Thou Shalt Do No Murder: Inuit, Injustice, and the Canadian Arctic

By Kenn Harper

High Arctic, 1920: Three Inuit men delivered justice to an abusive Newfoundland trader

This is a story of fur trade rivalry and duplicity, isolation and abandonment, greed and madness, and a struggle for the affections of an Inuit woman during a time of major social change in the High Arctic.

Doubts over the validity of Canadian sovereignty and an official agenda to confirm that sovereignty added to the circumstances in which a guilty verdict against the leader of the Inuit accused was virtually assured. The show trial that took place in Pond Inlet in 1923 marked a collision of two cultures with vastly different conceptions of justice and conflict resolution. It marked an end to the Inuit traditional way of life and ushered in an era in which Inuit autonomy was supplanted by dependence on traders and police, and later missionaries.

Kenn Harper draws on a combination of Inuit oral history, archival research, and his own knowledge acquired through 50 years in the Arctic to create a compelling story of justice and injustice in the Canadian far north.

Kenn Harper lived in the Arctic for 50 years in Inuit communities in Canada and in Qaanaaq, Greenland. He has worked as a teacher, historian, linguist, and businessman. He speaks Inuktitut, and has written extensively on Northern history and language. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, a recipient of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee Medal, and a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog (Denmark). Harper is the author of the bestselling Minik: the New York Eskimo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nunavut Arctic College
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781897568859

Kenn Harper

Kenn Harper is a historian, writer, and linguist, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and a former member of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. He is the author of the In Those Days series, Minik: The New York Eskimo, and Thou Shalt Do No Murder: Inuit, Injustice, and the Canadian Arctic. “Taissumani,” his column on Arctic history, appears in Nunatsiaq News.

Book preview

Cover: Thou Shalt Do No Murder: Inuit, Injustice, and the Canadian Arctic by Kenn Harper.

A photograph of four men standing in a row. The first and third are white men wearing RCMP uniforms. The second is an Inuit man in a jacket. The fourth is a white man in a suit.

$38.95 CAN

High Arctic, 1920: Three Inuit Men Delivered Justice to an Abusive Newfoundland Trader Named Robert Janes. Ottawa Responded with its Own Forms of Justice.

This is a story of fur trade rivalry and duplicity, isolation and abandonment, greed and madness, and a struggle for the affections of an Inuit woman during a time of major social change in the High Arctic.

Doubts over the validity of Canadian sovereignty and an official agenda to confirm that sovereignty added to the circumstances in which a guilty verdict against the leader of the Inuit accused was virtually assured. The show trial that took place in Pond Inlet in 1923 marked a collision of two cultures with vastly different conceptions of justice and conflict resolution. It marked an end to the Inuit traditional way of life and ushered in an era in which Inuit autonomy was supplanted by dependence on traders and police, and later missionaries.

Kenn Harper draws on a combination of Inuit oral history, archival research, and his own knowledge acquired through 50 years in the Arctic to create a compelling story of justice and injustice in the Canadian far north.

Thou Shalt do no Murder

Published by Nunavut Arctic College Media

www.nacmedia.ca

Box 600, Iqaluit, NU, X0A 0H0

Text copyright © 2017 by Kenn Harper

Design and layout by Marijke Friesen/Inhabit Education © 2017 Nunavut

Arctic College Media

Cover image © Thomas Henry Tredgold / Library and Archives Canada / PA-

187327

Photographs © as indicated

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrievable system, without written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of copyright law.

Printed in Canada.

Logos: Nunavut, Nunavut Arctic College Media

Harper, Kenn, 1945–, author

Thou shalt do no murder: Inuit, injustice, and the Canadian

Arctic / Kenn Harper.

ISBN 978-1-897568-49-1 (softcover)

1. Criminal justice, Administration of—Canada, Northern.

2. Trials (Murder)—Nunavut—Pond Inlet. 3. Inuit—Legal status,

laws, etc.—Canada, Northern. 4. Inuit—Canada, Northern—Social

life and customs—20th century. 5. Canada, Northern—Social

conditions—20th century. I. Title.

HV9960.C2H37 2017 364.9719 C2017-901916-3

Thou Shalt do no Murder

Inuit, Injustice, and the Canadian Arctic

Kenn Harper

Praise for Kenn Harper

and Thou Shalt Do No Murder

"As a child in Arctic Bay, I heard elders talk of the killing of a qallunaaq named Sakirmiaviniq, and of its aftermath, the trial of Inuit for murder. Kenn Harper moved to the High Arctic in the early 1970s and was fortunate to hear this story from those same elders. He has researched it ever since, from both Inuit and non-Inuit sources. I am impressed with the value he has placed on Inuit knowledge in telling a complex northern story for a wider audience."

—Eva Aariak, former Premier of Nunavut and language and culture enthusiast

The essential story of a defining and consequential event in the Canadian Arctic, convincingly and deftly told through the juxtaposition of Inuit oral history and official written records. Harper’s unsurpassed grasp of Arctic history, his love of storytelling, and his scholarly prowess all combine to make this volume a compelling and unmissable read for anyone interested in Canada’s early incursions into its Arctic territories.

—John MacDonald, author of The Arctic Sky: Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore, and Legend

Kenn Harper is our foremost historian of the encounters—and clashes—between Inuit and European cultures. A longtime resident of the Arctic, author of a definitive book on Minik, the New York Eskimo," and writer behind the long-running Taissumani column in Nunatsiaq News, he brings his extraordinary knowledge of the North to bear on the tragic case of Robert Janes and Nuqallaq, the Inuk sentenced for his murder. Harper’s skill at unravelling the complex threads of the story is unmatched, and offers fresh insights into one of the strangest chapters in Canadian history."

—Russell Potter, author of Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-Year Search

"In Thou Shalt Do No Murder, historian Kenn Harper examines a relatively obscure incident—the murder of a white trader by Inuit—and uses it to deliberate on Inuit–Canadian relations in the first few decades of the twentieth century. The book is a worthy successor to Give Me My Father’s Body, Harper’s celebrated account of a Greenlandic boy brought to New York City by white explorer Robert Peary. Highly recommended for Arctic aficionados as well as Arctic libraries!"

—Lawrence Millman, author of Last Places: A Journey in the North and At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic

I really enjoy reading Kenn Harper’s writing. His stories are well researched, and written in an entertaining way—you feel the emotions of the people involved. I know Kenn puts a lot of work into getting all the little details from people who saw the events or who heard the stories from their parents. Reading his work makes you want to read more.

—Germaine Arnaktauyok, artist and illustrator

‘Beware the tears of a white man’—this is the story of Robert Janes, killed or executed as a trader out of control, and out of luck, in the Canadian Arctic in 1920. His nemesis, Nuqallaq, careful and considerate, was tried and sentenced to a southern prison where he caught tuberculosis, which he would eventually die from. Harper tells this story, without embellishment, as one of greed for furs, jealousy for affection, and the need, then as now, for Canada to assert sovereignty in the North: Jack London without the pathos, a modern tale with biblical dimensions.

—Jonathan King, author, Blood and Land: The Story of Native North America

Kenn Harper, historian and raconteur par excellence of the Arctic, has produced an outstanding, detailed book on the Robert Janes affair and its impact on both Inuit and Canadian history in the twentieth century. In recounting this tragic story, he has thoroughly engaged oral history as well as printed materials, carefully interpreted through deep immersion in the subject as well as contemporaneous events and personalities bearing upon its history. Harper’s expert translations and elegant integration of different voices, combined with careful analysis, brings both a sense of immediacy and great understanding to the history of this impactful event.

—Lyle Dick (Lyle Dick History and Heritage, Winnipeg), author of Muskox Land: Ellesmere Island in the Age of Contact

"This extraordinary book tells the story of what happened when a centuries-old recognition of the Inuit duty to maintain social order came into conflict with ‘white man’s justice.’ At once fast-paced and profound, a page-turner and a sensitive, evenhanded interrogation of the historical record, Thou Shalt Do No Murder dramatizes a cultural clash that spawned a killing, a murder trial, and a miscarriage of justice. Like Give Me My Father’s Body, this work will resonate long into the future."

—Ken McGoogan, author of Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

"I also wanted them to get acquainted with government officials and to get used to the notion that they were now wards of the government, and must accordingly begin to adopt the ways of white men, especially in observing the laws of the country."

—Captain Joseph-Elzéar Bernier addressing the Inuit at Pond’s Inlet, 1906

"If Nuqallaq comes your way and he intends to come here when I am away will you tell him that if I find out he was here I’ll shoot him on sight the first time I see him. I mean it too. I hate that fellow."

—Robert Janes in a letter to Wilfrid Caron, October 3, 1918

"Never mind … if I kill somebody, never mind if I kill some of the people, and afterwards most of the dogs."

—Nuqallaq recalling the threats of Robert Janes made on March 14, 1920

For Jennifer Ipirq,

born December 24, 1976,

my daughter, and the great-great-granddaughter of Robert Janes.

In memory of Jimmy Etuk,

born February 1904,

died March 9, 1975, Arctic Bay, Nunavut,

hunter and storyteller.

In memory of Max Machmer,

born March 22, 1952, Peterhead, Scotland,

died August 6, 1986, Mary River, near Pond Inlet, Nunavut,

a man who loved the Arctic and its people.

A map of a section of Nunavut that includes Brodeur Peninsula, Broden Peninsula, and Bylot Island. The land is made up of peninsulas and islands., A map of Baffin Island. A zoomed-out version of the map is in the corner of the frame, and includes Devon Island, Greenland, Baffin Island, Labrador, and Newfoundland.

A map of a section of Nunavut. There are numbers along the map that are associated with a list of place names at the bottom of the frame. Along the top is the Brodeur Peninsula, which includes the number 13 (Cape Crauford/Kangiq); number 14 (Admiralty Inlet); the Borden Peninsula, which includes Arctic Bay, and number 15 (Adams Sound); number 9 (Navy Board Inlet); Bylot Island, which includes number 7 (Button Point/Sannirut); the land under Bylot Island, which includes number 10 (Milne Inlet), number 12 (Iqaluit (in Tay Sound), number 11 (Emerson Island/Qimivvik), number 5 (Patricia River/Tulukkaan), number 1 (Salmon River), Pond Inlet, number 2 (Igarjuaq/Pond’s Inlet), number 3 (Beloeil Island), number 4 (Albert Harbour), and number 6 (Erik Harbour). In the centre is Igloolik and Hall Beach. At the bottom is Repulse Bay. At the top is the body of water Landcaster Sound, and at the bottom is Foxe Basin. The land is made up of peninsulas and islands.

A map of a section of a section of Baffin Island. Above it is Baffin Bay, at the top of it is Clyde River, at the bottom of it is Pangnirtung, and below it is Cumberland Sound. There is a zoomed-out version of the map in the top corner of the frame. At the top is Devon Island, below it is Baffin Island, below that is Labrador, below that is Newfoundland, below that is Gooseberry Island, and below that is St. John’s. In the top right is Greenland, and in the bottom left is Quebec City. There is an emblem of a compass in the top left corner of the image.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Trading with the Inuit

1A Land of Extremes

2I Told Them That They Had Become Canadians

3Arctic Gold

4A Romantic, Colourful Character

5A Hard, Very Hard Man

6Trading at Tulukkaan

7Umik and Nuqallaq

8A Very Difficult, Unreasonable Fellow

9A Hard Bargain

Part 2: The Killing of Robert Janes

10 Escape from the Arctic

11 At Cape Crauford

12 The Killing of Robert Janes

Part 3: The Immoral Ethic of Conquest

13 The Return of Captain Munn

14 Coming Up Jesusy

15 No Man’s Land

16 Under Two Flags

17 The Investigation

18 1922: A Year of Change

19 White Man’s Justice

20 The Trial

21 The Immoral Ethic of Conquest

22 Thou Shalt Do No Murder

Epilogue

Appendix: Inuit Names and Other Inuktitut Words in Text

Acknowledgements

Chapter Notes

Bibliography

Index

A photograph of Jimmy Etuk. He is wearing a dark parka. He is wrapping string around pieces of wood, in the process of making a drum.

Jimmy Etuk, of Arctic Bay, spoke with the author often about his youth and his knowledge of the Janes episode.

source: photograph by lorne smith, in etuk makes a drum, the beaver outfit 299 (winter 1968): 27.

Introduction

With Jimmy Etuk, speech was volcanic. Words rumbled with increasing volume from a spot deep within his ample girth until they erupted with reverberations that filled my small living room. A full head of grey hair topped a weathered face marked by eyes that shone gently at the memories accumulated over seven decades. He had come to tell me stories, and had begun one that required him to abandon his usual levity, for this was a tale of events that changed forever the lives of his people, the Inuit.

"The Qallunaaq—the white man called Sakirmiaq—had been too long away from his own people, he began. His ship didn’t come. And the other white man, Kapitaikuluk, refused to take him south. We Inuit thought that shocking, that Kapitaikuluk would leave him near Pond Inlet, with no way at all to get back to the land of the white men, even after he had cried and begged for passage. I was just a boy and I had never known that white men could cry. My parents told me that Sakirmiaq seemed to really lose his mind after that. They said he had been a good man and they felt sorry for him, but now they were afraid of him at the same time. They were relieved when they heard, later that winter, that he was going south by dogsled.

That’s how he ended up at Cape Crauford in the spring. And that’s where the Inuit killed him.

Etuk reached for the rum bottle and poured another tot. His liking for the drink, he assured me, was hereditary, for his real father—not the Inuit man who had raised him—was a Scottish whaler. He prided himself on being able to understand the ways of the white men better than his countrymen in Arctic Bay did.

He continued the story that he had started so spontaneously.

One of the men went to Sakirmiaq’s igloo and asked him to come outside. He told him some of the other Inuit had fox pelts to trade. The white man picked up his pipe—all the men and even some of the women smoked pipes in those days—and crouched low through the doorway of the snowhouse. It was getting late but it was spring and so it was still light. It was the time of year when people usually start to feel more cheerful, with the dark of winter behind them. But nobody was feeling happy in this camp because everyone was afraid. Outside, Sakirmiaq headed for Nuqallaq’s igloo. Nuqallaq could talk some English and used to help the white man when he wanted to buy from the Inuit. Then Nuqallaq appeared—he had been hiding—and shot him. The white man stumbled. His pipe fell from his mouth. He saw Nuqallaq but didn’t realize that that’s who had shot him, and he called to him for help. But Nuqallaq aimed and fired a second time. Sakirmiaq staggered, but still he didn’t go down. Then another man, Aatitaaq—you know his son, Oyukuluk—rushed up from behind and grabbed him and pushed him, and Sakirmiaq tripped over a sled and fell. He tried to get up but couldn’t. He was mumbling something in his own language. Other men had heard the shots and they came and stood around him. Nuqallaq was the leader and he was the only one carrying a gun. He looked down at Sakirmiaq and then he put the gun near the white man’s head and killed him.

Etuk had told the story matter-of-factly, but the sparkle left his eyes and his conclusion resonated with sadness and regret. That was the only time, he said, "when my people ever killed a Qallunaaq. That’s why more white men came. That’s why they never left our land again."

---

Pond Inlet. Pond’s Inlet. Pond’s Bay. Only one name appears on today’s map of the Arctic. Pond Inlet, now a community of over one thousand souls, almost all Inuit, living at the northern limit of Baffin Island, in the Canadian High Arctic. White men gave it the name it holds today. To the Inuit it is and always has been Mittimatalik.

A century ago—a short time in the memories of Inuit elders, for whom oral history brings events alive across generations—there was a different Pond. Separated by only a few miles from today’s community, it was a place where cultures met, where a centuries-old hunting lifestyle came in contact with white men in search of whales. Those white men called it and its surrounding area of land and water Pond’s Inlet. To the Inuit, it and the mountain behind it is and always has been Igarjuaq.

Those same white men, Sikaatsi—Scottish whalers and traders—called the frigid water separating Baffin Island from Bylot Island to the north Pond’s Bay. It was Pond’s Bay that interested them, not the land to its north or south. Pond’s Bay was a home for whales, and whales meant profit and a livelihood.

To the Inuit, this whole area was known as Tununiq, the land with its back to the sun, behind the mountains and vast expanse of Baffin Island that separated it from the more populated Inuit areas to the south. Harsh though it was, this was their homeland.

---

The story told here is one I first heard from Jimmy Etuk in Arctic Bay, and later from other Inuit in Arctic Bay and Pond Inlet in the farthest reaches of Arctic Canada over forty years ago. Some told it hesitantly, tentatively, as if wondering if I would understand. It was a story that had touched the lives of their parents and closest relatives, a tale of culture contact, conflict, and change from the days when white men first came to stay in the High Arctic, and of the misunderstandings that occurred on both sides.

I listened to the story they told, to the versions told by different narrators, and I marvelled at the consistency between them, and at the gravity with which they were told. And I struggled to understand.

For four thousand years the High Arctic has been home to Inuit and their predecessors. For the last two centuries of that occupation, they have shared their waters and later their land with white men from across the sea, first British explorers and then Scottish whalers, and, within the last century, other white men who planted flags in the interest of establishing Canadian sovereignty. Slowly, a distant government in Ottawa began to take an interest in the land of the Inuit, though usually not in the Inuit themselves. Traders came as whaling petered out, in quest of furs and ivory.

This book is about the traders who dominated the Pond Inlet area and touched the lives of the Inuit during the early years of the twentieth century. It is, more particularly, the story of the strange life and macabre death of one trader, Robert Janes, the lives of his white competitors and Inuit customers, and the complex series of events that resulted from his death. It is also the story of Nuqallaq, an Inuit hunter, a community leader, whom events forced to stand up to protect his people, and of the tragic consequences of his actions.

One man kills another. We immediately call it murder. And in our minds, motives are ascribed, blame is attached, judgments formed, all because of this word. When punishment is meted out, it is deserved. Justice has been served. Or has it? For many years I thought of the events of the story told here as the murder of Robert Janes. Murder fit comfortably into the conclusions I drew. But slowly I came to realize that this was not a murder; it was a killing. And they are not the same.

---

A Note on Terminology

The people whom whalers and explorers once called Eskimos call themselves Inuit. That word has become more widely known outside the Arctic and outside Canada. It is the term that the people themselves prefer others to use when referring to them. Its use requires some explanation. Inuit is a plural noun; it means the people. The singular is Inuk: a person. And while Inuit is becoming commonly known, Inuk is much less well known outside the North. I have adopted the following conventions in this book: I use Inuit as a plural noun, Inuk as a singular noun, and Inuit as an adjective, whether singular or plural. The language of the Inuit, in the eastern Canadian Arctic, is called Inuktitut. The word Eskimo appears, of course, in quotations from original sources.

There are references in parts of this book to the Inuit of northwestern Greenland, who were usually known to explorers and anthropologists as the Polar Eskimos. In recent years they have been known as Inughuit (in the plural; the singular form is simply Inuk), and that is the name I have used.

I have regularized the spelling of most Inuit personal names. For consistency I have modified the spellings of those personal names used in direct quotations. I use the standard orthography for Inuktitut adopted by the Inuit Cultural Institute, except for words commonly known to non-Inuit by a non-standard spelling, such as igloo rather than iglu. I have also regularized the spelling of Inuit place names, unless a non-standard spelling has official recognition, as is the case with Igloolik and Etah. I have italicized Inuit words that appear in the text. An appendix lists the Inuit names and other Inuktitut words used in this book. I have also italicized the names of ships.

I have followed the usage of the time in referring to the former whaling and trading site as Pond’s Inlet and the modern community as Pond Inlet. They are not the same. The present-day term, Pond Inlet, dates from 1921 with the establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company post to the west of the former whaling station.

Part 1

Trading with the Inuit

A photograph of a whaling ship. It has three masts and a long bowsprit at the front. It is on still water, and there are mountains in the background.

A whaling ship, the Nova Zembla, near Pond Inlet, early 1900s.

source: harper collection.

Chapter 1

A Land of Extremes

Jimmy Etuk stood on the shores of Baffin Island, dishevelled, his hands stuffed into his pockets, gazing out to sea. A ship stood off Igarjuaq, where the Inuit who worked for the traders had been busy these last few days. Beyond it, framing it in a background of sea and sky, loomed the shoreline of the island that the white men called Bylot, but which Jimmy knew only as Qikiqtarjuaq—the big island—a scene of stark majesty, a grandeur that never became commonplace, even to the Inuit who were accustomed to seeing its frozen rivers of ice stretching boldly to the sea. At its tip, Sannirut, a place of plenty, reached stubbornly eastward; it had been a haven for the whalers who had come in years past to barter with the Inuit. Ships came less often now, and whalers not at all.

The ship that stood off Igarjuaq had arrived only a few days earlier, so late in the season that the Inuit who worked for the traders knew its visit would be short and their days hectic. It was the first vessel to reach Tununiq in two years, and the only one to arrive that season. Supplies long overdue and desperately needed had been unloaded, along with the always welcome but hardly essential tobacco and trinkets that were staples of the Inuit trade. Furs and ivory had been hauled aboard and stowed. The teenager—already a young man in the eyes of the Inuit, in whose world childhood ended early—had watched, fascinated with the affairs of the white men, and equally curious about the Inuit who worked for them. How different their lives were from the lives of his parents, who travelled and hunted and weren’t tied to the trading posts. He liked to listen to the workers whenever he accompanied his father to trade, and he had heard much about the ship that now stood offshore, a ship of legend in these waters—the Albert, the first whaling ship ever to have wintered in Tununiq. The formal marking of time meant nothing to the Inuit, and young Jimmy dated his birth by that famous ship, for he knew only that he had been born in the month that the sun first reappeared on the southern horizon after the Albert had made its first voyage to the far north under the command of another Jimmy, James Mutch, the veteran Scottish whaler the Inuit knew as Jiimi Maatsi. That made him, in this late summer of 1919, fifteen years of age.

Now the ship that he thought of as his birthmarker stood only a short distance offshore, preparing to leave, after a visit so abbreviated there had been barely time to celebrate its arrival. Jimmy’s gaze wandered uncertainly from ship to shore, to another man who stood nearby, gazing in disbelief at that same ship. His name was Robert Janes, but Jimmy knew him only by the curious Inuit word Sakirmiaq. The previous day Jimmy had learned something about white men that he had never suspected—that they shed tears, as did the Inuit. He had seen white men angry often, with Inuit and with each other. He had seen them display a gamut of emotions, from frustration, despondency, and sadness to unrestrained joy and elation. But on that day he saw Robert Janes cry. It was a defining moment in his understanding of the humanness and vulnerability of the white men—the Qallunaat—who had seemed so invincible and had had such an impact on the lives of the Inuit of Tununiq.

On that day Robert Janes had arrived from Tulukkaan, some thirty miles to the west, and rowed immediately to the vessel. Jimmy’s father, Aksaarjuk, told him that the man they called Kapitaikuluk—the little captain—had summoned the trader to the boat. Jimmy had watched from shore on that day too. He had heard shouting from the deck and seen punches thrown, a scuffle aboard ship. Three men had roughed up Sakirmiaq, egged on by the little captain, whose maniacal laughter rolled ashore with the breeze. Then, suddenly, one man had shoved Sakirmiaq to the side of the ship and pushed him roughly over the rail. He had landed ignominiously in his own boat. A hunter, one of the party that had accompanied him from Tulukkaan and who had gone with him to the ship, made sure that he was all right, then raced ahead in his kayak to tell those on shore what had transpired. Regaining his composure, the white man manoeuvred his boat to land. Blood streamed from a deep gash on his forehead, and the hood was completely torn from his caribou-skin coat. He came ashore—and he cried. Jimmy watched in stunned silence. A group of Inuit rallied round the white man, silent, concerned. But words of consolation failed them, for they, although adults all, had also never seen a white man cry.

Now, a day later, the little captain had come ashore to speak with Sakirmiaq. Their voices had risen in anger. Faces flushed with emotion, both men had shouted words that the Inuit could not comprehend. Then, abruptly, the captain turned away from Sakirmiaq and bid a hasty farewell to the Inuit. He boarded the ship, the anchor was hauled, and the Albert steamed away. The white man stood alone onshore, watching as it disappeared into the monochrome of a light September snow squall. Some distance away, Jimmy Etuk stood with a small group of Inuit and watched and wondered.

---

Nine years earlier, the C. G. S. Arctic had probed the ice-choked waters of the Northwest Passage as far as Melville Island. Only a few miles more and the captain would achieve his goal, the completion of the elusive passage by this northerly route. On September 2, 1910, with the ship farther west than any vessel had ever been in McClure Strait, the second officer twice climbed to the crow’s nest to survey the sea to the south and west. Everywhere was ice, unbroken, an unrelenting barrier as impenetrable as if it were solid rock. He estimated the floe to be up to sixty feet thick, with hills of ice rising even higher. He thought it as old as Adam. There was no way through it nor around it. Reluctantly the captain gave the order to retreat eastward to Baffin Island. Ten days later, the Albert entered the protected harbour of Arctic Bay, off Adams Sound, a long indentation running eastward from Admiralty Inlet, the world’s longest fjord. The crew immediately began preparations to winter the vessel there, near a small village of Inuit. She would remain in Arctic Bay for a full ten months, most of that time locked firmly in the grip of solid ice, the temperature often below minus fifty at the depth of the winter darkness. Aboard, among the complement of thirty-six men, were two whose destinies would become entwined, whose aspirations would often coincide, but whose activities would clash throughout many of the ensuing years. Neither could have predicted as much at the time. One had been enamoured of the Arctic and obsessed by its potential for more than a decade already; this was his third expedition to the High Arctic. The other was on his maiden voyage to the far north, yet its promise was to enchant and captivate him as well. The veteran was the ship’s captain, Joseph-Elzéar Bernier; the neophyte, his second mate, Robert Samuel Janes.

---

Joseph Bernier had been born in the French-speaking village of L’Islet in Quebec on the southern shore of the St. Lawrence River on New Year’s Day, fifty-eight years earlier. It would have been surprising had he not turned to the sea, for salt water coursed through his family’s veins. He made his first sea voyage as a baby of two years. When he became captain of a vessel at seventeen, Bernier was doing nothing more than following in the footsteps of three generations of his male relatives. He was to be at sea, save for a few brief intervals, for sixty years, and would command over one hundred ships, sailing most often between North America and Europe. It is said that he crossed the Atlantic more than five hundred times.

In 1871 he saw the Polaris in dry dock, being readied for a voyage north in which the American explorer Charles Francis Hall hoped to reach the North Pole. This chance observance aroused his interest in the Arctic, and he later wrote, "My knowledge of ice conditions in the St. Lawrence and in the north Atlantic, coupled with an experimental trend of thought, led me to read up the history of polar exploration in my spare time, and to study assiduously the problems of Arctic navigation. From 1872 my cabin library on shipboard consisted mainly of books on Arctic travel, and the latest Arctic maps were always in my chartroom."

Not until 1896, however, during a period of temporary retirement from the sea, did Bernier have the leisure to turn his attention seriously to the North. The previous year he had received a prestigious appointment as governor of the Quebec City jail, a position he would hold for three years. This sinecure allowed him free time to study the challenges and potential of the Arctic, and he set for himself an ambitious goal. He would discover the North Pole for Canada. To be the first to reach the geographical point where all lines of longitude meet had been a goal of explorers and adventurers for almost as long as the Northwest Passage had occupied their attentions. Already Robert Peary was active in prosecuting his attempts on the pole from a land base in northwestern Greenland and would shortly begin to use bases in Ellesmere Island, nominally Canadian territory. Bernier felt strongly that the glory of polar discovery should be Canada’s. "And why should Canada not reap the benefits of all the work accomplished so far? he asked the Quebec Geographical Society in 1898. Why should we allow other countries to overtake us?… Why should Canadians not go as far north as ninety degrees and place their flag on that part of the globe, the northernmost boundary of Canada, a country that is part of the British Empire."

Bernier was an able publicist. His country had yet to have anyone champion the cause of the Arctic and preach the necessity of exerting its sovereignty in a territory largely the domain of foreign whalers and explorers. With flair and skill, he began to promote his dream of conquering the pole, preparing detailed plans for achieving his goal. But although he won the support of many influential politicians, he failed to get sufficient financial backing to mount a private expedition. He turned, therefore, to the government, hoping to organize an official voyage on its behalf. The government’s reaction was unusual. While never firmly committing itself to support a Bernier-led polar expedition, it did nonetheless give him permission to select and purchase for the government a ship suitable for Arctic work. Bernier naturally assumed the ship would be used for his northern venture.

In 1904 he travelled to Germany and purchased the Gauss, a ship built there three years earlier for an expedition that had wintered successfully in the Antarctic. She was 165 feet in length and 37 feet across, solidly constructed of oak, and weighed 650 tons. A full-rigged ship with a 275-horsepower auxiliary engine, she had a cruising speed of five knots. For a touch of luxury, an electrical lighting system had been installed.

Back in Canada and renamed the Arctic, the vessel was provisioned with supplies sufficient for three years for Bernier’s attempt on the pole. But in July, shortly before the Arctic was due to leave, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier announced a change in plans; the Arctic would go instead to Hudson Bay to deliver supplies to the Royal North-West Mounted Police post established the previous year at Fullerton. The government had learned that American whalers were fishing the northern waters of Canada’s vast inland sea and feared for the validity of its claimed sovereignty over the area. Laurier announced to the House of Commons, "Unless we take active steps to assert … that these lands belong to Canada, we may perhaps find ourselves later on in the face of serious complications."

Bernier was bitterly disappointed. For years he had planned and publicized his vision of Canada at the pole and, at the last possible moment, the opportunity had been snatched from him. True, he was to act as captain of the ship, and it was a voyage to the Arctic, but this was little consolation; another man, Superintendent J. D. Moodie of the Royal North-West Mounted Police, had been given command of the expedition itself.

In the summer of 1904, Bernier took the Arctic to Hudson Bay, where he delivered supplies to the Fullerton post, a one-storey wooden structure, twenty-five feet by fifteen. This modest building, Bernier noted, served both as barracks and customs office. He wintered his vessel there, just four hundred yards from the post and only two hundred yards from the American whaler Era, under Captain George Comer, one of the perceived threats to Canadian sovereignty. The Arctic returned to Quebec the following October. The wintering had served only to bolster Bernier’s fascination with the Arctic. He vowed that he would return, but it was the High Arctic that beckoned him.

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For the Inuit, their homeland was a land of extremes—of warmth and cold, of light and dark, of privation and plenty. In the High Arctic, the pristine beauty of a spring and summer bathed in the light of a sun that did not set was counterbalanced by the cold and dark of a winter often visited by hardship. Their life was the hunt, and they had learned over centuries to eke out a living from an ungenerous land.

They and their predecessors had lived in the High Arctic for over four thousand years. Ruins of stone houses that characterize the abandoned sites of the pre-Dorset culture, the earliest migrants from Asia via Alaska, are found near Pond Inlet, as are those of the Dorset culture itself, which evolved in the eastern Arctic. A thousand years ago a new wave of immigrants from Alaska skirted the Arctic coastline on a rapid move eastward, displacing and eventually replacing the Tuniit, as present-day Inuit refer to those of the Dorset culture. These newcomers were Inuit of the Thule culture, and they depended