The Long Exile (12 page)

Even as he accustoms himself to the land, though, Ross Gibson continues to be baffled by the men and women who live on it. He finds so many things about them to admire: their honesty, resourcefulness, courage, capacity for hard work, their cheerful demeanour. Their lives are lean and there is a particular intensity to them which draws Ross Gibson as it drew Robert Flaherty before him. Still, he can't begin to understand them. Their impassiveness, their inscrutability. He interprets what are, in fact, a series of adaptations to harsh surroundings as evasiveness and guile. Why do they refuse to catch his eye, why declare their intention of doing something he wants them to do then simply not do it? Why appear so fatalistic, so unwilling, or unable, perhaps, to plan? Why so riotous, so childlike in their gleeful dancing, their sled races, their interminable cat's eradies,
then all of a sudden, so completely self-contained, so remote, so utterly impenetrable?

Of all the Inuit he encounters during the course of his patrols around the settlement and beyond, Ross Gibson finds Paddy Aqia-tusukboth easiest and most challenging. The man has a certain confidence, he has opinions and seems willing to voice them. You can get your teeth into Paddy. You can push him and feel him pushing back. All the same, he can be demanding and difficult to control.

Corporal Webster says they call him Fatty. He cannot remember why, since Paddy Aqiatusuk is not actually fat. (In fact, Aqiatusuk means replete or satisfied.)

But, Fatty it is.

Paddy Aqiatusuk comes in to the settlement often to sell his carvings. In the early 1950s, a white man by the name of lames Houston arrived on the
Nascopies
successor, the C.
D. Howe
, with a grant from the Canadian government to help promote Inuit handicraft. He returned to the south after that first visit with several thousand carvings, including many by Aqiatusuk, and sold them more or less immediately. After that he came every year, buying carvings and holding carving workshops to encourage the Inukjuamiut to carve what those in the south wanted to see: hunters, polar bears, shamans. Of all the sculptors, lames Houston rates Aqiatusuk's work as among the best. You may see some of it today among the collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilisations in Ottawa.

In mid-April 1953, only six months after his posting begins, Ross Gibson picks up a telegram from Superintendent Henry Larsen, head of “G” or Arctic Division at the RCMP HQ in Ottawa. It reads as follows:

It is suggested by Director Northern Administration to move this summer on the
C. D. Howe
from Port Harrison detachment 4 Eskimo families to Craig Harbour on Ellesmere Island and 3 families to Cape Herschel on Ellesmere Island to hunt and trap for a living under the supervision of RCM Police detachments.
Please ascertain whether any families are willing to go and if so their names and identification numbers and numbers of dependants and relationships of families involved … Conditions on Ellesmere should be carefully explained particularly the complete dark period …and other short days and only annual visits by supply ship … Families will be brought home at end of one year if they so desire.

Gibson hands the telegram to Webster, who gives it a cursory read, flips it over in his hand and offers it back. This one's for you.

A feeling of dread wells up in Ross Gibson. He understands something of what this request entails. What he does not yet know is that this telegram will colour the remainder of his life.

In 1953, the Department of Northern Affairs in Ottawa, the “Northern Administration” of Larsen's telegram, was an extraordinary place to work. Still relatively new, a creation of Canada's postwar awakening to its great northern lands, the Department was staffed almost entirely by ex-Hudson Bay Company men, most of whom had done their time in the Arctic and knew each other from past postings there. These doughty men were young boys when Roald Amundsen sailed his way through the Northwest Passage and Robert E. Peary reached the North Pole. Their heroes were men of the golden age of Arctic exploration, men like Peary and Amundsen, Otto H. Sverdrup and Vilhjalmur Stefansson. They grew up with
Nanook
, and later, when they were working for the Hudson Bay Company in its Arctic postings, they saw Nanook and Nyla reflected in the faces of the Inuit they met. They fell in love with the Arctic but it became
their
Arctic, a whole world to the north of the tree line about which their friends and colleagues in the south knew almost nothing. They remained a tiny, self-regarding confederation of amateur experts, working now within the conventions of the federal bureaucracy but always, somehow, considering themselves a tribe apart.

Of this band of fellow travellers, there was none so confident in
his own mystique as James Cantley, the man who, in the 1930s, had set up the Baffin Trading Company post in Inukjuak to rival the Hudson Bay Company post there. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Cantley had done what many bright, impoverished Scotsmen had done before him and immigrated to Canada as a teenager to work for the Hudson Bay Company. He had made it as far as Assistant Fur Trade Commissioner at the Bay before leaving to go it alone. When his Baffin Trading Company went bust, which it quickly did, Cantley slunk back to Ottawa and found himself a cosy niche in the newly created Department of Northern Affairs. His failure as an independent fur trader proving no bar to success in the Arctic Division of the Department, Cantley soon found himself promoted to head of the Department's Arctic Services Section. Moving the Inuit out of Inukjuak was originally Cantley's idea and it was he who had done most of the paperwork on the move.

The telegram in Ross Gibson's hands is from Henry Larsen, head of the “G” Division of the RCMP. Younger than Cantley by three years, Henry Asbjorn Larsen is already sitting at the top of a glittering northern career. Admiring voices speak of him in the same breath as Roald Amundsen, and there are undeniable similiarities. Larsen and Amundsen were both born in the same Norwegian fiord country and, like Amundsen, Larsen spent much of his childhood around boats. In 1928, when Josephie Flaherty and Ross Gibson were both boys, Henry Larsen immigrated to Canada and joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and was immediately assigned to the St
Roch
, based out of Pauline Cove on Herschel Island, as ship's first mate. The St
Roch
was a revolutionary ship. Made from Douglas fir sheathed in Australian ironbark, she had been built with special pressure beams and a rounded hull which would allow her to bob upwards under ice pressure. Her job was to police the Arctic seas and monitor game regulations while moving personnel between police posts. Sailing in her was a test of any man's sea legs, the rounded hull listed terribly in the swell, but Larsen's salty good
humour, his physical courage, his navigational skills, even his penchant for singing rousing hymns up on deck when all other hands were trembling below and praying for their lives, singled him out. After he was promoted to captain he naturalised and became a Canadian citizen. In a few years he had become known throughout the Arctic as Hanorie Umiarjuaq, Henry with the Big Ship.

While Larsen was skippering the St
Roch
around the Arctic, the RCMP was trying to extend its reach in the far northern Canadian mainland and on the eastern Arctic islands. In luly 1922, the
Arctic
, led by Captain loseph-Elzar Bernier and expedition commander J. D. Craig, left Quebec City to set up an RCMP post close to Smith Sound to deter Inughuit Inuit living in northwestern Greenland from crossing the ice bridge across Smith Sound between Greenland and Ellesmere Island and hunting musk ox there. The ship was beaten back by heavy ice to a rocky inlet on Ellesmere's southern coast and Bernier and Craig decided to set up a detachment wherever they could land, which happened to be on a small promontory somewhat to the east of Grise Fiord, known henceforth as Craig Harbour, the place to where Henry Larsen was now planning to send Inuit families from Inukjuak. At Craig Harbour, the Mounties unloaded a prefabricated detachment hut, along with the head of the detachment, Inspector Wilcox, a regular detachment constable, Special Constable Kakto, and his wife, Ooarloo, who would act as housekeeper. Kakto and Ooarloo's two children would live with them. The Craig Harbour post soon foundered, however, jinxed, perhaps, by the knowledge of its own, accidental, birth. Only months after landing, Kakto and Ooarloo's children died of flu and their parents began demanding to go back to their home in Pond Inlet on Baffin Island. That same winter, the burlap in the inner lining of the ceiling of the detachment building caught fire, the extinguishers were frozen solid and the men had to watch while the flames ate their home. The inspector could find no willing replacement for Kakto on Baffin Island and Wilcox wrote to his superiors in Ottawa that “the climate is far more severe than Baffin Island, colder and darker in winter, making hunting
conditions far different from Pond Inlet,” and that it was impossible to persuade Canadian Inuit to live there. Ottawa appeared undeterred by the news. In future, RCMP headquarters decreed, the detachment would have to recruit its Inuit special constables from among the Inughuit, or polar Inuit of northwestern Greenland, who could better tolerate the conditions. Canada needed flag bearers in her northernmost reaches and, one way or another, she would have them. The detachment at Craig Harbour would remain open.

It was no secret that life at Craig Harbour was as tough as walrus leather for any white man who had the misfortune to be posted there and tougher still for the special constables. The detachment quickly became a kind of black joke in the force, the empty threat of irritated superiors or resentful subordinates. In summer, the Moun-ties were expected to go out after walrus and seal in order to build up a winter cache of meat for the sled dogs. As summer gave out to the short autumn, they would have to ready the detachment building for the oncoming winter, which meant making good the insulation banking, shovelling gravel into the holes in the tuff which had opened up around the detachment building during the summer months and giving the whole place a new coat of creosote and paint. When the dark period arrived in October, the Mounties would be expected to type their reports and hunker down against the weather. After the first light of the New Year arrived in February, they would set about repairing the sleds and dog harnesses and equipment then take off on the sleds to Flagler and Hayes fiords to hunt seal there. In March they would make dried pemmican for dog food to see them through the patrolling period. During the best of the High Arctic weather, in May and lune, the Mounties would take turns going out on patrol. Their trips would take them as far out west as Norwegian Bay and east to Cape Isabella, just shy of the North Geomagnetic Pole. In luly and August they would make preparations for the annual arrival of the supply ship.

Despite its various depredations, Craig Harbour was an exciting posting for a man who wanted to test his limits and could stomach
the isolation. There was always plenty of bully beef, tobacco and booze. Annual leave was generous and the pay included a hefty hardship allowance. Though hunting musk ox and polar bear was prohibited, headquarters in Ottawa turned a blind eye to it and an active constable at Craig Harbour could make a tidy sum from dealing in pelts. In 1932, Inspector Sandys-Wunsch of the Craig Harbour detachment earned C$5,000 from pelts alone.

The detachment was ferociously expensive to maintain, though, and it was quietly abandoned in the late 1930s, only to be opened up once again in 1951, at the start of the Cold War, when it became the closest Canadian police detachment to the Soviet Union, across the North Pole.

With Craig Harbour closed, the Canadian hold on her High Arctic territories once again became tenuous. One of the thorns in the Canadian side remained Amundsen's successful navigation through the Northwest Passage. Amundsen was a Norwegian and his voyage had been followed by enquiries from the Norwegian government as to the sovereign status of those High Arctic islands first navigated and mapped by another Norwegian, Otto Sverdrup. The Canadian administration began to look for other ways to establish authority in the region. In 1940, it asked Henry Larsen to sail the
St. Roch
and a crew of eight through the Northwest Passage. Canada was keen for a Canadian to complete the navigation before an American got to it. Larsen set out by the southern route but the
St. Roch
got stuck in ice and was forced to overwinter in the Prince of Wales Strait off Banks Island. She pulled free the following summer, on 31 luly 1941, and began heading north once more, only to find herself trapped by ice again in lames Ross Strait. Northwesterly gales funnelled down McClintock Channel and flung floes against the ship. The ship sailed on but by 11 September she became iced in once more near the magnetic pole. Again, the crew were forced to overwinter and the following August, with the
St. Roch
still ice-bound, Larsen ordered several gunpowder charges to be set off to break the pack around her bows and reduce pressure on her hull. It was a dangerous
strategythe charges could so easily have sunk the ship but it worked. The St
Roch
escaped her winter prison on the summer winds. But her difficulties were not over. The onward voyage was plagued by dreadful weather. Blizzards started up out of nowhere only to give way to dense banks of fog. Sometimes the fog was so bad the crew had to navigate by watching the wake of the ship and try to keep it in a straight line. At Davis Strait they were confronted with constellations of icebergs and growlers and the sea grew so cold that the men were forced to chip ice off the propeller as they went. On 10 August one of the ship's cylinders blew, the engine room flooded and they narrowly avoided sinking. They put into Pond Inlet on the northeastern coast of Baffin Island to make repairs and on 22 September 1942, more than two years after she had first set out, the St
Roch
at last arrived at Bateau Harbour, Newfoundland, to a heroes' welcome. Henry Larsen and his crew had become the first Canadians to cross the Northwest Passage, and in 1949, after nearly twenty years at the helm of the St
Roch
, Henry Larsen was promoted to commander of the RCMP's “G” Division.