R.C.M.P.s and one missionary, which represented one of the main concentrations of Baffin Island population.

Ooloo had been busy dishing out tea to the men and women gathered in front of the store waiting to start the morning’s work of organizing the year’s supplies. The people were dressed in a variety of garbs. Some wore sealskin anoraks, some woollen ones and others ordinary bush shirts. The women, who did not wish to miss the chance of earning a dollar or two, were there, carrying their babies on their backs.

Gradually we sorted the large pile of boxes into the proper places in the store. It was general practice at that time to keep two years’ supply of all the more vital commodities on hand, to allow for the possibility of the Nascopie not being able to get through the ice. There were large quantities of tea, flour and similar items, each package being marked with the year of delivery indicated by an outfit number.

The first northern trading voyage undertaken by the ‘Gentlemen Venturers trading into Hudson’s Bay’ was in 1668 and the original instructions to one Zachariah Gillam, master of the ketch Nonsuch which had been selected for the voyage, are still preserved. The orders were that the master should sail his vessel to such places as were chosen by the traders who had come with him. He was to find safe anchorage and wait there while the trading took place. As soon as a good quantity of furs, skins and the like had been gathered together, the Nonsuch was to return home. Two years later, when the first trading post was established, outfit number one was sent north to be put ashore in the bay and the annual voyages had been numbered from that year onwards (1670), so that every item arriving in my first year had the number 260 painted or stencilled on it.

By the end of the day, we had stacked most of the new delivery away in the stores in the appropriate spots, the drums of gasoline had been moved to line up with the old stock, the coal piled behind the post building, the ammunition packed into its own special section and a home found for all that remained. Next morning we were able to turn our attention to the timber, which lay in higgledy-piggledy confusion beside the main store and was destined to provide two shacks for the company’s two Innuit employees.

Meanwhile Ooloo had got the stove going in the guardroom and had stretched her culinary abilities to the extent of heating up a delicacy known as ‘boiled dinner’, which came out of a tin. The guardroom was simply furnished. The square table from which we ate our meal served for all other purposes. There were no easy chairs but several basic wooden ones. A rickety bookcase with a cupboard underneath occupied a corner by the stove. A rather splendid Victrola phonograph filled the opposite corner to the bookcase. It had been retrieved from one of the shipwrecks, so they told me, which perhaps accounted for the haphazard selection of records, six or seven of them, varying from Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a bloodthirsty ballad about a certain Turk named ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’.

An elaborate but not very effective radio set stood on the window ledge behind the Victrola. It seldom gave us any continuous session of entertainment without going off into hysterical oscillation. Alan was the only person who had enough patience to attempt to control the thing.

My most urgent need, those first days, was to get fitted out with a pair of sealskin boots. Ordinary shoes were not fitted to the rocky terrain, apart from being very uncomfortable. One of the Eskimos working for the company, Kilabuk by name, said that his wife would make me a pair. She duly appeared, measured my feet with a piece of string in the most casual manner possible and went home, returning the next morning with a pair of sealskin boots which fitted me perfectly. The upper parts, which came to the knee, were of ordinary skin with a few black patches sewn in to make a pattern, while the soles were cut from a larger, tougher skin from a big seal known as an ujuk. The boots were secured with drawstrings at the top which fastened below the knee. I paid her one dollar fifty cents, which included the cost of the materials.

Next day, Agiak, for that was her name, sent a message by her husband (who could speak some English) to say that she was going to wash my clothes and would make an arrangement with Ooloo to use the facilities of our kitchen one day a week. I was quite pleased about this for it had not been easy to keep my small stock of clothes clean, and although I had seized every opportunity, my inexpert efforts at laundering had resulted in my garments looking decidedly dingy. What did not please me very much was my discovery, a few weeks later, that the Eskimos had also decided that I was a child and had named me simply ‘The Boy’.

By the next afternoon, the ship-time sorting had been concluded and the workers lined up in the store to be paid off. As each one came up to the counter, Alan looked in the book in which the times had been recorded, to find the amount due then spread out the coins to represent the pay. These coins were imitation money, acting as dollars, half dollars and quarters, so that people could see exactly how much money they had to spend. The Eskimo would normally debate with his wife as to what they should buy, generally deciding upon food, tobacco, ammunition and perhaps something small for the children. If the women had any spare money of their own it usually went on print for a dress or some other item of clothing.

The Innuit could not earn very much during the summer season. Trapping did not start until the end of October, but before that time it was necessary to lay in good supplies of dog food, so that the hunters could devote as much time as possible to their traps during the six-month open season for foxes. This meant that they had to be allowed quite large amounts of credit, so they could obtain supplies of petrol, cartridges and other necessities for the summer seal and walrus hunting. Each hunter was assessed according to his past record and allowed to run up a debt of as many foxes as it seemed likely he would be able to catch fairly easily during the winter.

That afternoon, Alan took me down to the blubber house, scene of much of the activity after a whale drive. The place was as unromantic in appearance as in name. Inside one shed was a rendering machine into which the cut-up blubber was stuffed to be processed into oil which was then pumped from the machine to tanks outside. In another shed, the hides were stored at one end and meat which could be used to feed the dogs at the other. The hides had been shipped off on the Nascopie, but a pile of decomposing meat remained. This was my first encounter with high meat en masse and the smell was too much for me. I had to grasp my nose and retire in haste. I surmised that, as with Geordie’s and Ooloo’s relationship, this was another aspect of my new life that I would adjust to in time.

III

HOUSEKEEPING ON BAFFIN ISLAND had its complications. We had a plentiful supply of canned goods in the storeroom, but fresh food supplies for the winter then had to be thought about weeks in advance. Hunting was seasonal and whenever possible we took advantage of each season to lay in a stock for the future.

The fall was an especially good time to concentrate on winter food requirements. The plump young ducks gathered on the lakes before their southward flight. The salmon trout, fresh and firm after their summer in the sea, could still be taken on their way back to their home lake, as well as the seals, always with us, though in varying numbers. The deer often came down to feed near the coast before the onset of winter. Apart from this normal plenitude of game, there was another useful advantage at this time of year, which was that with the temperature well down, meat, birds and fish could be stored in good condition right through the winter until the following May.

Geordie had remained absent in spirit from us for a few days after the ship had gone, but Alan set about his rehabilitation with determination and succeeded in bringing him back to our world by the start of the following week, when a party of hunters came in from one of the southerly camps. They reported that they had seen deer feeding near the shoreline of one of the inlets they had passed on their way to the post. Geordie decided that it would be a good opportunity to lay in meat supplies and perhaps a few fish for the winter stock.

Kilabuk and Beevee, the two post servants, were instructed to prepare for the hunt, and then it was suggested at the last moment that I go with them as a reward for all the hard work since ship-time. The suggestion was meant kindly, and no doubt both Geordie and Alan thought I would jump at the chance of a hunting trip, but the idea did not really appeal to me.

My recent journeyings had temporarily satisfied the explorer in me, while I felt that I had put up with enough discomfort for one year, particularly after my long spell on the draughty kitchen floor at Port Burwell. Not that my present quarters could be described as luxurious, but now that my unpacking was completed, so that my own things were scattered about the room and one or two pictures were up on the wall, it had an air of home about it. However, it seemed churlish to refuse what was obviously intended as a sort of holiday, so I took the easy way out, even managing to work up a rather spurious air of excitement about the coming trip. My box was packed with the cooking utensils, such as Primus stove, frying pan, pots and kettles under the mistaken impression that I was acquainted with the use of these things. It looked as though I was going to learn the hard way as usual.

We set off one beautifully calm morning. The hills were mirrored in the waters of the fiord and the seals coming up for air sent the ripples spreading over the sea in ever widening circles. Just down below the post buildings, an inquisitive seal popped up and dallied too long, giving Beevee time to shoot and manoeuvre the boat alongside. Kilabuk jabbed a harpoon into the body, then hauled it aboard with the attached line. Despite this short distraction, we made fairly good progress and stopped to go ashore in a pleasant cove to see if there were any signs of deer. We saw nothing of interest, so decided to boil the kettle.

Kilabuk got the Primus out and showed me in great detail how it worked. Once seen, of course, the operation is simple, but the Eskimo continued the demonstration for an excessively long time, so that a resolution formed in my mind that, come what may, I would get the thing going for the next meal and show them that I was not the complete fool they seemed to think me.

Darkness had fallen by the time we reached the cove where the deer had been reported. We had brought a fairly large tent with us, which the Eskimos now erected on a suitably soft patch of ground. We soon carried up our equipment from the boat, spread our deerskins around at the back of the shelter and formed a little section near the entrance. One of the drawbacks of northern camping is that the cooking space has to be included inside the tent, since conditions outside are seldom satisfactory, there being of course no wood with which to make camp fires.

Before anyone had a chance to forestall me, I lit the Primus, fortunately without mishap. The men cut some meat from a seal carcass and we boiled up a stew in the pot. We ate the meal sedately from plates, not the usual custom, and washed it down with a cup of seal ‘soup’. My stomach had protested at the very thought but in fact it was very palatable.

Kilabuk, who had lived most of his life at the whalers’ camps where his father had been employed, could speak quite good English, so after our meal we relaxed on the deerskins in reasonable comfort for a chat until the oil lamp which Beevee had got going began to flicker and splutter as the wick burnt low. The men hoped to make a good start next morning so we spread out our sleeping bags to settle for an early night.

I was soon to learn that it is wise, when sleeping among the Eskimos, to get some sleep as quickly as possible, for they are given to extremely loud snoring. As I lay reviewing my first day of camping out in the Arctic, a noise like a slow motion electric saw broke out on the far side of the platform, where Beevee lay, then Kilabuk joined in. I lay dazed by the cacophony of sound and in the end fell asleep only through sheer exhaustion, making up for my disturbed rest by being the last to wake the next morning.