The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World

313 Pages·2005·16.64 MB·English

by  Robert McGhee

The Last Imaginary Place
ALSO BY ROBERT MCGHEE
Canada Rediscovered
The Ancient People of the Arctic
The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher:
An Elizabethan Adventure
T h e L a s t
I m a g i n a r y
P l a c e
A Human History of
the Arctic World
Robert McGhee
2005
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Copyright © 2005 by Robert McGhee
First published by Key Porter Books,Canada,2005
Published by Oxford University Press,Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGhee,Robert.
The last imaginary place :a human history of the Artic world / Robert
McGhee.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographic references and index.
ISBN-13:0-19-518368-9
ISBN-10:0-19-518368-1
Arctic regions—History.I.Title.
G606.M39 2004
909’.0913—dc22
2004066296
Printing number:9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
C
O N T E N T S
Acknowledgements 6
Prelude:An Arctic Vision 7
1 After the Ice Age 11
2 A Distant Paradise:The Arctic in Ancient Thought 20
3 A Hunter’s World 34
4 In Arctic Siberia 56
5 Vikings and Arctic Farmers:The Norse Atlantic Saga 74
6 Inuit 102
7 Ice and Death on the Northeast Passage 130
8 Martin Frobisher’s Gold Mines 153
9 The Rape of Spitsbergen 173
10 Bay of Tragedy 190
11 Frozen Glory 216
12 The Peoples’Land 240
13 An Arctic Journey 272
Useful References,Interesting Reading 275
Index 287
A
C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
It is impossible to acknowledge the debts that I owe to so many people
who stimulated my fascination for the Arctic,who made it possible for me
to travel and work in the region,and who taught me what I know of it.
Farley Mowat’s early books on the Inuit of the Barren Grounds kindled my
first interest, and his writing over the subsequent years continues to
broaden my appreciation for his perception and humanity.The late William
E.Taylor,Jr.introduced me to Arctic archaeology,and encouraged me to
make my living at it.This was possible only through the help,patience and
good humour of the dozens of students and colleagues who worked with
me in field camps over the decades.Of these I must make individual men-
tion of Dale Russell,whose company I enjoyed over several summers from
the Mackenzie Delta to the High Arctic,and Jim Tuck,who introduced me
to the archaeology of Newfoundland and Labrador and who mentored me
in the Elizabethan archaeology of Baffin Island. Louwrens Hacquebord
made it possible for Jim and me to visit Svalbard,and to experience this
very different part of the Arctic.Hansjurgen Müller-Beck introduced me
to the European community of Arctic research, and to investigations in
Siberia.The time that I spent in Chukotka would not have been possible
without the continuous assistance of Mikhail Bronshtein, and I wish to
express my particular gratitude to Misha and his wife Lena for their hos-
pitality and generosity.I am also grateful to the people of Qausuittuq who
have helped me over the years that I have worked near their community.
I wish to thank Anna Porter of Key Porter Books for initially propos-
ing this project, and Michael Mouland for coordinating its production.
Earlier versions of the text were read by Hugh Brody,Igor Krupnik,Peter
Jull, David Morrison and Pat Sutherland, and I appreciate their helpful
comments.I am grateful to all who provided photographs.I also wish to
thank the librarians at the Canadian Museum of Civilization,who cheer-
fully and efficiently tracked down the often obscure publications that I
requested.
Finally,I wish to express my gratitude to Pat Sutherland for the support
that she provided to me in the completion of this project as in so many
other areas of life.
6
P :
R E L U D E
A N A R C T I C V I S I O N
I FIRST BECAME AWARE OF THE ARCTIC during the 1950s,
when I was a teenager whose world was limited to the well-tended
farmlands and tame urban environments of Ontario. It is hard to
remember how exotic most remote places seemed to us in those
days,when air travel was a rare luxury and television offered only a
few blurry channels depicting life in New York, London or occa-
sionally Toronto.The little we knew of distant environments came
mostly from books and movies,and from the imaginary journeys that
they stimulated. Our ignorance gave travel writers the freedom to
create visions of romantic landscapes and exotic peoples that at times
were only tenuously related to reality. Like many Canadians of the
1950s,I was stirred by Farley Mowat’s books on the desperate plight
of the Barren Grounds Inuit, telling of a hunting people who had
stepped directly from the Stone Age into a world of intrepid bush-
pilots,hard-drinking fur traders and heartless bureaucrats.To Mowat’s
readers the remote landscapes of the Arctic were enhanced by the
suggestion that they served as a meeting-place between a dramati-
cally alien present and an ancient past.
Soon my imagination was awash with Arctic images that had
flowed from books:a wild land of brilliant light,keen winds,pure ice
7
8 THE LAST IMAGINARY PLACE
and endless panoramas. Broad rivers of migrating caribou flowed
northwards under the midnight sun across limitless plains carpeted
with dwarf willows and tiny wildflowers.Bands of fur-clothed hunters
waited patiently at river crossings where the ancestors of people and
caribou had met every year for uncounted generations.In the polar
night they travelled by dogsled on icefields where they encountered
great white bears, or hunted walrus among the ice-floes that had
doomed the expeditions of nineteenth-century explorers.Across the
pole was another Arctic, a shadowy land peopled by Stalin’s victims
and known from rumour and propaganda. Superimposed on both
Arctics was the science-fiction world of electronic warfare,still under
construction, a ring of secret and isolated radar domes and sealed
metal shelters in which technicians lived as they would in space-
stations on a distant planet.
The Arctic of my young imagination is immediately recognizable
in Sherrill Grace’s perceptive Canada and the Idea of North. She
describes the presentation of the northern world in mid-twentieth-
century novels and documentary films as “a place of masculine
romance,” its wonders depicted in narratives that “construct the
North…as a space for virile, white male adventure in a harsh but
magnificent,unspoiled landscape waiting to be discovered,charted,
painted, and photographed as if for the first time.” This Arctic is a
land that irresistibly attracts “those special few who can go North…
and return safely to tell the tale.”
Across the pole, my Russian contemporaries were experiencing
the same pull towards the vast magnetic spaces of Siberia.In his study
Between Heaven and Hell:The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture,Yuri
Slezkine describes how Soviet literature of the period was populated
by “dozens of orphaned fictional youngsters [who] stampeded out of
the soulless old capitals to a land where the snow never melted and
where men kept their word.”
This was the Arctic that I longed to experience, but it was an
ambition that was not easily achieved at the beginning of the 1960s.
In 1965 archaeology finally took me north as field assistant on a crew
investigating one of the earliest indications then known of human
occupation in Arctic Canada.Thirty-five years have passed, yet that
PRELUDE: AN ARCTIC VISION 9
first experience of the Arctic remains vivid: the long droning flight
northwards from Yellowknife, past treeline and over the Barren
Grounds pocked with ice-covered lakes;the clatter of gravel and bil-
lows of dust as the propeller-driven DC-4 ploughed along the dirt
airstrip beside the DEW-line radar station;the chill air that filled the
cabin as we pulled on parkas and caps to climb down into the bril-
liant June night. Outside the low sunlight flooded colour over
snowdrifts,small and smiling people,old women with tattooed faces,
howling dogs,small houses of unpainted plywood,and an icy stream
flowing through a natural rock-garden of tiny yellow poppies and
purple saxifrage.The Arctic of my fantasy easily survived this first
encounter with reality,and I was immediately enchanted.
In his illuminating Landscape and Memory,Simon Schama explores
the intimate links that exist between terrain,mythology and culture,
and persuasively argues that these links condition our reactions to the
environments in which we find ourselves.In Schama’s view,the sci-
entific description of a location, such as might be produced by a
methodical geographer,is only the bare beginning of a definition of
place.“Landscape”also comprises the mythology,history,artistic con-
ventions and all the other cultural factors and associations that allow
us to define a homeland, a wilderness, a terrain of scenic marvels
worthy of sightseeing, or a land so dangerous that it inspires dread
and avoidance.I believe that the concept of “Arctic”that is held in
the minds and imaginations of those of us who live in more temper-
ate parts of the world owes far more to these associations than it does
to the actual physical reality of the North.
Most of the books that set out to portray the Arctic have ignored
this component of our multi-layered human reality.They describe the
temperatures and the seasons of the lands around the pole,the many
forms of sea ice and their vital importance to the life of the region,
the marvellous animals and tiny resilient plants, the ingenious,
resourceful natives, the intrepid explorers and investigators who
brought the territory into the realm of science.Many of these books
are thorough, accurate and valuable sources of information on the
Arctic regions;I make no claim that the present venture will be such
a comprehensive source.In the following chapters the sea ice and the