February 5, 2021 • 47 mins
European explorers often thought of the Arctic as an empty wasteland, and the Indigenous people who lived there as childlike. But as one historian put it, “the real children in the Arctic would be the white explorers.” From Martin Frobisher’s expeditions in the 16th century right up until Robert Peary’s time, Inuit people helped explorers in countless ways—from providing food, to teaching valuable skills, to saving their lives. In this episode, we’ll learn how Indigenous people viewed the Europeans and Americans in their lands, why they chose to assist in their expeditions, and how explorers often exploited them in their quests for the North Pole.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental Floss. It's August eighteen and
two British naval ships are dodging icebergs in Baffin Bay
on their mission to find the Northwest Passage. John Ross
(00:22):
commanding HMS Isabella, and William Perry in the h M
s Alexander are farther north along the western Greenland coast
than any previous explorers. They assume this land of glaciers
and stark mountains is uninhabited, but they're wrong. They spy
several figures running on a hill near shore. Ross assumes
(00:43):
their shipwrecked sailors in need of rescue, and he steers
the Isabella to get closer, but they turn out to
be native people, a community of a new wheat, living
farther north than Europeans believed was physically possible. Ross, following
the habit of previous explorers, in mediately sets out gifts
of knives, European clothing, and a Greenland dog with strings
(01:04):
of blue beads around its neck to signal that they
come in peace. Several hours later, Ross writes, the dog
was found sleeping on the spot where we left him.
The presence remaining untouched undaunted, Ross decides to raise a
flag with pictures of the sun, moon and a hand
holding a sprig of Arctic heath, the northern version of
(01:26):
an olive branch. At the base of the flag pole,
he puts out another bag of gifts and a sign
with a hand pointing to the ship. The following day
Rossi's a group of a new Wheat approached the gifts,
he sends out his Inuit interpreter, John Sacose, carrying a
small white flag. Eventually, he throws a knife on the
(01:46):
ground and urges them to take it as a present,
But the native people are terrified of the strange men
and looming ships. They approached the knife cautiously and gingerly
pick it up. After a few moments, they begin outing
with approval and pulling their noses, a move that Sacus imitates.
The curious Inu Whee bombard him with questions about his clothing,
(02:08):
the ships, and where he came from. Tho Saku speaks
a different form of the language. He finally understands that
these Inu Wheat have never before seen white people. They've
never met European explorers. They turned out to be one
of the last uncontacted communities of Arctic people in this region.
(02:28):
From the advent of modern European polar exploration in the
sixteenth century right up until the present day, nearly every
community of indigenous people in Greenland and Arctic North America
had some encounter with white explorers, whalers, or traders, and
yet European explorers often thought of the Arctic as an empty,
(02:48):
inhospitable wasteland. When they did describe the people who lived there,
they portrayed them as relics of the Stone Age quote
unquote savages or childlike folk who needed paternalistic guidance from whites.
Of course, none of that is true, as the historian
Pierre Burton rights, during the whole of European exploration in
(03:10):
the North, the real children in the Arctic would be
the white explorers. But native people's full contributions to human
understanding of polar geography, wildlife, and climate are often overlooked.
More than forty indigenous groups totaling over a million people
live in the circumpolar Arctic today, but in this episode,
we're going to focus on the peoples of what is
(03:31):
now eastern Canada and Greenland. They had the most consistent
interactions with white explorers over four centuries. In this episode,
we'll try to show the other side of the explorers stories.
We'll look at how indigenous people saw the white explorers
or hallunat in their lands, why they helped them, and
how they saved those explorers lives. Countless times you're listening
(04:05):
to Mental Flaws presents the Quest for the North Pole.
I'm your host, Cat Long, science editor at Mental Floss
and this is episode four and you Eat and the Explorers.
Before European explorers began arriving regularly to Arctic Canada in
(04:28):
the early nineteenth century, indigenous people there had some memorable
encounters with them. The first was with the Vikings. Virtually
all we know of the meetings comes from two North sagas,
written two hundred years after the events. They say that
when Vikings arrived in what is now Newfoundland and set
up a small colony, they traded with the indigenous people,
(04:50):
but there were deadly battles as well. It wasn't a
great start to European North American relations. Skipping ahead a
few hundred years, we to the English mariner Martin Frobisher,
whom you might remember from our first episode. When he
and his crew arrived in Baffin Island in fifteen seventy
six looking for the Northwest Passage, they saw a group
(05:12):
of Innuit and kayaks coming towards them. One of the
crew described them as having long black hair, wearing sealskin
clothing and paddling boats made of sealskin stretched over a
wooden frame. The women had facial tattoos and blue ink.
During the first meeting, the Innuit were just in awe
the klu Nat came with their huge ship. A revered
(05:33):
elder named Inuki Adamy told the Canadian anthropologist Dorothy Harley
Eber in the nineteen nineties in oral histories, his ancestors
had passed on their first hand memories of Frobisher's arrival
in the Arctic more than four hundred years earlier. Speaking
in Inuktitut, Innuki said that the Inuit had never seen
such a big ship and such strange people. They were wary.
(05:58):
The Hallunut fired two warning shots in the air. I'm
sure the Kluna had good intentions, but they had never
seen Innuit before. An Inuit had never seen hallunat the
scene quickly turned confusing, heightened by the Innuit's bewilderment at
the englishman's outfits. Here's kristo Uliuk Sawadski, an anthropologist and
(06:19):
curator of Innuite art from rank and Inlet on the
western shore of Hudson Bay. She's a PhD candidate with
a research focus on Arctic anthropology, archaeology, and Innuit oral histories.
I think that for Innit, when they encountered these people
in these ships that were lost or shipwrecked or stuck
(06:39):
in the ice, I think we probably thought that these
guys are very feel prepared for the Arctic. You know,
they're not wearing for clothing like we are. Cordial relations
went south when five crewmen who were ferrying an Innuite
man from the ship to shore never returned. Winter Forest
(06:59):
Frobish sure to go home without their comrades, but before
leaving he gathered quote unquote proof that he had found
the passage to Asia, a rock sample, and an Inuite hostage.
The man was taken to London, where artists painted his
portrait and sculpted his likeness. Frobishers surely expected to show
(07:19):
him off to the public as a curiosity of the
New World, but sadly the Inuit man lived only a
couple of weeks after arriving. Frobisher's sponsors paid a surgeon
five pounds to involve the man with the idea of
sending him back to his homeland, but for some reason
that didn't happen. Instead, the company paid for his burial
in St Olav's churchyard on Heart Street in London. So
(07:43):
the church has no record of his burial. We know
of his fate only from an accounting book belonging to
Frobisher's chief sponsor. The sponsors were much more interested in
Frobisher's rock samples anyway, they believe they contained gold. In
fifty seven they sent Frobisher back to Baffin Island with
a direct order to stop exploring and focus on gold mining.
(08:08):
As the men hacked at the ore, Innuit watched from
a nearby hill, wondering why the Hallunat were obsessed with
this worthless rock. The scene made a big impression on them.
Even in the mid twentieth century, a respected shaman pointed
to the shiny flex and a river and said to
his grandson, never show that to the klu Nat. It
steals their minds. Though mining was their sole objective, Diannice Settle,
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one of the ship's masters on this voyage, took note
of the Innuit customs. He saw that they hunted marine
mammals and birds for food. They lived in sealskin tents,
which were the traditional summer housing of the Innuit, easily
moved from place to place as they hunted migrating animals.
He admired their resourcefulness and putting every part of an
(08:53):
animal to good use. He wrote, Those beasts, fishes, and
fowls which they kill are their meat, drink, apparel, houses, betting, hose, shoes,
thread and sails for their boats, with many other necessities
whereof they stand in need, and almost all their riches. Meanwhile,
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Frobisher and another crew member searched for the missing sailors.
Encountering to Innuit on a beach, he tried to abduct them,
intending to ransom them for the return of his men.
One of the captives shot Frobisher in the buttocks with
an arrow and escaped. The other was wrestled to the
ground as he tried to run away, and was brought
back to the ship. Some of the English later explored
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the area and found what they thought was evidence that
their missing comrades were nearby, so they chased down the
Innuit and cornered them on a beach. The Innuit defended
themselves with bows and arrows. The old stories say that
the Innuit were so terrified of these white men in
the row boats that, thinking they were not of this world,
they started shooting arrows at them, and Nuki said several
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centuries later. In one account, five or six Inuite were killed.
The crew kidnapped a young mother and her baby. Frobisher
attempted to negotiate a hostage trade for the five missing men,
but that failed, so as soon as they filled their
ships holes with two hundred tons of ore, they left
the island with the three Innuit captives. What we know
(10:21):
of the captives after their abduction comes only from English sources. Unfortunately,
their own words and experiences are not recorded by history.
The Inuite man was named Collicho, while the woman was
called something like Arnac, and her baby was called Newtok
or Nutiak, although these words may have meant woman and
child in their language. To the sailors on the ship,
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the man and woman appeared not to know one another
when they were brought together in their cabin, but they
seem solicitous of each other, and Arnoc prepared meals for Collicho.
They arrived in Bristol, England, in September. Like in a
Elizabethan p t Barnum, Frobisher wanted to show off the
native people for paying customers and to the leaders of
(11:05):
the city. Callicho allegedly met the mayor of Bristol and
showed off his hunting skills by shooting ducks on the
River Avon with darts, even though he was also suffering
from broken ribs and other injuries, apparently from being tackled
by the English sailor. All three had their portraits drawn
and printed for the public before Frobisher could exploit them
(11:28):
as a side show. Though Collicho died of his injuries
in Bristol, the physician who treated him, Edward Dodding, made
Arnoc attend the burial to show her that the English
people did not practice human sacrifice or cannibalism, as he
believed the Innuit did. Arnoc was unwilling to see the ceremony,
and Dodding commented that she appeared stoic throughout, but she
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was also suffering from a disease that historians believe was
measles and died four days later. She was buried next
to Colicho and Bristol's St Stephen's Church. Frobisher sent Little
New Talk to London because Queen Elizabeth the First was
especially keen on seeing him, But tragically, the baby died
just over a week after arriving in the capitol. He
(12:14):
too was buried in Say No Loaves Church, and just
as tragically, none of their family and friends on Baffin
Island knew what had happened to them. Frobisher was not
done yet. His sponsors arranged a fleet of fifteen ships,
four hundred sailors and settlers and supplies for setting up
(12:34):
a colony next to the mines on Baffin Island. But
on their way there, the ships carrying their prefabricated house
sank in a storm, a site that so abashed the
whole fleet that we thought, verily we should have tasted
the same sauce, wrote Thomas Ellis, another ship's master. The
Englishman built a few workshops and a kiln for making bricks,
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surely planning to return the following year. An elder named
udluri ac Inniak told Dorothy Harley Eber in the nine
nineties that her ancestors used to talk about the Queen's people.
They had this deep trench and used it to repair
their boat, and they also had a water supply area
and the buildings they made for themselves, and there was
also a place on a cliff side where they fixed
(13:17):
their masts. That's how it got its name, not Parusovik
where the poles are set up. That name is still
in use today. But unbeknownst to Frobisher, they would not
be returning their gold was actually worthless. Iron pirate, just
like the Innuit new it ended up this building material
all over Elizabethan, England. While a few other European explorers
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poked around the Canadian Arctic, they didn't stay long and
Innuit life continued on as usual. Here's Kristo Uluk Sawatsky.
The explorers didn't have a huge impact on other than
adding to the stories that shared or to old I
don't think you know, today necessarily think about explorers as
(14:05):
like a detriment. I don't think that you necessarily think
of them as like, oh, this was first contact. You
know it went downhill from there, or it was great
from then on, or you know, there's not that sort
of mentality immunity, not that I know of. Like I said,
a lot of the change that occurred for Innuit was
(14:25):
around the whaling era, and so I think that, you know,
we appreciate when there's stories about first encounters with explorers
in the sense that these are old stories and they've
been passed on, you know, for hundreds of years, and
that's kind of cool, you know. I think people appreciate
that aspect of it, But in terms of um their
(14:49):
attitudes towards explorers, at least in where I'm from, you know,
people don't give much thought to explorers other than James Knight.
And there might be a story are here there that said, oh, yeah,
my grandfather remembers this story about his elders when they
remembered seeing the first ship arrived, that they had never
seen a ship before and it was shocking to them.
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They saw it from far away, and they thought it
took them so long to come to shore because they
didn't realize how big it was. You know, there's those
types of stories, but compared to other later in contrast,
they're not as impactful. We'll be back in a minute.
(15:33):
In eighteen eighteen, when John Ross and William Edward Perry
sailed up the western coast of Greenland to find the
Northwest Passage. They were lucky to have John Sacchus on board.
Sacus was born in western Greenland. Around when he was
about eighteen years old, he found his way aboard a
Scottish whaling ship called the Thomas and Anne, and arrived
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in Leith, the main port of Edinburgh. Reports from the
time indicate that he was interested in learning English and
becoming a missionary. Unlike the Innuit brought to England against
their will in the sixteenth century, Sakus is the first
known Inuit person who came to the United Kingdom by choice.
Saku seems to have enjoyed living in Edinburgh. He sketched
(16:17):
passers by at the harbor, and even demonstrated his paddling
skills against those of six men in a whale boat,
out maneuvering them in his canoe as a huge crowd watched.
Prominent artists painted or drew Sakus's portrait. One by the
Scottish painter Alexander Naysmith shows him in a sealskin jacket
holding a harpoon. Sakus was himself a talented artist, and
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Naismith offered him drawing lessons. Sakus also traded lessons in
inuktitute for instruction in English and writing. He joined Ross's
expedition as an Inuit interpreter. Ross perhaps hoped that Sakus's
presence among the white men would put native people they
met at ease, and that he would be able to
such scenes that few Europeans could imagine. In fact, Sacho's
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drawing of Ross and Parry meeting the Inu Wheat is
a revealing depiction of contact when the New Wheat accepted
the gift of the knife, Sach, who has found that
their languages were close enough that they could communicate. After
a brief chat, Saku's motion to Ross and Parry to
come over to where he and a group of eight
in New Wheat stood. In the drawing, Ross and Perry
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are in full naval dress, complete with bi coorn hats
and gold fringed epaulets, looking extremely out of place. The
New Wheat shouting and raising their arms where fur parkas
and tall boots, and some are gazing at themselves in
mirrors that Ross gave them as presents. Zachu has captured
a meeting that voted well for future explorers in their lands.
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The descendants of these very people would play important roles
and explorer's quests for the North Pole nearly a century later.
According to the anthropologist Jean Malorie, who lived with the
Inu Wheat in the ninth fifties, Ross and Perry's visit
to their home in eighteen eighteen was a cardinal date
in their history. Ross made a similar impact with Innuit
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on the other side of Baffin Bay too. After the
embarrassing Croaker Mountains experience, in which he mistook a common
Arctic mirage for a mountain range, which we talked about
in our first episode, Ross was basically blacklisted from leading
any more naval expeditions, but he didn't give up. He
got a wealthy gin distiller named Felix Booth to give
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him more than ten thousand pounds, with which he bought
a steamship named the Victory. In eighteen twenty nine, Ross
set off towards Prince Region inlet, a large channel leading
south from Lancaster Sound, hoping to locate the Northwest Passage.
The Victory spent the summer of eighteen twenty nine cruising
the eastern shore of a peninsula that he named Boothia
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after his benefactor. As winter came on, the Victory hunkered
down in a small bay ross called Felix Harbor. There
they encountered a groove of Innuit, the Netzelingmiut, who had
had no prior contact with Kalunat. The net Selingmiut called
the spot where they encountered the victory Kabluna Kyuvik, the
place for meeting white people. An elder named Bibbion niv
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Yovak described the famous meeting to Dorothy Harley Eber. A
group of hunters happened to be in the tom Bay area.
One hunter named Abulukte wandered away from the group and
saw something strange. He went toward it and found the Kalunat.
He was scared because he had never seen them before.
He ran so fast that the tail of his parka
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flew out behind him. When he got back home, he
told everybody that these were really different people with long
necks and long faces. He scared everyone. The other hunters
were not sure if they should go towards a ship.
The shaman in their village spoke through his spirit to
the Khalunat in English and then told the Innuit that
the Kalunat were not dangerous. The following day they went
(20:01):
to the Victory. According to Eber, the tale of Abiluktuk,
his flying parka and meeting the Kalunat is still shared
with laughter among communities all across the region. Ross presented
the Netzelenmia with gifts of metal implements. Soon a cluster
of igloos went up, which Ross sketched and called snow cottages.
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Ross also instructed the ship's carpenter to fashion a wooden
leg inscribed with the ship's name, for an Inuite man
who had lost his to a polar bear. The man
was able to resume hunting and providing for his family.
Ross noted and wrote in his journal, I am sure
the simple contrivance of this wooden leg raised us higher
in the estimation of this people than all the wonders
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we had shown them. The wooden leg is now in
the collection of the Manitoba Museum. The first winter passed
with the Victory crew and the Netzelenmia enjoying friendly relations,
but Ross would soon face a nightmare. Throughout eighteen thirty
and eight, Ice and Prince Region Inlet trapped the victory
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along a twenty miles sliver of coastline. What Ross had
envisioned as a one or two year expedition turned into
an ordeal lasting four years. Four dark, frigid winters, four
years of surviving on canned food and ship's biscuit, four
years of facing the same few people, four years of
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waiting to go home. The one bright spot was that,
for the most part, Ross's crew avoided scurvy, the often
fatal vitamin C deficiency that was the bane of sailors,
because the nets Alignia shared fresh meat with them. The
crew mounted the first phase of their escape in January
two by removing every useful thing from the victory and
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piling it on shore. Some of the supplies were bundled
into caches and left along their planned retreat. Valuable instruments
were buried in permafrost. The rest of the supplies were
left for the local people. On May twenty nine, they
abandoned the victory and began marching towards Fury Beach, a
depot of supplies salvage from the wreck of the h M. S.
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Fury Perry's old ship from an earlier expedition. There, the
crew hoped to repair the Furies whale boats obtained provisions
and sail to Lancaster Sound, where they hoped the European
whaling fleet would be able to rescue them, But whalers
always left the area in August ahead of winter, and
the Victory crew didn't make it in time. That meant
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a fourth winter in the Arctic. The men built a
hut out of the furies timbers and packed snow all
around the walls and root for insulation. They called its
Somerset House, after the elegant London building that houses several
of Britain's learned and scientific societies. Now without interaction or
food from the nets, Alumiut days turned into a grind
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of boredom and malaise. Everyone in the crew had a
touch of scurvy, which made them irritable into pressed. When
spring finally came, they were determined to escape the Arctic
or die trying. Despite their weakened state, they rode frantically
to Lancaster Sound, where they prayed they would be rescued
by a whaler. On August three, a ship did spot
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the whale boats and sent out an officer in a
boat to meet them. As Ross wrote, I requested to
know the name of his vessel, and expressed our wish
to be taken on board. I was answered it was
the Isabella of Hull, once commanded by Captain Ross, on
which I stated I was the identical man in question,
and my people as the crew of the Victory. The
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mate assured me that I had been dead for two years.
I easily convinced him, however, that what ought to have
been true, according to his estimate, was a somewhat premature conclusion.
They were back in England by October. Meanwhile, the wreck
of the Victory continued to provide supplies for generations of
net to Lignut, about thirty five miles north of where
(24:03):
Abeluktuk first saw the ship. Elder Gideon Caduacs said in
the ninety nineties there are some old pieces of iron around,
but a lot of it is vanished. The Innuit never
found exactly where they buried their stuff. Hunters also tried
to salvage the victories wooden mass to cut up for
sledges and harpoons. Many families in the area repurposed the
(24:23):
thick copper sheathing from the Victories hall to make traditional
seal oil lamps. Here's Kristo Ulikaatski. One of the misconceptions
that there might be is this idea that the explorers
came and it was like, damn, the world changed for Nui,
but not necessarily. Like there's a misconception right there that
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you know, it was like first contact, but it was
brief and there was not a whole lot of engagement,
and then that was it. You know, they came, they said,
and they lacked. There wasn't like this big bang that
people might think happened with explorers. But early explorers did
leave their mark in another noticeable way. Some of the
(25:08):
legacies that explorers have left, or some of the impacts
that explorers have made, is the names on our maps,
Like Hudson Henry Hudson was an explorer. Now we have
Hudson's right and Hudson Bay. And it's like, that's not
what we call Hudson Bay. We call it the See
we Olds aren't going around saying, oh yeah, on Hudson Bay.
(25:29):
There's this and this. No we you know, in our language,
we call it something else. And it's just like, I
find that a fascinating topic and it continues today, this
like encounter of names. You know the official Canadian government names.
It's riddled with probably knock names. We'll be back in
(25:51):
a minute. Inuite oral histories have offered critical clues towards
solving the biggest mystery and polar exploration. In episode two,
(26:15):
we mentioned Sir John Franklin and how his lavishly outfitted
expedition to find the Northwest Passage in eighteen forty five
seemed to disappear into the Arctic labyrinth. For years afterwards,
more than a dozen British and American expeditions scoured the
region looking for Franklin, including one led by seventy two
year old John Ross. They found remnants of Franklin's camps,
(26:37):
but no clues about the expedition's demise. In eighteen fifty four,
Hudson's Bay Company official John Ray was surveying an area
of the Boothia Peninsula. He met an Innuite man who
related a very interesting story other Innuits that a group
of thirty four or forty Coluna had starved to death
(26:58):
a few years before, some ways worth of their The
man was wearing a gold cap band, which he said
came from the place where the Callunat were found. Later
in the year, Innuit brought Ray a collection of objects
that definitely came from Franklin's expedition. The Innuit said that
some of their relatives had sold meat to the starving
columnat a few years earlier, and told Ray they had
(27:20):
come upon the remains of the sailors in the area
of the Great Fish River. There was one more horrifying detail.
The men had died of starvation after resorting to cannibalism.
Ray was satisfied that this was the answer to a
big part of the Franklin expedition mystery. He told the
Admiralty everything, but because the clues had come from so
(27:44):
called savages, many in Britain refused to accept it. Charles
Dickens captured the public feeling and a scathing racist commentary
in his popular magazine Household Words, saying it was far
more likely that the Inuit had murdered Franklin's man. But
in eighteen fifty nine the innuits word was proven correct.
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British teams set out by sledge to investigate King William Island,
where Innuit said that they had seen the starving men
along the western coast. They found indisputable evidence of their presence,
including a Cairn containing a note which finally revealed what
happened to Franklin. He had died on June eleven, forty
seven of an unknown cause. The expedition's ships HMS Arabis
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and HMS Terror had been stuck in ice for over
a year and abandoned. Several men had died. The survivors
were walking towards the mainland to the Great Fish River,
just as the Innuit had said, and further evidence uncovered
over the next century and a half has confirmed the
Innuit testimony. Many questions remained, However, an American newspaper publisher
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in the grip of Arctic Fever named Charles Francis Hall
believed that there was more to learn from the Innuit.
He convinced himself that there could still be survivors from
Franklin's expedition. In May eighteen sixty, Paul hopped on a
whaler out of New London, Connecticut. He was heading north
to live among the Inuit. So they were totally unaware
(29:14):
of this plan and to gather further clues. Here's Russell Potter,
polar historian at Rhode Island College, an author of most
recently Finding Franklin. The untold story of a one and
sixty five year search. Hall did not go up with
a lot of equipment, and his idea was just to
hire somebody. And as it happened, the ship he went
(29:34):
up on didn't get anywhere near where he wanted to go.
It ended up at Cumberland Sound, which was nowhere near
where Franklin went missing, so he decided to make use
of his time there. Paul met an Inuit couple takulk
to an epr Vic, whom the whalers had nicknamed Hannah
and Joe. They had already been to England with a whaler.
They met and had tea with Queen Victoria. When he
went to visit their igloo, Canada said hello, sir, would
(29:57):
you care for a cup of tea? And he said,
oh my god, I hooked up with the right Innuit here.
And he had not only worked with them and had
them work for him, but he lived with them. He enjoyed,
you know. In his journals, he writes with exclamation points,
first night in an igloo, second night in an igloo.
He loved switching over and sort of going natives, the
very thing the British hated, and he formed a very
(30:19):
strong bond with these two guys. I mean, Joe was
pretty much the hunter and guide and Hannah was more
the translator and worked with them for years. On his
two Franklin search expeditions, Paul visited their village, lived in
their igloos, and enjoyed long sledging trips with Hannah and Joe.
(30:40):
He really formed a strong bond there and kind of
by the end of their time together, he was driving
dogs as well as Joe, So that's pretty singular and
way in advance of any other person who later on
took up Innuit ways of travel. On one of the journeys,
with Joe's help, Paul rediscovered the roots of Martin Frobisher's
(31:01):
gold mining camp, where elders had said white men had
arrived in a big ship many years before. Hall even
recorded the Inuit explanation of the disappearance of Frobisher's men.
According to his retelling, they were left behind and lived
among the Innuit until they could build a large boat.
Then they set sail and disappeared. But by eighteen sixty six,
(31:25):
having found no Franklin survivors, Hal turned towards a new goal,
the North Pole. With Hannah and Joe's help, the three
returned to the United States, where Hall finagled to grant
from Congress to buy a ship, which he fitted out
for Arctic service and renamed the Polaris. With a crew
that included New London whaling master Sydney Buttington as sailing master,
(31:48):
another whaler George Tyson as navigator, and Hall as expedition commander.
The Polaris left the Brooklyn Navy Yard on June. Joe
and Hannah were aboard, plus a German surgeon named Emil Vessels.
When they arrived in Greenland, they brought on Hans Hendrick,
a well known Inuit guide and hunter, and his family.
(32:10):
Hall followed a route laid out by the American explorer
Alicia Kent Kane in the eighteen fifties. Kane's expedition had
found the large waterway between Greenland and Canada's Ellesmere Island,
now called Kane Basin, and mistook it for the open
Polar Sea. Now Hall planned to sail through Kane Basin
and hopefully reached the North Pole. However, the crew didn't
(32:32):
get along and Hall failed to restore a sense of calm.
Then Hall came down with a mysterious illness. He drifted
in and out of delirium, and after a period of
improvement and then relapse, he died on November eighth, eighteen
seventy one. Today, some historians believe that he was poisoned
with arsenic, possibly by Emil vessels who had access to
(32:56):
the ship's medicine chest. With their commander dead, there was
nothing to do but wait out the winter and then
head home. In summer eighteen seventy two, as they sailed south,
ice broke up around the ship and an immense iceberg
bore down on the polaris. They thought the ship had
sprung a leak. Buddington panicked and ordered all of the
(33:18):
provisions and supplies thrown onto a nearby ice flow. Hans
Hendrick later wrote, we brought our wives and children down
upon the ice and hurried to fetch all our little
luggage and remove the hole to a short distance from
the ship. Then the ice broke up close to the
vessel and her cables broke. But in the awful darkness
we could only just hear the voices on board, and
(33:40):
when the craft was going adrift, we believed she was
on the point of sinking. Here we were left nineteen
and all in the most miserable state of sadness and tears.
The Polaris and its remaining crew abandoned them. The nineteen
castaways were helpless and alone. Joe and Hans hunted seals
(34:00):
throughout the winter in the dark and kept them all alive.
The Inuit built snow huts that served as their shelter,
but they had inadequate clothing and other food, and starvation
was always a threat. As we advanced far south, we
had a heavy swell, and in the pitch dark night,
the flow our refuge split into Hans Road at length.
(34:24):
The whole of it was broken up around our snow huts.
When we rose in the morning and went outside, the
sea had gone down, and the ice upon which we
stood our house had dwindled down to a little round piece.
They drifted like this for six months over a distance
of two thousand miles. They were finally rescued in April
(34:46):
eight seventy three off the coast of Labrador. The master
of the ship and the crew altogether were exceedingly kind
to us and pitied us who had spent the whole
winter with our little children on a piece of ice.
Hans wrote. Hans Hendrick's memoir of his experience on the
Polaris and three other Arctic expeditions, was the first such
(35:07):
published account by an Innuite person. Roughly two decades later,
Robert E. Peary built on and expanded Hall's modus operandi.
Hall was different from almost every polar explorer who had
come before. He was just a man obsessed with solving
Arctic mysteries, from Franklin's fate to Frobisher's geography, to the
(35:28):
journey towards the North Pole, and the primary reason he
survived was his friendship with Hannah and Joe. His choice
to live as the Innuit did was one that no
explorer had then made. Now, with Matthew Henson's help, Peery
formed mutually beneficial yet unequal relationships with the Inuite of Eta,
(35:49):
the descendants of those Ross and Perry met in eighteen eighteen.
Over eight expeditions to Greenland and Canada's Ellesmere Island. Peary
hired a new wheat hunters and their families to obtain
food so for clothing, cook drive dogs, LEDs, build igloes,
and other tasks that were essential for Perry's success. Thanks
(36:11):
to Perry's regular visits. They came to rely on his
expeditions for certain Western trade goods, such as guns and
ammunition for hunting. In exchange for the items, the community's
best hunter signed on to help his expeditions. Here's Ken Harper,
a historian and author of many books, including Minic, The
New York Eskimo, An Arctic Explorer, A Museum, and The
(36:32):
Betrayal of the Inuit People. I'll let him introduce himself.
I write Northern history, and I also write about Northern
native languages, especially it. I lived in the Canadian Arctic
plus two years in Greenland, for a total of fifty years.
That's five zero, not one five. I started out as
(36:54):
a school teacher and ended up in business. I also
worked for the government for one year in six days,
every one of which I counted because it was a mistake.
And all the time that I was there, I've been
listening to Innuit people, listening and learning the inoquit or
(37:17):
polar Eskimos, as they were formerly called. They were a
very small group, a couple of hundred people, living very
you know, tenuously on the ice free parts of land
between the inland glazier and the sea they had developed
(37:37):
not a heavy dependence on whalers because there weren't enough
whalers in their waters to depend heavy along, so they
lived a very precarious subsistence existence. Then along came Pery
with his mission to get to the North Pole, and
(37:58):
Peery knew that he was not going to do this
without the assistance of the local people. So I think
Peerry always intended to be there for the long haul.
I don't mean permanently there for long all, but back
and forth and involved with that geographic region for the
long term. Light hal Perry realized that success in the
(38:21):
Arctic meant adopting the traditional ways of the people who
lived there, like wearing furs instead of Western made clothing,
using skin boots instead of leather, and traveling by dog
sled instead of man hauling heavy sledges. Peary's teams also
hunted an eight wild game and build igloos instead of
bringing tons of package supplies north with them and carrying
(38:41):
tents on their overland journeys. This method of living off
the land with the assistance of native people became associated
with American explorers because it was so different from the
earlier British way of doing things, and yet, despite his
admiration for inuite skills and survival tactics, Perry still viewed
the people who developed them as childlike and inferior to Westerners.
(39:05):
This was the golden age of scientific racism, when proponents
of eugenics sought to scientifically improve the human race by
allowing only people with desirable intellectual and physical characteristics to
have children. Predictably, the white European and American eugenicists believed
white people to be superior to all others. The movement
(39:26):
gained steam in the early twentieth century thanks to its
emphasis on pseudo scientific evidence, which was misinterpreted from ethnographic
studies of world cultures. Obviously, eugenics was fundamentally racist, and
Parry was absolutely a product of his time. Here's ken
Harper Parry was not, i would say, interested in improving
(39:49):
their living conditions. So, you know, Perry certainly wasn't a missionary.
He wasn't there to teach people things, build schools, promote religion.
He was there for his single minded goal of reaching
the North Pole, and so the Innuit were means to
(40:09):
an end. He said, they're feeling for me is one
of gratitude and confidence. I have saved old villages from starvation,
and the children are taught by their parents that if
they grew up and become good hunters or good seamstresses,
pure Leac that's their name for him, will reward them
(40:32):
sometime in the not too distant future. It's very arrogant
assessment of his own position visa vis the iniquit, but
I think he was right. But of course, then when
he did claim the North Pole in n nine, and
he's already admitted that the innuity have become dependent on him,
(40:53):
he has no further reason to stay there. He leaves.
Do you think that the inuuite there understood Perry's attitude
towards them? That's what I just can't quite understand or
get my head around. I think that they did. There's
there's another quote. I hate to burden you with quotes,
but you know that you know who we can say
(41:15):
it better than I can. They were there. In my book,
I mentioned that in seven an elderly man in the
little village of Siowk reminisced about Period, whom he called
the Great Tormentor. For some reason, in the book, I
didn't name the elderly man. But his name was Amina,
(41:38):
and he was a man that I knew quite well.
And in referring to period as the Great Tormentor, he
said people were afraid of him, really afraid his big ship.
It made a big impression on us. He was a
great leader. You always had the feeling that if you
didn't do what he wanted, he would condemn you to
(42:00):
f I was very young, but I will never forget
how he treated the unit. His big ship arrives in
the bay. He is hardly visible from the shore, but
he shouts he had to get the horn. I'm arriving.
For a fact, the nu we'd go aboard. Perry has
a barrel of biscuits brought up on deck. The two
(42:21):
or three hunters who have gone out to the ship
in their kayaks bend over the barrel and begin to
eat with both hands. Later, the barrel is taken ashore
and the contents thrown on the beach. Men, women and
children hurl themselves on the biscuits like dogs, which amuses
Pery a lot. My heart still turns cold to think
(42:41):
of it. That scene tells very well how he considered
this people, my people, who were for all of that
devoted to him. So that's how Amina remembered period. The
New Wheat had very different memories of Matthew Henson. They
referred to Matthew Hanson as ma Pluke, that was his
(43:05):
Inuktut name. By all accounts, Hansen was a very different
personality in than Pury. He was kinder, he was you know,
on the land traveling. He was a tough guy. He
was a good hunter, he was a good sled driver.
He did something that Pury didn't do, and in fact,
(43:29):
none of Peri's men other than Hanson did. He learned
how to speak the Inuktut language, the language of the Inoch,
and he learned it very well. And I remember when
when I was a much younger man in the nineties
seventies in in Karnak, I got to know a lot
(43:51):
of the old hunters, and the really old people remembered
him from their youth and their childhood. Middle aged people
knew the stories about Hinson and about Perry and and
everybody else look him up there. And they also knew
that both Perry and Henson had relationships with the New
(44:13):
Wheat women and both had children with them. Matthew Henson
left a child behind up there, and now Cook. And
I knew a now Cook. He used to say to
me because he was very curious about his biological father,
Matthew Henson. And he used to say, you know, what
(44:34):
do you know about my father's life in the USA?
Do I have relatives down there? Did he have children
in America? Do I have brothers and sisters down there?
So they were they were very curious about these people.
Perry left a couple of kids behind in Northern Greenland,
and I knew one of them quite well, Collige Kali Peri.
(44:56):
These old men were just very curious about their bio.
Much of the fathers, the memories were I wouldn't say fresh,
but well among the old man the memories were still fresh.
We're going to explore the amazing story of Perry's and
Henson's sons later in our show. Once Perry and Henson
(45:17):
believed that they had reached the North Pole in nine
they never returned to Greenland and never saw their loyal
and new wheat partners again. Just as suddenly as Perry
had arrived on his very first expedition, he left along
with the supply of tools and other trade goods that
the new wheat depended on Fortunately in Danish explorers Peter
(45:40):
Freakin and Canude Rasmussen opened the two Ley Trading Station
at Cape York near Eta, which served as a store
in base camp for their ethnological research in Northern Greenland.
By a lot of reports that he knew it. Were
astounded when Perry claimed to reach the North Pole and said, Okay,
we're here, you know this is it, and the inning
(46:02):
we looked around said but there's nothing here. This is
nothing different than what we've been traveling through for days.
A little bit of disappointment. I suspected the fact that
this long thought goal was really nothing that they could see.
(46:42):
The Quest for the North Pole is hosted by me
Cat Long. This episode was researched and written by me,
with that checking by Austin Thompson, thanks to our experts
Kristo Uluk, Sawadski, Russell Potter and Ken Harper. The executive
producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Klang. Supervising producer is
Dylan Fagan. The show is edited by Dylan Fagan. For transcripts,
(47:06):
a glossary and to learn more about this episode, visit
Mental Flaws dot com. Slash podcast, The Quest for the
North Pole, is a production of I heart Radio and
Mental Flaws. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, check
out the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. For more podcasts from my heart radio,
(47:40):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental Floss. It's August eighteen and
two British naval ships are dodging icebergs in Baffin Bay
on their mission to find the Northwest Passage. John Ross
(00:22):
commanding HMS Isabella, and William Perry in the h M
s Alexander are farther north along the western Greenland coast
than any previous explorers. They assume this land of glaciers
and stark mountains is uninhabited, but they're wrong. They spy
several figures running on a hill near shore. Ross assumes
(00:43):
their shipwrecked sailors in need of rescue, and he steers
the Isabella to get closer, but they turn out to
be native people, a community of a new wheat, living
farther north than Europeans believed was physically possible. Ross, following
the habit of previous explorers, in mediately sets out gifts
of knives, European clothing, and a Greenland dog with strings
(01:04):
of blue beads around its neck to signal that they
come in peace. Several hours later, Ross writes, the dog
was found sleeping on the spot where we left him.
The presence remaining untouched undaunted, Ross decides to raise a
flag with pictures of the sun, moon and a hand
holding a sprig of Arctic heath, the northern version of
(01:26):
an olive branch. At the base of the flag pole,
he puts out another bag of gifts and a sign
with a hand pointing to the ship. The following day
Rossi's a group of a new Wheat approached the gifts,
he sends out his Inuit interpreter, John Sacose, carrying a
small white flag. Eventually, he throws a knife on the
(01:46):
ground and urges them to take it as a present,
But the native people are terrified of the strange men
and looming ships. They approached the knife cautiously and gingerly
pick it up. After a few moments, they begin outing
with approval and pulling their noses, a move that Sacus imitates.
The curious Inu Whee bombard him with questions about his clothing,
(02:08):
the ships, and where he came from. Tho Saku speaks
a different form of the language. He finally understands that
these Inu Wheat have never before seen white people. They've
never met European explorers. They turned out to be one
of the last uncontacted communities of Arctic people in this region.
(02:28):
From the advent of modern European polar exploration in the
sixteenth century right up until the present day, nearly every
community of indigenous people in Greenland and Arctic North America
had some encounter with white explorers, whalers, or traders, and
yet European explorers often thought of the Arctic as an empty,
(02:48):
inhospitable wasteland. When they did describe the people who lived there,
they portrayed them as relics of the Stone Age quote
unquote savages or childlike folk who needed paternalistic guidance from whites.
Of course, none of that is true, as the historian
Pierre Burton rights, during the whole of European exploration in
(03:10):
the North, the real children in the Arctic would be
the white explorers. But native people's full contributions to human
understanding of polar geography, wildlife, and climate are often overlooked.
More than forty indigenous groups totaling over a million people
live in the circumpolar Arctic today, but in this episode,
we're going to focus on the peoples of what is
(03:31):
now eastern Canada and Greenland. They had the most consistent
interactions with white explorers over four centuries. In this episode,
we'll try to show the other side of the explorers stories.
We'll look at how indigenous people saw the white explorers
or hallunat in their lands, why they helped them, and
how they saved those explorers lives. Countless times you're listening
(04:05):
to Mental Flaws presents the Quest for the North Pole.
I'm your host, Cat Long, science editor at Mental Floss
and this is episode four and you Eat and the Explorers.
Before European explorers began arriving regularly to Arctic Canada in
(04:28):
the early nineteenth century, indigenous people there had some memorable
encounters with them. The first was with the Vikings. Virtually
all we know of the meetings comes from two North sagas,
written two hundred years after the events. They say that
when Vikings arrived in what is now Newfoundland and set
up a small colony, they traded with the indigenous people,
(04:50):
but there were deadly battles as well. It wasn't a
great start to European North American relations. Skipping ahead a
few hundred years, we to the English mariner Martin Frobisher,
whom you might remember from our first episode. When he
and his crew arrived in Baffin Island in fifteen seventy
six looking for the Northwest Passage, they saw a group
(05:12):
of Innuit and kayaks coming towards them. One of the
crew described them as having long black hair, wearing sealskin
clothing and paddling boats made of sealskin stretched over a
wooden frame. The women had facial tattoos and blue ink.
During the first meeting, the Innuit were just in awe
the klu Nat came with their huge ship. A revered
(05:33):
elder named Inuki Adamy told the Canadian anthropologist Dorothy Harley
Eber in the nineteen nineties in oral histories, his ancestors
had passed on their first hand memories of Frobisher's arrival
in the Arctic more than four hundred years earlier. Speaking
in Inuktitut, Innuki said that the Inuit had never seen
such a big ship and such strange people. They were wary.
(05:58):
The Hallunut fired two warning shots in the air. I'm
sure the Kluna had good intentions, but they had never
seen Innuit before. An Inuit had never seen hallunat the
scene quickly turned confusing, heightened by the Innuit's bewilderment at
the englishman's outfits. Here's kristo Uliuk Sawadski, an anthropologist and
(06:19):
curator of Innuite art from rank and Inlet on the
western shore of Hudson Bay. She's a PhD candidate with
a research focus on Arctic anthropology, archaeology, and Innuit oral histories.
I think that for Innit, when they encountered these people
in these ships that were lost or shipwrecked or stuck
(06:39):
in the ice, I think we probably thought that these
guys are very feel prepared for the Arctic. You know,
they're not wearing for clothing like we are. Cordial relations
went south when five crewmen who were ferrying an Innuite
man from the ship to shore never returned. Winter Forest
(06:59):
Frobish sure to go home without their comrades, but before
leaving he gathered quote unquote proof that he had found
the passage to Asia, a rock sample, and an Inuite hostage.
The man was taken to London, where artists painted his
portrait and sculpted his likeness. Frobishers surely expected to show
(07:19):
him off to the public as a curiosity of the
New World, but sadly the Inuit man lived only a
couple of weeks after arriving. Frobisher's sponsors paid a surgeon
five pounds to involve the man with the idea of
sending him back to his homeland, but for some reason
that didn't happen. Instead, the company paid for his burial
in St Olav's churchyard on Heart Street in London. So
(07:43):
the church has no record of his burial. We know
of his fate only from an accounting book belonging to
Frobisher's chief sponsor. The sponsors were much more interested in
Frobisher's rock samples anyway, they believe they contained gold. In
fifty seven they sent Frobisher back to Baffin Island with
a direct order to stop exploring and focus on gold mining.
(08:08):
As the men hacked at the ore, Innuit watched from
a nearby hill, wondering why the Hallunat were obsessed with
this worthless rock. The scene made a big impression on them.
Even in the mid twentieth century, a respected shaman pointed
to the shiny flex and a river and said to
his grandson, never show that to the klu Nat. It
steals their minds. Though mining was their sole objective, Diannice Settle,
(08:32):
one of the ship's masters on this voyage, took note
of the Innuit customs. He saw that they hunted marine
mammals and birds for food. They lived in sealskin tents,
which were the traditional summer housing of the Innuit, easily
moved from place to place as they hunted migrating animals.
He admired their resourcefulness and putting every part of an
(08:53):
animal to good use. He wrote, Those beasts, fishes, and
fowls which they kill are their meat, drink, apparel, houses, betting, hose, shoes,
thread and sails for their boats, with many other necessities
whereof they stand in need, and almost all their riches. Meanwhile,
(09:13):
Frobisher and another crew member searched for the missing sailors.
Encountering to Innuit on a beach, he tried to abduct them,
intending to ransom them for the return of his men.
One of the captives shot Frobisher in the buttocks with
an arrow and escaped. The other was wrestled to the
ground as he tried to run away, and was brought
back to the ship. Some of the English later explored
(09:35):
the area and found what they thought was evidence that
their missing comrades were nearby, so they chased down the
Innuit and cornered them on a beach. The Innuit defended
themselves with bows and arrows. The old stories say that
the Innuit were so terrified of these white men in
the row boats that, thinking they were not of this world,
they started shooting arrows at them, and Nuki said several
(09:57):
centuries later. In one account, five or six Inuite were killed.
The crew kidnapped a young mother and her baby. Frobisher
attempted to negotiate a hostage trade for the five missing men,
but that failed, so as soon as they filled their
ships holes with two hundred tons of ore, they left
the island with the three Innuit captives. What we know
(10:21):
of the captives after their abduction comes only from English sources. Unfortunately,
their own words and experiences are not recorded by history.
The Inuite man was named Collicho, while the woman was
called something like Arnac, and her baby was called Newtok
or Nutiak, although these words may have meant woman and
child in their language. To the sailors on the ship,
(10:45):
the man and woman appeared not to know one another
when they were brought together in their cabin, but they
seem solicitous of each other, and Arnoc prepared meals for Collicho.
They arrived in Bristol, England, in September. Like in a
Elizabethan p t Barnum, Frobisher wanted to show off the
native people for paying customers and to the leaders of
(11:05):
the city. Callicho allegedly met the mayor of Bristol and
showed off his hunting skills by shooting ducks on the
River Avon with darts, even though he was also suffering
from broken ribs and other injuries, apparently from being tackled
by the English sailor. All three had their portraits drawn
and printed for the public before Frobisher could exploit them
(11:28):
as a side show. Though Collicho died of his injuries
in Bristol, the physician who treated him, Edward Dodding, made
Arnoc attend the burial to show her that the English
people did not practice human sacrifice or cannibalism, as he
believed the Innuit did. Arnoc was unwilling to see the ceremony,
and Dodding commented that she appeared stoic throughout, but she
(11:51):
was also suffering from a disease that historians believe was
measles and died four days later. She was buried next
to Colicho and Bristol's St Stephen's Church. Frobisher sent Little
New Talk to London because Queen Elizabeth the First was
especially keen on seeing him, But tragically, the baby died
just over a week after arriving in the capitol. He
(12:14):
too was buried in Say No Loaves Church, and just
as tragically, none of their family and friends on Baffin
Island knew what had happened to them. Frobisher was not
done yet. His sponsors arranged a fleet of fifteen ships,
four hundred sailors and settlers and supplies for setting up
(12:34):
a colony next to the mines on Baffin Island. But
on their way there, the ships carrying their prefabricated house
sank in a storm, a site that so abashed the
whole fleet that we thought, verily we should have tasted
the same sauce, wrote Thomas Ellis, another ship's master. The
Englishman built a few workshops and a kiln for making bricks,
(12:55):
surely planning to return the following year. An elder named
udluri ac Inniak told Dorothy Harley Eber in the nine
nineties that her ancestors used to talk about the Queen's people.
They had this deep trench and used it to repair
their boat, and they also had a water supply area
and the buildings they made for themselves, and there was
also a place on a cliff side where they fixed
(13:17):
their masts. That's how it got its name, not Parusovik
where the poles are set up. That name is still
in use today. But unbeknownst to Frobisher, they would not
be returning their gold was actually worthless. Iron pirate, just
like the Innuit new it ended up this building material
all over Elizabethan, England. While a few other European explorers
(13:42):
poked around the Canadian Arctic, they didn't stay long and
Innuit life continued on as usual. Here's Kristo Uluk Sawatsky.
The explorers didn't have a huge impact on other than
adding to the stories that shared or to old I
don't think you know, today necessarily think about explorers as
(14:05):
like a detriment. I don't think that you necessarily think
of them as like, oh, this was first contact. You
know it went downhill from there, or it was great
from then on, or you know, there's not that sort
of mentality immunity, not that I know of. Like I said,
a lot of the change that occurred for Innuit was
(14:25):
around the whaling era, and so I think that, you know,
we appreciate when there's stories about first encounters with explorers
in the sense that these are old stories and they've
been passed on, you know, for hundreds of years, and
that's kind of cool, you know. I think people appreciate
that aspect of it, But in terms of um their
(14:49):
attitudes towards explorers, at least in where I'm from, you know,
people don't give much thought to explorers other than James Knight.
And there might be a story are here there that said, oh, yeah,
my grandfather remembers this story about his elders when they
remembered seeing the first ship arrived, that they had never
seen a ship before and it was shocking to them.
(15:12):
They saw it from far away, and they thought it
took them so long to come to shore because they
didn't realize how big it was. You know, there's those
types of stories, but compared to other later in contrast,
they're not as impactful. We'll be back in a minute.
(15:33):
In eighteen eighteen, when John Ross and William Edward Perry
sailed up the western coast of Greenland to find the
Northwest Passage. They were lucky to have John Sacchus on board.
Sacus was born in western Greenland. Around when he was
about eighteen years old, he found his way aboard a
Scottish whaling ship called the Thomas and Anne, and arrived
(15:55):
in Leith, the main port of Edinburgh. Reports from the
time indicate that he was interested in learning English and
becoming a missionary. Unlike the Innuit brought to England against
their will in the sixteenth century, Sakus is the first
known Inuit person who came to the United Kingdom by choice.
Saku seems to have enjoyed living in Edinburgh. He sketched
(16:17):
passers by at the harbor, and even demonstrated his paddling
skills against those of six men in a whale boat,
out maneuvering them in his canoe as a huge crowd watched.
Prominent artists painted or drew Sakus's portrait. One by the
Scottish painter Alexander Naysmith shows him in a sealskin jacket
holding a harpoon. Sakus was himself a talented artist, and
(16:41):
Naismith offered him drawing lessons. Sakus also traded lessons in
inuktitute for instruction in English and writing. He joined Ross's
expedition as an Inuit interpreter. Ross perhaps hoped that Sakus's
presence among the white men would put native people they
met at ease, and that he would be able to
such scenes that few Europeans could imagine. In fact, Sacho's
(17:04):
drawing of Ross and Parry meeting the Inu Wheat is
a revealing depiction of contact when the New Wheat accepted
the gift of the knife, Sach, who has found that
their languages were close enough that they could communicate. After
a brief chat, Saku's motion to Ross and Parry to
come over to where he and a group of eight
in New Wheat stood. In the drawing, Ross and Perry
(17:26):
are in full naval dress, complete with bi coorn hats
and gold fringed epaulets, looking extremely out of place. The
New Wheat shouting and raising their arms where fur parkas
and tall boots, and some are gazing at themselves in
mirrors that Ross gave them as presents. Zachu has captured
a meeting that voted well for future explorers in their lands.
(17:48):
The descendants of these very people would play important roles
and explorer's quests for the North Pole nearly a century later.
According to the anthropologist Jean Malorie, who lived with the
Inu Wheat in the ninth fifties, Ross and Perry's visit
to their home in eighteen eighteen was a cardinal date
in their history. Ross made a similar impact with Innuit
(18:09):
on the other side of Baffin Bay too. After the
embarrassing Croaker Mountains experience, in which he mistook a common
Arctic mirage for a mountain range, which we talked about
in our first episode, Ross was basically blacklisted from leading
any more naval expeditions, but he didn't give up. He
got a wealthy gin distiller named Felix Booth to give
(18:31):
him more than ten thousand pounds, with which he bought
a steamship named the Victory. In eighteen twenty nine, Ross
set off towards Prince Region inlet, a large channel leading
south from Lancaster Sound, hoping to locate the Northwest Passage.
The Victory spent the summer of eighteen twenty nine cruising
the eastern shore of a peninsula that he named Boothia
(18:53):
after his benefactor. As winter came on, the Victory hunkered
down in a small bay ross called Felix Harbor. There
they encountered a groove of Innuit, the Netzelingmiut, who had
had no prior contact with Kalunat. The net Selingmiut called
the spot where they encountered the victory Kabluna Kyuvik, the
place for meeting white people. An elder named Bibbion niv
(19:18):
Yovak described the famous meeting to Dorothy Harley Eber. A
group of hunters happened to be in the tom Bay area.
One hunter named Abulukte wandered away from the group and
saw something strange. He went toward it and found the Kalunat.
He was scared because he had never seen them before.
He ran so fast that the tail of his parka
(19:38):
flew out behind him. When he got back home, he
told everybody that these were really different people with long
necks and long faces. He scared everyone. The other hunters
were not sure if they should go towards a ship.
The shaman in their village spoke through his spirit to
the Khalunat in English and then told the Innuit that
the Kalunat were not dangerous. The following day they went
(20:01):
to the Victory. According to Eber, the tale of Abiluktuk,
his flying parka and meeting the Kalunat is still shared
with laughter among communities all across the region. Ross presented
the Netzelenmia with gifts of metal implements. Soon a cluster
of igloos went up, which Ross sketched and called snow cottages.
(20:22):
Ross also instructed the ship's carpenter to fashion a wooden
leg inscribed with the ship's name, for an Inuite man
who had lost his to a polar bear. The man
was able to resume hunting and providing for his family.
Ross noted and wrote in his journal, I am sure
the simple contrivance of this wooden leg raised us higher
in the estimation of this people than all the wonders
(20:43):
we had shown them. The wooden leg is now in
the collection of the Manitoba Museum. The first winter passed
with the Victory crew and the Netzelenmia enjoying friendly relations,
but Ross would soon face a nightmare. Throughout eighteen thirty
and eight, Ice and Prince Region Inlet trapped the victory
(21:03):
along a twenty miles sliver of coastline. What Ross had
envisioned as a one or two year expedition turned into
an ordeal lasting four years. Four dark, frigid winters, four
years of surviving on canned food and ship's biscuit, four
years of facing the same few people, four years of
(21:25):
waiting to go home. The one bright spot was that,
for the most part, Ross's crew avoided scurvy, the often
fatal vitamin C deficiency that was the bane of sailors,
because the nets Alignia shared fresh meat with them. The
crew mounted the first phase of their escape in January
two by removing every useful thing from the victory and
(21:48):
piling it on shore. Some of the supplies were bundled
into caches and left along their planned retreat. Valuable instruments
were buried in permafrost. The rest of the supplies were
left for the local people. On May twenty nine, they
abandoned the victory and began marching towards Fury Beach, a
depot of supplies salvage from the wreck of the h M. S.
(22:08):
Fury Perry's old ship from an earlier expedition. There, the
crew hoped to repair the Furies whale boats obtained provisions
and sail to Lancaster Sound, where they hoped the European
whaling fleet would be able to rescue them, But whalers
always left the area in August ahead of winter, and
the Victory crew didn't make it in time. That meant
(22:31):
a fourth winter in the Arctic. The men built a
hut out of the furies timbers and packed snow all
around the walls and root for insulation. They called its
Somerset House, after the elegant London building that houses several
of Britain's learned and scientific societies. Now without interaction or
food from the nets, Alumiut days turned into a grind
(22:54):
of boredom and malaise. Everyone in the crew had a
touch of scurvy, which made them irritable into pressed. When
spring finally came, they were determined to escape the Arctic
or die trying. Despite their weakened state, they rode frantically
to Lancaster Sound, where they prayed they would be rescued
by a whaler. On August three, a ship did spot
(23:19):
the whale boats and sent out an officer in a
boat to meet them. As Ross wrote, I requested to
know the name of his vessel, and expressed our wish
to be taken on board. I was answered it was
the Isabella of Hull, once commanded by Captain Ross, on
which I stated I was the identical man in question,
and my people as the crew of the Victory. The
(23:40):
mate assured me that I had been dead for two years.
I easily convinced him, however, that what ought to have
been true, according to his estimate, was a somewhat premature conclusion.
They were back in England by October. Meanwhile, the wreck
of the Victory continued to provide supplies for generations of
net to Lignut, about thirty five miles north of where
(24:03):
Abeluktuk first saw the ship. Elder Gideon Caduacs said in
the ninety nineties there are some old pieces of iron around,
but a lot of it is vanished. The Innuit never
found exactly where they buried their stuff. Hunters also tried
to salvage the victories wooden mass to cut up for
sledges and harpoons. Many families in the area repurposed the
(24:23):
thick copper sheathing from the Victories hall to make traditional
seal oil lamps. Here's Kristo Ulikaatski. One of the misconceptions
that there might be is this idea that the explorers
came and it was like, damn, the world changed for Nui,
but not necessarily. Like there's a misconception right there that
(24:45):
you know, it was like first contact, but it was
brief and there was not a whole lot of engagement,
and then that was it. You know, they came, they said,
and they lacked. There wasn't like this big bang that
people might think happened with explorers. But early explorers did
leave their mark in another noticeable way. Some of the
(25:08):
legacies that explorers have left, or some of the impacts
that explorers have made, is the names on our maps,
Like Hudson Henry Hudson was an explorer. Now we have
Hudson's right and Hudson Bay. And it's like, that's not
what we call Hudson Bay. We call it the See
we Olds aren't going around saying, oh yeah, on Hudson Bay.
(25:29):
There's this and this. No we you know, in our language,
we call it something else. And it's just like, I
find that a fascinating topic and it continues today, this
like encounter of names. You know the official Canadian government names.
It's riddled with probably knock names. We'll be back in
(25:51):
a minute. Inuite oral histories have offered critical clues towards
solving the biggest mystery and polar exploration. In episode two,
(26:15):
we mentioned Sir John Franklin and how his lavishly outfitted
expedition to find the Northwest Passage in eighteen forty five
seemed to disappear into the Arctic labyrinth. For years afterwards,
more than a dozen British and American expeditions scoured the
region looking for Franklin, including one led by seventy two
year old John Ross. They found remnants of Franklin's camps,
(26:37):
but no clues about the expedition's demise. In eighteen fifty four,
Hudson's Bay Company official John Ray was surveying an area
of the Boothia Peninsula. He met an Innuite man who
related a very interesting story other Innuits that a group
of thirty four or forty Coluna had starved to death
(26:58):
a few years before, some ways worth of their The
man was wearing a gold cap band, which he said
came from the place where the Callunat were found. Later
in the year, Innuit brought Ray a collection of objects
that definitely came from Franklin's expedition. The Innuit said that
some of their relatives had sold meat to the starving
columnat a few years earlier, and told Ray they had
(27:20):
come upon the remains of the sailors in the area
of the Great Fish River. There was one more horrifying detail.
The men had died of starvation after resorting to cannibalism.
Ray was satisfied that this was the answer to a
big part of the Franklin expedition mystery. He told the
Admiralty everything, but because the clues had come from so
(27:44):
called savages, many in Britain refused to accept it. Charles
Dickens captured the public feeling and a scathing racist commentary
in his popular magazine Household Words, saying it was far
more likely that the Inuit had murdered Franklin's man. But
in eighteen fifty nine the innuits word was proven correct.
(28:04):
British teams set out by sledge to investigate King William Island,
where Innuit said that they had seen the starving men
along the western coast. They found indisputable evidence of their presence,
including a Cairn containing a note which finally revealed what
happened to Franklin. He had died on June eleven, forty
seven of an unknown cause. The expedition's ships HMS Arabis
(28:29):
and HMS Terror had been stuck in ice for over
a year and abandoned. Several men had died. The survivors
were walking towards the mainland to the Great Fish River,
just as the Innuit had said, and further evidence uncovered
over the next century and a half has confirmed the
Innuit testimony. Many questions remained, However, an American newspaper publisher
(28:53):
in the grip of Arctic Fever named Charles Francis Hall
believed that there was more to learn from the Innuit.
He convinced himself that there could still be survivors from
Franklin's expedition. In May eighteen sixty, Paul hopped on a
whaler out of New London, Connecticut. He was heading north
to live among the Inuit. So they were totally unaware
(29:14):
of this plan and to gather further clues. Here's Russell Potter,
polar historian at Rhode Island College, an author of most
recently Finding Franklin. The untold story of a one and
sixty five year search. Hall did not go up with
a lot of equipment, and his idea was just to
hire somebody. And as it happened, the ship he went
(29:34):
up on didn't get anywhere near where he wanted to go.
It ended up at Cumberland Sound, which was nowhere near
where Franklin went missing, so he decided to make use
of his time there. Paul met an Inuit couple takulk
to an epr Vic, whom the whalers had nicknamed Hannah
and Joe. They had already been to England with a whaler.
They met and had tea with Queen Victoria. When he
went to visit their igloo, Canada said hello, sir, would
(29:57):
you care for a cup of tea? And he said,
oh my god, I hooked up with the right Innuit here.
And he had not only worked with them and had
them work for him, but he lived with them. He enjoyed,
you know. In his journals, he writes with exclamation points,
first night in an igloo, second night in an igloo.
He loved switching over and sort of going natives, the
very thing the British hated, and he formed a very
(30:19):
strong bond with these two guys. I mean, Joe was
pretty much the hunter and guide and Hannah was more
the translator and worked with them for years. On his
two Franklin search expeditions, Paul visited their village, lived in
their igloos, and enjoyed long sledging trips with Hannah and Joe.
(30:40):
He really formed a strong bond there and kind of
by the end of their time together, he was driving
dogs as well as Joe, So that's pretty singular and
way in advance of any other person who later on
took up Innuit ways of travel. On one of the journeys,
with Joe's help, Paul rediscovered the roots of Martin Frobisher's
(31:01):
gold mining camp, where elders had said white men had
arrived in a big ship many years before. Hall even
recorded the Inuit explanation of the disappearance of Frobisher's men.
According to his retelling, they were left behind and lived
among the Innuit until they could build a large boat.
Then they set sail and disappeared. But by eighteen sixty six,
(31:25):
having found no Franklin survivors, Hal turned towards a new goal,
the North Pole. With Hannah and Joe's help, the three
returned to the United States, where Hall finagled to grant
from Congress to buy a ship, which he fitted out
for Arctic service and renamed the Polaris. With a crew
that included New London whaling master Sydney Buttington as sailing master,
(31:48):
another whaler George Tyson as navigator, and Hall as expedition commander.
The Polaris left the Brooklyn Navy Yard on June. Joe
and Hannah were aboard, plus a German surgeon named Emil Vessels.
When they arrived in Greenland, they brought on Hans Hendrick,
a well known Inuit guide and hunter, and his family.
(32:10):
Hall followed a route laid out by the American explorer
Alicia Kent Kane in the eighteen fifties. Kane's expedition had
found the large waterway between Greenland and Canada's Ellesmere Island,
now called Kane Basin, and mistook it for the open
Polar Sea. Now Hall planned to sail through Kane Basin
and hopefully reached the North Pole. However, the crew didn't
(32:32):
get along and Hall failed to restore a sense of calm.
Then Hall came down with a mysterious illness. He drifted
in and out of delirium, and after a period of
improvement and then relapse, he died on November eighth, eighteen
seventy one. Today, some historians believe that he was poisoned
with arsenic, possibly by Emil vessels who had access to
(32:56):
the ship's medicine chest. With their commander dead, there was
nothing to do but wait out the winter and then
head home. In summer eighteen seventy two, as they sailed south,
ice broke up around the ship and an immense iceberg
bore down on the polaris. They thought the ship had
sprung a leak. Buddington panicked and ordered all of the
(33:18):
provisions and supplies thrown onto a nearby ice flow. Hans
Hendrick later wrote, we brought our wives and children down
upon the ice and hurried to fetch all our little
luggage and remove the hole to a short distance from
the ship. Then the ice broke up close to the
vessel and her cables broke. But in the awful darkness
we could only just hear the voices on board, and
(33:40):
when the craft was going adrift, we believed she was
on the point of sinking. Here we were left nineteen
and all in the most miserable state of sadness and tears.
The Polaris and its remaining crew abandoned them. The nineteen
castaways were helpless and alone. Joe and Hans hunted seals
(34:00):
throughout the winter in the dark and kept them all alive.
The Inuit built snow huts that served as their shelter,
but they had inadequate clothing and other food, and starvation
was always a threat. As we advanced far south, we
had a heavy swell, and in the pitch dark night,
the flow our refuge split into Hans Road at length.
(34:24):
The whole of it was broken up around our snow huts.
When we rose in the morning and went outside, the
sea had gone down, and the ice upon which we
stood our house had dwindled down to a little round piece.
They drifted like this for six months over a distance
of two thousand miles. They were finally rescued in April
(34:46):
eight seventy three off the coast of Labrador. The master
of the ship and the crew altogether were exceedingly kind
to us and pitied us who had spent the whole
winter with our little children on a piece of ice.
Hans wrote. Hans Hendrick's memoir of his experience on the
Polaris and three other Arctic expeditions, was the first such
(35:07):
published account by an Innuite person. Roughly two decades later,
Robert E. Peary built on and expanded Hall's modus operandi.
Hall was different from almost every polar explorer who had
come before. He was just a man obsessed with solving
Arctic mysteries, from Franklin's fate to Frobisher's geography, to the
(35:28):
journey towards the North Pole, and the primary reason he
survived was his friendship with Hannah and Joe. His choice
to live as the Innuit did was one that no
explorer had then made. Now, with Matthew Henson's help, Peery
formed mutually beneficial yet unequal relationships with the Inuite of Eta,
(35:49):
the descendants of those Ross and Perry met in eighteen eighteen.
Over eight expeditions to Greenland and Canada's Ellesmere Island. Peary
hired a new wheat hunters and their families to obtain
food so for clothing, cook drive dogs, LEDs, build igloes,
and other tasks that were essential for Perry's success. Thanks
(36:11):
to Perry's regular visits. They came to rely on his
expeditions for certain Western trade goods, such as guns and
ammunition for hunting. In exchange for the items, the community's
best hunter signed on to help his expeditions. Here's Ken Harper,
a historian and author of many books, including Minic, The
New York Eskimo, An Arctic Explorer, A Museum, and The
(36:32):
Betrayal of the Inuit People. I'll let him introduce himself.
I write Northern history, and I also write about Northern
native languages, especially it. I lived in the Canadian Arctic
plus two years in Greenland, for a total of fifty years.
That's five zero, not one five. I started out as
(36:54):
a school teacher and ended up in business. I also
worked for the government for one year in six days,
every one of which I counted because it was a mistake.
And all the time that I was there, I've been
listening to Innuit people, listening and learning the inoquit or
(37:17):
polar Eskimos, as they were formerly called. They were a
very small group, a couple of hundred people, living very
you know, tenuously on the ice free parts of land
between the inland glazier and the sea they had developed
(37:37):
not a heavy dependence on whalers because there weren't enough
whalers in their waters to depend heavy along, so they
lived a very precarious subsistence existence. Then along came Pery
with his mission to get to the North Pole, and
(37:58):
Peery knew that he was not going to do this
without the assistance of the local people. So I think
Peerry always intended to be there for the long haul.
I don't mean permanently there for long all, but back
and forth and involved with that geographic region for the
long term. Light hal Perry realized that success in the
(38:21):
Arctic meant adopting the traditional ways of the people who
lived there, like wearing furs instead of Western made clothing,
using skin boots instead of leather, and traveling by dog
sled instead of man hauling heavy sledges. Peary's teams also
hunted an eight wild game and build igloos instead of
bringing tons of package supplies north with them and carrying
(38:41):
tents on their overland journeys. This method of living off
the land with the assistance of native people became associated
with American explorers because it was so different from the
earlier British way of doing things, and yet, despite his
admiration for inuite skills and survival tactics, Perry still viewed
the people who developed them as childlike and inferior to Westerners.
(39:05):
This was the golden age of scientific racism, when proponents
of eugenics sought to scientifically improve the human race by
allowing only people with desirable intellectual and physical characteristics to
have children. Predictably, the white European and American eugenicists believed
white people to be superior to all others. The movement
(39:26):
gained steam in the early twentieth century thanks to its
emphasis on pseudo scientific evidence, which was misinterpreted from ethnographic
studies of world cultures. Obviously, eugenics was fundamentally racist, and
Parry was absolutely a product of his time. Here's ken
Harper Parry was not, i would say, interested in improving
(39:49):
their living conditions. So, you know, Perry certainly wasn't a missionary.
He wasn't there to teach people things, build schools, promote religion.
He was there for his single minded goal of reaching
the North Pole, and so the Innuit were means to
(40:09):
an end. He said, they're feeling for me is one
of gratitude and confidence. I have saved old villages from starvation,
and the children are taught by their parents that if
they grew up and become good hunters or good seamstresses,
pure Leac that's their name for him, will reward them
(40:32):
sometime in the not too distant future. It's very arrogant
assessment of his own position visa vis the iniquit, but
I think he was right. But of course, then when
he did claim the North Pole in n nine, and
he's already admitted that the innuity have become dependent on him,
(40:53):
he has no further reason to stay there. He leaves.
Do you think that the inuuite there understood Perry's attitude
towards them? That's what I just can't quite understand or
get my head around. I think that they did. There's
there's another quote. I hate to burden you with quotes,
but you know that you know who we can say
(41:15):
it better than I can. They were there. In my book,
I mentioned that in seven an elderly man in the
little village of Siowk reminisced about Period, whom he called
the Great Tormentor. For some reason, in the book, I
didn't name the elderly man. But his name was Amina,
(41:38):
and he was a man that I knew quite well.
And in referring to period as the Great Tormentor, he
said people were afraid of him, really afraid his big ship.
It made a big impression on us. He was a
great leader. You always had the feeling that if you
didn't do what he wanted, he would condemn you to
(42:00):
f I was very young, but I will never forget
how he treated the unit. His big ship arrives in
the bay. He is hardly visible from the shore, but
he shouts he had to get the horn. I'm arriving.
For a fact, the nu we'd go aboard. Perry has
a barrel of biscuits brought up on deck. The two
(42:21):
or three hunters who have gone out to the ship
in their kayaks bend over the barrel and begin to
eat with both hands. Later, the barrel is taken ashore
and the contents thrown on the beach. Men, women and
children hurl themselves on the biscuits like dogs, which amuses
Pery a lot. My heart still turns cold to think
(42:41):
of it. That scene tells very well how he considered
this people, my people, who were for all of that
devoted to him. So that's how Amina remembered period. The
New Wheat had very different memories of Matthew Henson. They
referred to Matthew Hanson as ma Pluke, that was his
(43:05):
Inuktut name. By all accounts, Hansen was a very different
personality in than Pury. He was kinder, he was you know,
on the land traveling. He was a tough guy. He
was a good hunter, he was a good sled driver.
He did something that Pury didn't do, and in fact,
(43:29):
none of Peri's men other than Hanson did. He learned
how to speak the Inuktut language, the language of the Inoch,
and he learned it very well. And I remember when
when I was a much younger man in the nineties
seventies in in Karnak, I got to know a lot
(43:51):
of the old hunters, and the really old people remembered
him from their youth and their childhood. Middle aged people
knew the stories about Hinson and about Perry and and
everybody else look him up there. And they also knew
that both Perry and Henson had relationships with the New
(44:13):
Wheat women and both had children with them. Matthew Henson
left a child behind up there, and now Cook. And
I knew a now Cook. He used to say to
me because he was very curious about his biological father,
Matthew Henson. And he used to say, you know, what
(44:34):
do you know about my father's life in the USA?
Do I have relatives down there? Did he have children
in America? Do I have brothers and sisters down there?
So they were they were very curious about these people.
Perry left a couple of kids behind in Northern Greenland,
and I knew one of them quite well, Collige Kali Peri.
(44:56):
These old men were just very curious about their bio.
Much of the fathers, the memories were I wouldn't say fresh,
but well among the old man the memories were still fresh.
We're going to explore the amazing story of Perry's and
Henson's sons later in our show. Once Perry and Henson
(45:17):
believed that they had reached the North Pole in nine
they never returned to Greenland and never saw their loyal
and new wheat partners again. Just as suddenly as Perry
had arrived on his very first expedition, he left along
with the supply of tools and other trade goods that
the new wheat depended on Fortunately in Danish explorers Peter
(45:40):
Freakin and Canude Rasmussen opened the two Ley Trading Station
at Cape York near Eta, which served as a store
in base camp for their ethnological research in Northern Greenland.
By a lot of reports that he knew it. Were
astounded when Perry claimed to reach the North Pole and said, Okay,
we're here, you know this is it, and the inning
(46:02):
we looked around said but there's nothing here. This is
nothing different than what we've been traveling through for days.
A little bit of disappointment. I suspected the fact that
this long thought goal was really nothing that they could see.
(46:42):
The Quest for the North Pole is hosted by me
Cat Long. This episode was researched and written by me,
with that checking by Austin Thompson, thanks to our experts
Kristo Uluk, Sawadski, Russell Potter and Ken Harper. The executive
producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Klang. Supervising producer is
Dylan Fagan. The show is edited by Dylan Fagan. For transcripts,
(47:06):
a glossary and to learn more about this episode, visit
Mental Flaws dot com. Slash podcast, The Quest for the
North Pole, is a production of I heart Radio and
Mental Flaws. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, check
out the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. For more podcasts from my heart radio,
(47:40):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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