Authors: Melanie McGrath
The Inuit call the C.
D. Howe
“the place where you take your clothes off.” They dread their annual medical inspections and often have to be strong-armed by missionaries or policemen into attending.
Qalunaat
have brought with them a panoply of diseases to which the Inuit have virtually no immunity. Polio, tuberculosis, influenza, diphtheria, measles and whooping cough are rife among the Inuit living along Canada's Arctic coast. The medicals are designed to detect any outbreaks of disease and limit their spread. The chief medical officer on each Eastern Arctic Patrol is responsible for isolating those suffering from an infectious illness and keeping them on board ship from where they are taken to clinics and sanatoria in the south. On board, the Inuit have their tongues depressed to search for signs of diphtheria, their eyes inspected and chests X-rayed to show up the symptoms of TB and their skin, joints and muscles prodded for anything else. The children are inoculated, then checked for scabies, lice and fleas. If any are found their young hosts will be swabbed down with disinfectant and their heads shaved. If anything more serious is spotted, they are taken away, more often than not with no opportunity to say goodbye to their parents or families. The C.
D. Howe
is often carrying so many Inuit consumptives that northern administrators label her the Shakespeare ship: “TB or not TB.”
The Shakespeare ship was as much a part of the problem as she was the cure. Wherever she went in the Arctic she left behind her
epidemics of what the Inuit termed “ship sickness,” which could be anything from flu or pneumonia to measles and polio. The ship sicknesses were by no means trivial episodes in the history of the Arctic. In the western Arctic, where infections spread more rapidly than they did in the eastern archipelago, ship sicknesses had reduced the Inuit population from around twenty thousand at the beginning of the nineteenth century to around two thousand at its end. In 1902 a visit by the Scottish whaler,
Active
, wiped out the entire population of Southampton Island. Half a century on, ship sicknesses were rarely quite so dramatic, but it was very common for every settlement on the
Howe's
route to lose several children and elderly people every year to ship sickness, and for many more to be hauled off to the south.
Had Paddy Aqiatusuk known about the state of the C.
D. Howe
itself he might never have got back on board. The captain, Paul Fournier, was a competent seaman in ordinary conditions, but he had absolutely no experience of Arctic navigation. He was, in all senses of the phrase, completely out of his depth. His crew were mostly greenhorns, hired off the quay at Quebec. For some reason Fournier never made any ship's inspections, perhaps because he had a sense of what he would find, so drunken sailors were left to shoot craps games in the lifeboats while the watch slept in their bunks. Safety procedures were more or less ignored. In the darkroom, developing chemicals slopped around in tanks, creosote leaked from barrels in the hull and sailors used oil barrels as ash trays. None of the crew had been briefed on the itinerary or supplies, there had been no instructions on what was expected of the crew in port and no emergency drill or storm procedures were in place. Many of the
qalunaat
passengers were themselves too drunk to notice anything was wrong, but it was. The C.
D. Howe
was ill-run and its crew and captain completely green and they were about to enter some of the most dangerous waters on earth.
Her stay at Churchill over, the ship reloaded the Inuit and their belongings, weighed anchor and continued on her way. On 7 August
1953 she crossed the 6oth parallel, on the western coast of Hudson Bay, at the mouth of the McConnell River, where a grizzle of dwarfed black spruce finally gave out to the Barrenland tundra. From time to time Paddy Aqiatusuk was allowed up on deck to watch the Barrens sliding by, to smell the air, already so unfamiliar, and to see the light change colour. He had never imagined anywhere so vast, so superficially familiar to his homeland but so totally strange and there was a part of him that already felt too old for such novelty. As the ship crawled north, making short scheduled stops at the tiny settlements of Rankin Inlet and Chesterfield Inlet before turning through Roes Welcome Sound, Paddy sneaked off ship to talk to the local Inuit but their dialects were difficult to decipher and he could rarely make much sense of what they said. No one seemed to know Ellesmere Island. Few had even heard of it. He took whatever small item of trade he could from among his possessions and traded it for fresh meat, for there was none on board ship and an Inuk feels the lack of meat as strongly as he feels a lack of air or water. He returned to ship no wiser about this destination but with delicious packages of whale, caribou or seal, which he shared around among his own. Others, not bold enough to slip off ship and go ashore, took to stealing the pig fat and frozen walrus meat intended for the dogs.
They sailed on north, across a hard, antique world of naked rock and shale, under a sky as soft and luminous grey as sealskin, which billowed from time to time with storm clouds. There were fewer birds now, and those there mewed and keened as though lost and looking for company. Two and a half weeks out of Inukjuak they crossed the Arctic Circle at Repulse. At Salisbury Island they were followed for a while by a group of beluga but were forbidden to hunt any from on deck so they remained in their quarters, throwing up their daily diet of potatoes and porridge, foods that neither nourished nor sustained. It was getting noticeably darker now, and the Northern Lights sprayed the twilight sky in reds and greens. Pretty soon, they would be too far north even for those.
During the third week, they entered the Hudson Strait and Paddy Aqiatusuk mounted the stairs from the Inuit quarters and went on deck to look at the land. A few glaucous gulls stirred the air above the ship, hoping to find fish in the churn. Otherwise they were completely alone. To the north lay the low hills of Baffin Island's Meta Incognita Peninsula and to the south the Ungava Peninsula and everything Paddy had ever known. To comfort himself, Paddy recalled the stories Ross Gibson had told of the endless herds of caribou and the abundant fox on Ellesmere Island and added in a few of his own. He thought about the meat they would eat, the animals they would see, the narwhals, bowhead whales and polar bears his grandparents had spoken about when he was a child but which he had never seen. He thought about his stepson losephie, sad thoughts mostly, but also happy thoughts about the next time they would meet. Perhaps by then, Paddy would own a Peterhead and his stepson would be able to give up working for the
qalunaat
and return to his place in the family.
A day or two later, the C.
D. Howe
pulled into Frobisher Bay which Inuit call Iqaluit. From there she would continue north along the coast of Baffin Island to Cumberland Sound, where the waters once roiled with blue whales and bowheads, now all hunted out. She would then make two more scheduled stops in southern Baffin, at Pannirtuuq and Qikiqtarjuaq, before meeting the Canadian Department of Transport icebreaker, the
d'Iberville
, at Clyde River. There, the plan was to transfer all the migrants on to the
d'Iberville.
The C.
D. Howe
would then carry on its supply duties in northern Baffin before heading back down south to Quebec, while the
d'Iberville
dropped the migrants off at the two proposed Ellesmere Island camps at Craig Harbour and Alexandra Fiord and at the Resolute Bay site on Cornwallis Island.
While the
Howe
was steaming along southern Baffin, the
d'Iberville
was in Resolute Bay unloading supplies. As she was lying at anchor, Henry Larsen paid a visit to the chief of the Resolute Bay base, Air Commodore Robert Ripley. A few weeks before, Ripley had
written a stern letter of complaint to the Department about its plans to move the Inuit. He did not think there was enough wildlife on Cornwallis and he was worried that the base would wind up having to bail the Inuit out or, worse still, that the Inuit might run into some kind of trouble the air base could not fix. On the same day as Larsen's visit, lames Cantley was stuck in his office in Ottawa listening to an RCAF Squadron Leader repeating the air force's gripe. Larsen knew the problem would not go away until he had given some personal reassurances to Ripley. During that meeting he promised the Air Commodore that the Inuit would be camped at some distance from the base and that they would be forbidden to travel there in any circumstances. If there were any problems at the camp, Constable Ross Gibson would have full authority to deal with them. Larsen said he was confident that the air base would not even know the Inuit were there.
After his meeting at the base, Larsen had taken off along the coast to look for a good spot for the campsite. It was midsummer and most of the snow and ice had melted into the muskeg, leaving brown pools of stagnant water. Here and there a few shreds of whitlow grass clung to the rubble of rock and Arctic lichen licked along its sunnier surfaces, but in most places the rock was bare of vegetation. Farther south, there were clouds of mosquitoes rising on the winds and Arctic bumble bees busying themselves at clumps of blossoming Arctic willow, but there was none of that here. The wind was full of ice crystals.
Down near the beach, about four miles from the air base, there were the remains of a Thule settlement. It was here that Larsen wanted the Inukjuamiut to settle. For hundreds of years, the Thule people had roamed across the High Arctic, setting up camps around the coastal area where whales congregated, but when the ice returned in the Little Ice Age during the fifteenth century, they had moved south or died out (no one knew which), leaving middens of bones, broken harpoons and chipped-granite arrowheads as well
as stone polar bear traps and the bleached whale-rib frames of what were once their houses. The land they lived on was covered in ice and snow for ten months of every year, they had no access to wood nor, with the exception of one or two meteorites, to metal, yet they had moved across the huge stretches of the Arctic, building villages and settling the previously uninhabited terrain. Equipped only with sealskin and bone
kayaks
and bone harpoons tipped with meteorite iron, they had hunted bowhead whales all along the northern continental coast for a thousand years before the arrival of European whalers, oblivious to the existence of other, easier lives. To Henry Larsen, even the accomplishments of the great Arctic explorers were nothing when set beside the tremendous human feat of Arctic settlement, and the policeman had not forgotten that the Inuit currently making their way to the High Arctic on the C.
D. Howe
were the Thule people's descendants. For a little while, Larsen thought, before the air base made janitors and porters of them as it would surely do, the men and women of Inukjuak would get their chance to live alone and untroubled in the footsteps of their forebears.
The following day, the
d'Iberville
weighed anchor and began heading back east into Lancaster Sound. At dawn on 12 August, she rounded Cape Parker on Devon Island and made her way through Lady Ann Strait towards Craig Harbour and Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island. The ice here had only just melted, letting loose the flotilla of icebergs it had captured on the previous freeze-up. The ship moved through the strait slowly, through growlers and pieces of floe which drifted about in the soupy water. At the entrance to Iones Sound, the water turned noisily, then fell silent, and the ship suddenly found herself surrounded on both sides by glassy slabs and blue ice scree. There, ahead of them, lay the Craig Harbour RCMP detachment buildings, two small clapboard houses sitting on an ocean of shale. The only land lying between the
d'Iberville
and northern Siberia, 1,500 miles distant across the polar ice cap, was the
mountainous ice capped terrain of Ellesmere Island. It was a forbidding place. Layers of peaks stretched back as far as the eye could see like a great army waiting the call to march. Ice mist glittered from the crags and drifted into the air and it would have been easy for anyone of a superstitious nature to suspect the island of being some kind of rocky anteroom to eternity, an in-between world where discarded spirits and the souls of never-born children curled up from the high peaks like mist and real life was just a dimming dream.
Henry Larsen spent a little while at Craig, briefing the two detachment police officers, Corporal Glenn Sargent and Constable Clay Fryer, who together would be responsible for the welfare of the group of Inuit going to Craig Harbour, just as Ross Gibson would be in charge of those at Resolute Bay. It had been almost impossible to discuss anything with the two men in detail on the radio. This far north, the signals phased in and out. One minute you could be holding a conversation and the next listening to an opera broadcast from Beijing or some fragment of Russian music. Larsen had worked with Sargent on the St
Roch
and trusted him. The corporal was a tough man but a true northerner and could be relied upon not to shy away from difficult decisions in hard conditions.
While Larsen briefed his subordinates, the crew of the
d'Iberville
unloaded her cargo. In three weeks' time the navigation season would be over and the
d'Iberville
still had to visit the old abandoned Alexandra Fiord police detachment on the east coast of Ellesmere to make it habitable, before her rendezvous with the C.
D. Howe far
to the south at Clyde River on Baffin Island. The
d'Iberville
left Craig Harbour with haste in a thick mist. She continued on round the heel of Ellesmere Island at Cape Norton Shaw until ice began to creep in round her hull and the sounds of grinding and moaning came through the mist like the roars of disturbed animals. Before her lay Smith Sound. The American Arctic explorer, Robert E. Peary, once wrote: “There is probably no place where ice navigation is so hazardous as Smith Sound …The negotiation of the three hundred and fifty miles … presents problems and difficulties which will test
the experience and nerve of the ablest navigator and the powers of the strongest vessel that man can build.” They were heading directly into it.