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June 30, 2006

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
July 1, 1860 — Burial at Sea: The Death of Kudlago

KENN HARPER

In 1860 Charles Francis Hall began making plans for his first expedition to the Canadian Arctic. In New London and Groton, Connecticut, he met the whalemen who held the key to his success.

One of them was Captain Sidney O. Budington, who offered Hall passage. Budington had whaled off southeastern Baffin Island, and had been in the habit of taking Inuit he worked with south to spend a winter with his family. Through him, Hall met one such man, whose name Hall recorded as Kudlago, who was spending that winter in Groton. Hall befriended the man, expecting that he would be able to use him as an interpreter and guide in the north.

On March 8, Hall briefly addressed a meeting of the American Geographical and Statistical Society on his plans, the first of many formal lectures that Hall would give on the Arctic. Although the main speaker was Dr. Isaac Hayes, a veteran Arctic explorer who was then planning an expedition to the High Arctic, Kudlago, who accompanied Hall, was the biggest attraction for the newspaper reporters in attendance, who mangled the spelling of his name variously as “Cudlockdchue” and “Cudlouchdchdue”.

Hall’s spellings of Inuit names were extremely unreliable and it is often dangerous to hazard a guess as to what was really meant. But perhaps in these newspaper spellings we have a closer approximation of the actual pronunciation than in Hall’s own rendering. Comparing both spellings, I think his name was probably Kallaarjuk. But I’m not certain, and so I’ll continue to use “Kudlago” for this account.

Hall described Kudlago as “a remarkably modest and unassuming man.” Kudlago was “quick to learn, and… never expressed surprise at anything. He looked upon the works of civilization with interest, but never with wonder.”

Hall wrote: “One day, while riding in the cars toward New York, a boy passed through distributing circulars, giving one to Kudlago. He took it, looking attentively to see what others might do, and then, as they did, so, to all appearances, did he! Others held the circulars up before them and read. Kudlago held his up before his eyes and appeared to read. Though he could not read a word, yet he looked learned. Solomon may have been wiser, but surely not sharper than Kudlago.”

In mid-May, Hall and Kudlago both sailed north with Budington on the whaler, George Henry. For Budington it was a whaling voyage. For Hall, it was the New Franklin Research Expedition. For Kudlago, unfortunately, it was a voyage of death.

In the early part of the journey, Hall got to know Kudlago well. Unfortunately, the man took ill. He caught a severe cold as the ship passed through the fog-shrouded waters near Newfoundland. His condition deteriorated quickly, to the point that he was unable to spend much time talking with Hall at all. The crew pitched a tent on the deck for him, and shot eider ducks so that Kudlago could eat their hearts and livers raw. But their efforts were for naught. His health steadily worsened.

Kudlago knew he was near death. In his last days he talked of his home and family in Baffin Land, and his hope that he would see them once more. “His prayer,” Hall wrote, “was that he might arrive home, and once more look upon his native land — its mountains, its snows, its ice — and upon his wife and his little ones; he would then ask no more of earth.”

In the early morning of Sunday, July 1, off the Greenland coast, still about 300 miles from home, Kudlago spoke his last words. They were in the pidgin whaler jargon that Inuit used to communicate with whalers in the eastern Arctic. Hall recorded the man’s pitiful question. “Taku siku? taku siku?” he asked hopefully. (“Do you see ice? Do you see ice?”) Then the Inuk, who had gone to Groton as a reward for his service to Budington, passed on to his eternal reward.

At Captain Budington’s request, Hall took part in Kudlago’s burial at sea. The entire ship’s company gathered for a solemn service to pay their last respects to the popular man. Hall read a section from the Masonic Manual and, after a prayer from the same work, Kudlago’s shrouded body was consigned to the deep.

Hall was a deeply religious man who saw the hand of God in everything. He had earlier described the first iceberg he saw as “a mountain of alabaster resting calmly upon the bosom of the dark blue sea... Its fashioning was that of the Great Architect.” An hour after Kudlago’s body had slid into the sea, Hall gazed back to the ocean grave. “A snow-white monument of mountain size, and of God’s own fashioning, was over it,” he wrote. Hall sketched the iceberg and named it “Kudlago’s Monument.”

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.

June 23, 2006

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
June 27, 1931 - US Regrets Loss of Ellesmere Island

KENN HARPER

Within the last year Canada has seemed determined to draw attention to questions about its sovereignty over the Far North. There is the well-known dispute over Hans Island, and lingering concerns over the Northwest Passage and the US's insistence that it is an international waterway.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Canada was busy establishing its sovereignty over the High Arctic through the establishment of police posts. Inevitably the question was asked: Why does Canada spend money policing an island like Ellesmere Island, which is uninhabited? Who else would want it?

Part of the answer was provided in 1931 by an American. And not just any American, but a man who had commanded U.S. forces during the First World War, and later became director of aviation in the U.S. Army. This pioneer recognized the importance of the Arctic to future polar air routes. He was Major-General William Mitchell. In 1931 he wrote an article, published in the popular Liberty magazine, with the futuristic title: "The Next War - What About Our National Defence?" This might have seemed an odd title, for the world was enduring a restless peace and the economy had been plunged into depression. Official Nazism in Germany was then in its infancy. Then again, one might say that the U.S. is always looking for the next war.

Major-General Mitchell wrote:

"A few years ago great nations searched the earth for suitable naval bases. Now this search is for air bases... The Azores, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland, might all be used as air bases against us in case of war with Europe."

And then he wrote specifically about northern Ellesmere Island. Following in the tradition of Americans explorers, Peary, Cook and MacMillan, he called it Grant Land.

"The United States very foolishly renounced its claims to Grant Land in the Arctic when we purchased the Virgin Islands. (The United States gave up any claim to the High Arctic when it purchased the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917.) Had an airman been consulted about this he would have shown that Grant Land may form one of the greatest air bases in the world..."

"From its position opposite the northern tip of Greenland it is, also, equidistant from New York, San Francisco, China, Russia and western Europe. Supplies for air forces on these islands could be carried through the air in either airplanes or dirigibles, or under water in submarines."

A writer in 1934 suggested that: "Were Canada completely to abandon her title to Ellesmere and its near neighbours, some other nation would be glad to take them over... The maintenance of Mounted Police posts in these regions is in accord with the modern far-reaching insistence upon effective occupation and magisterial or police authority everywhere as a condition of sovereignty."

When the United States bought Alaska from the Russians for a paltry seven million dollars, there was tremendous opposition. The money was wasted, thought much of the public, and the purchase was referred to as Seward's Folly. William H. Seward was the American Secretary of State who negotiated the purchase. Some folly!

Years later, Canada lost a boundary dispute with Alaska over a long strip of land along the British Columbia coast - the Alaska Panhandle. Canada lost in large part because of the United States assertion that, although Canada claimed the area, it did not occupy it.

Today Ellesmere Island is occupied by civilians at its southern end, and by Canadian military personnel at its northern extreme. Major-General Mitchell's dream of an American airbase in the High Arctic came to pass with the building of Thule Air Base in Greenland in the early 1950s. But the Canadian High Arctic is still of immense strategic importance. Mitchell's 1931 article was an early recognition of that.

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
June 19, 1764 - The birth of John Barrow

KENN HARPER

John Barrow was a civil servant who rose from humble origins to a position of influence in the British government. For almost a half century, he was the Second Secretary of the British Admiralty. His interests were wide-ranging but he had an especial interest in the Arctic and its exploration. What was known of the Canadian Arctic until the ill-fated Franklin expedition in 1845, was learned largely as a result of expeditions sent out by Barrow.

He was born in Lancashire on June 19, 1764, the son of a farmer. As a child he was bright, excelling in Latin, Greek and mathematics. But he left school at the age of 13 to work in an iron foundry. Working his way slowly up from the underclass, Barrow became a master at making and maintaining important contacts. In his late twenties, through some of those contacts, he attracted the attention of Lord Macartney, and accompanied him to China when Macartney became ambassador to the imperial court there. He remained with Macartney when he became the first British governor of Cape Colony in South Africa.

Back in England, John Barrow was a “dark-haired, moon-faced man of forty” when he was appointed Second Secretary of the Admiralty, the highest-ranking administrative position in the organization. Except for a few months, he held this post until his retirement 41 years later. The Royal Navy was at its largest when Barrow joined the Admiralty, but fell into a period of quick decline after the defeat of Napoleon. Barrow was concerned to find employment for the otherwise unneeded naval officers. This, combined with his innate curiosity over everything geographical, led him to propose a series of expeditions that would fill in the blanks on the globe. The biggest of those blanks lay to the north.

In 1818, Barrow sent two expeditions to the Arctic, one via Svalbard which was tasked with reaching the North Pole, the other via Davis Strait charged with finding a Northwest Passage. Both were failures.

Barrow had a low tolerance for failure. And he developed a special loathing for John Ross, commander of the expedition which had returned without finding a Northwest Passage. Part way through Lancaster Sound, the eastern entrance to the passage, Ross thought he saw a range of mountains blocking his path. He turned back. It was the wrong decision. The Croker Mountains (as Ross named them) do not exist, and many under Ross’s command claimed not to have seen them at all. Ross had been deceived by a mirage.

By this time Barrow, as well as being the power that controlled the Admiralty, was also a prolific writer and thereby gained influence far beyond his administrative role. In 1818 he wrote “Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions,” and he wrote extensively for the influential “Quarterly Review,” often in articles that were published anonymously. He used his poison pen to effectively hamper the career of John Ross, who remained officially on the sidelines for decades.

At the same time Barrow advanced the career of William Edward Parry, who had been Ross’s second in command on the failed expedition. The following year Barrow sent Parry back to the Arctic, where he pushed through Lancaster Sound, through the non-existent Croker Mountains, to winter successfully on Melville Island, the first expedition by ship to ever winter deliberately in the High Arctic. Other Arctic names whose careers were advanced by Barrow were John Franklin, George Lyon, Frederick Beechey and George Back.

Despite his obsession with the Arctic, Barrow only traveled to high latitudes once in his life, and that was as a teenager aboard a whaler bound for Spitsbergen. Nonetheless he got a lot of mileage out of telling after-dinner tales of the brief summer’s voyage. One of those occasions may have added to his dislike for Ross. John Ross wrote:

“After dinner Barrow, as usual, began to repeat his story of having been at Greenland in a whaler when he was a boy. A significant nod from me and a negative shake of the head attracted the notice of Lady Melville, who quickly said “Mr. Barrow, what was the name of the ship you went to Greenland in?” “I — I do not remember the name just now.” “What was the Captain’s name?” says her Ladyship. Barrow had also no Captain’s name ready and replied “I — I don’t remember just now but it was out of Whitehaven.” “Whitehaven,” says I, “that is a small dry harbour. No whaler ever sailed out of that.” Barrow… coloured up to the eyes, while the whole company burst out in laughter but from that moment Barrow was my bitter enemy.”

But perhaps there is another reason for Barrow’s low regard for John Ross. Barrow was a man who took great pride in his erudition. In the “Quarterly Review” he published numerous reviews of newly-published volumes on exploration during the course of his career. But a review by John Barrow was nothing like the brief reviews published in modern-day journals. His reviews were mini-books in themselves, often running well in excess of twenty-five pages of small print. Barrow modestly claimed that they “were written off hand as an amusement.”

Shortly after Ross had humiliated Barrow at Lord Melville’s dinner, he committed an even graver crime. He accused Barrow of trying to rewrite Ross’s soon-to-be-published book and complained that something that Barrow had written was ungrammatical. Now here was an insult! Barrow stormed out of the publisher’s office, saying, “I’ll have nothing more to do with you.”

The final expedition organized by John Barrow was the tragic adventure commanded by John Franklin, which disappeared into the Arctic in 1845. Barrow planned it, but he opposed the choice of the 59-year-old Franklin as its leader. But this time Barrow didn’t get his way. He retired a few months before the ships sailed. Three years later, with Franklin lost, but with hope remaining that he would yet be found, John Barrow died at the age of 84.

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.

June 9, 2006

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
June 7, 1929 — Inughuit hunters pass the Thule Act

The Thule Act was a unique piece of legislation passed by a group of Inughuit hunters in the Thule District of northern Greenland, without recourse to, or permission from, any national government.

Knud Rasmussen had established his Thule Station, a trading post, in the district in 1909. The Danish government, which controlled west Greenland north only as far as Melville Bay, had no presence in the district, and could exert no authority over the people there. Rasmussen, in fact, was a benevolent law unto himself.

He ran his trading post, really an excuse to be in the district and conduct scientific and ethnographic research, as unobtrusively as possible. He provided the Inuit with the trade goods that they had become accustomed to through years of sporadic trading with whalers and members of the Peary expeditions. And he respected the Inuit ways.

Rasmussen could foresee that change would eventually come to the district. He wanted to safeguard the native population from disruption as much as possible. In 1925 the Danish Parliament asked Rasmussen to cede the Cape York District to Danish colonial authority. But Rasmussen refused.

Instead he assisted the Inughuit leaders in establishing a Hunter’s Council in the district, a means of settling disputes and establishing authority in this no-man’s land. On June 7, 1929, the Hunters’ Council adopted the Thule Act — the “Laws of the Cape York Station Thule.”

This Act laid out rules of conduct according to customary Inughuit practice. Rights of movement, hunting and living in the entire district were codified in the Act. Article 5 ensured that Inughuit hunters participated in all decision-making about their territory. The Hunters’ Council was the only body with the legal authority to make laws and propose initiatives that would affect the local way of life. In its preamble, the Act declared “all members of the Tribe constitute the society, and the society speaks through the Hunters’ Council.”

Unlike what passes for consensus in today’s bureaucracy-bedevilled northern governments, this was a true consensus government in which decisions were reached through lengthy discussion and eventual agreement.

What is more amazing is that the Thule Act was ratified by the Danish Parliament two years later. This meant, in fact, that the Danish Parliament accepted the legitimacy of the Hunters’ Council and its right to pass legislation relevant to the Thule District.

Even in 1937, when an agreement was reached transferring the Thule Station to the Danish authorities, it was acknowledged that all that was being transferred was the trading station. In fact, the Danish Prime Minister went so far as to write a note to the chairman of the Hunters’ Council saying that “the takeover by the State of the trading station at Thule... does not affect the present legal position of the district.” This left all rights laid down in the Thule Act still under the jurisdiction of the Inughuit.

In 1953, when the Danish government unilaterally relocated 116 Inughuit from Uummannaq to Qaanaaq at the behest of the United States, it was in contravention of the Thule Act, which remained in force until 1964.

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.

June 9, 2006

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
June 11, 1848 — The fate of Sir John Franklin

KENN HARPER

Sir John Franklin: one of the most inept explorers the Arctic has ever seen.

---

John Franklin, born in England, joined the Royal Navy at the age of 14. But in May of 1815, with the Napoleonic Wars drawing to an end, he found himself discharged. Three years later, the Admiralty, under the determined leadership of its second secretary, John Barrow, became interested in exploring the Arctic and finding a passage to the Pacific, either through what we now know as the Northwest Passage or over the North Pole. Franklin was given command of a ship, the Trent, as part of a two-ship expedition under the command of David Buchan. They attempted, unsuccessfully, to cross the Arctic Ocean but were stopped, prophetically, by impenetrable ice north of Spitsbergen. Franklin and impassable ice — it was a theme that would recur.

In 1819, Franklin left for the Arctic again, this time in charge of a land expedition sent by the Admiralty to explore the north coast of America eastward from the mouth of the Coppermine River to Hudson Bay. That expedition eventually descended the Coppermine, thereby confirming Samuel Hearne’s earlier account of reaching the Arctic Ocean.

The expedition met some of its objectives, but did not come anywhere close to reaching Hudson Bay. One member, Robert Hood, was murdered, and his murderer, an Iroquois boatman, was in turn executed. George Simpson, the outspoken governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, had little regard for Franklin, his failure to adapt to Arctic conditions and his inflexible approach. He wrote that Franklin “has not the physical powers required for the labour of moderate voyaging in this country; he must have three meals per diem, tea is indispensable, and with the utmost exertion he cannot walk above eight miles in one day, so that it does not follow [that] if those gentlemen are unsuccessful that the difficulties are insurmountable.”

But he had shown one quality that impressed the Admiralty — courage. Perhaps they didn’t recognize the fine line between that sterling quality and its tragic counterpart — foolhardiness.

And so in 1825 he was back in the Arctic again on another overland expedition. He built his winter quarters at a fort that he named for himself on the shores of Great Bear Lake. This time they reached the Arctic Ocean via the mighty Mackenzie River. Franklin’s party then went westward to map the coast, while another party traveled eastward. By the fall of 1827 he was back in the comfort of England.

Franklin’s next major posting was as lieutenant governor of Tasmania, then known as Van Diemen’s Land, a penal colony south of Australia. When he returned home in 1844, he was given the command of the Erebus and Terror, to leave the following year for the Northwest Passage. At 58, he was too old for the task, and much more out of shape than when he had met George Simpson almost 30 years earlier.

Franklin’s was the best-provisioned Arctic expedition to that time. His two ships carried 134 men and supplies for three years. They left England amidst much fanfare and great expectations in May of 1845 and were last seen by whalers in northern Baffin Bay on July 26. And then, silence. John Franklin was never heard from again and no trace was found of his lost expedition for five years.

A huge search effort resulted — 30 expeditions during the 12 years from 1847 to 1859. In that year, on King William Island, William Hobson, a member of Francis Leopold McClintock’s expedition, found a message in a cylinder at the base of a cairn. The paper had been signed by James Fitzjames, captain of the Erebus, and by Francis Crozier, who had been captain of the Terror. It presented the facts starkly — that both ships had been deserted on April 22, 1848, having been beset in the ice for over a year. It went on to say that “Sir John Franklin died on 11th June 1847; and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date 9 officers & 15 men.”

Ice had once again proven to be John Franklin’s nemesis. The rest of his men perished. His ships have never been found. McClintock’s expedition solved the fate of Franklin himself, but left unanswered many other questions about the expedition.

The Franklin mystery continues to consume the passions of many Arctic historians and adventurers. They want to know what happened to the ships, where (if at all) the records were cached, why and where all the men died. A century and half later, small expeditions head annually to the central Canadian Arctic in search of the rest of the story of this incredibly inept but “pious, diffident, gentle” man.

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.

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