Table Of ContentENCOUNTERS ON THE PASSAGE:
INUIT MEET THE EXPLORERS
‘First communication with the natives of Prince Regents Bay, as drawn by John
Sackheouse and Presented to Capt. Ross. Augt 10. 1818.’
ENCOUNTERS
PASSAGE
ON THE
Inuit Meet the Explorers
DOROTHY HARLEY EBER
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© Dorothy Harley Eber 2008
University of Toronto Press Incorporated
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9275-5
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Eber, Dorothy
Encounters on the passage : Inuit meet the explorers / Dorothy Harley Eber.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9275-5
1.Northwest Passage – Discovery and exploration – British. 2.Inuit –
Nunavut – History. 3.Oral tradition – Nunavut. 4.Explorers – Northwest
Passage – History. 5.Explorers – Nunavut – History. 6.Oral history. I.Title.
E99.E7E335 2008 910.9163(cid:99)27 C2008-905150-5
In different form, short sections of this book have appeared in ‘Recording the Spirit
World,’ Natural History Magazine (August 2002); ‘Eva Talooki: Her Tribute to Seed
Beads, Long-Time Jewels of the Arctic,’ Innuit Art Quarterly (Spring 2004); ‘A
Chance Encounter with Simon Tookoome,’ Inuit Art Quarterly (Spring 2001); and
‘Rumours of Franklin,’ The Beaver (June/July 1996).
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing
program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing
activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program (BPIDP).
Illustration on previous pages: ‘First communication with the natives of Prince
Regents Bay, as drawn by John Sackheouse and Presented to Capt. Ross. Augt. 10.
1818.’ Sackheouse, a Greenlandic Eskimo who served Ross as an interpreter,
shows Captains John Ross and Edward Parry with the ‘wild people,’ or Arctic
Highlanders as Ross named them, in Northern Greenland, at the outset of the
British nineteenth-century search for the Northwest Passage.
To the memory of GFE, who gave me the tape recorder, and to the interpreters
of the North, past and present, without whose work the written history of the
North would be merely a white man’s story.
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
Chronology and Maps of Principal Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century
Arctic Expeditions by Sea xxi
Prologue: Opening Salvos 3
1 Into the Arctic Archipelago: Edward Parry at Igloolik and the
Shaman’s Curse 12
2 John Ross at Kablunaaqhiuvik – the ‘Place for Meeting White
People’ 37
3 The Franklin Era: Burial of a Great White Shaman 64
4 The Death Marches: ‘They were seen carrying human meat’ 74
5 New Franklin Stories: The Ship at Imnguyaaluk 84
6 A Northwest Passage on Foot – and Lost Opportunity 108
7 Norwegian Victory: ‘Amusi’ and the Prize 116
8 Modern Times 131
Appendix 1: Rumours of Hudson 137
Appendix 2: Charles Francis Hall and the Lost Men 139
Notes 143
Illustration Credits 159
Index 161
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Acknowledgments
This book draws in the main on personal interviews conducted and
tape-recorded in locations across Nunavut, and occasionally on the tele-
phone, from 1994 to 2008. I owe my sincerest thanks to all those I inter-
viewed for so patiently answering my questions. I was fortunate
enough to work with amazingly talented interpreters, and I would like
to express my admiration for their remarkable skills and my thanks for
their major contribution to this book. I am most grateful, too, to have
had the opportunity to read and to quote from the transcripts of inter-
views done with the elders of Igloolik and held in the archives of the
Inullariit Elders’ Society at the Igloolik Research Centre. Among the
able interpreters who assisted me in Nunavut, I particularly want to
mention Tommy Anguttitauruq, Lisa Ell Ipeelie, Oleepa Ikidluak, Leah
Otak, Louise Anaija, James Pamioyok, and Christopher Amautinuar. I
thank also Pia Pootoogook, who sadly died before this book was pub-
lished, and Papak Panegyuk, both of whom helped with the review of
certain sections of tape back in Montreal.
This book depends also on the records, excerpts from which are
freely quoted, of expeditions to the Canadian Arctic, from those of Mar-
tin Frobisher in the sixteenth century to those of Sir William Edward
Parry, Sir John Ross, and Sir Richard Collinson in the nineteenth cen-
tury, and Roald Amundsen, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and Knud Rasmus-
sen in the twentieth. I am indebted, too, to the many insights in books
on nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Arctic exploration.
Among earlier studies, I would like to mention R.J. Cyriax’s Sir John
Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition (London: Methuen & Co. 1939), still one
of the best books on the Franklin tragedy, and L.P. Kirwan’s The White
Road (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959). Particularly helpful among more
