Chapter One

PLANTING THE FLAG

ESTABLISHING BRITISH/CANADIAN
SOVEREIGNTY IN THE NORTH

“The authorities . . . were carrying more important burdens than the remote and useless Arctic.”

– DIAMOND JENNESS, anthropologist, 1964

Sir Martin Frobisher
(c.1539–1594) Library and Archives Canada (LAC) C11413

Canada’s Arctic sovereignty ought to be rock solid and unchallengeable, and yet commentators in the political, media, and academic worlds assert that it isn’t. This is just a jaw-dropping fact, for the British, our predecessors in the region from whom our sovereignty descends, first claimed northern lands half a millennium ago. It’s been more than five hundred years since John Cabot came to Labrador (1497), and more than four hundred since the first Englishman came to the Arctic (Martin Frobisher’s three expeditions to Baffin Island in the 1570s), so you would think that there would be not the slightest question about Britain and then Canada’s sovereignty in the North. Despite this, Canadians remain concerned, rightly or wrongly, that foreign powers such as Russia, the United States, and Denmark are still trying to gnaw at Canada’s claims. A sensible person would wonder how this could possibly be, but the reason is fairly straightforward. It was summed up fifty years ago by Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent: the region has been “governed in a fit of absence of mind.” In other words, most of Canadians’ anxieties about sovereignty are our fault, caused by indifference and neglect. Readers who expect this book to be a diatribe against the United States and others are going to be disappointed. First, the main historical challenge to Canadian sovereignty in the North came not from the U.S.A. but from traditionally inoffensive Norway. Second, as the history of the Klondike gold rush, the building of the Alaska Highway, and similar episodes show, when the Americans wanted something in our North, they didn’t have to invade us or throw their weight around:¹ all they had to do was ask, and we usually said “sure, take what you need.” In the current dispute, which concerns Arctic waters rather than the land area, the Americans have an arguably good case that an international strait runs through the Northwest Passage, and have no need to be threatening.

Besides Canadian neglect, the issue has to do with some of the most basic requirements for the establishment of sovereignty. Territorial sovereignty under international law is established by several means, among them cession (someone gives it to us), purchase, and discovery. All of these have figured in the Canadian North: Britain ceded or transferred its northern territories to Canada; there was a kind of quasi purchase of claims to certain Arctic islands from Norway; discoveries were made; some of Canada’s claim to northern sovereignty is based on the fact that some territories are attached to or lie near others. Of the above factors, however, the most important has been discovery.

One way to acquire sovereignty over territory is to discover it, but an ongoing claim must be established as well. The most important way to do this is by control, often demonstrated through administration, especially of the law. In a nutshell, the historical difficulties Canada has encountered in regards to sovereignty have been connected to the two factors of discovery and control: much of the North, particularly the Arctic islands, was discovered by men who were not British or Canadian. As well, through indifference and neglect, Canada’s control over the region was virtually nonexistent in the nineteenth century and spotty for much of the twentieth, though it became stronger over time. Indeed, it still comes under question, as far as the Arctic waters are concerned, in the twenty-first. This chapter traces the process from the early days of Canada’s northern history until the Second World War.

When ordinary Canadians think about territorial sovereignty nowadays it is usually in connection with First Nations land claims. This brings up a question that First Nations people often raise, though government lawyers and scholars take the answer for granted: what right do Europeans have to declare sovereignty in any case? When England,² for example, granted a charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1660, it did so on the assumption that it had sovereignty over Rupert’s Land (the watershed of Hudson Bay). But Rupert’s Land was not unoccupied, nor was it terra nullius (no man’s land). It had been occupied by people, mostly Cree and Dene, for thousands of years. Britain claimed ownership of this territory through the exploring activities of Martin Frobisher, who sailed into Hudson Strait in 1578, John Davis and Martin Weymouth, who ventured into it in 1587 and 1602, respectively, and especially Henry Hudson, who explored much of the bay from 1610 to 1611, and was left to die there. These episodes are where most accounts of the British claim begin. The question of what right England had to claim sovereignty over occupied land is not often raised, probably because an honest answer contains a harsh truth: that English and British sovereignty over the northern regions, like that of other European nations over the rest of the western hemisphere and other parts of the world, whether benign (as we would like to think ours is) or brutal, is based in its essence on force, the threat of force, or the possibility of force. In 1660, no Englishman lived in Rupert’s Land, and only a few had even seen it; no towns or trading posts had been built, no farms cultivated. It was English because a few English explorers had seen it and claimed it, and because the English said it was and had the army and navy to enforce the claim against the indigenous inhabitants and against the French.

Because it suggests warfare and death by sword and gun, we don’t use the word “conquest” here in speaking of Britain or of France in northern North America, though of course it fully applies to the history of Spain in the new world. The workings of force in the process were more subtle. Essentially what happened was that English settlers appeared on the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States early in the seventeenth century, and signed treaties or agreements of various sorts with the Indians, the purpose of which was mostly to permit the English to settle and farm. The Indians were much more powerful than the English in the early years, and the newcomers bargained from weakness rather than strength. The English trade goods were attractive, they exploited tribal rivalries when they could, and the introduction of diseases from Europe took a terrible toll of the native population. In the second period, from the later seventeenth century until the end of the War of 1812, the indigenous people were sought as allies in the wars between England and France, and then between Britain and the United States. The treaties of this period were often like alliances between military equals. The third period, which took up the rest of the nineteenth century, was one in which the two parties were increasingly unequal, and in which treaties were designed to extinguish aboriginal rights to permit settlement over the whole of the United States and Canada. Although force was used often enough in the United States, it was only at the very beginning of contact that it would have been possible for the Indians to throw the Europeans off the continent. Even then, had they slaughtered the colonists at Plymouth and Jamestown, colonization would probably have been delayed, not thwarted.

In Canada, naked force was very rarely used, but the power of law, which is a form of veiled force, was the lever by which First Nations were pried off their land and into reserves. As one commentator put it, the great symbol of Canadian Indian policy in the nineteenth century was the figure of the lone Mounted Policeman riding bravely into the Indian camp to inform the Queen’s new subjects of their lack of civil rights. And if they failed to get the message, as in 1885, the Queen’s Own Rifles could be sent out to make it clear.

Labrador was the first part of what is now considered to be the Canadian North to come under British sovereignty, by virtue of the voyages of the late fifteenth century. Next was Rupert’s Land, thanks to Henry Hudson. Rupert’s Land is a huge area, about 7.77 million square kilometres (3.00 million square miles), comprising much of northern and western Canada. Not all of Rupert’s Land is northern, of course, however one defines north in Canadian terms, for it includes all of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and southern Alberta. Except during time of war with France, the Hudson’s Bay Company was secure for the first century of its operations. For a hundred years it operated out of posts on the shores of Hudson and James Bays, avoiding the interior, and compelling the Indians to travel to the river mouths to trade. Eventually, when after the British conquest of Quebec, Montreal-based fur traders began to invade the Company’s territory, it was forced to awaken from its “sleep by the frozen sea,” as critics put it, and move inland to counter its rivals. But in this rivalry both parties were British, so there was no threat to sovereignty. In fact, it was strengthened because the trade war between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwest Company, based in Montreal, led to a vigorous period of northern exploration and discovery. The period between 1770 and 1821, when the two companies merged, saw Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, and John Franklin explore the Mackenzie Valley and reach the Arctic coast.

It was in this period that British sovereignty over the mainland area of the northern territories and northern Quebec was established. Before that time it had been claimed by Britain, but little actual occupation or control had existed inland from the coast of Hudson Bay. The expeditions of Samuel Hearne (1745–92) took the British presence to the Arctic coast. Hearne joined the Hudson’s Bay Company as a young man, and in 1766 was stationed at Fort Prince of Wales, just outside modern Churchill, Manitoba. The Hudson’s Bay Company, facing increasing competition from the Montreal traders, was looking for new sources of trade and revenue. Rumours had come from the North that there were deposits of native copper (copper that did not need to be refined) in the region, and Hearne was sent out to investigate. The episode that followed is one of the classics of Canadian exploration. Beginning in 1769 it took Hearne three tries to reach his goal, and it was not until he secured the help of a First Nations man, Matonabbee, that he was able to reach the mouth of the Copper-mine River in the summer of 1771, the first European to reach the Arctic coast by land. Although his expedition was the kind of episode that reinforced British sovereignty, its success was due almost entirely to Matonabbee, who insisted that the expedition follow the game to supply food instead of heading straight north, which is why the expedition took eighteen months. Hearne was impatient, but he got there and back alive. It was a lesson that future explorers had to learn again, to their cost.

Sir Alexander Mackenzie
(1764–1820) Photo © National Gallery of Canada

Alexander Mackenzie made two great discoveries, the first one by accident, and both of them important to sovereignty, since in both cases he was the first European to travel over significant stretches of Canada. The first was the accidental discovery in 1789 of the river that bears his name; it led him to the Beaufort Sea instead of the Pacific, but it opened the Mackenzie Valley to the fur trade and established a British presence down the length of the river. By 1840, the Hudson’s Bay Company had built a post at Fort McPherson near the Mackenzie Delta, and a string of posts dotted the river. In the second trip of 1792 Mackenzie achieved his objective and reached the Pacific Ocean, but an even more important achievement was to open northern British Columbia to the fur trade.

Sir John Franklin
(1786–1847) Photo © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK

John Franklin also played an important early role in establishing the British presence in the western Arctic. Although he is mostly now known for his disastrous last expedition of 1846, in which he and all his crew perished, he commanded two earlier expeditions, in 1819–21 and 1825–27, that put much of the western Arctic coast on the map, and led the way for later Hudson’s Bay posts along the coast.

The importance of the fur trade activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company to sovereignty is shown by the history of the Canadian-American boundary in northwestern British Columbia— the so-called Alaska Panhandle. The first Europeans to exploit that area were the Russians, who began trading with indigenous people for sea otter pelts in the mid-eighteenth century, and who established permanent settlements beginning in 1784. Russia claimed sovereignty over all of what is now the state of Alaska, but when the Hudson’s Bay Company began to operate in British Columbia early in the nineteenth century, the border between the British and Russian territories was not delineated. Except for the Hudson’s Bay Company, there was no presence on the west coast to counter the influence of the Russians.

Fortunately, and this is a major theme of this chapter, there was no essential conflict of interest in this situation. As was to happen elsewhere in the North, British sovereignty prevailed partly because the British were on the ground, but equally because the foreign power had no reason to challenge British assertions. As it happened, British and Russian interests did not clash at all. The Russian trade was based on the sea otters of the north Pacific coast and the Aleutians, while the Hudson’s Bay Company traded inland. The Anglo-Russian treaty of 1825 set the border between British and Russian America, giving the Russians a strip of coastline, which is what they wanted, with the British confirmed in their rights to the interior. In the North, the boundary ran up the 141st meridian to the Arctic Ocean, and in the south it ended at the 54°40' line. The contrast with what happened in southern British Columbia and south of that—the so-called Oregon Country—is instructive, for there the British and Americans had overlapping claims and interests, and resolving them was not so easy. An even better comparison is what happened when the boundary of the panhandle was delineated. In 1825, neither the British nor the Russians cared about the exact location of the boundary; so long as the Russians were on the coast and the British in the interior, the location didn’t matter. But in 1867 the Russians sold Alaska to the Americans, and the new owners did care, especially when gold was found in the Yukon in 1896, because the quickest route to the goldfields lay across the panhandle. In this case, interests clashed strongly, and the result was the Alaska Boundary Dispute, in which Canada did not win its case.

The Alaska Boundary Dispute of 1903 (the year the issue was settled) concerned the boundary between the Alaska Panhandle and British Columbia, and is worth mentioning here as an example of what happened on a rare occasion when Canadian sovereignty in the North was actually challenged by another power. There was little interest in the region for decades after the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1825; when the province of British Columbia requested soon after it entered Confederation in 1871 that a joint boundary survey be made, the Americans rejected the idea as not being worth the money, since there was very little non-Native settlement outside the old Russian villages. What brought the issue to the boil was the discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1896. The cheapest route to the goldfields involved a voyage up the Pacific coast to Skagway, at the head of the Lynn Canal, a climb over the coastal mountains of the Panhandle across what is now the international border into British Columbia, to the headwaters of the Yukon River, then a downriver trip into the Yukon. Skagway was in Alaska, and thus the Americans controlled access to the Klondike.³

Although the general intent of the 1825 treaty was clear enough—the Russians got the coast and the British got the interior, the actual wording of the treaty made a variety of other interpretations possible. The crucial passages were

. . . the said line shall ascend to the north along the channel called Portland Channel as far as the point of the continent where it strikes the 56th degree of north latitude; from this last-mentioned point, the line of demarcation shall follow the summit of the mountains situated parallel to the coast as far as the point of intersection of the 141st degree of west longitude. . . . Whenever the summit of the mountains shall be at a distance of more than ten marine leagues from the ocean, the limit shall be formed by a line parallel to the winding of the coast, and which shall never exceed the distance of ten marine leagues therefrom.

These were words drawn up by negotiators who had never seen the region in question and who understandably had only a shaky grasp of its geography. Using them, Canada claimed a line much closer to the open sea than the present boundary, a line that cut through the deep coastal inlets, putting Skagway well into British Columbia, and leaving the Americans a line of truncated peninsulas. The United States used the same words to draw a line well into British Columbia. The issue was whether the “ten marine leagues” (30 nautical miles, 34.5 miles or 55.5 kilometres) was to be measured from the heads of the long inlets or from some sort of baseline. The two countries reached a compromise in 1898, but the government of British Columbia rejected it. Finally, under the terms of the Hay-Herbert Treaty of 1903, the matter was put to binding arbitration; each side was to appoint “three impartial jurists⁴ of repute.”

At this point the episode entered Canadian mythology. In that era, Canadian foreign affairs were still handled by Britain, so the British appointed three of the arbitrators. Two, as a courtesy to Canada, were Canadians (Louis-Amable Jetté, the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec⁵ and Allen Aylesworth, a prominent lawyer from Ontario⁶), and the third, Lord Alverstone, was Lord Chief Justice of England. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Elihu Root, secretary of war, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and George Turner, a former senator from Washington State. The arbitrators voted four to two, with Lord Alverstone siding with the Americans, to draw a line that supported neither claim, but was considerably closer to the American position than to the Canadian. There was a firestorm of criticism in Canada, which had loyally supported Britain during the Boer War (1899–1902), and nationalists ever after have believed that Alverstone had supported the Americans because Britain, worried about the growing military power of Germany, had sacrificed Canadian interests to curry favour with the United States. The Alaska Boundary Dispute is generally considered to have stimulated Canada’s desire to conduct her own foreign affairs, though concrete steps in this direction were not taken until after the First World War.

One of the iconic scenes of Canadian history: gold miners climbing the final stage of the Chilkoot Pass during the winter of 1897–98. Author’s collection

Several comments can be made about this result. It is true that President Roosevelt spoke of sending troops to Alaska if the decision went the wrong way. It is also true that the three American commissioners were Republican supporters of the president, who might be expected to favour the American position. What is less often stated, though, was that the two Canadian commissioners were both Liberal politicians. Jetté had been a Liberal member of the House of Commons, and Aylesworth would serve in Wilfrid Laurier’s cabinet and later as a Liberal senator. It is not clear how these men were less partisan than the Americans. Finally, though it is perhaps true that the British were anxious to secure American friendship, the essential point about the dispute was that the Canadian case was fraudulent. It was absurd to think that in 1825 the Russians would have agreed to a treaty that relegated them to a series of peninsula tips and islands; the whole point of the treaty was to give them an unbroken coastal strip. The dispute still echoes in another way as well, for the southern end of the boundary, where the line comes out of Portland Canal into the Pacific, is still in dispute.⁷

From the point of view of northern sovereignty, however, the episode had the important result of spurring Canadian interest in the North. During the buildup to the dispute, the Klondike gold rush took place. What is now the Yukon was not part of Rupert’s Land, but was added to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s territory along with the rest of the mainland part of the territories after the merger of 1821. In 1831, the first tentative exploration was made of the southern Yukon on behalf of the company, and in 1842 the first post was built. However, until 1870 there was only a handful of Europeans in the region—the staff of two fur trade posts and the occasional missionary. After 1870, miners began to trickle in, and by the 1890s there were about a thousand men and women, the majority of them Americans, living and mining around Fortymile on the Yukon River near the 141st meridian. Not from any sense of purpose or plan, but simply out of necessity, the miners had established de facto control over the region in the form of the “miners’ meeting.” This was a kind of citizens’ assembly, based on the mining laws of the western United States, that acted as both criminal and civil court.⁸ Someone with a grievance or knowledge of a crime—usually theft—could call a meeting of the whole community, which would render a verdict and a sentence. The existence of this institution on Canadian soil at the very end of the nineteenth century is explained by the fact that there was no Canadian official presence anywhere in the Yukon, despite the size of the mining community. The nearest official resided in Edmonton, and might as well have been on the moon. Almost incredibly, no one in Ottawa showed concern even when the situation was brought to their attention by William Carpenter Bompas (1834–1906), Bishop of the Yukon, who was worried about the moral effect of the miners on the First Nations people of the region. In the years before 1894 he wrote several letters to government officials talking about the “debauchery” that resulted from the miners abusing First Nations women. As a result, the government reluctantly sent two members of the North West Mounted Police (NWMP) to the region in 1894, and in 1895 a detachment of twenty was sent north, luckily, the year before the great discovery of 1896.

This episode is an early example of something that is not often noted in writing about the North, or about Canada in general. We call it the “embarrassment factor.” Cynics have said of government that it is wrong to attribute to malice actions that could be better attributed to stupidity, but they rarely consider the possibility that government policy may have been influenced by the embarrassment factor, in which actions are dictated by fear of criticism and public shame for doing the wrong thing, or (particularly in the North) fear of not taking action when action is warranted. This is currently evident in events that take place in First Nations communities across Canada—Davis Inlet and Kashechewan are painful recent examples—and has been an important motivation to government in the history of sovereignty in the North.

Superintendent Charles Constantine (1846–1912), second row, fourth from the left, with his detachment of Mounted Police at Fort Constantine, their post at Fortymile, on the Yukon River west of what is now Dawson. It is the winter of 1895–96, and the police have come north in some strength to show the flag on the eve of the gold rush. Glenbow Archives, NA-919-15

When the first Mounted Police detachment arrived at Fortymile in 1895, it represented the first real extension of government presence into northern Canada. Despite the fact that most of the miners were not Canadian, the police encountered almost no difficulty in establishing their authority over them. They were quick to move against the miners’ meetings, the only organized institution that might have resisted them. In that year, a miners’ meeting was called—the last of its kind, as it turned out—to listen to a complaint of some men who had been hired to work on a mining claim but had not been paid. The meeting ruled they had a case, and ordered the claim seized and sold to a third party, with the money going to the unpaid workers. Although this was the kind of decision that miners’ meetings regularly made, it was of course contradictory to Canadian law. When the police learned of it they sent twelve of their number, armed with rifles, to the claim, and told the workers to leave, and that no more meetings of this sort should be held. None were. This was a dramatic and forceful assertion of official control, one of the hallmarks of sovereignty.

During the height of the gold rush, from the fall of 1897 to 1899, the newcomer population of the Yukon (which was made a separate territory in 1898) rose to nearly 40,000, though there are no accurate figures. Again, Canadians were a minority of the population, yet despite a good deal of grumbling, there was never any serious challenge to Canadian control in the region. This fact speaks to a recurrent theme in Canadian sovereignty over the North—the virtual lack of challenge to Canadian authority. There were several reasons why this was the case in the Yukon. In the first place, the Klondike was an exception to the general rule of government indifference to the North. Unlike the mining towns of the American West, which were often virtually lawless in their early days, the Yukon was very heavily policed. At the height of the rush there were over 300 members of the force in the Yukon, assisted by the Yukon Field Force, a 200-man contingent of the regular Canadian army. More than 500 law enforcement officers for a community of less than 40,000 is a far higher percentage than in a modern Canadian community.⁹ Secondly, the population was highly concentrated, and thus easier to control. Although the Yukon covered a large area, the miners occupied only a very small part of it—just the Yukon and Klondike river valleys, so it was not difficult for the police to keep track of them.

Moreover, the geography of the Yukon worked in favour of the authorities. There were only a few ways to get in and out of the territory, and the police guarded them closely. When the newcomers reached the tops of the mountain passes inland from Skagway (the route the vast majority used) they found the police waiting for them, taking names and inspecting gear. The police gave the boats that floated down the Yukon numbers and recorded the names of passengers. It was almost impossible to get out of the country overland without the bush skills that most miners lacked. If a wrongdoer fled Dawson and went upriver to Whitehorse, intending to escape, the police simply telegraphed the Whitehorse detachment and had the person arrested. Thus geography, which in other regions hindered Canadian sovereignty by making it difficult or unpleasant for Canadians to stay in the North, in this instance strengthened it by helping to enforce the authority of Canadian officials there.

Members of the Yukon Detachment of the North West Mounted Police pose at the international boundary at the summit of the White Pass, August 8, 1899. The boundary was in dispute, but the police simply put their posts at the heads of the Chilkoot and White Passes, and these locations were accepted as part of the Alaska Boundary settlement in 1903. Yukon Archives, 82/390 H-179

Another reason why Canadian control over the Yukon was never challenged from within is that it was not really in the interest of the miners to subvert it. Despite all the talk from the police about the average miner being the scum of U.S. coastal cities, the miners on the whole seem to have been a fairly orderly lot, at least as compared with western U.S. cities such as Bodie, Wyoming, which had far more murders per capita than Dawson did. The Yukon was not easy to get to, and those who made the trip were highly motivated. The majority wanted to find gold, get it out, and return home, not to die in a gunfight or serve a long sentence at hard labour in the Dawson jail.

Finally, as in other places in the North, Canadian sovereignty in the Yukon was secure because no other country was interested in making claims to the place. The logical claimant would have been the United States, of course, and in some of the more paranoid Canadian quarters it has been suggested that the United States had evil designs on the Klondike. Farley Mowat, for one, suggested that the Ottawa bureaucracy was preparing to turn the Yukon over to the rapacious Americans until a few brave souls intervened and sent the police north.¹⁰ This is a fantasy. The Americans were not interested in owning the Yukon. So long as the rights of their citizens were protected there, they were content to let Canada bear the costs of administration. In any case, it would have been difficult for them to press a claim, since the treaty of 1825, whose provisions they had bought along with Alaska, made the northern boundary perfectly clear. They would have had to do what they did with Mexico, which was to provoke a war, and that was out of the question, given Canada’s position in the British Empire. The price to be paid for the Yukon would have been unthinkably high, had the Americans wanted it, which they did not.

Another example of the embarrassment factor in this process is the initial expansion of a Canadian presence into the Arctic early in the twentieth century. This was at first focused on the northwest coast of Hudson Bay and on Herschel Island in the western Arctic. Both places became important in this era because of their use by foreigners as whaling stations. Herschel Island (named by Franklin after the Astronomer Royal, Sir John Herschel) lies in the Beaufort Sea, just 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) off the Yukon coast, and has the only safe harbour for hundreds of kilometres along the coast. By the end of the nineteenth century, the whaling industry had almost wiped out the whales in the Pacific Ocean. In 1888–89 an American whaler named Joe Tuckfield ventured east of Point Barrow and spent a season hunting whales with the Inuit in the Mackenzie Delta. He reported back that the bowhead whales were “thick as bees” in the region, and other captains seized the chance to make money, flocking to Canadian waters to hunt. The whaling ships were based in San Francisco, and because the voyage north and around Alaska was so long, they had to overwinter in the North, and Herschel Island was the logical place to do so. The Inuit of the region naturally gravitated to the island in the winter, where they could work and trade with the whalers, and within a year or two the island became the centre of human activity in the western Arctic. By 1895 there were fifteen ships wintering at the island. The trade was immensely profitable, since the market for whale oil and baleen¹¹ was still strong. Whales were worth as much as $15,000, and one ship, the Mary D. Hume, returned to San Francisco in 1892 with a cargo worth $400,000, one of the richest catches in the history of whaling. By the end of the whaling era, around 1910, $15 million worth of whales had been killed, and another $1.5 million worth of goods traded with the Inuit.

This activity had a considerable effect on the Inuit. The ships’ crews were a rough lot; it was hard, filthy work, and the pay was low, so many of the crew members were desperate, fleeing the law, or had been shanghaied on board while drunk. The ships’ officers sometimes kept Inuit women as servants and sex partners, but the crews were not permitted to do this, a situation that sometimes led to violence. By the mid 1890s tales of debauchery and orgies were making their way south, especially after the first missionary arrived on the island in 1893.¹² How much damage was being done is open to question, for debauchery is very much in the eye of the beholder, and at least one Inuit who witnessed it lived to write in his memoirs that he found the experience a great deal of fun.¹³ More importantly from the point of view of sovereignty, however, as Bishop Bompas took pains to point out to the government, large sums were being made by foreigners on which no customs duties were being paid (there was a lively market in trade goods as well as whales), crimes of various sorts were being committed far from any police officer, the Inuit were being given alcohol, and so on. Whether the Inuit were being debauched or not, they were certainly suffering from disease, particularly measles and influenza, which they caught at Herschel Island and carried to the remote camps. So many had died by the middle 1890s that the whalers had to import Inuit from Alaska to work for them. It is estimated that by 1930 only a handful of the original 2,500 or so Inuit indigenous to the region were left; the Inuvialuit of the region are more recent arrivals.

For several years, however, the government did nothing about the situation. The reason for this has little to do with the North per se, and a great deal to do with the way government operated in those days, so a short digression is necessary by way of explanation. The Second World War was a pivotal point in Canadian history in a number of ways, one of the most important being that it marked the dividing line between small-government and big-government Canada. Before the war there were hardly any government welfare programs except for workmen’s compensation at the provincial level and a rudimentary old age pension. During the war, unemployment insurance and the mothers’ allowance were introduced, and the principle of equalization payments to the provinces was planned. In the decades after the war a blizzard of programs was launched, along with new taxes to support them. Before the war, the government’s attitude towards expenditure was to ask, “What are we forced to do, and where do we find the money to do it?” After the war, it became “What could we do if we had the money?” and eventually, “What are we going to do with all this money we have?” Before the war, a balanced budget was sacred, and the government spent as little and kept taxes as low as possible; after the war, the sky was the limit. In short, the government’s attitude towards the North was ruled by parsimony, especially because the region was politically unimportant. Ottawa ignored Herschel Island simply because it did not want to spend the money to establish its authority there.

What changed this was the embarrassment factor. The year that Canada asserted its sovereignty in the western Arctic and Hudson Bay (where American whalers were also operating, though apparently doing less harm) was, significantly, 1903, the year of the unsatisfactory settlement of the Alaska Boundary Dispute. The government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, stung by its perceived defeat in this dispute, was anxious to avoid responsibility for further losses of face and power. As an official in the Department of the Interior wrote: “It is feared that if American citizens are permitted to land and pursue the industries of whaling, fishing, and trading with the Indians [sic] without complying with the revenue laws of Canada, unfounded and troublesome claims may hereafter be set up.”¹⁴ In the summer of that year the government sent parties of Mounted Police to Hudson Bay and to the western Arctic, and posts were set up at Cape Fullerton on Hudson Bay, Fort McPherson in the Mackenzie Delta, and on Herschel Island.

The operation of the Mounted Police post at Herschel Island is an early example of yet another theme in the history of Canada’s sovereignty in the North: the distinction between developmental or concrete sovereignty and symbolic sovereignty. Developmental or concrete sovereignty consists of those acts of control and administration that make sovereignty real and unquestioned, whereas symbolic sovereignty involves, as the name suggests, the symbols rather than the practical realities of sovereignty. Geologist Albert Peter Low and five Mounties spent the winter of 1903–4 in Hudson Bay on the sealing ship Neptune, trying to track down an American whaling ship to enforce Canadian regulations. They followed this up by sailing north into Smith Sound between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, raising the Union Jack on Ellesmere, proclaiming Canada’s claim and customs laws, and erecting a cairn of stones to show the dominion’s occupation. But all this was essentially symbolic. When the government of Canada sent Joseph-Elzéar Bernier on voyages to the eastern Arctic between 1904 and 1911, he was “showing the flag,”¹⁵ rather than doing anything concrete. Nationalists might think, as one article has it, that in setting a cairn and a plaque on Melville Island in 1909, Bernier “did more than any other person to solidify Canada’s claim to the Arctic islands,”¹⁶ but what he did was totally symbolic, though, admittedly, it was more than Canada had done up to that point, which was nothing.

J.-E. Bernier (1852–1934), the Québécois sea captain and Arctic enthusiast who showed the flag in the North for Canada, doing “more than any other person to solidify Canada’s claim to the Arctic islands.” LAC, PA102292

In 1907, Canadian senator Pascal Poirier articulated a “sector theory” upon which Canada’s claims might be based. According to this principle, countries exercise sovereignty between their mainland territory and the North Pole in an area bounded by the lines of longitude running from their east and west coasts. So, in a nutshell, this theory simply drew lines on a map and created pie-shaped wedges extending to the North Pole. Everything within the wedge belonged to Canada. This was a convenient way, it seemed, for Canada to declare sovereignty over all the islands in the archipelago. But no one in the Senate seconded his motion, so it never became official government policy. Bernier, however, decided to proclaim it on the ground. In 1908, the Arctic headed north to collect customs duties and to claim every island in the Arctic Archipelago for Canada. At each island they visited, Bernier and his crew went ashore, climbed a high point or hill, and erected a stone cairn containing a metal box with a proclamation claiming the land for Canada. The next year, unable to reach Victoria Island as planned, Bernier delivered his master stroke. On July 1, 1908, he and his entire ship’s company of thirty-three men, accompanied by a baby muskox, marched up to Parry’s Rock on Melville Island. The officers, in shirts and ties, the brass buttons on their peacoats glistening in the sun, unveiled a bronze plaque claiming for Canada the whole Arctic Archipelago between 141 and 60 degrees west longitude up to 90 degrees north latitude. This blanket declaration, which was little more than a restatement of the sector theory claiming everything from the Yukon to Baffin Island up to the Pole, freed Bernier of feeling that he needed to keep flying flags everywhere he visited in the Arctic from this point onward.¹⁷ If his gesture “did more than any other person to solidify Canada’s claim to the Arctic islands,” as nationalists are prone to suggest,¹⁸ it was still totally symbolic. But he had high hopes. “We have annexed them—we want the people to settle there now!” Bernier told the Empire Club of Canada that December. “I am glad that you approve of that because progress moves not only westward but northward too.”¹⁹ But if settlement was the measure of progress, then Canada had little to boast about in the North.

Only the lonely vigil mounted by the Royal North West Mounted Police (RNWMP) in its isolated posts represented effective occupation in the Arctic. Of the three posts established in the summer of 1903, the one on Herschel Island was the most important because that was where the threat to Canada’s interests was felt to be most acute. A police post, of course, is a concrete example of sovereignty, but this is true only if it exercises its powers effectively. This was not the case with the Mounted Police detachment on Herschel Island during the whaling era. The detachment was staffed by two members of the force: Sergeant F.J. Fitzgerald and Constable F.D. Sutherland. When a steamer rented from the Hudson’s Bay Company was wrecked, they were forced to go to the island from Fort McPherson that summer in an open boat, with very little in the way of supplies or equipment; nor did they have anywhere to live. As a result, they were compelled to buy food and rent living quarters from one of the whaling companies. More significantly, because they had no proper boat, they were unable to make patrols at sea, so that the only way they could figure out the amount of tax to charge on trade goods was to accept the sums the captains reported to them.

Outpost of Empire—buildings at Herschel Island, c. 1909. By this time the whaling industry was on its last legs, but the Canadian government maintained the Mounted Police detachment on the island as a demonstration of sovereignty over the western Arctic. RCMP Photo, 4071-13

This approach was not very effective, but it was highly symbolic. Once again success was achieved through lack of opposition. The whaling captains, who might have been expected to resent the presence of the police, in fact welcomed it. The police did not hinder their operations much; they had a relaxed attitude towards debauchery, and in fact Sergeant Fitzgerald had a child by an Inuit woman. Moreover, they were of assistance to the captains in preserving order by arresting violent crew members. Again, Canada’s assertion of sovereignty on the cheap succeeded largely because it was unopposed. Although the whaling era was over by the outbreak of the First World War, the police maintained the detachment on Herschel Island until 1937, using it as a base from which to patrol the western Arctic.

The Yukon gold rush had alerted Canada to the fact that there was more wealth in the North than the profits from furs and whales, and in the twentieth century the idea of the region as a treasure house of mineral wealth gained currency. In order for this potential wealth to be exploited, however, government control over the region would need to be established. In the more southerly parts of the North this control was shown by treaties signed with the First Nations, notably Treaty 8, signed in the southern Mackenzie watershed in 1899 and designed to smooth the path for an all-Canadian route to the Yukon. In the more remote parts of the Northwest Territories, control was marked by a number of remarkable demonstrations of authority on the part of the police. In three criminal cases, the government made it clear, through the actions of the police, that it was determined to show and enforce its authority through application of the law.

The first case involved two explorers, H.V. Radford, an American, and George Street, a young man from Ottawa, out in the tundra in search of adventure. In June 1912, while travelling with Inuit guides near the southern end of Bathurst Inlet, they were murdered by one of their guides after Radford threatened and struck the man. To do such a thing was extremely foolhardy, as Radford, who had travelled in the North before, must have known, for it was important in Inuit culture for people to behave in a friendly fashion to one another. Anger was seen as a kind of madness, and people who fell into rages could be killed to protect the community. Radford, however, had a reputation for bad temper, and his temper got both men killed. In 1913, word of the incident reached the authorities, and a patrol was sent out to contact the Inuit, not to arrest and punish them, but to explain the law to them and to establish friendly relations with them. The authorities believed that the Inuit were friendly and that the explorers had brought their fate on themselves, and that once the Inuit were told that this was not the way to behave, they would conform to Canadian law. Unfortunately, unlike most police patrols, this one was something of a disaster, mostly due to hesitant leadership, and it was not until the winter of 1917–18 that the police found the men responsible and passed along the official message. No further action was taken. This was not a very convincing demonstration of authority—in fact, it made the government look rather weak. It is interesting to note that as early as 1912 the authorities would take such a tolerant view of indigenous culture. But they always had a soft spot for Inuit, though not for Indians.²⁰

The next case was similar, but ended differently. This one involved two Oblate missionary priests, Fathers Rouvière and Le Roux, who had been working among the Inuit of the Coppermine region. Late in 1913 they were killed by their two guides near Bloody Falls, at the mouth of the Coppermine River. The motive for the killings was the same as with the two explorers: Father Le Roux had become impatient, and had struck one of the Inuit. The confession of Sinnisiak, one of the killers, showed what had happened:

Ilogoak [Le Roux] was carrying a rifle. He was mad with us when we started back from their camp and I could not understand his talk. I asked Ilogoak if he was going to kill me and he nodded his head . . . he pushed me again and wanted me to put on the harness and then he took his rifle out on top of the sled. I was very scared and started to pull. We went a little way and Uluksuk and I started to talk and Ilogoak put his hand over my mouth. Ilogoak was very mad and was pushing me. I was thinking hard and crying and very scared and the frost was in my boots and I was cold. I wanted to go back. I was afraid. Ilogoak would not let us. Every time the sled stuck Ilogoak would pull out the rifle. I got hot inside my body . . . I was very much afraid . . . he looked away from me and I stabbed him in the back with a knife.²¹

Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, the killers of Fathers Rouvière and Le Roux, on trial for murder in Alberta in the summer of 1917. RCMP Photo, 302-2

Although the circumstances of the killings were almost exactly the same as in the case of the two explorers, the case worked out differently. The news got out when a trader saw an Inuit man wearing a priest’s cassock, and the police patrol found the killers quickly. As usually happened, the Inuit cheerfully confessed. The dynamics were different too: it was one thing to kill a bad-tempered American and his unfortunate companion, but it was another to kill two priests; the hierarchy of the Church was determined, not on an un-Christian vengeance, but certainly to ensure that the loss of their priests’ lives was taken seriously. Four killings of Europeans in a year made the Canadian authority look weak in the region, so this time the government decided that an example needed to be made. Thus, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk were taken to Edmonton in the summer of 1917 and tried for the murder of Father Rouvière. To the amazement and chagrin of the authorities, the verdict was “not guilty”; the jury, reflecting the anti-Catholic bias of the times, apparently felt that the priests had got what they deserved. The two Inuit were then taken to Calgary and tried for the murder of Father Le Roux, and this time they were convicted. The judge told them, however, that the “great white Chief” had decided to be merciful, and they were sentenced to life imprisonment at the Fort Resolution police detachment, where they spent two relatively pleasant years before being released back to their people. The government did not want to make them suffer, but simply to make it possible for whites to travel safely in the region. Again, the episode shows a remarkable tolerance of the Inuit and their customs, but then as has been noted, the authorities took a very benign view of the “Eskimos” in those days. If the killers had been Cree or Dene, they would have been tried and hanged in short order.

This tolerance had its limits, as the third case showed, and when yet another murder occurred, and when the victim was a member of the Mounted Police, official attitudes hardened. For a third time two white men had been killed, one of them a police corporal, an act that struck directly at Ottawa’s authority in the North. In April 1922, a young man named Alikomiak, while being held under arrest at the Tree River detachment (on the Arctic coast east of the mouth of the Coppermine River) for the murder of a man named Pugnana, shot and killed Corporal W.A. Doak while the officer was sleeping, then shot Otto Binder, the local Hudson’s Bay Company trader, when he arrived for morning coffee. Alikomiak later claimed that Doak had behaved in a threatening manner towards him, and had forced him to do “women’s work,” though he had not been struck, and he had killed the policeman for that reason. The police tracked him down, and in the summer of 1923 he and Tatamigana, another Inuk, were taken to Herschel Island for trial. Tatamigana was also charged with the murder of Pugnana and of another man named Hanak.

In this case the government felt that an example had to be made to keep the North safe for non-Natives, and that the two Inuit would have to be punished to the full extent of the law, something that some southern newspapers were demanding. The trial of Alikomiak and Tatamigana was thus something of a show trial. Lawyers working for the government were appointed as attorneys for the Crown and for the defence. T.L. Cory, the defence lawyer, had written that since “kindness has failed in the past I strongly recommend that the law should take its course and those Eskimos [sic] found guilty of murder should be hanged in a place where the natives will see and recognize the outcome of taking another’s life.” A judicial party consisting of a presiding judge from Edmonton, the lawyers, other officials, and the hangman, who brought along a portable gallows, was sent down the Mackenzie River, picking up a jury from the white population of the posts along the river.

The two men were first tried for killing the other Inuit; these trials were completed in a single day. Alikomiak’s trial for killing Doak and Binder took place the next day. Since he had made a full confession, the result was not in doubt. The importance of the trial lay in its theatrical aspect, particularly Judge Dubuc’s address to the jury at the end of it. Dubuc made it clear that the real purposes of the trial were not only to impress on the Inuit that the government would not tolerate further killings, but also to reassure the Mounted Police and Canadians in general that the government’s policy was to make the North safe for outsiders. He first gave a dramatic definition of the role of the police in the North; Doak was “one of those lonely and fearless sentinels for Law and Order, posted somewhere on some barren and desolate point in the Polar Sea. A man whose duty was to prevent if possible, and if not, to detect and help in punishment of crime . . . always on guard for us.”

He warned the jury against excessive sympathy for the accused:

I am further satisfied that you shall not fail to bring a correct verdict because you have not forgotten I am sure those undying principles of British fair play which go with British justice, for although you may feel that you should have some consideration for the simple mentality of these primitive people, yet you also feel that you owe a duty to your country, who extends to them its generous protection in every way.

He then spoke to the main point, and warned the jury that if they did not do their duty it would send a dangerous message to the Inuit:

It is your duty as Jurymen who have taken the oath as such to decide according to the evidence, and make these tribes understand that the stern but at the same time just hand of British justice extends also to these northern shores. We want it plainly understood in the minds of these people that one of our most important laws is for the protection of human life which flows from the Divine command “Thou shalt not kill.” . . . Our Government has not undertaken this expensive Judicial Expedition to have exhibited here a mockery and travesty of Justice before these primitive people. You have a duty to perform as Jurymen, a duty to your Country and to our Laws, and a duty to yourselves. We are leaving this Island very shortly after these Trials and the result of your verdict shall fall on you who are to remain here, and it is you who shall have to bear the consequences.²²

The jury duly brought in a verdict of guilty, and after a debate in the press over whether mercy should be shown, the two men were hanged at Herschel Island on February 1, 1924. Whatever comfort the episode may have brought to the general public, it does not seem to have had much immediate effect on the Inuit of the region. The explorer Knud Rasmussen, for example, who spoke to Alikomiak’s people after the execution, was scornful of the government’s policy and its impact on the Inuit. What was not to be scorned, however, was the demonstration of sovereignty that this episode implied. Its purpose was to make the region “safe for white men,” as a contemporary official put it, and although it did not necessarily do that, it certainly was a strong demonstration of the application of authority.

Things did not go as smoothly in the Arctic islands, however, where in some places Canadian sovereignty was questionable at best. Officially, the islands had belonged to Canada since 1880,²³ but Britain’s right to the islands, and thus Canada’s, was not totally secure. In the first place, a number of the islands had been explored by men who were not British. In the second, in 1880 a large part of the Arctic island archipelago was still completely unknown when Britain transferred its nebulous rights to the young dominion.²⁴ During the 1870s the British government, which was anxious to turn over responsibility for the Arctic to Canada, wrestled with the difficulty of finding a legal definition for a territory, part of which was yet to be discovered. There was some urgency because Britain had received requests for permission to fish and mine in the Arctic. Particularly concerning was an 1874 request from a Lieutenant W.A. Mintzer of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for permission to mine in the Cumberland Gulf region.²⁵ One Colonial Office official noted of this request, in the sneering tone British officials often used in referring to Americans in the days when the United Kingdom was still great and powerful,

It would be desirable to ascertain the views of the Dominion Govt I think before the F[oreign] O[ffice] give [sic] any answer. We must remember that if this Yankee adventurer is informed by the British FO that the place indicated is not a portion of H.M. dominions he would no doubt think himself entitled to hoist the “Stars and Stripes” which might produce no end of complications.²⁶

Between 1875 and 1880 there was a flurry of correspondence between the British Foreign Office, the Governor General of Canada, and the Canadian government on the issue of sovereignty over the Arctic islands. Two issues complicated the proposed transfer: no one knew the boundaries or extent of the lands in question, and the Canadian government was not particularly keen to accept the transfer.

The matter of boundaries was solved by defining the northern limit of British possessions as “the utmost northerly limits of the North American continent and the islands appertaining thereto.” Getting the Canadian government to accept the gift proved more difficult. By 1877, Lord Carnarvon, the British foreign secretary, was growing impatient, writing to Lord Dufferin, the Governor General,²⁷ in elegant Victorian prose:

From reports which have appeared in the Newspapers I have observed that the attention of the citizens of the United States has from time to time been drawn to these territories and that private expeditions have been sent out to explore certain portions of them, and I need hardly point out to you that should it be the wish of the Canadian people that they should be included in the Dominion great difficulty in effecting this may easily arise unless steps are speedily taken to place the title of Canada to these territories upon a clear and unmistakable footing.

I have therefore to request that you will move your ministers to again take into their consideration the question of the inclusion of these territories within the boundaries of the Dominion, and that you will state to them that I shall be glad to be informed, with as little further delay as may be possible, of the steps which they propose to take in the matter.²⁸

Or, as our contemporaries would say, “Use it or lose it.”

Several more years elapsed, however, before the transfer was finally made official, the delay being due mostly to ongoing uncertainties about how to word the document when no one knew exactly the limits of the territory involved. Finally in July 1880, by Order in Council, the Arctic was transferred to Canada, the land involved being described in the most general terms possible:

. . . all British territories and possessions in North America, not already included within the Dominion of Canada, and all islands adjacent to any of such territories or possessions, shall (with the exception of the Colony of Newfoundland and its dependencies) become and be annexed to and form part of the said Dominion of Canada; and become and be subject to the laws for the time being in force in the said Dominion, in so far as such laws may be applicable thereto.²⁹

As documents of this sort go, this is vague in the extreme, reflecting the uncertainty of Britain’s claim to some of the islands, and the feeling in official circles that attempts at being more precise might simply draw attention to this uncertainty. As one authority put it, “The British Government did not know what they were transferring, and on the other hand the Canadian Government had no idea what they were receiving.”³⁰

Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) led the first party to traverse the Northwest Passage, 1903–6. LAC,C14073

Fifteen years passed before, in 1895, Canada created four provisional districts in the northern territories, one of them the District of Franklin, including the Arctic islands, but other than a few exploratory summer voyages north, nothing else was done to demonstrate Canada’s control over the region. In the meantime, explorations were carried out, mostly by citizens of other countries. Between 1903 and 1906, Roald Amundsen traversed the Northwest Passage from east to west, the first expedition to do so, but he made no claims to Canadian territory. More alarming from Canada’s point of view was the remarkable expedition of Otto Sverdrup, like Amundsen a Norwegian, from 1899 to 1902. During those years, using Ellesmere Island as a base, he discovered and explored land that was totally unknown: the Sverdrup Islands (Axel Heiberg, Amund Ringnes, and Ellef Ringnes Islands, named after his sponsors, Norwegian brewers). Most alarming of all, he claimed the islands for Norway. Luckily for Canada, Norway had more urgent issues than solidifying its claim, chiefly establishing its independence from Sweden, a process that was completed in 1905. The issue was not dead, however, but merely sleeping, and Canada’s title to the region was to remain cloudy for another quarter century.

The Amundsen and Sverdrup expeditions, along with the unsatisfactory conclusion to the Alaska Boundary Dispute, were all factors in the spread of Canadian authority via Mounted Police posts to the Arctic coast in 1903. They also ensured that when someone offered to mount a Canadian expedition to the Arctic, the government would welcome the offer, despite the expense involved, especially when the offer came from a man as persuasive as Vilhjalmur Stefansson.³¹ Stefansson was nominally a Canadian, having been born in Gimli, Manitoba, in 1879 to Icelandic immigrant parents, though he spent most of his life in the United States. He was a highly controversial figure who inspired strong admiration and even stronger dislike. To be fair to the man, he depended on publicity to sell his books and finance his expeditions; this explains some of the more unfortunate episodes of his life. An example occurred after his 1910 Arctic expedition in which he met Inuit who had never met Europeans. He decided that they were lighter in complexion and hair than the norm, and when he talked to reporters about this, the press turned it into a story about “Blonde Eskimos,” which exposed him to a good deal of ridicule.

Nonetheless, Stefansson was tough, resourceful, and determined, and when just before the First World War the Canadian government decided that it was well past time that it sent an exploratory expedition to the Arctic, Stefansson jumped at the chance to lead it. The result was the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–16, during which the last islands of the western Arctic were discovered: Borden Island, Lougheed Island, Meighen Island, and Mackenzie King Island. At last, land had been discovered in northern Canada by a Canadian. The expedition was dogged with controversy; when its ship, the Karluk, became stuck in ice, Stefansson went off to hunt and explore. When he returned, a storm had blown the ship far to the east, where it was crushed and destroyed, with some loss of life. He was accused of abandoning it. Nevertheless, he was amazingly successful at using what he called, naturally, the “Stefansson method” of exploration, which was essentially to adopt indigenous techniques and live off the land—the exact opposite of what Sir John Franklin had done.

Stefansson was a tremendously important figure in the history of Canadian Arctic sovereignty, for both positive and negative reasons. There is no question that the Canadian Arctic Expedition was a huge success from the point of view of discovery and thus sovereignty, despite the loss of life and the cost overruns. Stefansson also was a great enthusiast for the future development of the region, and spent the rest of his life, mostly in the United States, as a kind of Arctic prophet. He talked of the Arctic Ocean as a “polar Mediterranean,” at the centre rather than at the periphery of civilization, and was an early proponent of the idea of shipping through the Northwest Passage (though in those years, before global warming, he thought it would have to be done by submarine).

Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879–1962), the Canadian-born Arctic explorer who discovered new islands in the High Arctic and spent much of his life lecturing about the “Polar Mediterranean” on Canada’s northern coast. LAC,C86406

Some of Stefansson’s schemes, however, were far-fetched, and one in particular concerned sovereignty and embarrassed the Canadian government. This was his Wrangel Island expedition of 1921. The island lies north of eastern Siberia, and Stefansson’s plan was to send a party there to claim it for Canada. The island is large, about 7,200 square kilometres (2,772 square miles) in area. Among its claims to fame is that the world’s last mammoth seems to have died there as recently as 1,700 years ago, but more importantly, it is strategically located from the point of view of controlling the Arctic basin. Stefansson sent a party of three Canadians, an American, and Ada Blackjack, an Inuit woman, though he did not go himself. The expedition was a disaster; everyone died but Ada Blackjack, and a later party was arrested by the Russians. More dangerously, Stefansson’s enthusiasm so infected the Mackenzie King government that it made approving gestures towards asserting sovereignty over the island, though it soon backed off. Given the uncertain sovereignty over its own Arctic islands, the thought that the Canadian government would assert its sovereignty over someone else’s island seems foolhardy if not insane, and probably the government realized it. The episode was embarrassing, and made Stefansson persona non grata in Ottawa for the rest of his long life.

In 1920, Canada had had title to the Arctic islands for forty years, and yet had no permanent presence on them. There had been a series of official voyages to the region, notably the ones mentioned above, made in the early years of the twentieth century by Joseph-Elzéar Bernier (1852–1934). Bernier was the son of a sea captain from Quebec, and was commanding his own ship at the age of seventeen. He was fascinated by the North, and in 1904 outfitted a ship for an attempt to reach the North Pole. The federal government learned of his plans, and hired him and his ship instead to patrol the eastern Arctic. He made several voyages north, wintering on Baffin Island and Melville Island, collecting fees from whalers and traders, and carrying scientists north. It was on Melville Island in 1909 that he unveiled a plaque claiming the Arctic islands for Canada.

Certainly the activities of Bernier in the east and Stefansson in the west in this era were important to Canada’s claims of sovereignty, but still, on the outbreak of war in 1914 there was no permanent official presence anywhere in the Canadian territories except in the Yukon, and there the government was being downsized as the population shrank after the end of the gold rush.³² In the Northwest Territories there was none at all; the Territory’s capital remained in Ottawa until the mid 1960s. At the end of the war, however, events occurred that forced Canada to take a more active approach to demonstrating sovereignty. As is the case now, the issue was environmental—specifically, the protection of the muskox.

Muskoxen were protected under the Northwest Game Act of 1917, and could not be shot except by special permission for scientific purposes. In 1919, government interest in the animals was further demonstrated by the Reindeer and Musk-ox Commission, which looked into their biological and economic potential as a source of food for the Inuit. The muskox herd on Ellesmere Island, however, could not be entirely protected, for the Inuit of northern Greenland regularly crossed Smith Sound to hunt them. In July 1919, as the commission was beginning its work, the Canadian government sent a request via Britain to Denmark asking the Danes to restrain the Inuit of the Thule region from killing Canadian muskoxen. Denmark, which did not officially proclaim its sovereignty over Greenland until 1921, asked the advice of Knud Rasmussen, the famous explorer who had opened a trading post at Thule in 1910. In his reply, he said, “As everyone knows, the land of the Polar Eskimos [Ellesmere Island] falls under what is called ‘No Man’s Land,’ and there is, therefore, no authority in this country except that which I myself am able to exert through the Trading Station.”³³ Ominously, the Danish government replied to Canada that it agreed with Rasmussen.

Canada hastened to reply that Ellesmere Island was not no man’s land, but was part of Canada, but the officials in the Department of the Interior were privately worried. Much of Ellesmere Island had been discovered by non-Britons, and it was entirely unoccupied. The Greenland Eskimos and the occasional explorer, such as Robert Peary and Adolphus Greely (both Americans), were the only humans who had ever set foot on it in recorded times. An internal department memo suggested that Canada’s sovereignty over this huge island (nearly four times the size of Nova Scotia), and in the rest of the High Arctic as well, was very tenuous:

The situation in the northern islands, therefore, appears to be that Britain has had an inchoate title which now probably through the lapse of time may be considered to have terminated; that the Low and Bernier expeditions may have established a “fictitious” title which also has probably lapsed; and therefore, that Denmark or any other country is in a position to acquire sovereignty by establishing effective occupation and administration.³⁴

This was a startling admission. An “inchoate title” is one that is incomplete or imperfectly developed. International law contained the concept that discovery established title to land, but it was inchoate until some effective form of administration or occupation took place.³⁵ A “fictitious” title was a made-up or fabricated one. For an Ottawa bureaucrat to admit that Canada had no real claim to the High Arctic, and that the region was up for grabs, was of course something of a bombshell, and this memo was not publicly circulated.

It did, however, stimulate action, albeit grudging. J.B. Harkin, Canada’s first commissioner of National Parks, who was interested in the muskox issue, wondered if Ellesmere and the other islands were worth bothering about. At a meeting of northern experts, including Stefansson (who was still in Ottawa’s good graces), it was concluded that they were, for two reasons. First, the islands might be worth something. Second, and here the embarrassment factor surfaced again, there was a “sentimental” reason: “Ellesmere and the other northern islands have always been regarded in Canada as Canadian, and there doubtless would be a strong sentiment against their being taken possession of by any other flag.”³⁶ More pointedly, Harkin wrote to his superior reminding him of the public uproar in 1903:

One has but to recall the outburst of public indignation and protest in Canada at the decision of the Alaskan arbitration to realize what public opinion would be if any neglect on the Gov-e ernment’s part resulted in the loss of an area thousands of times larger and more important than was involved in the Alaskan case.³⁷

So it seemed that something must be done to make Canadian sovereignty more real in the Arctic islands. But what? Harkin suggested, in a strange forecast of what actually happened thirty-five years later, that some Inuit³⁸ be sent to Ellesmere Island, where a police post could protect them and the muskox as well. Stefansson agreed, and said that two police posts should be set up on the island, because it would not do for Canadian authority to be established on the southern part of the island if the Danes claimed the north. The idea of sending the police to the High Arctic was accepted. They seemed the logical people to send because they had done such good work in the Yukon. Moreover, their pay was low and they represented Canadian authority in a manner that no other Canadian agency could. It might be noted, however, that there were other ways of establishing national sovereignty among and over the Inuit. The Danes, for instance, had not used police in Greenland, preferring to work through missionaries and other civilian agents of the government.

More than a year was taken up with preparation. This was carried out in secret, partly so as not to alert the Danes, and partly so that Stefansson could be kept out of the loop. He was anxious to command the expedition north, but his stock was falling fast in Ottawa, and when he gave an interview to the American press in which he spoke of “islands and country lying north of Canada,” it fell even further, for of course the Canadian government’s position was that there was nothing north of Canada. Finally, in the summer of 1922, an expedition was sent north on the Arctic, Captain Bernier’s old ship which was refitted for the occasion, captained by Bernier himself. The expedition was led by J.D. Craig, the advisory engineer for the Northwest Territories Branch of the Department of the Interior. Two posts were to be set up, one at Pond Inlet on northern Baffin Island, where a trader named Robert Janes had been shot in 1920, for the same reason that the two explorers and the two priests had died in the west—he had behaved in a violent and irrational way.³⁹ Staff Sergeant A.H. Joy had visited the community in 1921 to investigate the incident, and it was a logical place for a detachment. The location of the other detachment was to be on Ellesmere Island, and since the island was unoccupied, the exact location was left to Craig. Eventually, ice conditions dictated a harbour at the extreme southeast corner, which he named after himself, and the detachment of Craig Harbour was established.

The Mounted Police detachment at Craig Harbour, on the southeast corner of Ellesmere Island, photographed in the summer of 1925. The post was staffed by two members of the RCMP, accompanied by a family of Inuit employees. Since no one lived anywhere near the detachment, its function was purely a symbolic demonstration of sovereignty. LAC, PA100771

Each of the detachments was staffed with two members of the police, usually a fairly senior officer and a constable. Craig Harbour was commanded by Inspector C.E. Wilcox, and Pond Inlet (often called Pond’s Inlet in this period) by Staff Sergeant Joy. An Inuit family or sometimes two was hired to live at the detachment and work for the police. When Bernier and the Arctic returned south in the fall, the press hailed the expedition as a demonstration of Canada’s rights: “Canada’s Northern Empire Within 850 Miles of North Pole, Making Our Sovereignty Certain,” exulted the Ottawa Journal.⁴⁰ Although this was not altogether true, it was closer to the truth than it had been ten or twenty years earlier.

Landing supplies at Craig Harbour, summer 1925. LAC, PA102444

By 1927, six RCMP posts had been opened in the Arctic islands: Craig Harbour and Pond Inlet in 1922, Pangnirtung (on the east coast of Baffin Island) in 1923, Dundas Harbour (southeast Devon Island) in 1924, Bache Peninsula (halfway up the east coast of Ellesmere Island) in 1926, and Lake Harbour (south coast of Baffin Island) in 1927. Nor did the government go back to sleep once these posts had been established. In the spring of 1925 the Northern Advisory Board was set up to deal with sovereignty and other matters concerning the Arctic. Its members were senior officials of the various government departments with interests in the region: the Department of the Interior, the RCMP, External Affairs, Indian Affairs, and Fisheries. The impetus for the board’s formation was another shock to Canada’s assertion of Arctic sovereignty. It had been discovered that an American explorer named Donald B. MacMillan, a man with considerable Arctic experience, was planning a new expedition based at northern Greenland, with stations on Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg Islands, to carry out aerial exploration of the polar region under the command of Admiral Richard Byrd. When Ottawa heard of this, MacMillan was informed through the British embassy in Washington that licences were required if the expedition planned to collect plant or animal specimens. The deputy minister of the interior made a trip to Washington in May 1925 to tell the secretary of the navy that Canada’s permission should be obtained before the expedition landed on Canadian territory, and offered to assist the expedition in any way possible, including supplying the “necessary permits.” In August, Inspector Wilcox travelled north on the Arctic and visited MacMillan at Etah, in northern Greenland. During the visit, which was apparently friendly, Commander Byrd asked if any Canadian had ever visited Axel Heiberg Island. The answer was no, and the implications of the question were worrying.

Because the American government had no interest in making claims to Ellesmere Island, nothing untoward came of this episode, but it did lead directly to the establishment of the most unusual Mounted Police post in the history of the force. In 1926, an expedition was sent to set up a detachment at Bache Peninsula, in the vicinity of where the MacMillan expedition had been operating. The detachment was located on the east coast of Ellesmere Island at about 79 degrees north latitude. It was the most northerly police post in the British Empire, and the most northerly in the history of the RCMP. What made it unusual, however, was that there was no one there to police, because no one lived there; in fact, except for the Greenland Inuit at Etah, there wasn’t another human being within hundreds of kilometres of the place.

The Bache Peninsula detachment was in operation for only a few years. Because it was so far north, it was hard to supply. A ship came once a year with supplies; one year weather conditions were so bad that the supplies had to be left on the ice a considerable distance to the south. Bache Peninsula was the quintessential example of symbolic sovereignty. The detachment, for instance, was a Canadian post office, supplied with stamps and a cancellation stamp, though the mail was collected and delivered once a year and could just as easily have been stamped when the ship docked in Halifax. The operation of a post office is a major proof of effective sovereignty, and since there was no one around to arrest, the police ran a post office. They had customs declaration and other forms, though it’s unclear if they were ever used. There was more going on at Bache Peninsula than symbolic sovereignty, however, for in the late 1920s the Mounted Police made a number of remarkable patrols in the High Arctic. Of course, the police had nothing else to do. Two of these patrols are particularly worthy of mention. Between March and May 1929, Inspector A.H. Joy, the constable at the detachment, three Inuit and four dog teams made a patrol of over 2800 kilometres (1740 miles) from Dundas Harbour to Bache Peninsula via Melville, Lougheed, Ellef Ringnes, Cornwall, Axel Heiberg, and Ellesmere Islands. The police were not the first to travel in these regions, but at least for the first time it could be said that a Canadian had actually visited the Arctic regions claimed by Canada. In 1934–35 Corporal H.W. Stallworthy, on loan to the Oxford Arctic expedition, reached 82 degrees 25 minutes north, and was made a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society.

At the other detachments where there were people living— Pond Inlet, for example—the police carried out most of the functions of government, since there were still no other government officers anywhere in the Arctic. As well as performing law enforcement functions when necessary, they took the census, registered births, marriages (for Inuit who had accepted Christianity) and deaths, sometimes gave out rough-and-ready medical assistance, ran the post office, wrote reports for the Department of Indian Affairs, served as customs and tax officials, and did whatever else needed to be done along those lines, demonstrating actual rather than symbolic sovereignty. Until the 1940s, when Ottawa at last took a more active role in the North, the police were the entire face of government in the region. By 1930, Canada had

exercised jurisdiction in and over the Arctic islands by establishing police, customs, and post offices at strategic and necessary points and by conducting patrols over the surrounding territory. . . . The title of Canada to the Arctic islands was recognized by Norway in 1930; and the claims of Denmark and the United States have been nullified by Canadian occupation of the territory.⁴¹

Getting Norway to recognize Canada’s title proved something of a sticky matter. Remember that Norway’s claim was to the islands discovered by Otto Sverdrup at the turn of the twentieth century, a claim that, it could be argued, was better than Canada’s, for Norway’s rested on actual discovery, while Canada’s rested merely on an assertion made by Britain.⁴²

The settlement of Norway’s claims, while peaceful, involved a good deal of diplomacy.⁴³ The usual interpretation of events is that in 1930, as Sverdrup lay dying, the Canadian and Norwegian governments agreed that Canada should pay $67,000 to Sverdrup, ostensibly for his maps and papers (which are now in the national archives in Ottawa), but in reality because Norway insisted that Sverdrup be compensated for his efforts as a condition of that country relinquishing its claims to the islands bearing his name. The reality, however, was a good deal more complicated. The question of the Sverdrup Islands became linked with several controversies that were ongoing between Britain and Norway over other territory in the Arctic and in the Antarctic as well. “The polar regions played an important role in the perception of the national destiny of Canada, Norway and Britain between 1920 and 1930,” historian Thorlief T. Thorliefsson recently explained. “The final agreement over the Sverdrup Islands reflected these national and imperial aspirations.”⁴⁴

The sequence of events that led to Norway’s formal recognition of Canada’s sovereignty over the Sverdrup Islands is a complicated one, but it was essentially a triangular agreement among the three countries, ending amicably, with each party gaining its main objectives. Canada wanted a clear title to the Arctic islands, Norway wanted Jan Mayen in the Arctic,⁴⁵ and Britain wanted a free hand to pursue sovereignty over Antarctica. A scholar who has studied the agreement calls it “a fundamental illustration of Canada’s growth as an independent nation in the years between the Imperial Conference of 1926 and the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931.”⁴⁶ O.D. Skelton, undersecretary of state for External Affairs and the most important Canadian civil servant of the inter-war years,⁴⁷ handled the delicate negotiations with supreme skill. Britain wanted to use the Sverdrup issue as a pawn in convincing Norway to drop its Antarctic claims, but Skelton made Canada’s interests paramount. The difficulty with Norway was that public opinion in that country was proud of Sverdrup’s achievement and reluctant to abandon his claim. The problem was solved when Canada not only paid the $67,000 to Sverdrup, who was in need and very ill, but also guaranteed Norway access to hunting and fishing rights on the Sverdrup Islands, rights that were meaningless in practice, but which satisfied the Norwegian public. Canada also recognized Norway’s sovereignty over Jan Mayen Island, as did Britain. It was a happy outcome, in which all three countries got what they wanted.

On the eve of the Second World War, Canada’s sovereignty in the North was unchallenged, partly because on the mainland it was unchallengeable under international law, and partly because farther north no one wanted to challenge it. Canada’s sovereignty still manifested itself largely in symbolic ways: the Mounted Police posts, the flags flown at them (Union Jacks in this era), the post offices and the other paraphernalia of bureaucracy used to show that the region was under formal Canadian control. The Northwest Territories had seen the development of the gold-mining town of Yellowknife, and other economic booms had taken place at Norman Wells (oil) and on the shores of Great Bear Lake (radium). Yet outside Yellowknife, the newcomer population of the Northwest Territories in the 1930s consisted of a handful of scattered traders, missionaries, and police. There were no civilian representatives of the Canadian government permanently stationed north of the mainland.

The government was aware of this vacuum, and pondered how to fill it at the lowest possible cost. One solution was to be perhaps the most symbolic of all the symbols of sovereignty. In 1928, the RCMP commissioned a schooner for Arctic service. The St. Roch was launched in April of that year, and in 1929 began a series of annual patrols of Arctic waters, for most of that period under the command of Inspector Henry Larsen (1899–1964), a Norwegian seaman who immigrated to Canada in 1927 and joined the RCMP the next year.⁴⁸ The St. Roch was able to visit remote Inuit camps and to operate in waters where there had never been a Canadian presence. Some years the ship wintered in the North, and in 1940–42 it traversed the Northwest Passage from west to east, the first ship to do so. In 1944, it achieved another first, when it made the passage from east to west in a single season, and yet another when in 1950 it sailed from Halifax to Vancouver in a single season, becoming the first vessel to circumnavigate North America.

Henry Larsen (1898–1964), the Norwegian-born RCMP officer who commanded the schooner St.Roch on Arctic patrols from 1928 to 1948. LAC, C70771

The achievements of the St. Roch were well publicized in Canada and throughout the world, serving as powerful symbols of Canada’s northern sovereignty. And symbols they were, for in 1940 there was still virtually no official Canadian presence north of the mainland except for the police. The Inuit were mostly left to their own devices, with no schools, no doctors (one might accompany a supply ship on its annual visit), no welfare or assistance of any kind, except perhaps handouts of food from a Hudson’s Bay Company post in times of starvation. Almost all the Inuit of what is now Nunavut still lived on the land as their ancestors had done. For those who gravitated to settlements such as Pond Inlet, tuberculosis was becoming a scourge. Yet a real government presence had to wait until after the war.