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In Those Days: Collected Writings on Arctic History
Book 1: Inuit Lives

by Kenn Harper

Iqaluit: Inhabit Media. $19.95

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter




"In those days" is the English equaivalent of Taissumani, the name of Kenn Harper's long-running history column in the Nunatsiaq News; this volume collects from among them those dealing with significant Inuit figures. Many of them will be well-known to anyone with an interest in Arctic histories: "Joe" Ebierbing and "Hannah" Tookoolito, guides and translators for Charles Francis Hall; John Sakeouse, an interpreter and artist who accompanied John Ross on his 1818 voyage to northwest Greenland; and Hans Hendrik, who worked with Elisha Kent Kane, Isaac Israel Hayes, and was part of the party who survived on an ice-floe for six months after being separated from Hall's Polaris. But these are only three of the twenty-eight  life-stories in these remarkable, turnable pages. Harper, who has lived and worked in the Arctic for half a century, tells them with clarity and grace, drawing not only from his life experiences and personal contacts but from extensive historical research. I think it's fair to say that there's no living writer with more breadth and depth of knowledge of life in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland -- and by 'life' I mean the lives lived out on the land by people for whom explorers were merely occasional visitors and (often rather demanding) guests.

The tales encompass both the tragic and the comic. We learn of Tatamigana and Alikomiak, the only Inuit ever executed by hanging in Canada; of "Prince" Pomiuk, an Inuit boy who was part of a group displayed at the World's Columbian Exposition, but who suffered physical and emotional abuse during his time among the white people, returning home only to be rejected by his own; of Nancy Columbia, whom Harper aptly dubs the 'most famous Inuk in the world,' whose career stretched from that same Columbian Exposition which gave her her name to her roles in early Hollywood films alongside Tom Mix. Many of the figures here are known due to their connections with early missionaries, especially the Moravians who established the first missions in Labrador, and from whose settlements many Inuit departed to be shown to the public for education and (more often) profit. We learn, too, of those Inuit women who experienced intimate relations with male explorers; with the apparent exception of Hall, every last one of them seems to have had one or more Inuit mistresses. Particularly affecting is the account of Aleqasina, who became Peary's mistress at the age of fifteen, who at one point had to be nursed back to health by Peary's wife Josephine. And yet, of all these tales, perhaps the most touching is that of Ruth Makpii Ipalook, who as a child survived the ill-fated Karluk expedition. That's her on the cover -- and within the book, there's a photo taken of her in 2001, eighty-eight years later -- instantly recognizeable, as her smile was still exactly the same. Throughout the terrible trials of the Karluk survivors, who had to endure the loss of their ship followed by a long trek to land with inadequate supplies, Makpii kept up her spirits and those of others. Asked by her father, "Makpii, are we going to live out the year?" she replied cheerfully "We're living now, and we're going to keep on living!"

And that's what comes across most clearly in this collection -- the extraordinary spirit of the Inuit, who survived and thrived in a region where, despite their seemingly-superior knowledge and technology, white people kept getting lost, starving, and dying. It's the same spirit evident in Minik Wallace, the subject of Mr. Harper's previous book, Give Me My Father's Body -- and, as with that volume, it's the author's frankness, compassion, and intimate knowledge of Inuit life that makes every single one of these stories resonate.

NB: The book is amply illustrated with original pictorial materials, most of them from Mr. Harper's own notable collection. Inhabit Media, the book's publisher, is located in Iqaluit, Nunavut; the book is available now in Canada, and will be published in late March in the US.

Thou Shalt Do No Murder

by Kenn Harper

Iqaluit, NU: Nunavut Arctic College Media, 2017. ISBN 978-1-879568-49-1

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore



For more than thirty years Kenn Harper has been writing historical books and journalism that skilfully combine the archival sources available in southern Canada with the rich oral histories of the Inuit, among whom he has lived for half a century. In doing so he’s shown the journalist’s unerring instinct for finding compelling human stories that are emblematic of the cultural exchange, and often cultural collision, between the two. But he’s also shown the historian’s ability to step back from his immediate subject, seeking its roots in the longer term and the broader view, with an impressively unpartisan sympathy for all the characters, Inuit and European, who fall within his view. In 1986 he first told the story of Minik, the Inuit boy swept along in the wake of Robert Peary’s polar monomania (Give Me My Father’s Body, republished in a new and much expanded edition as Minik, the New York Eskimo in 2017). And two years ago he published two collections, titled In Those Days, of his regular historical column in the Nunatsiaq News. The second of these volumes focused on Arctic Crime and Punishment, and it is one of these stories that Harper has chosen to expand into a full-length study, Thou Shalt Do No Murder.

On 15 March 1920 the independent fur trader Robert Janes was ambushed and shot dead at a hunting camp on the ice near Cape Crauford at the mouth of Admiralty Inlet, the north-westernmost corner of Baffin Island. The man who shot him, Nuqallaq, was one of about twenty Inuit in the camp, most of whom agreed with his action. None of them attempted to hide what they had done, but respectfully buried Janes’s body and, on returning to their home settlement of Pond’s Inlet, brought back and stored his furs and trade goods in his house before reporting their actions to the fur traders there. These events, so baffling on the surface, were the climax to a long series of confrontations, stretching over years, that the increasingly unstable Janes had had with Nuqallaq and most of the other hunters in the camp.

Robert Janes was a Newfoundlander, originally a sailor and eventually ship’s master, who first came north in 1910 on one of Joseph Bernier’s many voyages for the Canadian government. Bernier’s practice was to build cairns, fly flags, and make declarations of claim on behalf of Canada at strategic points on as many different Arctic islands as he could, but in between he traded furs on his own account, often using government-supplied goods as trade items but selling the furs for his own profit. Janes, his second-in-command, was drawn into his web of embezzlement, trading on his behalf during the winter at Pond’s Inlet. After an abortive diversion into gold-prospecting, he eventually got backing from a Newfoundland businessman, Kenneth Prowse, to set up a well-stocked trading station on his own account in 1916.

Almost immediately, however, he began sowing the seeds of his own downfall by his approach to trade. Attempting to ingratiate himself with the local hunters in the hope they would supply him rather than Bernier or another wily businessman, Henry Toke Munn, he gave the Inuit valuable items—guns, ammunition, knives—that he regarded as advances on future payment in furs. But it seems that the Inuit regarded the items as gifts, sweeteners to set the ball rolling in a new trading relationship. As his stock of better trade goods ran out and, increasingly desperate, he was left with only minor items such as cutlery and plugs of tobacco, this mutual misunderstanding was compounded by Janes’s increasingly brusque and overbearing manner, peremptorily demanding furs with menaces before he had even asked for them. Hunters became increasingly disinclined to deal with him as he abused them, eventually attacking one, Umik, with a knife and threatening to shoot him. He also developed a deep personal animus against Umik’s son, Nuqallaq, who was having an affair with Kalluk, the woman providing Janes with wifely services (by arrangement with her husband) during his stay. Through intermediaries, he warned Nuqallaq that he would shoot him on sight if he came near his post, and said the same in a letter of pure venom sent to Bernier’s post manager. Munn’s post manager Jamie Florence, meanwhile, not only had few furs but not enough food to feed himself. He appealed to Janes to buy some of his supplies and Janes, now desperate for furs, gave his terms: Florence must hand over half the furs he had collected for Munn. It was a demand too far, and Florence stuck out the winter of 1917–18 on starvation rations.

But the watershed moment came in September 1919, when for the third summer in a row a relief vessel expected from Janes’s business partner in St John’s failed to arrive. Unbeknown to him, Prowse had received a visit from the wily Munn, who told him not to bother sending a ship to pick up Janes since he himself was going north that year and would bring Janes back. When he arrived he learned of Janes’s demand for furs from Florence, and when Janes arrived at Pond’s Inlet and asked to be shipped out, the same terms were vengefully laid before him: Munn would take him home, but only in exchange for half of his own furs. A demand that would have inconvenienced Munn would have ruined Janes, who, beaten up by Munn’s men, refused. It was a turning point that the Inuit said unhinged the lone trader. His only option for ever getting back would be to return south by dogsled.

After enduring another miserable winter at his post, he and his Inuit post assistant Uuttukuttuk set out by sledge in February 1920. When they reached Admiralty Inlet they found the sea-ice hunting camp where Janes knew he would find several men who he thought owed him furs. They spent several days at the camp as Janes demanded and strong-armed fox pelts from the sleds of the hunters. Used to his tactics by now, the Inuit stoically went about their lives until a newly arrived hunter Miqutui, who had come from the direction Janes was travelling in, told the trader that the ice on that route was so bad he wouldn’t be able to get through that year. With all his options for escape blocked, the news cracked what little mental equilibrium Janes had left. He began threatening to shoot the dogs, and then the people, cooling down only because he temporarily couldn’t find his gun. Two women were so terrified they quietly left the camp, meeting hunters returning to it. Nuqallaq was among them, and as the natural leader of the group he knew that something had to be done.

Although Harper doesn’t draw the comparison, perhaps the closest situation to Nuqallaq’s dilemma in earlier Arctic history was John Richardson’s in October 1821, when he had to decide to shoot the voyageur Michel Terohaute once he became certain that Terohaute, who had already murdered one of their companions and cannibalized others, would otherwise kill him and Hepburn. Likewise, Nuqallaq and his fellow hunters were far from any settlements where they could enlist aid and, before a time when the police had any permanent presence in the north, they were entirely on their own with a dangerously volatile man whom they expected to open fire on them the next time he emerged from his igloo. So Ululijarnaaq called for Janes to come out of his igloo to see some furs, and when he did, Nuqallaq shot him dead.

The Canadian government did not marshal a response until 1921, when it sent a single policeman, Alfred Joy, to act first as coroner, then as justice of the peace, and finally as constable to effect an “open arrest”—there were no facilities for incarceration—of three men, Nuqallaq, Aatitaaq, and Ululijarnaaq.  His report went south the following summer, and only in the one after that, 1923, did a government party arrive at Pond Inlet to conduct the trial. Although the testimony of all the Inuit called as witnesses was clear that Janes had been behaving in a manner so aggressive they feared for their lives, Nuqallaq, as the man who had taken the responsibility of pulling the trigger, was found guilty, though of manslaughter rather than murder. Ululijarnaaq was found guilty of abetting him, though with a recommendation for clemency, and Aatitaaq was acquitted. Ululijarnaaq served his two-year sentence as an open prisoner at Pond’s Inlet, while Nuqallaq was sent south to prison in Manitoba on a sentence of ten years. His health broken by TB, the radical change of climate, and hard labour, he was allowed to return north two years later on licence, the government fearing that if he died and was never seen again the salutary tale he would tell of prison experience would be lost on his community at Pond’s Inlet. Although he tried to pick up the threads of his former life again, he was dead from TB within a year of returning.

On one level, this is a tragedy of personalities. Janes seems to have been short-tempered and, as his fortunes got worse, increasingly overbearing and then aggressive, frequently losing control in violent outbursts. This naturally brought him into conflict with anyone with the confidence and self-possession to stand up to him, which Nuqallaq certainly had. But Nuqallaq was also a piece of work: his first wife had committed suicide rather than put up with his continued beatings, and his young second wife was subject to the same treatment.

But Harper expertly puts this personal tragedy into its larger context—of the fur trade and its effect on Inuit communities, and of a Canadian state at first hesitant but eventually determined to impose visible marks of its sovereignty over lands, and the allegiance of its people, which it claimed in theory but had barely begun to get to grips with in practice. Harper’s mastery of all these levels to his story is what makes his book’s cumulative effect so impressive.

The intense competition that evolved between rival fur traders, competing for the limited trade of Pond’s Inlet, meant that, in a land where profits were modest at best, one bad year could make the difference between success and failure and traders’ could never afford to relax, or fail to take a chance to best the competition. Bernier had the backing of the Canadian government, Munn that of a financial consortium in Britain, but Janes was bankrolled by just one man in St John’s, so was in the most precarious position. Harper’s work in Canadian and British archives bears fruit in the behind-the-scenes correspondence he reveals going on between and about these and other traders as they jockeyed for advantage in the North.

And the fur traders’ presence in the High Arctic was itself a manifestation of long-term forces playing out in the South. Canada’s sovereignty over the Arctic, not even acknowledged by the Canadian government until the 1890s, was still at the stage of assertion and proclamation. Only occasional exploratory expeditions by the United States and European powers would goad Ottawa into actual action, but even that would be done as far as possible through diplomatic channels. Actually establishing a physical presence of the state was an expensive last resort. What they typically relied on instead was for fur traders to act as proxy representatives of Canadian power and values, so someone like Bernier was for them an ideal representative: he planted flags and made speeches to the Inuit telling them they were now Canadian citizens, but also managed to tie them into the Canadian economy through his fur-trading, deflecting men away from hunting food for their families towards hunting non-food game for their skins, thus increasing their dependency on trade goods still further. It’s hard to imagine that no civil servant in Ottawa noticed that Bernier was siphoning off government provisions to line his own pocket: it’s likely they just considered it a reasonable price to pay for maintaining a Canadian presence in the North.

Another mechanism of proxy representation was religion, and Harper details the strange syncretic forms of belief that grew up around this time as Bibles translated into Inuktitut syllabics were disseminated long before missionaries were there to make sense of them. This left the field open for those who wanted to set themselves up as religious leaders, and one of the first to do so was none other than Umik. He established a Christian commune at Igloolik in which he placed himself at the head. He directed where the others should hunt, but did no hunting himself. He declared that men should no longer swap their wives for a season, as the custom had been, yet he continued to do so himself. And Nuqallaq, as his son, shared in these privileges, which can only have added to his cynicism.

But the killing of Robert Janes required the Canadian state to make its presence known in a way that it could not delegate to a proxy: the operation of law. First in the person of Joy, and finally in the person of a judge, Louis Rivet, travelling with the staff and trappings of a court, this was the point at which the state had to turn up in person. Here again Harper is meticulous in establishing the background to the scene that unfolded, giving us summaries of three similar cases in the western Arctic that occurred in the years around the Janes killing, and the gradually escalating judicial response. A 1912 killing of an American sports hunter and a Canadian surveyor had been deemed acts of self-defence when the American seemed about to kill one of his Inuit guides, and the case did not come to court. The following year a very similar case occurred, this time involving two priests: again the elder one lost his temper, threatened to shoot his two Inuit guides, and was stabbed by them before he could do so, and again the companion, fleeing away, was also killed in the melee. This time it came to trial in two separate cases: in the first, one defendant was found not guilty of murdering the younger priest; in the second, both were found guilty of killing the elder priest—the one who had actually threatened violence, and thus ironically the one in which the Inuit had the stronger case for self-defence. But the automatic death sentence was then commuted, and the men were discharged from open confinement after little more than a year. Finally, in April 1920, just a month after Janes was killed, a young man in Tree River killed a police constable and a fur trader after the policeman had arrested him and his uncle for five other murders on the Kent Peninsula. With clear and cool premeditation, these killings seemed to represent the clearest case of murder, and when the case came to trial in July 1923, a few weeks before the trial at Pond’s Inlet, it again led to guilty verdicts, but not this time to commutation, and both defendants were hanged.

In all three cases the actual judicial result was undermined by rhetoric, both spoken and unspoken, that made it clear the process and the verdicts reached were important less for their truth than for the salutary moral effect it was hoped they would have in convincing the Inuit population, first, of the mercy of the law, then of its impartiality, and eventually of its unrelenting determination to punish if that initial lenience were abused. Harper describes them as “show trials”, which is perhaps too strong a term since, although they were procedurally flawed in the many specifics he documents, they were a response to actual violent deaths, rather than the purely fictitious crimes the term suggests.

This is the immediate context in which the three men were tried at Pond’s Inlet, but it’s interesting that the verdict, flawed as it might have been, does not represent the continued ratcheting up of severity that might have been expected from the pattern of those three previous trials. The mitigating circumstances of Janes’s behaviour, and the reality of the fear of imminent violence he inspired, seems to have been at least partially recognized, while the differing sentences might have been intended to show that each man’s culpability was being judged individually, rather than making an undifferentiated example of them all.

But translation problems with the trial—testimony had to be filtered through two translators (one of them the prosecution counsel!) between the Inuktitut witnesses and the Francophone jurors—meant that the defendants, and their broader community, seem to have had little understanding of what was going on. Later, stories emerged in Pond’s Inlet that Nuqallaq had been taken away not for the killing but for beating his wives, or that a demonstration of kayaking prowess by Ululijarnaaq had so impressed the jurors that it turned them aside from their intention of killing the defendants. The exceptional range of Harper’s sources, gleaned from dozens of conversations over the years with descendants of Inuit eyewitnesses, gives this, as every other part of his account, a richness that could never be recreated from published sources alone. The author’s act of bringing together archival and oral sources reveals the broader tragedy of which the Janes case was a part, that of two cultures with different conceptions of law and punishment, each misinterpreting the other’s actions through their own prisms of understanding.

Anyone with an interest in Canadian history and the North should welcome Harper’s latest as a masterly account of the case and its background, as a first-class evocation of a time and place, and not least as a healing and perhaps redemptive braiding together of perspectives to enhance the understanding of all.

Minik, the New York Eskimo: An Arctic Explorer, a Museum, and the Betrayal of the Inuit People

Havover, NH: Steerforth Press

$17 (US), $20 (CA)

By Kenn Harper

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter



This is a new, and substantially revised edition of Kenn Harper's book, which was originally titled Give Me My Father's Body: The  Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo. Originally published in 1986 by Blacklead Books in Iqaluit (then still known as Frobisher Bay), the book recounts in plain yet passionate detail the sad details of the life of Minik (or Mene) Wallace, a young boy who was among a group of Inuit brought back from northwest Greenland by Robert Peary, at the seeming behest of his sponsors, particularly Morris Jesup of the Museum of Natural History, and the anthropologist Franz Boas.

The first US edition of the book came out from Steerforth in 2001; we reviewed the book in what was, at the time, only the second 'issue' of the Arctic Book Review. And we stand by everything we said there; we still feel, as we wrote then, that "in a book as meticulous and thoughtful as this, the author can seem invisible at times, but Harper manages to say just what is needed, and when it's needed, to add to the difficult and poignant story he has so patiently uncovered." And this is yet more true of this new edition; every portion from the previous edition has been carefully gone over and selectively refined; there is also a good deal of new material, and new photographs, the fruit of Harper's ongoing research into the story over the past two decades.

Among the more significant such material is the identity and role of the woman who served as translator for Minik, his father Qisuk, and others in their group during their time in New York. She was Esther Eneutseak, a Labrador Inuk who had been in the United States since 1892, on her way to become part of the "Eskimo Village" at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At the exposition, she'd given birth to a daughter, Nancy, who would go on to become the star of many such attractions, and the first Inuk to be credited with writing and starring in a Hollywood film. At that moment, though, Nancy was back in Labrador being cared for by relatives, while Esther -- only 21 at the time -- had been hired as a maid by William Wallace, the chief custodian at the Museum.

It was a fortunate hire -- Esther soon became known to the anthropologists at the Museum, and served as the principal informant for a key early paper on Inuit burial and mourning customs. This paper, which Harper originally credited to Theodore Kroeber, a young anthropologist who worked with Boas, he has now found to be largely the work of Boas himself, working with Esther. The subject of the paper had a poignant resonance with Minik's own plight: following the death of his father, Qisuk, Boas and the others at the museum staged a burial on the Museum grounds in order to see what sort of customs the young boy would follow. They didn't bury Qisuk's body -- that they wanted for their scientific work, and to mount the skeleton for display -- but only buried a log covered in cloth.

It was the revelation of this deception that marked the start of Minik's sad destiny; although he was adopted by the Wallaces and treated in every conscious way the same as their own son, the news of his father's body reached his ears all the same, from his schoolmates:

  "He was coming home from school with my son Willie one snowy afternoon, when he suddenly began to cry.  'My father is not in his grave,' he said, 'his bones are in the museum.'
    "We questioned him and found out how he had learned the truth. But after that, he was never the same boy.  He became morbid and restless.  Often we would see him crying, and sometimes he would not speak for days.
    "We did our best to cheer him up, but it was no use.  His heart was broken.  He had lost faith in the new people he had come among."

And the resonance of these words still reaches us today. This is indeed a story of a young Inuk, a polar explorer, and of betrayal -- but most of all, it remains a very human story. And the inhumanity of nearly all those in whose balance Minik's life hung has never been told so vividly.

By Shelagh D. Grant

Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre

$39.95

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

Canada's sovereignty over its Arctic territory has been a hot-button issue of late, the more so under the government of Steven Harper. The sight of live-fire interdiction drills, flag-plantings on Hans Island, and the flying of a government minister for a live video at the site of the rediscovery of HMS Investigator in Mercy Bay are all signs of how central the issue has become. And yet, while willing to put out a good deal of money and resources for such shows of force, the federal government of Canada has shown much less interest in supporting the social and infrastructure needs of its Arctic inhabitants, particularly the Inuit. How did this state of affairs come about?

With her new book, Polar Imperative, Shelagh D. Grant provides an eloquent and well-documented answer. And, as it turns out, the Harper government is far from the first in Canadian history to discover in the issue of sovereignty a convenient, seemingly innocent vehicle for political advantage. First, however, Grant lays out the kinds of legal and political arguments which have evolved in the field of international law, and without which "sovereignty" as such cannot be understood. There are many ways a claim of sovereignty can be made; prominent among them are discovery (I was here first), cession (you can have it, I don't want it), subjugation (I conquered it), and contiguity (it's in the midst of lands I already claim). One might think, given all the flag-plantings, that discovery was the strongest claim, but it practice is can be the weakest; land discovered but not occupied, or without the effective exercise of control, may be deemed "inchoate" -- undeveloped or temporary -- and thus liable to the claims of others who may, in fact, come much later.

Then comes the history; Grant offers both a panoramic view and a number of illustrative episodes of the most significant turning points in Canada's, and other nations, Arctic claims. It turns out that Canada has acquired its northern lands by nearly all of the above means: British explorers discovered it; having done so they then ceded it to Canada; Ellesmere Island, though in parts first discovered by Americans, lost its claims there because Canada both occupied them and exercised control. Indeed, Canada's two most northerly outposts, Resolute and Grise Fiord, were both established in order to cement claims of sovereignty. They were also settled, forcibly, when the Canadian government took a number of Inuit families, urged them on with false promises, and then abandoned them. Grant briefly mentions these "High Arctic Exiles," as well as native groups used in a similar manner, but I was disappointed that the larger dimensions of the injustice -- what a nation will do to people in order to wave its flag -- seemed so briefly passed over.

There is, of course, a lot of ground to cover; Grant's narrative stretches from Frobisher's voyage to the D.E.W. line to the era of Russia's underwater flag-scatterings a few years ago. Along the way, there are some fascinating diplomatic dramas, such as the British government's lengthy attempt to "give" the Arctic sea islands north of Barrow Strait to Canada, a move that bounced back and forth through several governments on both sides of the Atlantic before it finally came to pass. Grant touches on the search for Franklin, as well as the later dash for "farthest north," and how these narratives became part of a perceived claim -- by loss of life, as well as discovery -- of the Arctic as a region with a particular role in Canada's history and identity. Here, alas, there are a few errors of fact: Sir Francis Leopold McClintock was never a "whaling captain," and his 1858-59 expedition, although "private" at its outset, was retroactively deemed to have been a period of active service in Her Majesty's Navy. It's a slight, mistake, though in a narrative where "private" and "public" can make such a difference, it's significant.

Nevertheless, the book as a whole is expertly documented and eminently readable. My personal favourites tend toward the grand delusions, none of them more extravagant than the United States' attempt to create a permanent subterranean settlement, "Camp Tuto," deep inside year-round glacial ice; the station was to be powered by a nuclear power plant, and featured tunnels large enough to drive enormous trucks through them. The plan had to be abandoned when shifts in the glacial ice made it clear it could never be stable. Canada, for its part, attempted to establish its own Arctic fortress at Resolute, connecting the oversize airport to the town and Inuit settlement area with a graded highway, under which ran an enormous "Utilidor" pipe, capable of carrying enough raw materials, electricity, water, and fuel for a settlement twenty times its size. Neither side, ultimately, entirely realized their cold-war era dreams, although Thule AFB was built, and the Inughuit inhabitants displaced -- another injustice which has been found illegal by the world court, but the United States refuses to recognize. And this, in the end, is the problem with sovereignty: it turns out that the body of international law on which it is supposedly founded is often in conflict with the views of various nations, and yet these nations cannot be compelled to accept international judgments.

At the present moment, for instance, Canada's sovereignty is under no real threat; though the U.S. and others may believe the Northwest Passage to be an international waterway, they still go through the motions of asking to use it; though the Russians may scatter little titanium flags on the floor of the Arctic Ocean near the Pole, they as yet have shown no sign of searching for resources there (although contracts are being signed for their Arctic oil reserves closer to the mainland). Canadians, at least, should be able to sleep a bit better at night, the more so if this book is on their nightstand. By showing the long history of the vagaries of Arctic sovereignty, Grant's book makes it clear that these fears and posturings are nothing new, and in this case at least, the more we know about this history, the less likely we are to hit the panic button when next it rears its head.

Product details

• Format Hardback | 528 pages
• Dimensions 153 x 234 x 48mm | 915g
• Publication date 08 Feb 2018
• Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Imprint Raven Books
• Publication City/Country London, United Kingdom
• Language English
• Illustrations note 1 x double-spread illustrated floorplan (used as endpapers)
• ISBN10 1408889560
• ISBN13 9781408889565
• Bestsellers rank 26,334

Product details

• Format Hardback | 272 pages
• Dimensions 147 x 206 x 28mm | 431g
• Publication date 19 Jan 2017
• Publisher Black Cat
• Publication City/Country New York, United States
• Language English
• ISBN10 0802125395
• ISBN13 9780802125392
• Bestsellers rank 439,348

A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier

by David Welky

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017 [2016].

Reviewed by Kenn Harper


In late June of 1906 Robert Peary stood on a mountain top on Ellesmere Island and surveyed Nansen Sound, still ice-covered, to the west, and beyond it a land that he called Jesup’s Land, which we know today as Axel Heiberg Island. And to the northwest? Much later he wrote, “… northwest it was with a thrill that my glasses revealed the faint white summits of a distant land…”

A few days later, having crossed Nansen Sound with his two guides, Iggiannguaq and Ulloriaq, he climbed Cape Thomas Hubbard. From there, he later wrote, “… with the glasses I could make out apparently a little more distinctly, the snow-clad summits of the distant land in the north-west, above the ice horizon…. in fancy I trod its shores and climbed its summits, even though I knew that that pleasure could be only for another in another season.”

Thus, on Robert Peary’s penultimate northern expedition, was born the legend of Crocker Land.

In 1913, another expedition left the United States, bound for northwestern Greenland. Two young men, George Borup and Donald MacMillan, were to have been its co-leaders, but Borup drowned accidentally in Long Island Sound some months before the expedition’s departure. In 1908-09 both had been tenderfeet on Peary’s last expedition, in which he claimed to have reached the North Pole. Both worshipped Peary. They knew that he would never return to the Arctic. But even before their return to America, they determined that they would come back – together they would find Crocker Land. The pleasure of “another in another season” would be theirs. After Borup’s untimely death, the mantle of leadership for the expedition they had planned, sponsored in the main by the American Museum of Natural History, fell on MacMillan.

David Welky, a historian with the University of Central Alabama, has written a history of the Crocker Land Expedition. A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier is a welcome, indeed long-overdue, contribution to Arctic history. At 502 pages, it is an exhaustive (but not exhausting) look at the expedition, its successes (few) and failings (many).

MacMillan’s expedition was planned to last two years. For some of its participants, it lasted four; others managed to leave the Arctic after three. MacMillan’s personal failure happened in the first year of the expedition. In the spring of 1914 he and Fitzhugh Green, an ensign in the United States Navy, crossed Ellesmere Island by way of Beitstad Fiord, then sledded north up Eureka and Nansen sounds to Cape Thomas Hubbard on Axel Heiberg Island, from where Peary had claimed his second sighting of Crocker Land almost eight years earlier. Accompanied by two experienced Inuit, Piugaattoq and Ittukusuk, they travelled northwest over the ice surface. On April 21, MacMillan sighted his goal, a huge island, complete with “hills, valleys, snow-capped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon.” He was ecstatic.

But there was nothing there. Piugaattoq told him it was nothing but pujoq – mist. MacMillan couldn’t believe him. For five days, they chased their phantom island – perhaps a continent – over increasingly dangerous sea ice. But finally MacMillan conceded defeat. “My dreams of the last four years were merely dreams, my hopes had ended in bitter disappointment,” he wrote. It was a “will-o’-the-wisp, ever receding, ever changing, ever beckoning.” He had been tricked by an Arctic mirage, a deceit of the atmospheric conditions of springtime and the shifting sea ice. Crocker Land was an illusion.

Welky delves deep into the origins of the Crocker Land myth. Peary, it turns out, had made no mention of his sighting of land to the northwest of Axel Heiberg Island in his diary entries made at the time, nor in the cairn records he left on site. Nor did he mention it on his return to New York, not even at a meeting of the Peary Arctic Club in December of 1906, at which George Crocker was in attendance. And not even in the draft of his book, Nearest the Pole. The name makes its first appearance in the published version of that book, and even there it does not appear in the text, but only on the accompanying map. The text, and that of a magazine article published at about the same time, refers only to the “faint white summits” and “snow-clad summits” of the distant land. What was Peary’s motivation in deciding, sometime between writing the draft and the final text of the book, that he would claim to have seen land far out in the Arctic sea? Simply this: His 1906-7 expedition was a disaster that had produced no tangible results, but he would need some result in order to secure funds for yet another expedition. Welky concludes, as have many others, that Peary was not averse to lying. He had “lied about reaching Greenland’s north shore” in 1892, and he was lying again when he “… saw a fata morgana…” and should have known that he was witnessing a mirage. “Nothing worth writing about in his cache notes or diary, but convincing enough to inspire a story about new land,” writes Welky. “Then he inserted the remarkable tale into his book in order to raise money.”

Welky sums up MacMillan’s (and Borup’s) belief in their mentor succinctly: “Crocker Land was an illusion that grew into a lie that took on a life of its own. Borup and MacMillan turned the lie into a dream…” But even in defeat, MacMillan maintained his belief in Peary. Welky writes, “When Crocker Land evaporated, he was convinced that the Arctic had deceived Peary, not that Peary had deceived him.”

The Crocker Land Expedition shattered more than MacMillan’s dream. One participant was, or became, a madman who literally got away with murder. This was Fitzhugh Green, scientist and would-be poet, who was the only white man with MacMillan on the actual search for Crocker Land. On the return leg, the two men took separate routes, each travelling with his own guide along the shores of Axel Heiberg Island. During a storm, Green misunderstood the actions of his guide, Piugaattoq, who forced the American to walk behind the sled to keep his toes from freezing. Green complained that he could not keep up, but Piugaattoq knew that keeping a steady pace was imperative. Green, feeling that his guide was abandoning him, shot the man, recording matter-of-factly in his journal, “I shot once in the air. He did not stop. I then killed him with a shot through the shoulder and another through the head.” Green confessed his deed to MacMillan. He was never charged nor punished. But the other white men of the expedition learned of it, and it drove a wedge through the camp.

All this within the first year. During the rest of the expedition, MacMillan managed to do some surveying, and Ekblaw made some heroic trips. But the early camaraderie disintegrated after the murder of Piugaatoq, and MacMillan proved himself an ineffective leader. One might expect the rest of the book to be anticlimactic, as it might well have been in the hands of a less skillful author. But Welky is a superb writer, and he mines the interpersonal relationships of the expedition’s participants – the loyalties, the friendships grown or torn asunder, the cultural insensitivities – as effectively as he describes the travel, the exploration into unknown territory, and the constant flirtation with death at the hands of the elements.

A less skilled author might have been tempted to focus on the heroism of the search for Crocker Land – for a journey over unpredictable ice in often-blizzard conditions, whether the objective is reached or not, or real or not, is heroism nonetheless and makes a compelling tale – and then relegate the denouement to a final chapter or two. But Welky has not taken this easy way out. He unwinds the expedition as meticulously as he had set it up. MacMillan’s party does not even reach northwestern Greenland until page 134 of this book – the author sets the stage for the expedition, its inspiration, the administrivia of its organization, the backgrounds of its personnel, in considerable detail. Similarly, he meticulously documents the last two years of the expedition, a stay in northern Greenland prolonged by the failure of relief ships to arrive or even be seaworthy. One bright point in what for some participants was a time of despair and boredom was MacMillan’s trip of pure exploration with only Inuit companions to the unknown region west of Axel Heiberg Island.

The illustrations for this book are well-chosen. One map shows the area and most of the relevant place names, but the reader might have benefited by the inclusion of more maps with more detail of the 1914 Crocker Land attempt and MacMillan’s 1916 journey. Welky has wisely avoided the use of the out-dated word Eskimo in his text, opting instead for the self-designation of the people of northwestern Greenland, the word Inughuit; this is a plural word, a variant of the more general Inuit, and the singular form for both is Inuk. But it can be a daunting task for the writer who does not speak Inuktun, the language of the Polar Inuit, to keep this nomenclature straight. On occasion Welky slips up and refers to “an Inughuit” or “a true Inughuit” – an impossibility – but is generally consistent in using Inuk as the singular form. In a footnote on page 461, he is in unfamiliar territory when he refers to McClure’s abandoned ship, Investigator, providing the Inughuit with a source of metal; but these were people in the western Canadian Arctic, who do not describe themselves as Inughuit – the proper term should simply be Inuit. He also uses the term Polar Inuit in reference to the people once known as Polar Eskimos. Welky has consistently used the spelling Battle Harbor for the telegraph station on the Labrador coast, but this is incorrect for it is an official place name and should be spelled in the Canadian manner as Battle Harbour. But these are minor quibbles in a book this good.

As the long centennial of the Crocker Land Expedition finally draws to a close in 2017, a reading of A Wretched and Precarious Situation would be an appropriate way to celebrate this little-known and much-misunderstood expedition.

From the Tundra to the Trenches

By Eddy Weetaltuk

Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016
$24.95 Canadian/ $27.95 US

Reviewed by Kenn Harper



To say that Eddy Weetaltuk lived an eventful life, unlike the lives of his fellow Inuit, is an understatement. He was born in 1932 on Strutton Island in James Bay, one of twelve children. His surname, he points out, means “innocent eyes” (and should really be spelled Uitaaluttuq). His grandfather, George Weetaltuk, was a guide for the film-maker Robert Flaherty in the making of his ground-breaking documentary, Nanook of the North. Eddy’s childhood was what one would expect for an Inuk boy growing up in the 1930s and 40s at the southern limit of traditional Inuit land, in James Bay and on the Quebec coast – periods of joy and hunger in the comfort of a large family.  He went to school in Fort George, and finished the eighth grade at boarding school. By the time he reached adulthood, he was multi-lingual, speaking English, Inuktitut, French and Cree.

Although he describes the loneliness he experienced at school in Fort George because of his absence from family, Eddy focuses on the inter-racial friendships he made there, and the camaraderie he had with the religious brothers who were his teachers.  It is perhaps worth noting that, at a time when Canadian media is obsessed with the subject of abuse encountered by indigenous students at residential schools, and indigenous authors are documenting their own experiences of abuse, this book is not of that genre.

Always curious about the world outside his small community, and encouraged by a Catholic priest, in 1951 Eddy made a fateful decision – to go south. His friend, Brother Martin, told him “Edward, my dear son, do not stay in the North. Do whatever it takes but go south. Your real place is there… you will be able to succeed there… Our laws are foolish; we should not be preventing Eskimos from going anywhere.” This seems to be the genesis of Eddy’s belief that Inuit were not allowed to leave the north; although technically mistaken – there was no such law - in practical terms few Inuit at the time had the language and other skills needed to make the transition to a southern life.

Fearing the discrimination he thought would confront him outside his comfort zone, Eddy changed his name – he would no longer be Eddy Weetaltuk E9-422, but rather Eddy Vital, and he would pass as a French-Canadian. He made up a cover story that his father was a French-Canadian from Winnipeg, with the surname Vital, and his mother an Inuk “which made me not Eskimo but Canadian.” (Those were the days when people of mixed race often denied their indigenous ancestry, rather than embracing it.)

Eddy joined the Army and was sent to Korea. He saw battle there, and sought his solace, like many young soldiers, in alcohol and in the brothels of Japan and Korea. Following his Korean service, he trained as a parachutist in Manitoba, then was stationed for many years in Germany before finally leaving the Army in 1967 and returning to northern Quebec.

The story of how Eddy’s life experiences finally made it into print is almost as interesting as his story itself. He first wrote down his tale in 1974. With the help of a friend, he sent the handwritten manuscript of about 200 pages, along with twenty drawings – for Eddy was an artist as well as a writer - to the National Museum of Man in Ottawa (now the Canadian Museum of History). And there it languished. In 2002 a curator came across the forgotten manuscript and drawings, and arranged for them to be transferred to the Canadian War Museum. Eddy agreed to the transfer, believing that the war museum might take more of an interest in his story and finally publish it.  But again it languished. Then, with the help of a lawyer, he recovered the manuscript from the war museum, and submitted it to a southern publisher. They considered it, but wanted major revisions. And so it went unpublished once more.

Then, by chance, the lawyer met an academic, Thibault Martin, at a conference and told him the story of Eddy’s manuscript. Martin had previously met Eddy while doing research for his doctorate, and the two began a collaborative editing process. Eddy died at his home in Umiujaq in 2005, when the editing was almost complete. Unfortunately, he didn’t live to see his work published.

Eddy’s book was published first in French in 2009, in Paris, by a publisher which specialized in exceptional life stories. In 2015, a German language edition was produced. Finally, it has appeared in English, in the University of Manitoba series, First Voices, First Texts. 

Thibault Martin is not reticent to acknowledge the role he played in shaping the manuscript for a non-Inuit audience. Eddy had been “adamant in his refusal to write an academic text that would cater to an audience of anthropologists and ethnographers.” Yet the museums had treated his work as an archival document that would appeal to just those interests, and even when it reached a mainstream Canadian publisher for consideration, Eddy’s story did not make the grade – it didn’t satisfy what the publisher thought Canadian readers wanted in a book from an Inuit author, namely “traditional Inuit tales and children’s literature.”

Martin asked Eddy to expand on some aspects of his life story and to cut back his narration of other parts.  He felt that the early part of the story needed more childhood memories, and that the parts dealing with the author’s military service needed paring to avoid repetitive descriptions of inebriation, imprisonment, disgrace and discrimination.  Martin described the “revised life story” that resulted as “a compensatory autobiography “

Thibault Martin’s foreword is followed by an introduction by Isabelle St-Amand, a specialist in Canadian native literature, who places Eddy’s work in the context of other Inuit biographies. Inuit and First Nations authors have, in recent years, broken the boundaries of what was once considered “acceptable” indigenous literature. A thirty-five-page appendix by Martin, with the mind-numbing title, “The Experience of Eddy Weetaltuk in the Context of Aboriginal Participation in Canadian Wars,” is far too long and detailed and detracts from the book. It should have been condensed into a paragraph or two and imbedded in the editor’s foreword, or treated in footnotes.

Eddy’s narrative ends with his return to Great Whale River in 1967 and the very beginning of his re-integration into a much-changed north. “A new life was ahead of me,” he wrote in his final paragraph. “The life of an Inuk in his village.” And there it ends. But it shouldn’t have. This reader wants to know some details of that life, of how Eddy Weetaltuk reconciled his unique experiences in the south and abroad with his new-old life-of-an-Inuk in the years after 1974. How did he spend his time? What were his interests? How did his community accept him?  Eddy’s own narrative ends too soon and he never had the chance to write his own version of the epilogue that his story deserves. The book would have been greatly enhanced had someone done the research to include an appendix on Eddy’s life post-1974. Eddy deserved that, and we, the readers, deserve it too. As it stands very little other material has been written about Eddy’s life back home. Bob Mesher wrote an interesting article, “A Closer Look at Eddy Weetaltuk’s Painting” for the Winter 2006-2007 issue of Makivik Magazine, but those paintings too were done before 1974.

Eddy had made no bones about the fact that he wanted to write a best-seller. He wanted his work to serve as an encouragement to Inuit youth to achieve their potential. “I wish to tell them,” he wrote in the book’s last chapter, “your life belongs to you. You are the ultimate master of your destiny, so don’t let despair, alcohol, or drugs control you. Be yourself, be proud. Be proud of being Inuit and always remember that your ancestors had to fight every single day of their lives to survive. It is now your turn to be strong and courageous.” 

Product details

• Format Paperback | 272 pages
• Dimensions 135 x 206 x 18mm | 181g
• Publication date 05 Jun 2018
• Publisher HARPER PERENNIAL
• Language English
• ISBN10 006242873X
• ISBN13 9780062428738
• Bestsellers rank 472,494

Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

By Ken McGoogan

Toronto: HarperCollins, 2017

Reviewed by Kenn Harper



Ken McGoogan has produced yet another worthy northern book. Dead Reckoning sets out to tell, as its sub-title proclaims, “The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage.” The book is peopled with the usual suspects in the history of Arctic exploration and the search for the elusive Northwest Passage. I needn’t name them here; if you are reading this, you already know who they are.  But this book introduces other names that will be unfamiliar to many readers, even some well-versed in northern history. Their stories are the “untold stories” of the sub-title.

McGoogan points out in his Prologue that orthodox history only grudgingly acknowledges non-British explorers - he specifically mentions Amundsen, Kane and Hall - as well as “short-changing” fur-trade explorers - and here he mentions Hearne, Mackenzie and Rae. He has mentioned these explorers before, of course, and his focus on John Rae is well-known. But in the present volume he takes his championship of the neglected considerably further. “The twenty-first century,” he says, “demands a more inclusive narrative of Arctic exploration–one that accommodates both neglected explorers and forgotten First Peoples.”

 His goal, then, is “to restore the unsung heroes to their rightful eminence.” He recognizes not just the physical work, but the contributions, of the fur-trade explorers, and of Dene, Ojibway, Cree, and especially Inuit. He points out that Franklin’s ships would still be undiscovered at the bottom of the ocean were it not for Inuit and their oral histories.

And so the reader encounters unfamiliar names in this sweeping tale. McGoogan’s point is that they have largely been nameless to date, so I feel compelled to name them here, in solidarity with McGoogan’s championing of them, and to help in rectifying the injury that past histories have done them.

Thanadelthur, an unsung Dene woman who assisted James Knight, has her story told in these pages, as do other Dene leaders, Matonabbee, who accompanied Hearne, and Akaitcho, who assisted Franklin on his overland expeditions. The Ojibway hunter, Thomas Mistegan, played an important role in support of John Rae. Even the Iroquois voyageur (and murderer), Michel, makes an appearance.

Two Greenlandic Inuit are recognized in these pages: John Sakeouse is present for his role in helping John Ross make the first contact by Europeans with the Inughuit of north-western Greenland; Hans Hendrik is featured for the reliance Elisha Kent Kane placed on him.

Early Inuit interpreters in what is now Canada ranged far and wide. They include Tattannoeuck and Hoeootoerock, both from the western shores of Hudson Bay, but who travelled extensively with explorers as far west as the Mackenzie Delta. Albert One-Eye lost his life in the service of John Rae. Ouligbuck (William Ouligbuck Senior), an Inuk from the Keewatin region, worked with explorers and traders as far east as Fort Chimo (Kuujjuaq) and as far west as Fort McPherson, certainly an accomplishment worth noting, yet the historical record has been generally silent on his contributions, less so for those of his son, William Ouligbuck Junior, on whom much of Rae’s success depended.

Other Inuit contributed directly to the work of those Qallunaat explorers who searched for Franklin and his missing men. The oral histories provided by men like In-nook-poo-zhe-jook and Puhtoorak, and the indispensable couple, Tookoolito and Ebierbing, not to mention their physical labours – and those of men like Tulugaq - in support of the expeditions of Hall and Schwatka, leave one wondering why their stories have not been known earlier. Tookoolito’s brother, Eenoolooapik, played an important role in the rediscovery of Cumberland Sound by whalers, but no role at all in the search for Franklin or the Northwest Passage. But his biographer later sailed as assistant surgeon with Franklin, and this prompts McGoogan to tell his story in a “what if” chapter. Might things have turned out differently for Franklin if Eenoolooapik had travelled with his friend, the surgeon, on Franklin’s doomed expedition? Eenoolooapik can be seen here as a surrogate for Inuit in general, and the question becomes – What if Franklin had made use of Inuit travel methods and Inuit knowledge? It’s a question worth pondering.

McGoogan devotes a chapter also to Knud Rasmussen, an explorer-ethnographer of Danish and Greenlandic heritage, who spoke Greenlandic (closely related to Inuktitut) as his native language. He collected Franklin reminiscences on his epic dog-sled journey across Arctic America from Hudson Bay to Bering Strait. He travelled with two indispensable Inughuit companions. Ironically McGoogan doesn’t give us their names, but they were the hunter, Qaavigarsuaq, and his female cousin, Arnarulunnguaq.

Of course, the story must end (and does) with acknowledgement of the contributions of Louie Kamookak and Sammy Kogvik, both instrumental in the finding of the Erebus and Terror.
McGoogan highlights also the work of non-British explorers whom he feels history has short-changed, among them Jens Munk, a Dane who led an early and tragic expedition to Hudson Bay, and Roald Amundsen, the first to sail the Northwest Passage. David Woodman, a modern-day researcher, is given the credit he richly deserves for his work in pointing out that Inuit oral histories held the key to “unravelling the Franklin mystery.”

McGoogan achieves admirably his goal of bringing the unsung, whether Indigenous or Qallunaat, to the fore. In some areas, I would suggest he overachieves it.

In his desire to give Indigenous people their due, he sometimes over-reaches. While there is ample reason to include Hans Hendrik for his work with Kane, and Tookoolito and Ebierbing for their assistance to Hall, there seems little reason to discuss Hall’s expedition in search of the North Pole, in which all three participated, in a book on the Northwest Passage; perhaps it was a way of making the Inuit biographies more complete. The inclusion of a chapter on Minik (the New York Eskimo) in a book on the passage is more perplexing, although I am personally grateful for the exposure this inclusion gives to Minik’s sad story.

And yet a few Inuit who were involved in the search for Franklin are omitted, perhaps because the author felt their roles were quite minor. Kallihirua (properly Qalaherhuaq, and usually abbreviated to Kalli), from northern Greenland, was with Ommanney in 1850 and ended up in England where he assisted Captain John Washington in preparing an English-Eskimo dictionary for the use of Franklin search parties. The West Greenlander, Adam Beck, also played a minor (and confusing) role in the Franklin search.

In his blog on August 30, McGoogan pointed out that “copies from the first print run include a map-related glitch that will turn these books into collectors’ items.” The challenge implicit in his statement was to find the glitch. OK, I found it. It is the misplacement of the maps (but not the map titles) on pages 206 and 254. All the maps, by the way, and especially the end-paper maps are superb.

A book of this scope necessarily gives rise to questions and quibbles. They are remarkably few.

In discussing James Knight’s ill-fated expedition, which perished, it is claimed, in its entirety, he makes no mention of “the English Man.” Between 1738 and 1744 Francis Smith, the captain of a Hudson’s Bay Company trading sloop which ventured annually north from Churchill, reported that at Whale Cove the Inuit called one of their number “the English Man.” The captain noted that he was of an age that meant that he could possibly be the son of a survivor of the Knight expedition and an Inuit woman. This is supposition, of course, but would have made a nice aside.

The controversial Moses Norton of Churchill is referred to as “HBC governor” (43), when what is meant is “chief factor,” the position that Norton held there from 1762 until his death in 1773. The same error is repeated in reference to Samuel Hearne (52).

In “Matonabbee Leads Hearne to the Coast,” the slaughter of Inuit by Dene at Bloody Falls is recounted. But I was disappointed that there was no reference to recent scholarship casting doubt on the veracity of Hearne’s account of the massacre – whether one believes the recent scholarship or not - although an earlier chapter casts doubt on Hearne’s account of the James Knight story.

Eenoolooapik’s birthplace, Qimisuk, is not Blacklead Island (155), which is farther down the coast of Cumberland Sound and has the Inuktitut name Uummannarjuaq. Qegertarsuag should be Qeqertarsuaq (364). “Qallunaat,” the word given for “white man” is the plural form; the singular is “qallunaaq” (399).

On page 335, it is claimed that in 1870 when Lady Franklin visited him, Charles Francis Hall was working on his “soon-to-be-published book Life with the Esquimaux: A Narrative of Arctic Experience in Search of Survivors of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition.” But that book was published in 1866, the American edition of a two-volume work first published in England under a different title two years earlier. In 1870 Hall was, in fact, working on plans for his North Pole expedition. He never published an account of his second expedition, the one in which Lady Franklin was interested; his notes were edited and published posthumously as a third-person narrative in 1879.

But these are minor quibbles in a sweeping work that sets out to bring the Indigenous contributors to northern exploration into the story as participants with names – not just tribal affiliations or occupations stated as “hunter” or “my faithful interpreter” – and lives, families, and accomplishments.  McGoogan achieves his goal. Let’s hope that future writers follow his lead and give Indigenous people their rightful place in the development of inclusive, cross-cultural histories of northern exploration.

Product details

• Format Hardback | 224 pages
• Dimensions 157 x 236 x 20mm | 367g
• Publication date 26 Nov 2020
• Publisher Harpercollins Focus
• Imprint Harper Horizon
• Publication City/Country Nashville, United States
• Language English
• ISBN10 0785233873
• ISBN13 9780785233879
• Bestsellers rank 108

Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration

by Adriana Craciun


Cambridge: Cambridge UP, $120 (hardcover); $70 (Kindle)


Reviewed by Russell A. Potter



In the wake of the renewed interest in the history of the Franklin expedition and those who searched for it, we are beginning to see two different  -- yet complementary -- phenomena: First, a fresh effort to better understand what went wrong, and with it why the search still inspires such passionate feeling; and second, an emerging body of scholarship that points the way to a more critical consideration of the larger mythos of Franklin, and of Arctic exploration generally. Adriana Craciun's Writing Arctic Disaster is, as it were, the flagship of this second fleet, gathering together recent scholarly work and using it as the foundation for a reconsideration of the old myths and counter-myths that have, at times, trapped scholarly perspectives in an icy tomb just as unchanging and sterile as the graves of Franklin's men on Beechey Island. Sartain's engraving of these graves, based on a watercolor by James Hamilton (based in turn on a sketch by Dr. Elisha Kent Kane), fittingly appears on the cover of this new study.

Craciun opens her book with a reference to Nietzsche's (in)famous consideration of historiography, in which he distinguishes three sorts of history: the monumental, the archaeological, and the critical. Each, in its extremes, has its flaws: the monumental 'leaps from mountain-top to mountain-top,' often missing the complexities of the valleys in its urge to hammer out a race of heroes; the archaeological can get lost in minutiæ, becoming only the 'restless raking-together of everything that has been thought and said.' It's the last sort -- the critical -- 'history which judges, and condemns' -- that Craciun seeks to pursue, though not to such an extent that it damages the previous two (Nietzsche's prescription, after all, was for a balance of all three forms).

Craciun argues that, for too long, we have experienced the Franklin story, along with others of explorers in extremis, in a manner rather too similar to that of our Victorian forebears. Like them, we read the explorers' original narratives, letting the woodcuts and engravings with which they were illustrated carry us north on imaginary wings; like them, we dote over relics, seeking amidst spoons and eyeglasses the vital clues which might solve it all; like them, we take it for granted that exploration is a vital human impulse, as old as time, and dating back to the first moment that the earliest women and men wondered what was over the next hill.

She's right, of course. And so, as a remedy to this head-ache of anachronistic proportions, she alternately applies the salve of the archaeological and the sharp astringency of the critical, both to good effect. The enmeshment of exploration in the culture of print, and in the nineteenth-century's vast expansions of literacy and utility, is aptly observed; drawing here upon work such as Janice Cavell's Tracing the Connected Narrative, as well as upon the theoretical work of de Certeau and Foucault, she gives us, as it were, a genealogy of the fascination with Arctic disaster.

Her first chapter, "Arctic Archives: Victorian Relics, Sites, Collections," is the most exemplary of these; where others have seen the Franklin relics mainly as clues in a detective story about loss, she emphasizes their ambiguity, uncertainty, and hybridity:

Beginning with the earliest collections of Franklin disaster debris, not only the message but the relics themselves were indistinct and unstable artifacts verging on ecofacts, further losing ontological cohesion and categorical integrity as searches proliferated more objects and they in turn more questions.

As instances of this, she notes the many items that had been repurposed by Inuit, some still showing the maker's marks of their British manufacturers; here was the Empire not merely ended, but mended, turned to native purposes and verging on the sort of anthropological artifaction that might attend a Kwakiutl mask or a Samoan spear. Each new search, of course, added to this store, but this accumulation of relics failed to clear up the mystery, offering instead only a "broken syntax" that could never be assembled into a coherent sentence.

The chapter following takes a step further back in time, to Franklin's first land expedition, which -- with its resulting narrative, published as were to be nearly all others, in a quarto edition by John Murray -- she sees as the cornerstone of what she calls 'polar print culture.' She includes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein among these texts, and demonstrates how, in one sense, Franklin's failure in his first foray was shadowed by his "perpetual disappointment with the land's bewildering resistance to [his] aesthetic expectations." And yet, in the end, the illustrated edition of his narrative reiterated those expectations, omitting to depict those incidents of starvation and cannibalism beside which boot-eating was merely a minor sin.

Chapters 3 & 4 take us further back still, to the era prior to Barrow's flurry of Naval expeditions, when gentleman adventurers (the latter a word which originally referred to the venturing of capital, not lives) first sailed into uncharted waters. The central section of this chapter offers a critical account of James Knight's prior Arctic disaster. Knight, of course, was looking for copper, and so his demise pre-dates the ideology of the disinterested scientific 'explorer,' but it certainly laid some of the foundation. These chapters also feature some quite remarkable images, both of the elaborate manuscripts that the Hudson's Bay men prepared, and their inscriptions upon stone, each of which with their bold serifs seemed almost willing to claim pre-eminence by letterform alone.

Of more particular interest to those who approach this book with a Franklin fascination, Chapter 5 offers a fresh consideration of Frobisher's voyages, along with Hall's recovery of relics from sites identified by the Baffin Island Inuit. Many have dismissed Hall's discoveries there, and as Craciun notes, the items he brought back had "none of the photogenic and affective power of the personal effects and scientific instruments found by the Franklin searches." Nevertheless, they formed an important connection, what she calls the 'rediscovery' of early modern voyages, that dovetailed perfectly with the emergent interest in writing the backstory of exploration, and of establishments such as the Hakluyt Society.

The book concludes with an epilogue in which Craciun turns her critical faculties upon what she calls the "twenty-first century reinvention of Franklin's legacy." Much of it, including the support of the former Harper government and petrochemical companies, she views dimly, seeing a sad admixture of "Imperial nostalgia" and a return to a new, yet no less false monumental sense of history. There's certainly some truth to this, but I don't agree with her that the Franklin story is, ultimately, a distraction (though if so, 'tis a pleasant one). As an embodiment of the ultimate question of why we explore -- past, present, and future -- Franklin's disaster seems to me to offer a stark reminder of risk, rather than a rear-view mirror of lionization. And it's that element of willing risk -- of lives, of time, of materiel -- that is, in the end, the vital part of discovery. Still, Craciun is right to remind us that that word -- discovery -- along with (ad)venture -- is always in danger of being collapsed back into a merely capitalistic exercise. In both senses, it's a cautionary tale.

NB: The book is printed in a large octavo format, on moderately high-surface paper, which shows the numerous well-reproduced illustrations to good effect. Cambridge University Press, so far, has made this book available only as a hardcover priced for the library market at $120, with a Kindle version available for $70. While the academic language of the book may initially pose a challenge for some readers, the book is nevertheless of broad interest, and it's to be hoped that, before too long, an affordable trade paperback will be made available, or the price of the e-book reduced.