The whole complex Arctic hunting society was, I believe, meticulously formed by trial and error over many thousands of years.
SIXTY NAUTICAL MILES NORTH OF Killinek Island, across the tumultuous waters of Hudson Strait, lies the southern tip of Baffin Island, known in Norse sagas as Helluland or “Slab Rock Land.” The Norse were perceptive geographers whose naming traditions accurately described the economic features of the Maritime Far Northeast—at least from a Norse perspective. Southwestern Greenland was a suitable pasture land for livestock; Helluland was a high rocky land of little use to farmers. Markland, “Forest Land,” encompassing central and southern Labrador, was a land that could supply timber for building boats and houses, and Vinland was a rich land where wild grapes and grass held promise for Norse settlements similar to those in their Scandinavian homelands. To the Norse, northern Labrador and Baffin, with their mountainous coasts and deep fjords, were indistinguishable. Today, geographers, botanists, geologists, and even anthropologists would agree; the distinctions between the Torngat coast of northern Labrador and Baffin Island are largely due to recent political history. In fact, the Inuktitut term for the islands around Killinek, taujat or “stepping stones,” embodies Inuit recognition of their geographic and cultural continuities and shared history.
Today Baffin Island, which stretches 1600 km (1,000 mi) from Hudson Strait to Lancaster Sound, is part of the newly created Canadian political entity called the Federal Territory of Nunavut (fig. 7.02). Nunavut was created from the earlier Northwest Territories to be a political homeland for Canada’s Inuit population, about half of whom in 2006 (24,640) self-identified as Inuit and lived in Nunavut, with the remainder living elsewhere in Canada.
7.02 Map of Eastern and Northern Nunavut, Canada
7.03 Northwest Passage
This view from diminutive Adams Island, located between Baffin and Bylot islands at the northern end of Navy Board Inlet, looks north into the fabled Northwest Passage.
The 2011 census recorded Nunavut’s population as 31,906. The new province is governed by a legislative assembly that reflects its largely Inuit ethnicity. Nunavut is anchored at its southeastern corner by Cape Chidley, the northernmost point in Labrador on Killinek Island. Although thought of as an Arctic land, Nunavut also encompasses all islands in Hudson Bay, even those as far south as James Bay at 53 degrees North. But politically, Killinek is the most diverse of all these islands, sharing borders with the Provinces of Newfoundland Labrador, Quebec, and Nunavut.
These lands are generally categorized by a combination of latitude, climate, and ecological conditions, which biologists sometimes called life zones for their ability to produce biomass (fig. 1.06). From south to north, these include the Subarctic, roughly from southern Labrador at 52 degrees North to southern Baffin Island and the southern part of Greenland at 65 degrees North; the Arctic, including most of Baffin Island and Western Greenland from 66 to 74 degrees North; and the High Arctic, including northernmost Baffin Island, the Queen Elizabeth Islands, and Greenland north of Upernavik from 74 to 83 degrees North.
The climate that characterizes these zones is not simply a function of latitude any more than the Arctic Circle is a definitive marker between more temperate and Arctic regions. Arctic travelers would not necessarily know at what point they have crossed the Arctic Circle. In fact, Arctic vegetation and its associated animal life extend far south of the Arctic Circle into southern Labrador and even the Gulf of St. Lawrence, while the temperate Subarctic extends north of the Arctic Circle in northern Norway.
The Arctic Circle is defined as the latitude where the sun remains below the horizon all day long on the Winter Solstice, the 21st of December. On this day the Northern Hemisphere, during its annual precession or wobbling on its axis, tilts farthest away from the Sun, leaving the greatest amount of the Northern Hemisphere in shadow, creating winter. North of the Arctic Circle the number of days of winter darkness increases; conversely, in summer, these lands experience midnight sun, creating strong warming for the brief summer months. Local and regional climates are also affected by geography, wind, ocean currents, and elevation.
The High Arctic is reached as one approaches Lancaster Sound (74 degrees North), the eastern entrance to the fabled Northwest Passage, long sought by European and American expeditions seeking a sea route to the Pacific and Asia. The same sequence of Arctic peoples who pioneered Labrador and the rest of northern Canada and Greenland are found in abundance around Eclipse Sound (fig. 7.01), the east-west waterway between Baffin and Bylot Islands, which constitutes a gateway, like the openings of Hudson Strait and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but this one leads to the western Arctic via the real Northwest Passage. The Bylot Island region has many Dorset and Thule archaeological sites, including Button Point (fig. 7.01) and Karsuq, “Place of Many Rocks,” a Thule site a few kilometers west of Button Point, with a profusion of Thule stone dwellings, human graves, bone middens, and raised beaches.
7.04 Indigenous Building Materials
This Thule site at Radstock Bay, Devon Island, contains enormous whale bones, which were used to construct a winter house. Most of the bones at this site are from young whales, which were easier to kill and drag home than adults.
Each of the major cultural shifts—from Pre-Dorset caribou and musk-ox hunters (4,200–2,500 years ago), to Dorset walrus and seal hunters (2,500–800 years ago), to Thule Inuit whalers (800–400 years ago)—corresponds to a climatic change. By 4,500 years ago glacial ice had disappeared from the central Canadian Arctic, and warm climates and ice-free summer waters helped Paleo-Eskimos expand from Alaska into Canada, Greenland, and northern Labrador, where they became known as Pre-Dorset. Over 2,000 years the Pre-Dorset evolved into the Late Paleo-Eskimo Dorset culture during a cold period that required new sea ice hunting methods. Thule whale hunters spread into northern Canada in AD 1250–1300 during a warm phase, and with the return of cold weather ca. 1400 Thule people in the central Canadian Arctic had to abandon whaling and shift back to a walrus- and seal-hunting economy like that practiced by Dorset people. In this way Thule was transformed into Inuit culture of the historical period.
Pre-Dorset people probably looked like the Inuit of today, both having ancestry in northern Asia. The Arctic Mongolid physical type shows adaptation to cold Arctic climate of northern Asia: high cheekbones, a broad flat face, and a robust torso with muscular limbs; these were accompanied by a shortening of the nose, torso, limbs, and fingers, producing a compactness of body that facilitates heat retention. Pre-Dorset people made small triangular points that were fitted to arrows shot from powerful Asian bows. Bow and arrows gave them a military advantage over other Native American cultures that used only heavy spears and hand-thrown darts; for some reason the bow and arrow was not adopted by American Indians for another 2,000 years.
When Pre-Dorset people entered the eastern Arctic, the land was unoccupied, but game was plentiful. Pre-Dorset people were efficient caribou and musk-ox hunters but had only a rudimentary technology for hunting sea mammals, which required toggling harpoons. It seems likely that they learned about harpoons from the Maritime Archaic Indians of Labrador, for by 3,500 years ago, harpoons similar to those used in Labrador are found in Pre-Dorset sites, and seals and walrus begin to become important prey. Pre-Dorset people had a highly mobile life, intercepting game throughout a band’s territory, using only tents both winter and summer, heated with fires fueled with driftwood and greasy animal bones. Despite a seminomadic life, they produced remarkable bone and ivory art, and their chipped stone tools made from carefully chosen colorful cherts and quartz crystal have a jewel-like artistry. They probably believed that making their tools and weapons beautiful showed their respect for the animal spirits and deities that controlled their destiny.
Around AD 1250–1300 a new cultural tradition with roots also in Siberia and Alaska arrived in the eastern Arctic. This Neo-Eskimo or Thule tradition culture is named for an archaeological site at Thule, Greenland, on the opposite side of the Arctic from Alaska. Thule people had learned to hunt large whales around Bering Strait, and with the warm climate of the Medieval Optimum, which opened the ice-filled channels among the Canadian Arctic islands, Thule whale-hunters moved swiftly into the Canadian Arctic and northern Greenland. By this time the Norse had established colonies in Greenland, and the desire to obtain iron from the Cape York meteor fall or by trade, for the Norse may have provided added incentive to migration. Thule was a large and boisterous, competitive culture, equipped with sled dogs, large skin-covered whaling boats, and powerful sinew-backed bows. The resident Dorset people were no match for this onslaught, and within a century or two most were driven into marginal areas, unattractive to Thule whalers, or had been killed or absorbed into Thule culture. Thule’s use of Dorset harpoon styles, soapstone vessels, and igloos indicates a degree of contact and acculturation. Genetic evidence of Dorset-Thule interaction has been limited by the scarcity of Dorset human remains.
7.05 Thule Winter House, Resolute, Cornwallis Island
A passageway carved out of the tundra kept cold air below the living level of this Thule winter house. This early version of climate control is one adaptation that allowed the Thule people to survive in a hostile climate.
Thule culture spread quickly throughout the central Canadian Arctic and into northern Greenland and northern Labrador. In most of these areas they reoccupied abandoned Dorset dwellings (fig. 7.05), making houses that were larger and better insulated. Unlike the Eskimo tradition, Thule people did not make chipped stone tools, relying instead on tools of bone, ivory, and slate. Similar slate tools had been used in Alaska, and this technology produced sharp edges like those on iron tools.
Shaped like an L lying on its side in a roughly northwest direction, Devon Island extends through 20 degrees of latitude. Devon Island, on the north side of Lancaster Sound, the real—rather than fabled—Northwest Passage, has a large number of prehistoric Thule Eskimo settlements containing houses made of sod, turf, and whale bones, and food caches and burial cairns made of boulders. The earliest of these sites dates to about AD 1250, the time of the initial Thule migration when the Canadian Arctic island channels were ice-free enough to allow whales to pass from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The latest sites were abandoned during a cold period known as the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about AD 1450 to 1750. During this period Lancaster Sound and the passages to the west became ice-bound throughout the year, restricting Thule access to whales, driftwood, walrus, seals, and other resources crucial to their survival. These same climatic conditions had brought calamity earlier to the Norse agricultural settlements in Greenland. By 1500 the High Arctic was abandoned and with a few exceptions remained without indigenous population to this day. Devon Island, at 55,247 km2 (21,331 mi2), is almost three times the size of the Canadian Province of Prince Edward Island and four times the size of the American state of Connecticut; it is the world’s largest uninhabited island.
The bones of walrus, whale, polar bear, and caribou found at these archaeological sites testify to the skill of Thule hunters (fig. 7.04). Harpoons that toggled beneath the skin and blubber of large sea mammals had been used earlier by Dorset hunters in the Eastern Arctic, but hunting large whales required the use of inflated seal-skin floats and large skin boats with well-trained crews directed by experienced whaling captains. Social organization was as integral to success in whale hunting as the hunting equipment itself. During the twelfth to fourteenth centuries Basque people independently pioneered the hunting of large whales in the Bay of Biscay, but they used primitive barbed harpoons and did not utilize floats, so they had to remain physically attached to the whale rather than letting it expend its energy fighting the floats. Although Thule people were in contact with European whalers shortly after 1500, Europeans did not adopt Inuit technology until the seventeenth century, when the Dutch began whaling with Basque and Inuit collaboration in Labrador and Davis Strait.
7.06 Kuyait Site, Frobisher Bay
In the early 1990s a Smithsonian-Canadian team investigating the 1576–78 voyages of Martin Frobisher found Elizabethian-period artifacts at Inuit sites including Kuyait, only a few miles from Frobisher’s mines.
West of Devon Island, across Wellington Channel, is Cornwallis Island and the Inuit/Canadian village of Resolute, the modern administrative hub of the High Arctic. The Inuktituk name for Resolute is Qaqsuittuq, which translates as “place with no dawn,” an apropos term considering its location eight degrees above the Arctic Circle. In 2006 Resolute had a population of 229. Resolute was an important American air base in World War II, and it continues as a communications and transportation center for the Canadian High Arctic.
Resolute has a large prehistoric Thule Eskimo site, which was first excavated by Henry Collins of the Smithsonian Institution in the early 1950s and produced some of the first iron and ceramics found in the eastern Arctic. Today several of its underground houses, with roofs supported by whale mandibles and ribs, have been reconstructed. Thule people utilized an ingenious method of keeping their houses warm in the winter. First they excavated about one meter into the ground; then they constructed a sod-covered subsurface entry passage that had at its inner end a large vertical slab that acted as a “cold trap” to prevent cold air from entering the house. One had to step over the stone slab and up onto a higher-level floor that served as the family’s working space. Finally, they built a sleeping platform at a still higher level where all the warmest air in the dome-shaped room collected. A small vent hole in the roof could be opened or closed to regulate air quality and temperature.
7.07 Igloolik Bowhead Hunt
Alaska’s Thule Eskimos brought the tradition of hunting large whales into Canada and Greenland around 1250–1300. The large quantity of meat, blubber, baleen, and bones supported larger populations and fed the teams of dogs that were crucial to the Inuit way of life. Although dogs are fewer today, whale hunting continues as an important source of nutrition and social and cultural identity. Today’s bowhead stocks are carefully monitored, and in recent decades their population has been increasing.
Similar houses continued to be used by later Inuit people throughout the North American Arctic and Greenland into the mid-twentieth century. In Alaska, Thule and later Eskimo houses usually were rectangular because they were made with driftwood timbers. In the eastern Arctic they were built with whale ribs and mandibles and were round and sometimes had multiple lobes for extra rooms. After the decline of whaling and with the appearance of iron tools, Inuit houses began to be built with driftwood or timbers and became rectangular, and in the eighteenth century in Greenland and Labrador, these structures were large enough to house extended families of thirty to forty people. Inuit territories from Labrador to the Canadian Arctic and Greenland contain thousands of these winter dwellings, each type representing a different chronological period or regional variant.
7.08 Sharing Maktaaq
Inuit consider the inner skin and outer layer of blubber of white whales and bowheads a prized delicacy, rich in nutrition and vitamin C. Here two elders enjoy maktaaq after a successful bowhead whale hunt in Igloolik in 2002.
For more than 4,000 years the Inuit lived successfully in the Arctic with a small number of core technologies: tailored fur clothing, soapstone oil lamps and pots, snow goggles, harpoons, snow houses, and skin boats. However, one item, above all, is responsible for the development of the large, vibrant society that came with the Thule and still remains crucial to modern Inuit: the sledge or komatik. Ice travel in Nunavut involves riding in a komatik (fig. 7.09) that today is usually pulled by a snowmobile rather than a dog team.
The komatik is about a meter wide and seven meters long and has a box-like cabin amidship for passengers and gear. These sleds have a structural resemblance to Inuit kayaks and umiaks, the latter being large skin-covered boat used both for transport and whaling. These conveyances are always fastened using thong or line lashings, rather than nails or screws, in order to provide flexibility in waves or over rough ice, without which the wood frames of these crafts would shatter. The Canadian Inuit komatik differs from the Greenlandic dog-pulled qamutit, which are shorter and lack a cabin, and the qamutit also has two vertical posts rising from the rear ends of the runners, which allows the driver to push and maneuver the sled over rough ice and reflects the Alaskan heritage of the original Thule migration.
7.09 Komatik Construction
Flexibility is built into the sled, allowing the komatik runners and cabin to bend around obstacles, where more rigid assembly would break up on rough ice. The same technique is used in constructing kayaks, which must flex when passing over waves.
Whether crossing flat ice, open leads, or pressure ridges, sledges, komatiks, and snowmobiles all operate more or less the same way. The biggest risk in spring travel is crossing open leads or crevasses that are more than two meters wide.
7.10, 7.11 Seal Hunting
Guide David Suqslak unsuccessfully thrusts his harpoon into a ringed seal’s breathing hole, where his son Curtis later succeeded with a rifle. Seal—particularly ringed seal—is a primary food of Inuit and is traditionally used for clothing, lamp oil, and many other products. Curtis displays his take, most of which we ate on the ice—both raw and cooked.
By AD 1500 the Little Ice Age had set in and Thule people in the central Canadian Arctic were no longer able to hunt whales in passages that were now ice-filled. These climatic changes caused Thule people to shift to hunting ring seals at breathing holes during the winter. Villages moved from the shores onto the sea ice; snow houses replaced sod houses; and winter became a time of long-distance dog-sled travel, visiting, and trade. This was the Inuit culture that the Elizabethan explorer Martin Frobisher met in 1576–78. However, along the Atlantic and Baffin Bay coasts, and in Greenland, the shift in Inuit economy and settlement was not so evident because here the ocean was open for ice-edge whaling and walrus-hunting all winter long. In these regions where the earliest European contacts occurred, the Thule whale-hunting economy continued long after European fishermen, explorers, and whalers arrived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until the stock of whales became severely depleted.
Depictions of “skraelings” in the Norse sagas are at best ambiguous, referring to both Indians and Inuit without distinction. Real ethnography of the Inuit did not emerge until the three voyages of Martin Frobisher in 1576, 1577, and 1578 (Stefansson and McCaskill 1938; McGhee 2002). It may seem strange that Britain, with no prior history of northern exploration, began venturing into the Arctic during the Elizabethan age, but England was desperate to match (or better) Portugal and Spain’s conquests in the south by finding a northwest passage to Cathay and the wealth of Kublai Khan’s Orient, which had been reported a century earlier by Marco Polo. Frobisher’s venture was an enormous undertaking: two ships in 1576, three ships in 1577, and fifteen in 1578—making it the largest Arctic exploration fleet of all time. Nonetheless, it failed in almost every dimension: it failed to find the Northwest Passage; its claims of discovering gold were bogus; and it bankrupted its financiers, tarnished the Crown, and landed Frobisher in debtor’s prison for a spell before he was pardoned by his friend (and paramour) Queen Elizabeth. However, the expeditions achieved enormous success in geographic discovery and produced the first detailed observations of the Inuit, who—appearing Asian and wearing ornaments of copper or bronze, and using iron tools—were seen as living proof of the proximity of Cathay.
7.12 Portrait of Kalicho, 1577
This illustration and a companion portrait of an Inuit woman, both painted by John White, are the earliest images of Inuit to appear in Europe. Painted from life in London before the three Inuit Frobisher captured in 1577 died of a European disease, they show the artist’s attention to accurate recording of seal-skin garments, boots, and a sinew-backed bow.
For three summers Frobisher and his captains dodged Inuit arrows—one of which found a mark in the admiral’s buttocks. Undeterred, Frobisher—a giant of a man—engineered a trading encounter in which he lured an Inuit kayaker alongside his ship, Gabriel. When the Inuit reached for a large metal bell, Frobisher single-handedly snatched him aboard, kayak and all. On his 1577 voyage he managed to capture an Inuit man (fig. 7.12), woman, and child, whom he brought home to Bristol as living proof of the Cathay connection. The hostages all died within a month, but in the meantime the English got their first look at America’s Arctic Natives when the man, wearing traditional Inuit skin clothing, demonstrated hunting ducks on the Avon River in his kayak with a bird spear. These events were immortalized in woodcuts, and in watercolor drawings by John White, that show Inuit clothing, tools, and physique in remarkable detail. White’s later illustrations of Virginia Indians, painted while he was Governor of Virginia, carried the art of visual ethnography to an even higher degree.
The written descriptions of Frobisher’s captains, especially those of Edward Fenton and George Best, were very informative. Best accurately described many features of the Inuit dwellings encountered in 1577, which he surmised to be winter dwellings:
made two fathome undergrounde, in compass rounde, lyke to an Oven, being joyned fast one by another, having [entry] holes lyke to a Foxe … From the ground upwards they builde with whales bones, for lacke of timber…& are covered over with Seales skinnes, whiche, instead of tiles, fenceth them from the rayne. In each house they have only one roome, having the one halfe of the flour payfed with broad stones a fote higher than y other, whereon strewingMosse, they make their nests to sleepe in (Best, in Stefansson and McCaskill 1938:I: 64-65).
Collectively the many records of the Frobisher voyages provide, for their time, unparalleled geographic and ethnographic detail. In part this resulted from the uncommon level of education of Frobisher’s ship captains, who considered themselves gentlemen “adventurers” as much as navigators and wrote detailed logs and narratives of their exploits. Also, because the expeditions went into bankruptcy, its records became court documents that constitute an extensive archival record of the voyages.
Charles Francis Hall, a Cincinnati newspaper man, wrote the next chapter on the Frobisher voyages with the rediscovery in 1861–62 of the “gold mines” in an inlet some 230 km (140 mi) deep of the Labrador Sea in southeastern Baffin Inland, that is today called Frobisher Bay (Hall 1865). Until Hall’s discovery, historians thought the Frobisher mines were located in southern Greenland.
Hall discovered the Frobisher mines by accident on his first trip to the Arctic, when he was searching for the John Franklin expedition that had been lost some fifteen years earlier while attempting to navigate the Northwest Passage. Hall had shipped out from New London, Connecticut, on the Arctic whaler George Henry in 1860, bound for southeastern Baffin Island, where he hoped to find evidence of Franklin, but he was off by about 1,000 miles from Beechey Island. While the George Henry was frozen in for the winter Hall teamed up with the local Inuit and became the first kablunaat (Inuktitut for “white man”) to utilize Inuit technology and way of life as a means of exploring the Arctic (fig. 7.14). Hall found the Inuit thoroughly engaged with the Yankee whaling industry, which was then centered in Cumberland Sound, serving as guides, hunters, and harpooners, and in return, receiving payment in the form of guns, iron tools, wooden boats, beads and ornaments, and other goods.
7.13 Iron Bloom
Historian Wilcomb Washburn excavated iron blooms found during a Smithsonian survey of Kodlunarn Island in 1981. Frobisher ballasted his ship, Gabriel, with “ironstones of Russia.” This bloom—the initial product of refining iron in a bloomery furnace—was found in a trench Frobisher’s men excavated.
7.14 Charles Francis Hall
This illustration appeared in Hall’s Arctic Explorations: My Life with the Esquimaux in 1865. It shows him with Inuit collecting artifacts from Frobisher’s principal mine and base camp on Kodlunarn Island. Most of the artifacts, split between the British Museum and the young Smithsonian, were subsequently lost, except for a single iron bloom rediscovered in the 1980s at the Smithsonian.
The Inuit told Hall about Kodlunarn (“white man’s”) Island, in the southeastern part of Baffin Island, where white men had visited “long, long ago.” Taken to a tiny island in outer Frobisher Bay where he expected to discover Franklin remains, Hall instead found a much older site containing an assay shop, piles of coal, a shore-side trench in which ships had been repaired, a large ditch excavated as a mine or water reservoir, and copious amounts of Frobisher’s “black ore” bearing its sparkling “marqueset of gold” (After three expeditions, assayists discovered the “gold” was worthless iron pyrite (fig 7.15). Hall also recovered several lumps of iron, sharing these and other finds with the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution to ensure their preservation.
7.15 Frobisher’s Black Ore
In 1576 Frobisher returned to London with an Inuit captive and a piece of black rock containing gold-colored minerals. Fraudulent assays financed two more expeditions, which produced great scientific and geographical discoveries but bankrupted the Cathay Company and briefly landed Frobisher in prison. The rock, a horneblend with crystals of iron pyrites, contains no gold.
The remains on Kodlunarn Island then were forgotten for another hundred years. In 1964 the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada recommended that Kodlunarn be designated a site of national historical importance, but no new research was conducted until the lump of iron Hall had collected and given to the Smithsonian for safekeeping produced a Norse-era radiocarbon date (fig. 7.16). That dating raised enough questions that in 1981 a Smithsonian scouting expedition visited Kodlunarn Island and found many Elizabethan-era materials as well as several more iron lumps. The radiocarbon dates on these pieces, AD 500 to 1200, prompted a series of Canadian-American expeditionsin 1990–1994 organized by the Canadian Meta Incognita Committee (using Queen Elizabeth’s Latin words for “unknown shores”).
7.16 Smithsonian Iron Bloom
This bread-loaf size lump of partially processed iron was one of two blooms recovered by C.F. Hall at Kodlunarn Island. The inscription reads, “Iron smelted by the Frobisher Expedition AD 1578.”
New research on Kodlunarn Island was limited to testing and stabilization; an excavation in Hall’s Ship’s Trench, where three of the iron blooms had been found, produced important new finds: more Elizabethan ceramics, a food cache of lentils and bread, and a glazed Elizabethan roof tile bearing a date of 1561 (Auger et al. 1995). Excavations at nearby Thule Inuit sites also produced Elizabethan materials that had been scavenged from Kodlunarn or obtained by trade (Fitzhugh and Olin 1993; Alsford 1993; Symons 1999). Our research determined that the iron lumps came from bloomery furnaces in which small amounts of iron ore was smelted, leaving a mass of iron mixed with slag and charcoal. The mystery of the early bloom dates was resolved when we determined that the surface of the iron had been contaminated by “dead carbon” from coal-fueled fires. Uncontaminated charcoal from the center of one of the blooms dated to the Frobisher era. The Frobisher court records list “a hundred-weight of yronstones of Russia” purchased in a Thames shipyard as ballast for the Gabriel, which is the likely source of the metal. Before all archaeological traces of the Frobisher voyages have vanished from erosion and rising sea levels, much new research is needed.
Pangnirtung, “place of bull caribou,” is located on the northern shore of Cumberland Sound on the east side of Baffin Island north of Frobisher Bay. As a coastal community, Pang has a place in early European history, which began with visits by the English explorers John Davis in 1585 and William Baffin—both, like Frobisher, exploring for the Northwest Passage—in the early years of the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century it became a major British/Scottish whaling station and trading center. Compared with the length of occupation of these lands by aboriginal people, the few centuries of European presence are brief, but they were deeply consequential in cultural and ecological impacts. Whalers depleted local populations of whales and decimated caribou, walrus, and seal to feed their crews, causing hardship for Inuit residents who also suffered from introduced European diseases. Today the vestiges of the tumultuous whaling era still can be seen in Pangnirtung (fig. 7.17), which has become the center of a new industry to which local Inuit have quickly adapted: adventure tourism.
7.17 Pangnirtung Whaling Station
The Hudson’s Bay Company established a whaling station at Pangnirtung in 1921, where Meeka Kilabuk’s father worked when she was a child. Meeka remembers running with friends around the perimeter of the old HBC building trying not to fall on the blubber grease that was still slathered on the ground.
What Hall sought was eventually found a thousand miles north on Beechey Island, located across Barrow Strait from the southwestern end of Devon Island. Beechey has recently become famous for the graves of sailors from the Franklin Expedition discovered there (fig. 7.18). Trapped by ice, the expedition that had hoped to complete the exploration of the Northwest Passage instead wintered first at Beechey Island, where at least three of its 129 crewmen died. In the subsequent years, from 1846 to 1880, scattered remains of the other 126 men were located by a succession of twenty-five expeditions sent to find traces of the missing men and their ships (Beattie and Geiger 1987). The desolation and bleakness of this place is overpowering. Its beaches of shingle rock dominate the site and remnants of the Franklin Expedition—rusted empty food tins and barrel staves—are still scattered across the land. It must have been a depressing place to die.
In 1984 excavation of the sailors’ graves provided the first solid evidence of their death and a probable cause of the expedition’s failure. Forensic anthropologists from the University of Alberta, led by Owen Beatty, exhumed three bodies and found them in an excellent state of preservation, having been frozen continuously since burial. Because high levels of lead were found in their tissues, the team concluded the men had been poisoned by lead used in the recently invented canning process. Ironically, that process had been invented to preserve food so that men on such expeditions would not die of scurvy, caused by a deficiency of vitamin C. Later research determined that the men were probably poisoned by lead from an experimental water distillation apparatus used by the expedition.
Ellesmere Island, the northernmost of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, and the northern tip of Greenland are about equidistant from the North Pole, but because northern Ellesmere is more accessible, it has been the jumping-off point for most over-ice North Pole expeditions. Ellesmere Island’s northernmost latitude is N830 06’, that is, 976 km (610 mi) from the North Pole while Point Barrow, Alaska, is 2,560 km (1,600 mi) removed from the Pole. Ellesmere is so far north that magnetic distortion makes navigation by compass impossible. Instead, a modern version of the ancient astrolabe is used by pilots, who take frequent readings off the sun’s position.
7.18 Franklin Expedition Graves
Beechey Island, on the north side of Devon Island, was used as a base camp by the Sir John Franklin expedition exploring for the Northwest Passage. The island later became the grave site of three men who died here in 1846 during the first expedition’s first year, probably poisoned from food stored in tin cans sealed with lead solder.
Ellesmere and its interior corridor around Lake Hazen have also been the route followed by most migrating human populations. Because the lake is shielded from winds off the Arctic Ocean by the Grant Land Mountains, its climate is relatively temperate, providing a niche for animal life, which supplied food for the Paleo-Eskimo and Thule people who transited this corridor on their migrations from Siberia and Alaska to Greenland. These movements coincided with warm climatic periods when the ice channels in the Canadian High Arctic islands were open and game was abundant and accessible. Trade, population movements, and communication between Greenland and Canada mostly ceased during the cooler Early Dorset period (2,500–1,500 years ago) and the Little Ice Age, ca. 1450–1750. In the near future contacts throughout the Maritime Far Northeast seem destined to blossom once again, as warmer conditions encourage the type of migrations that brought the Norse and Thule to this part of the Arctic—only now these migrations are likely to come from outsiders from the south.
7.19 Ellesmere, Island of Contrasts
Glacial rivers with 10,000-year-old ice have yet to recede on Ellesmere Island. Like the continent-wide Greenland Ice Sheet, these northern glaciers are being mined by scientists studying global climate history.
7.20 High Arctic Desert
At about 83 degrees North, the snow does not fall because the ocean is either iced over or too cold to release water vapor. There is neither ice nor life, only mottled earth stained rust and brown over ridges and valleys on Ellesmere.
7.21 Landing on Ellesmere
Ellesmere’s seasonal airport at the head of Tanquary Fjord could more accurately be described as a fuel dump.
Ellesmere has 50 percent of all the glacial ice in Canada, which makes it the largest concentration of glacial ice outside of Antarctica and Greenland, and its permafrost has been measured as deep as 450 m (1,476 ft). There are also snow-free zones at this latitude because for much of the year the ocean is either iced over or too cold to release the water vapor that rises, cools, and falls as snow. There is neither ice nor life in Ellesmere’s desert biome (fig. 7.20), which experiences annual precipitation of less than 6.0 cm, making it drier than the Sahara Desert.
Ellesmere has been the location of many infamous Arctic explorations seeking to discover new Arctic lands or verify the existence of a theorized open Arctic Ocean. One of the largest and most disastrous expeditions was mounted by U.S. Army Lt. Adolphus Greeley as part of the International Polar Year of 1881–82. Greeley and his men were marooned at their base at Fort Conger for several years when supply ships failed to arrive, and many men died. Later, at the turn of the century, Admiral Robert E. Peary used Fort Conger as a base camp for his trek to North Pole. Peary’s quest was aided by Greenland’s Polar Eskimos, known as Inughuit, who acted as guides and provisioners. Peary’s party harvested musk ox, caribou, and Arctic char at Lake Hazen in preparation for their trek and made a point of living off the land, Inuit-fashion, a technique that became known as “the Peary way” (Dick 2001; Fleming 2001; Malaurie 2003; Bartlett 1928).
After the Pole was “conquered,” there was a surge in exploration by Europeans, Americans, and by Canadians representing the British Crown. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, and especially after World War II, the presence of Americans, Danes, and Norwegians prompted the Government of Canada to assert sovereignty over its Arctic regions. Royal Canadian Mounted Police “sovereignty patrols” cruised the Queen Elizabeth Islands, and to reinforce legal occupancy in the area the government—employing false promises and poor knowledge of the High Arctic environment—brought Inuit to settle at Grise Fjord. Today this settlement in the Queen Elizabeth Islands has a population of 150 people, but the tactics used to create the community were criticized in a Canadian Commission report that resulted in a rare official Canadian apology and reparations (Taylor 1955; Dick 2001; Waterman 2001; McGrath 2007).
Today air flights over the Arctic and satellite views have tamed our earlier views of the Arctic as a vast trackless expanse. This archaic view was, in part, a product of the Mercator map projection that shows the lines of longitude parallel to each other, running north and south. In fact, longitude lines on the globe converge north and south of the equator and meet at the Poles, which greatly exaggerates distances between the northern continents on our most common Mercator maps. In actuality these continents are quite close; the borders of Eurasia, the Americas, and Greenland almost meet around the Arctic. Travelers flying over the high latitudes are always impressed by how close Greenland and Iceland are to Norway and Denmark. The reality of the converging polar hemisphere forces us to reassess Arctic distances and brings a new perspective to the Norse voyages, Inuit migrations, and other Arctic explorations. As global warming opens more of the Arctic Ocean to travel, our geographic orientation to the Arctic—and to the globe itself—will undergo a profound change.
As Arctic ice melts, Canada again is showing the flag along the Northwest Passage. At Nanasivik, the site of a closed copper mine on Admiralty Inlet just south of the Northwest Passage, a Canadian naval base has been established, and there is a plan to build additional ice breakers. Issues of sovereignty are heating up again, this time fueled by global warming with its attendant reduction of sea ice, navigation access, and exploitation of natural resources. Polar nations claiming sovereignty in the north—Russia, United States, Canada, Greenland (Territory of the Danish Realm), and Norway—are becoming involved in a variety of diplomatic contests. China and Korea, unwilling to be left on the sidelines, have made bids to join the Arctic Council, the association of Arctic nations. In play is access to sea routes and natural resources that are no longer inaccessible due to ice-choked seas.
Claiming the sea floor as an extension of the topographical features of sovereign lands is becoming an international issue for all Arctic nations. Russia now is claiming the seabed from its shores to the Lomonosov Ridge in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, including the North Pole, as an extension of its continental shelf. Also being contested are the waters beyond each nation’s 200 nautical mile limit, the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). These limits established by the UN Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS) are being advanced for expansion towards the Pole by Russia, United States (Alaska), Denmark (Greenland), and Norway (Svalbard Islands). Purportedly at stake are 10 billion tons of oil and gas (Fick and Julie 2008; Wasserrab 2008). While costs and environmental hazards of exploiting Arctic oil deposits will restrict development, it seems inevitable that it will occur.
In some ways in the twenty-first century we are returning to a view of the Arctic that drove European explorers like Martin Frobisher to seek a mercantile Northwest Passage to China in the sixteenth century. Only now, that pathway leads through the middle of the polar sea, both as an Arctic transit route and for purposes of resource exploitation.
It would be wiser to seek out resources that present fewer risks, such as petroleum sites in less precarious locations and full-bore development of alternative, less-centralized energy systems, predicated on locally available energy types–solar, hydro, tidal, geothermal, or wind.
7.22 Pond Inlet Cemetery
The hamlet of Pond Inlet and the mountains of Bylot Island are viewed here from the settlement’s cemetery. Plastic flowers at wooden crosses meld consumer and subsistence cultures, marking graves—too many of them graves of young people who died from suicide.
ADVENTURES ON THE FLOE EDGE AROUND BYLOT ISLAND
By Wilfred E. Richard
THE PORTION OF NUNAVUT WITH WHICH I AM most familiar is the entrance to the fabled Northwest Passage (fig. 7.03), where Baffin Bay merges with Lancaster Sound, north of Bylot Island. My visits began by ship in 2002, followed by five expeditions to the Baffin Bay floe edge, that is, the open water between the drifting sea ice and the ice that is frozen fast to the land, between 2003 and 2008. My objective for these trips was to capture the activity of wildlife as it returns to the waters of Lancaster Sound and Baffin Bay in late May through late June. Depending on winds and tides, the floe edge, known to Inuit as the sina, may be a wide, open lead or a choked corridor filled with different types of ice such as grease ice (slush-like ice), hardened pressure-ridge ice, or parts of ancient icebergs from Greenland or from as far away as Siberia.
Surprisingly, sea ice is not just frozen water; rather, it is an ecosystem that sustains a complex food web beginning with algae, phytoplankton and zooplankton reaching up to fish, birds, and vertebrates like foxes, polar bears, sea mammals, and humans (Campbell 1992). Barcott (2011: 31) compares this Arctic food web to that of a farm: “ice and snow are to the Arctic what soil and rain are to the temperate latitudes.” This profusion of life in a seemingly desolate, icy setting is fueled by the long hours of summer sunlight, which results in huge blooms of phytoplankton. Here the greening that signals the onset of spring in the south occurs under the sea ice. As day lengthens in the Arctic, marine phytoplankton form the basis from which algae grow, feeding jellyfish (fig. 7.23), and so on up the food chain. Only recently have scientists discovered that the floe edge has one of the most complicated and concentrated food webs of any environment on earth.
7.23 Sea Gooseberry
This minute jellyfish, the incandescent sea gooseberry (Pleuro brachiapileus), is part of an almost complete spectrum of life that returns to the floe edge.
7.24 Polar Bear and Tent
This bear investigated a vacated camp on the floe edge. Polar bears’ thermodynamic qualities include the insulating effect of hollow hair and dark skin to better absorb solar radiation.
Besides being a habitat for seals, walrus, and whales, the floe edge also provides a place for rest, birth, and sanctuary for the region’s master predator, the polar bear. Polar bears use the sea ice as a hunting platform, and with the reduction of Arctic pack ice, polar bears have begun to explore habitats on land. Land sightings are increasing, and several DNA-confirmed offspring of polar bear and grizzly matings have recently been documented (Revkin 2012; Gorman 2012). But Ursus maritimus is a marine creature and consequently may be deficient in land hunting skills. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that a polar bear on sea gains weight while a polar bear on land losses weight. Debate continues about whether polar bears will develop a seasonal terrestrial adaptation. In short, melting sea ice means more than a change in scenery for humans and animals; it may eliminate or change an entire system of life that has evolved to sustain itself in a cold climate.
When I arrived in 2002 at Pond Inlet, a village at northernmost Baffin Island, which is the easiest point of departure to Sirmilik National Park, a magnificent iceberg was stranded near the settlement; a year later, this berg still dominated the sky and dwarfed villagers loading their komatiks for the seal hunt out on the ice. Pond Inlet’s Inuit name is Mittimatalik, meaning “where Mittima is buried,” although no one has ever been able to find out who Mittima was (Nunavut Handbook 1998: 323).
Sirmilik, which means “The Place of Glaciers,” is the third largest of Canada’s national parks and encompasses parts of Baffin Island and all of Bylot, which is covered with glaciers, comprising about 3 percent of Canada’s glacial ice (Dowdeswell and Hambrey 2002: 95). Its surrounding waterways—Baffin Bay, Eclipse Sound, Navy Board Inlet, and Lancaster Sound—are a nursery for fish, sea mammals, and migratory birds. In the Arctic of Canada and Greenland, this “icescape” is an ecosystem that provides a suite of services—a home for seals, walruses, and polar bears; a source of protection for these and other wildlife; a highway by which human populations access relatives and friends; and a fresh meat larder (Eicken 2010: 360). Sila, sea ice, connects people, with their environment, and their weather (Holm 2010: 147).
7.25 Mother and cubs
Polar bears usually give birth to two cubs per litter, either in dens in the pack ice or on snow-covered slopes of Arctic islands.
7.26 Polar Bear Paw Print
A glove alongside a paw print in slush conveys the size of these massive, burly animals.
According to Parks Canada (2003), Bylot Island contains the most diverse bird population in Canada north of 70 degrees latitude. Seventy-four species of birds are found among the Baillarge Bay seabird colony, the Bylot Island Migratory Bird Sanctuary, Oliver Sound, and Borden Peninsula. When the sea ice melts in late May and into June, 75 percent of the world’s population of snow geese (Chen caerulescens), of which there are now millions, nest on Bylot Island.
Richard Sale’s A Complete Guide to Arctic Wildlife (Sale 2006) identifies a plethora of bird species found in the Arctic, many of which annually migrate between the Arctic and Maine (Fig. 5.10) Those most common around Baffin Bay are long-tailed jaeger (Stercorarius longicaudus), snow bunting (Plectrophenax nivalis) (fig. 7.30), northern fulmar (Fulmarus glaciallis), Arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea) (fig. 5.14), snow goose (Chen caerulescens), glaucous gull (Larus hyperboreus), thick-billed murre (Uria lomvia), and black-legged kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla)(fig. 7.29).
Bylot Island and surrounding waters constitute a northern oasis, particularly as summer sets in and the ice begins to break up. Parks Canada catalogs twenty-one species of mammals in the Pond Inlet–Bylot Island area, including caribou (Rangifer tarandus); five species of seals including ringed seals (Pusa hispida) and bearded seals (Erignathus barbatus); four species of whales, including beluga whale (Delphina pterusleucas) and narwhal (Monodon monoceros); walrus (Odobenus rosmarus); and polar bear (Ursus maritimus) (figs. 7.24–25, 7.27).
7.27 Odd Couple
It is not uncommon for sea gulls to cohabitate with polar bears (Ursus maritimus). The bears do not seem to mind, and the gulls appreciate leftovers to eat. Behind the bears is the floe edge, with fast ice (ice connected to land) in the foreground and pack ice (moving ice) behind.
Without doubt, the most interesting creature found in this part of the world is the narwhal, a sea mammal with a tusk (figs. 9.04, 9,05). Martin Nweeia, a dentist as well as a medical instructor at Harvard and a research associate of the Smithsonian Institution, has been studying the unknown function of the narwhal tusk for years. He believes that the tusk, which is actually an elongated incisor tooth, is a sensory organ that may detect sound, temperature, and salinity or generate an electric current as an aid in navigation and hunting (Nweeia et al. 2007; Malkin 2005; Broad 2005). Nweeia’s research on narwhals in the Bylot Island–Pond Inlet region, as well as in Greenland, involves histological studies of narwhal fossils, behavioral studies of living animals, and oral history on narwhal behavior gleaned from Inuit hunters.
Within the first decade of the twenty-first century, Parks Canada created two new parks, Torngat in Labrador and Sirmilik on Bylot Island. Each has a large polar bear population, which inevitably creates a conflict with the human population attracted to the park. Visitors are not allowed to carry guns in Canada’s national parks, although before the parks were established, visitors were encouraged—if not required—to carry a weapon. Today only aboriginal people may be armed (Kobalenko 2007), and Inuit guides may only carry a weapon to engage in traditional activities of hunting, fishing, trapping, and sealing. Could guiding activities such as hiking, skiing, climbing, kayaking be added to that list? Can guides who may not be Inuit carry guns for self-protection and fall within the definition of “traditional” use? Parks Canada regulations state unequivocally no, but people are going to get hurt and there are economic repercussions to that stance. These parks create new recreational activities with substantial direct and indirect sales and employment in Pond Inlet including airlines, hotels, restaurants, clothing, craft, and other retailers, and guides use money they make to buy and maintain snowmobiles in order to continue hunting, fishing, sealing, and trapping. The dilemma requires a more nuanced resolution.
7.28 Fair-weather Friends
King eiders (Somateria spectabilis) are one of many bird species that migrate between temperate and Arctic zones. They frequently travel in large flocks flying fast and low along the floe edge. Greenland Inuit used their colorful plumage and down for fancy coverlets and their down for insulation. Both became popular European trade items during the historical era.
7.29 Nesting
Black-legged kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla) are numerous in Atlantic Canada and the coastal waters of Nunavut. Along with thousands of their kind, this pair nests on the vertical wall of a cliff on Bylot Island.
7.30 Snow Buntings
Snow buntings (Plectrophenax nivalis)live throughout the year at Arctic latitudes in both Nunavut and Greenland.
I will always treasure my memories of witnessing the summer solstice from the vantage point of the Baffin Bay floe edge. Long-tailed jaeger are common here and trailed our komatik, much like sea gulls trail fishermen on Maine lobster boats. Ivory gulls (Pagophilae burnea) and glaucous gulls (Larus hyperboreus) are also present at this time of year, seeking prey and fighting on a patch of ice, attacking each other with wings wildly flapping. The backdrop of the mountains on Baffin and Bylot looked as if they had been dunked in marshmallow fluff. After three days of snow, the solstice day began in near whiteout conditions, but by late evening we were basking in a golden Arctic sunlight.
Ice floating on the sea constitutes a temporary habitat for us land animals to venture upon. It is a fragile place that sparks a strange reverence in the viewer for intimacy with nature. This creation is beyond our ability as a species, with all of our technology, to control. The footprint of humanity does not dominate. Arctic ice is a place of the spirit, a place of the senses, a place of being, and a place to be with nature. It is a place that always draws me back. Here is a place where nature still controls life, but it can change, irrevocably, with just a few degrees of warming.
By Wilfred E. Richard
HAVING REACHED NORTHERN LABRADOR, I found myself irresistibly drawn further north. I felt compelled to follow this mountainous arc of coastline and its caribou, harp seals, polar bears, as well as native cultures and European exploration history on to Baffin Island and Greenland. Pangnirtung, or “Pang,” as it is called locally, is the transportation hub closest to Auyuittuq National Park, arguably the most dramatic of Baffin’s four national parks. My purpose in visiting Pang in 2002 was to explore the most mountainous region of the Maritime Far Northeast.
The entrance to Auyuittuq National Park, “the land that never melts,” is 25 km (16 mi) northwest of Pangnirtung Fjord. At 21,470 km2 (8,290 mi2), Auyuittuq is 1.5 times the size of Connecticut. The park straddles the Cumberland Peninsula and is dominated by a north-south mountain chain with Alpine-like peaks in excess of 2,000 m (6,000 ft) and has equally deep fjords. Back-country foot travel is always conditioned by weather, but here temperature and solar radiation are even more important because they determine the amount of snow melt. The greater the amount of sunlight, the greater the volume of meltwater that rushes from hanging glaciers situated in side valleys above the floor of the pass. Known as the “Alps of Canada,” they draw climbers from all around the world. One of these mountains, Thor Peak, named for the Norse god of thunder, has a vertical face of about 1,500 m (4,900 ft) and requires some of the most technical climbing in the world. This hiking route offers spectacular topographical relief with craggy granite peaks reaching higher than 2,000 m (6,600 ft.). Only a few people will ever experience these mountains, let alone know of the existence of these peaks, valleys, rivers, and glaciers, wildflowers, and birds. In retrospect, increasing public knowledge of this region was the most significant reason for visiting these sculptured mountains. It seems that in the United States—and even in Canada—geographic knowledge is on an east/west axis, not north/south. As the north is increasingly becoming the target of resource exploitation, the need for citizens of North America to gain some knowledge of the northern reaches of our continent becomes more critical.
7.31 Arctic Idyll
Summit Lake, located at the head of the Weasel River some 40 km (25 mi) up the valley, was the destination of our hiking party. We camped here and experienced ideal Arctic weather: hours of continuous sunlight, undiminished by moist air or pollutants.
7.32 Hiking in Auyuittuq National Park
Our group reached the entrance of park on Baffin Island’s east coast by boat from Pangnirtung and hiked the first day over sand-covered ice punctuated by large boulders.
7.33 Stream Crossing
Hikers ferry upstream on a diagonal using trekking poles to cross a glacial stream feeding the Weasel River. Heavy packs weighing up to 35 kg (80 lbs) are carried unbuckled so if the hiker stumbles, the pack can be quickly shed.
Our trek up the Weasel River Valley to Summit Lake was 66 km (41 mi.) and had an elevation increase of about 450 m (1,500 ft.). Once inside the park, the hiker quickly reaches the Arctic Circle on a broad, till-covered plain. Here rock in its various forms and sizes dominates everything, from wind-blown sand to massive boulders and huge mountains (fig. 7.32). Campsites established beside the valley walls are always subject to chance rock falls. One particular place that hikers fear is Windy Lake, where house-sized blocks of black granite are known to cascade upon unwary visitors. Aside from a plethora of boulders lying helter-skelter, the other ever-present feature is rushing water, white with ground-up rock particles known to geologists as “rock flour.”
7.34 Weasel River Valley, Auyuittuq National Park
This view north up the Weasel River Valley captures the magnitude of the land. Tents in the lower left and a cable bridge, just barely visible where the river disappears behind an outcrop, provide a sense of scale.
7.35 Thor Peak
A field of Arctic poppies (Papaverra dicatum) flourishes beside the Weasel River. Thor Peak, a sheer rock overhang named for the Norse god of thunder, dominates the terrain behind the camp.
In terms of precipitation, the Arctic, like the desiccated lands of equatorial climates, is a desert. Where there is continuous summer sunlight and snow-fed streams the lower slopes of valleys are magically transformed into a polychromatic flowering carpet. Vegetation with bright flowers is more efficient at attracting pollinating insects, and this adaptive mechanism helps them reproduce during the short Arctic growing season. Almost paradoxically, as one proceeds further north in the Arctic, plants become brighter-flowered at the same time they become smaller, lower to the ground, and more compact. The gravelly soil, often dun-colored, is garlanded with a mélange of tiny ground-hugging flora, vibrant with yellow, orange, blue, pink, white, and purple blossoms.
7.36 Fleeting Summer Beauty
Large-flowered wintergreen (Pyrola grandiflora) has all the characteristics of Arctic flora: delicate, diminutive, and short-lived.
Summit Lake (fig. 7.31) is an ideal place to capture close-up images of the flowering plants, which are rarely taller than 10 cm (4 in.), that comprise this mosaic of colors. With the sun shining in a high-altitude northern atmosphere, Arctic flowers blossom in a matter of hours. Few sensual experiences exceed simply stretching out on a brightly pigmented Arctic slope and soaking up the intense Arctic sun.
By Wilfred E. Richard
IN 2001 I JOINED TWELVE OTHER TREKKERS—Canadians, Americans, and one European—on a field trip to Quttinirpaaq National Park on Ellesmere Island. The entire island of Ellesmere measures 196,237 km2 (75,767 mi2) and is more than twice as big as the State of Maine. The park itself is almost three times the size of Connecticut, making a trek here more than a simple “stroll in the park.” There are no amenities or trails, only routes worked out by the trekkers themselves based on dead reckoning and planned to avoid the most severe physical barriers like glaciers, crevasses, swollen rivers, steep loose moraines, and mud. In its subarctic and Arctic manifestations, the Maritime Far Northeast is a demanding land. Reduced solar gain challenges all life forms and is disastrous to the unprepared. During the two weeks I spent on Ellesmere, other than two park personnel, a helicopter pilot, and a few geologists at Tanquary Fjord, we saw no other humans. On average, the park receives fewer than 100 people a year.
Navigation by GPS is not reliable in the High Arctic because of lack of sufficient satellites. As the plane flew north from Resolute we could see rivers of ice flowing to the sea, nunataks (mountain peaks protruding hundreds of feet through the Ellesmere ice sheet), and rock faces shaded by dull monotone grays, soft reds and browns, silently conveying the impossibility of life. We landed at Tanquary (fig. 7.21) at the southwestern entrance to the park and set out a route that would take us to within 900 km (500 miles) of the North Pole.
The High Arctic makes demands on one’s body and senses that, at first, have an alien feeling. One struggles, as if in a dream, to cut through the fog of this weird, disorienting land. It was my first High Arctic experience, and I found myself ready to quit. In this clime, humility is the first lesson learned. The second lesson is that one can do more than one thinks. The third lesson is to bring less stuff. All that lightweight gear adds up: eighty pounds is eighty pounds.
We trekked about 25 km (16 mi) along the Viking Ice Cap. After descending Niagara Glacier, the weather improved as we entered the valley of the Lewis River, which flows west into Ekblaw Lake. Our spirits rose as the altitude decreased, the terrain leveled, and warmer weather and welcoming vegetation returned. As in Labrador, expanses of cotton grass (Eriophorum) were growing in tussocks. Rich in phosphorous and nitrogen, cotton grass is a favorite food for muskox and caribou. There were no signs of humans, but animal signs were everywhere: prints of muskox (Ovibos moschatus) and gray wolf (Canis lupus), and a distant view of Peary caribou (Rangifer tarandus pearyi). Tufts of brown shaggy fur from muskox and white Arctic hare (Lepus arcticus) clung to sedges and tussocks and large amounts could be easily collected. Dorset people used to weave this fur into strong lines for boats and harpoons. We found evidence of snow geese (Anser caerulescens) and the long-tailed Jaeger (Stercorarius longicaudus). Such imprints, including our footprints, on High Arctic lands can remain for a long time.
7.37 Glacial Retreat
At the northern terminus of our trek, we followed the Air Force River valley with its plethora of hanging glaciers. As a glacier recedes, life blooms on the minerals it has released from solid rock, as this broad-leaved willow herb (Epilobium latifolium) illustrates.
7.38 Hiking Hazards
This land consists of dun-colored hills of mud with the consistency of quicksand and the sticking power of pine pitch on mohair. Park authorities had recommended this detour through the valley south of Viking Ice Cap to our planned route—which, in turn, required a second detour out of the boulder clay.
The High Arctic is not an unending expanse of white or gray, but its diversity of plant life is considerably less than in those more southerly regions of Baffin and Auyuittuq National Park. Most common here are the purple saxifrage (Saxifrag oppositifolia), the yellow Arctic poppy (Papaver radicatum), and the white capitate lousewort (Pedicularis capitata). Fields of cotton grass and Arctic poppies dominate large stretches of tundra. Buffeted by the constant winds, they behave like tiny airfield wind socks.
7.39 Cleaves Glacier
The trekking party worked its way out of the valleys of mud and up onto the Cleaves Glacier. Not equipped for glacier climbing, hikers stepped cautiously, probing the edge of the glacier with trekking poles.
In the brief Arctic summer, land and sea give forth an abundance of life—sea mammals, miniature flora, and birds that migrate to these northern regions to raise their young in the highly productive but brief summer season. Ironically, in an Arctic climate, it is often easier to experience these natural wonders than in a temperate climate with its complexity of species, full vegetation cover, and human-dominated terrain.
Our route toward ice-covered Ekblaw Lake took us between two glaciers, Charybdis Glacier flowing from the north and the Scylla Glacier flowing from the south (Hattersley-Smith 1998: 30). Like the hero of Greek mythology in The Odyssey, we had to avoid the monsters on either side of the passageway while navigating through a morass choked by glaciated rock, ranging from rock flour to house-sized boulders. Moraines of every conceivable shape and size create a chaotic, hellish landscape, like a large sand and gravel pit peppered with obstacles hundreds of feet high. As I was climbing a moraine to photograph this field of glacial debris I fell and landed on my back with my head downhill and my pack stuck in the loose moraine gravel, as helpless as a flipped turtle.
Freed from the jaws of glaciers, we soon arrived at Ekblaw Lake, whose shore is sculpted by huge deposits of Pleistocene ice. Its lower end is blocked by Air Force Glacier, named (with less imagination than Scylla and Charybdis) to commemorate a dangerous landing made on it by a RCAF aircraft in the 1950s (Hattersley-Smith 1998: 20). At Ekblaw Lake we had reached our “furthest north.” Viewing the frozen lake and its glaciers absorbed us for two days. The sun was warm, the sky a deep blue, and the glacier, pristine white.
We then turned south and followed the east side of Air Force Glacier and the Air Force River to the braided streams of the glaciated valley just north of our starting point at Tanquary Fjord. At Tanquary, I was able to board a plane and view from the air the route we had so laboriously covered by foot. Our footprints in the boulder clay were clearly visible and will probably be there for years.
Being in the silence of snow and ice in these northern lands arouses a long-sentient consciousness that was once part of our experience as a species and is still to a large degree present in peoples living along the coasts of the Maritime Far Northeast. Humans have developed a highly successful culture, but our mastery of the environment has come with a price: our disregard for the health and beauty of the land upon which we all depend for survival.
8.01 Glacial Recession
The farm nestled in this green oxbow occupies land revealed when the Kiattut Sermiat Glacier receded. A millennium ago, the home of Erik the Red and his son Leif Ericsson was situated on the far side of the inlet.
