DURING THE FIRST two months of the expedition, the only team member who was in constant residence at base camp was Percy Lemon, the radio operator. Though he had met Watkins at Cambridge in 1928, the two were not close friends before the BAARE. At thirty-two, Lemon was the oldest man in the team. He remains something of an enigma.
The fjord in which base camp was situated was also home to several Inuit families, whose summer tents were pitched as close as six miles away. Intrigued by their new neighbors, the locals visited the base camp hut day after day. From the start, Gino arranged to pay the hunters for all the seals and sea trout (which they speared in the water) they could catch, but the supply was never equal to the demands of fourteen men and forty-nine dogs.
Taking advantage of the regular visits, Lemon assiduously set himself the task of learning the Inuit language. Lindsay recounts the frustration of his efforts.
Lemon had to start from absolute zero. It took him several days to get a single noun from them. Whenever he pointed at an object and raised his eyebrows, they thought he was crazy, and laughed. And when they had grasped what he was driving at and named all the things he pointed to, it took him a considerable time longer to obtain the first verb.
None of the fourteen BAARE members ever became conversant in the native language, but several made serious efforts, none more diligent than Lemon’s. Scott and Watkins had met Inuit speakers in Labrador, but their dialect would have been barely intelligible to the East Greenlanders.
To their credit, several of the BAARE men soon recognized the complexity of the language. As Lindsay cautiously ventured, “It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that every verb changes both its root and stem in every case of every tense, but this is certainly the principle upon which the language is built.” And the men were impressed by the sheer size of the Inuit vocabulary. Lindsay cited not the hoary cliché of “fifty words for snow,” but rather that “they distinguish between the swimming of man, dog, bear and seal, and that ten fingers and ten toes have twenty different names.”
To communicate at all with the Inuit, the team members resorted to the usual gibberish and pantomime. “Some people relied on signs and drawings,” wrote Lindsay, “others baby talk or English spoken slowly with an accent—any good foreign accent. One man was heard to use a word which he admitted was Swahili, ‘but seems to do all right.’ ” (If these efforts indeed communicated at all, chalk it up to the skill of some of the Inuit to pick up a little English.)
A consequence of this linguistic impasse, though, was that the BAARE men remained completely ignorant of virtually all aspects of Tunumiut† religion, history, morality, and cosmology—all the things that constitute a culture at the deepest level. (Of this incomprehension, and what the team missed, more below, in “Interlude: The Cosmos of the East Coast Inuit.”)
On August 13, the day after the Quest departed on the Northern Journey, an event occurred that at first quite flummoxed Percy Lemon. As Chapman tells the story,
Three girls, beautifully dressed but rather shy and giggling, arrived at the Base and offered to clean the place up. Lemon got them to scrub the floor of the Base, to sew the curtains, and to do the cooking, while the men, who soon arrived in their kayaks, carried wood, and did other heavier jobs. The girls wanted to stay, but as food was short, and Lemon didn’t want to compromise himself—chaperons being rather scarce in this district—he set off in a motor-boat to take them home.
Unfortunately, four miles out, the motor broke down. Lemon had to row the boat all the way back to base camp, with the “girls” still aboard. At once they installed themselves in the hut, choosing crannies in the attic above the main room in which to sleep. Without further demurral, Lemon accepted the bargain—as did, apparently, nearly all the men as soon as they returned from the Northern Journey and the trek to establish the Ice Cap Station. Among the other services the newcomers provided was to give the men haircuts.
Chapman’s jaunty account of this new ménage imports all the unconscious assumptions of upper-middle-class British superiority, as well as the colonial notion that “natives” were happy to serve their “masters” as domestic servants. (The names by which the men addressed these Inuit women—and one man—were no doubt awkward stabs at their “unpronounceable” real names.)
Our permanent staff consisted of Arpika, the oldest and most sensible of the girls; Gertrude [or Gitrude], the prettiest, who expected to be made a fuss of and at first only worked when she felt like it; and Tina, Gertrude’s younger sister, an incredibly sluttish and dirty girl who was given such jobs as cleaning the pans, peeling potatoes, and washing up. The party was completed by Gustari [or Gustare], a youth of about 18, who helped with heavier jobs such as carrying up coals for the kitchen stove, and ice for our supply of drinking water. Very soon he became extraordinarily efficient, learning to run the outboard motor, and even to start charging the engine on his own.
Likewise Lindsay, whose vignettes of hut life feature Arpika “showing off to an admiring circle the evening dress that she has made from an old pair of curtains”; Gitrude, who is “a sex conscious young woman, highly strung and inclined to be tiresome”; and Tina, “who was once seen blowing her nose on someone’s sleeping-bag, and when she first came she had a habit of spitting on the dirty plates and then rubbing them with her fingers, so she was usually known to us as the ‘Little Slut.’ ”
Except for Gustari, described as “about 18,” it’s hard to judge the age of these Inuit housekeepers. In the photos the men took of them, for which they happily posed, none of the “girls” looks older than eighteen. They could well have been younger—especially Tina.
What was in it for these women to become domestics for the Kratouna? They shared the meals, full of novel foods for them, that they cooked for the men. They were each paid a “salary” of two cigarettes a day. And there was the gramophone. Given free rein of the record collection, Gitrude played one in particular so often that it drove Lindsay to distraction. At last he seized the record, smashed it to pieces, and threw it away. Gitrude retrieved the pieces, pasted them back together, and tried to play the record one more time.
The men of BAARE started to expect the kinds of diligence and reliability that noblemen in Britain would demand of their servants. As Lindsay complained,
Although the staff always did their best, they needed a lot of supervision. They would never tell each other to do anything, so among themselves there was little organisation. If more wood was wanted in the kitchen, it did not occur to Gitrude to tell Tina to go and fetch another bundle. Instead she would wait until the fire had gone out, and then come to whoever was doing the catering that week and say, “There is no wood.” He would then shout to Gustare to go and get more, and Gustare would run off with the best will in the world; but by the time that the wood was chopped up and the fire relit, half an hour had been wasted.
Chapman had kindred complaints:
The Eskimos had somewhat specialized ideas of cleanliness. When they were told to wash up the cups and saucers they threw them out of the window . . . and the dogs licked them clean. The natives were quite hurt when told to wash them again. . . . The kitchen stove would have to be relit six or seven times each morning, while coal and water were invariably “perangera” [“there isn’t any”]. . . . Lemon always had to be very careful not to hurt their feelings, for they were very prone to sulk, weep, and have hysterical fits.
As the autumn months wore on, however, the relations of the four “domestics” with their hosts grew more complex—and more troubling.
* * *
As he headed out from the weather-monitoring station on October 5 with Jamie Scott, his best friend and most trusted partner in the BAARE, on the push across unknown ice cap that he would call the Southern Journey, Gino had every reason to believe the complex expedition he had devised—even with the compromised goals of the Northern Journey—was a success. Despite the nastiness of Buggery Bank, two parties had covered the 130-mile trek to the ice station without a serious setback. One pair of men had stood duty in the domed tent for five weeks, taken their readings, and suffered only minimally while finding much to please them in their novel isolation. Another team, having just taken over, should likewise flourish. The route from base to station was well-flagged and comparatively easy to follow both coming and going.
It was true that the wireless set, which would make the ice station more secure and its monitors less anxious, had yet to be carried up to the distant site, but Gino had hopes that radio transmissions might soon link the two vital outposts of the BAARE. And he had even grander plans: as soon as the Gypsy Moths were fully operational, one of the team’s several pilots ought to be able to resupply the station via airdropped supplies. Gino even thought it possible that a plane could land there, which would render the relief of one party and the installation of another almost a piece of cake. At the beginning of October, morale among all fourteen members seemed sky-high.
During that first week of October, however, things started to go wrong.
Gino’s plan was to sledge for six weeks, first reaching Nansen’s traverse route on a south-southwest vector, then turning back to head east-northeast along the hypotenuse of a triangle toward base camp, hoping to intersect the established route somewhere near Big Flag Depot, but discovering a whole new massif of coastal mountains along the way. He was also prepared, if need be, to find a new route through one of the glaciers spilling off the ice cap, down to the coast somewhere south of base camp, then along the coast back to base.
Total distance: something like five hundred miles. If it took all six weeks, the pair would have to average about twelve miles a day. And that allowed for no stationary pauses to wait out storms. It was a bold plan, but the kind of challenge Gino relished, and the kind of exploring, stripped to a single partner and a minimum of supplies, that he lived for.
The best discovery the two could make would be that of a deep hidden valley or hollow at much lower altitude than the rest of the ice cap. That might then serve as the corridor for the trans-Greenland flights in the Gypsy Moths the team hoped to attempt the next spring, paving a path for the great British Air Route to western Canada that was the express purpose of the whole expedition. But aside from practical considerations, the two-man jaunt would embody Gino’s exploratory ideal, to go where no one else had ever been.
Scott and Watkins started out on October 5 with two sledges hauled by seven huskies each, carrying a total load of 700 pounds, which Gino had calculated as full rations for both men and dogs. The start was smooth, on “old wind-drifts covered by 6 inches of powder snow,” but even so, the men at first averaged only eight miles a day.
For five days, the temperature dropped steadily, reaching a new expedition low of minus 36 Fahrenheit on October 10. Despite the difficulty of staying warm, the men welcomed the cold with its better sledging conditions. But after that date, the temperature started to rise again, and a new surface gave them fits. Gino switched from skis to snowshoes, but the sledges kept overturning as they tried to breach the sastrugi (from the Russian for “small ridges,” for the sharp parallel fins of hard-packed snow created by the prevailing winds, the bane of polar explorers throughout the centuries). Each time a sledge overturned, “the two of us wasted a lot of time and energy in righting them again.”
Then a warm snowstorm hit the plateau, which succeeded in “filling up the hollows between the ridges,” but it was followed by a plunge in temperature of no fewer than sixty degrees in a single night. The effect on the dogs was dramatic: all fourteen now became “listless and miserable.” Gino fed the huskies extra food by cutting down on his and Scott’s own meals.
Always one to see the bright side even of privation, Gino took heart in the fact that each day the sledge-loads were lightened by twenty pounds—the weight of the food consumed by fourteen dogs and two men. On the evening of October 15, as Scott later recounted, “We crawled into the tent as excited as if we were sitting down to a very special dinner.” Burning paraffin, the Primus gave off fumes, as it had each night. Scott tended the pot, while Gino, whose eyes were sensitive to smoke, lay prone against the tent wall.
I knelt upright, stirring a well-filled bowl of pemmican, sprinkling in porridge oats and pea flour to make it still more appetising. Then, after no conscious interval, I was gazing at the stars and my head was full of noise. I did not know where I was, nor greatly cared. Gradually I realized that I was lying with my feet in the tent and my head and body in the snow outside, while the noise was partly singing in my ears and partly the yapping of a hysterical dog, puzzled by my behaviour.
Slowly regaining his senses, Scott crawled back inside the tent, where he found Gino “wringing my carefully prepared pemmican soup out of the light down sleeping-bag he used.”
“Are you all right?” Gino asked. “At first I thought you had gone mad and wondered how I should get you home, and then I thought you were dead.”
“What happened?”
“You suddenly blew your nose into the butter,” Gino answered. “I thought that a bad sign; but when I protested mildly you started throwing your arms about and knocking everything over. So I turned off the primus and hauled you outside.”
Scott had come close to being a victim of one of the most insidious perils faced by mountaineers and polar explorers camped in small tents. A poorly burning stove can give off carbon monoxide fumes, which are completely odorless and can quickly prove fatal. An inordinate number of adventurers have perished from this poisoning over the years, most without ever having an inkling of what hit them.
Because he was lying on the floor and close to the tent wall, Gino had mostly escaped the fumes, and his quick reaction saved the day. But in the time-honored tradition of treating near-disasters with deadpan irony, Scott later wrote, “Gino’s strength and calmness had saved my life; but you cannot thank a man when he starts cursing you light-heartedly for making a filthy mess and ruining a good dinner.”
For another two weeks, the men pushed on south, increasingly discouraged. Their own determination was almost as keen as when they had set out on October 5, but the dogs told another story. As Scott put it, they “seemed more bored than anything else: they wandered along without interest and sat down every fifty yards or so, while neither beatings and curses nor petting and encouragement could wake them from their lethargy.”
Scott and Watkins realized by now that the goal of intersecting Nansen’s route was out of reach. A trek of only a hundred miles seemed to Gino “insignificant,” but he wisely determined to turn toward home when half the rations were gone. Even that strategy was cutting it thin, for the triangular hypotenuse back toward Big Flag Depot was a longer leg than the outbound march along the south-southwest vector. Accordingly, he called for a turnaround even before the team had covered the hundred miles.
Though neither man explicitly reached this conclusion, it seems clear that the dogs in their fatigue were attuned to dangers that Scott and Watkins, caught up in their goal-oriented push, were blind to. It would not be an exaggeration to say that in the end, the huskies saved the men’s lives.
According to Scott, “As soon as [the dogs] had grown used to the new direction their tails went up and they began to trot. We did double figures for the first time and the next day Gino often had to ride on his sledge because he could not keep up with his dogs. He was disgusted: one week like this before we turned would have taken us to the line of Nansen’s crossing and so fulfilled our main objective.”
The huskies’ new-found exuberance would lead, four days later, to the closest call of the whole Southern Journey. First, however, the team was engulfed in a violent windstorm blowing heavy snow for fifty hours straight. Outside the tent, the men “could scarcely breathe or see,” but inside it they were warm, “content to sleep and talk.”
While Scott and Watkins stayed cozy inside their sleeping bags, the dogs were suffering miserably in the cold and wind. They “rolled themselves up, their noses under their tails, and disappeared,” Scott recorded. “Now and then one of them got up, leaning against the wind; he blinked the ice from his eyes and tried to shake the snow out of his coat. He gave it up, [then] stood disconsolately with his fur blowing up the wrong way.”
After a fifty-hour layover during a fierce storm, the men packed up on October 29 and moved on. Both men wore snowshoes that alternated skimming the crust and breaking through, each extrication requiring a tiresome flounder back to the surface. In late afternoon, Scott stopped to adjust one of his snowshoe bindings. And as he did so, he made a serious mistake.
As he fiddled with his binding, he allowed the dogs to pull ahead with the sledge, “for it was only too easy to catch them up.” Suddenly, however, the dogs crested a small pass. “The leader started to trot,” Scott later wrote, “and the others followed him.” He shouted “Unipok, stop!” again and again, but the huskies ignored him. Scott tried to run after them, but kept tripping in his snowshoes; after he removed them, the crust broke under the weight of his boots. The sledge pulled farther away. On it were lashed the tent, Scott’s sleeping bag, and most of the food. Without those items, Scott admitted, “we would fare badly in another storm.” In reality, without them, both men would almost certainly have perished.
Powerless to catch up, Scott yelled to his partner for help.
Gino took off his snowshoes and started to run. He ran lightly, with quick short steps; but he broke through every four or five yards. At first he gained rapidly; but as he began to grow tired the distance between him and my sledge remained much the same. Several times he made a sprint but just before he reached the handle-bars he stumbled through the crust on which the dogs ran easily. It began to grow dark. He knew that he must catch up soon or not at all.
Scott postholed along, watching the drama unfold ahead of him, only beginning to foresee the consequences of failure. But Gino “made a final effort, dived for the sledge, caught it and held on. The dogs, as if tired of the game, stopped and lay down at once.”
When Scott stumbled up to his partner, Gino, still panting from the exertion, cursed, “Damn you, Jamie”—then turned the close call into a joke. “I’d taken a lot of trouble,” he complained, “to stay cool all day and now I’ll have to sit up half the night to dry my clothes.” But after the expedition, Gino confessed—not to Scott or any of the other BAARE men, but to his father back in England—“that this had been one of the most anxious occasions of his life.”
The storms that would have likely cost the men their lives, had Gino failed to recover the sledge, continued almost nonstop for the next six days, during which the pair advanced a paltry fourteen miles. In the tent, the men had trouble sleeping.
Gino treated the storm as a bad joke. “This is a damned silly way to spend one’s time,” he suddenly burst out. “We ought to be lying in our bunks with an Eskimo playing the gramophone and feeding us with seal meat and milk chocolate.”
The storm finally died out. Though unable to take latitude readings with the theodolite, Gino and Scott estimated from the sledge-wheel count that they might be only thirty miles from the marked route to Big Flag Depot. Now Gino decreed that they should abandon one sledge and load all their essentials onto the other. Scott was impressed by how cavalierly his partner threw away belongings that were dear to him: “I knew this trait of a true vagabond, but still I was shocked to see his fine copy of the History of England lying in the snow with its pages flicking over in the wind.”
On November 8 they entered a crevasse field, indicating the near edge of the ice cap. Gino took the lead and carefully wove a route, probing the snow bridges with a ski pole. Another day of whiteout dictated a rest; but early on November 10, an object to the side of the trail caught Gino’s eye. It was a tiny scarlet thread. They must be very close to the flag-marked route leading back to base camp.
Only moments later, they saw “a broken black line which gradually resolved itself into men and dogs.” By an astonishing coincidence, they had intersected Chapman’s party that had set out on October 26 to relieve the Ice Cap Station. The two parties rushed to embrace each other. With Chapman were five teammates. They must be returning from their mission, Gino and Scott concluded, but as they looked into each other’s iced-up faces, they realized that none of those six men was D’Aeth or Bingham.
With rising incredulity, Gino blurted out, “Where are you going? Not in to the ice-cap station?”
Chapman acknowledged the fact. His team of six had had an excruciating trek through the same storms that had battered Watkins and Scott. In fifteen days, they had covered only a little more than fifteen miles. Now it was too cold to stand around chatting, so Gino made a quick, grim calculation. He told Chapman, “Never mind about the wireless. Take its weight in food and concentrate entirely on getting in and bringing out Bingham and D’Aeth. You may have to abandon the station. I don’t know. You’ll just have to use your own judgment and do the best you can.”
As the two teams parted ways, Gino was full of self-recrimination. What had gone so wrong? What, in the end, had the truncated Southern Journey accomplished? Scientifically, the trip achieved little, Scott admitted.
All the way back to base, Gino tried to figure out what fatal flaws had so soon threatened to wreck the BAARE. Perhaps, with his seven different mini-expeditions, each with its exploratory goal, he had stretched the team too thin. From a perspective ninety years later, we can say that the BAARE, like all the explorers of the ice cap before and after, had simply underestimated the difficulties that otherworldly frozen void, stretching beyond the horizons, with its violent and unpredictable storms, threw in the faces of all intruders.
As he and Scott made their weary descent through Buggery Bank, Gino was preoccupied by a single thought: how to save what was left of the BAARE.
* * *
In the base camp hut, by November the relations between the three Inuit “girls” and their British hosts had taken on a new dimension. The men’s accounts—Chapman’s Northern Lights, Lindsay’s Those Greenland Days, Scott’s Gino Watkins—are silent about this development. Lindsay alone hints at it very obliquely, with Victorian squeamishness, when he writes, “We systematically spoiled the girls who worked in the house. . . . We treated them exactly like children; but we brought them up in the way that no children should go.”
It is only in the men’s diaries, never intended for publication, that the more troublesome reality surfaces. At some point that autumn, Lemon started crawling up into the attic at night to have sex with Arpika. Not long after, Gino followed suit with Tina, the youngest, the “Little Slut.” Finally Chapman got into the act, pairing off with “sex-conscious” Gitrude. The nightly fornications, noisy or muted, became a fact of base-camp life.
Understandably, this caused the first major disruption in the team’s moral solidarity—though almost no hint of that friction crept into the “official” accounts. Quintin Riley, with his ascetic Christian bent, was deeply disturbed by the liaisons, especially that of his erstwhile best friend with an Inuit teenager. Lindsay too was upset. Tina’s bunk was directly above his, and for weeks into the winter, when he was not off on exploratory missions, Gino spent every night upstairs. Privately Lindsay griped, “Every time this bloody Eskimo girl got up into his bunk she had to put her feet within an inch or two of my face. I objected strongly, and so did some of the others, and if the ship hadn’t come when it did [in the summer of 1931] we’d have formed up and said look here, Gino, this has bloody well got to stop.”
Lindsay’s dudgeon explains a sentence in Those Greenland Days that otherwise hangs like a conundrum: “The female servants of an expedition should be as prescribed for bedmakers in an old University statute—horrida et senex [ugly and old].”
The reactions of most of the other team members remain unknown. Perhaps they simply shrugged, or perhaps they thought that since Gino was in charge and had indulged in the temptation himself, it was not for them to protest.
In the context of 2022, the couplings of Lemon, Watkins, and Chapman with Inuit teenagers could certainly be excoriated as sexual abuse, or even, depending on the true ages of the “girls,” as rape. But there is another context in which those liaisons must be viewed: that of Inuit mores. By 1930 the Danish authorities were fully aware of the hazards of sex between white explorers and Inuit natives. That’s why, on arriving at Angmagssalik, the BAARE men had had to bare their genitals for inspection for venereal diseases, and in Copenhagen Gino had had to lay down a bond in anticipation of any pregnancies that might result from such matings.
During the period when Arpika, Gitrude, and Tina were sharing the attic with their paramours, many other Inuit men and women, but mostly men, also visited base camp. They were curious about everything to do with these white-skinned strangers who had moved uninvited into their fjord. They seemed happy to perform all kinds of chores for the Kratouna, in exchange for dinners featuring unfamiliar foods such as margarine and sugar and coffee and biscuits. If it was too late to head back to their tents, they simply lay down in clumps on the floor of the hut to sleep, or climbed into the attic and fit themselves into whatever space was left.
We have, of course, only the Englishmen’s side of the story, but there is little evidence that any of the Inuit men were angry about the sexual liaisons between the three teenagers and three of the explorers who had come from so far away. To probe this disjunction between cultural norms, it’s worth looking at the experience of Europeans whose comprehension of the Inuit way of life far exceeded that of any of Gino’s team.
Peter Freuchen was a Danish explorer who first went to Greenland in 1906, at the age of twenty-two. He fell in love with the country and the people, and ended up spending decades on the great island, accomplishing a number of dangerous expeditions, including the first ice cap traverse after Nansen’s. In 1910, with his best friend, the great Danish-Inuit explorer and ethnographer Knud Rasmussen, he founded a trading station they called Thule, at 76˚ N. on Greenland’s remote northwest coast, where the most isolated of all the Inuit bands flourished. There he became infatuated with Mequpaluk, a twenty-one-year-old Inuit beauty, whom he spotted around the trading post. He courted her for weeks with little success.
But one day she arrived to serve as a chaperone for Rasmussen’s wife (also Inuit) in the house the two traders shared, while Rasmussen, as was his bent, took off on a solo expedition. Freuchen bided his time until an evening when the other woman was absent. Abruptly he told Mequpaluk “that she had better stay with me.”
She looked at me a moment and then remarked simply: “I am unable to make any decisions, being merely a weak little girl. It is for you to decide that.”
But her eyes were eloquent, and spoke the language every girl knows regardless of race or clime.
I only asked her to move from the opposite side of the room over to mine—that was all the wedding necessary in this land of the innocents.
This seduction sounds like something out of eighteenth-century Restoration comedy, translated to the Arctic. But among the Inuit in Greenland, a vastly different set of social norms from those of Georgian England (or 1930s Denmark) obtained. As other ethnographers have verified, simply sleeping together for the first time could be tantamount among the natives to getting married. But marriage itself in no way precluded other sexual pairings.
Freuchen himself was twenty-five when he married Mequpaluk, who promptly changed her name (as was the custom) to Navarana. For ten years, they shared an adventurous life, as Navarana joined her husband on fox-trapping and narwhal-hunting forays. They had two children together. The daughter became a well-known writer, and a grandson later served as the first Inuit member of parliament in Canada.
“She gave me some of the happiest years of my life,” Freuchen wrote of Navarana in 1961. Yet even before they had met, the Danish explorer had learned about Inuit sexual customs that bore little resemblance to the amatory practices of Europeans. Lending another man your wife for the night had nothing to do with adultery or infidelity: it was a ritualized favor that was part of the fabric of Inuit society, and to refuse was considered an insult by both the husband and wife. Before he met Mequpaluk, Freuchen himself had engaged in the practice.
This casualness about sex did not preclude intense jealousy, however, and Inuit lore is rich with tales of murderous deeds committed by lovers driven mad with rage. This apparent paradox was one of many that somehow held communal life together generation after generation.
In the course of his many years in Greenland, Freuchen became completely fluent in the native language, and he came to understand Inuit culture better than any European before him—except his comrade, Rasmussen. His 1961 masterpiece, Book of the Eskimos, blends personal accounts of expeditions and the trading life with a de facto ethnography of the northwest Greenland Inuit. When it was published, the chapters about marital and sexual mores shocked European and American readers, in much the same way that Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa had in 1928.
As Freuchen wrote,
Among the Eskimos, sexual life is not directly connected with marriage, and the simple biological need for the opposite sex is recognized in both men and women, young and old. Toddlers of both sexes are encouraged to play together with a freedom that would outrage a mother in America, and the game of “playing house” can—among Eskimo children—assume an awfully realistic appearance.
The sharing of wives was for the Inuit often a way of remedying threats to their very existence. If in a given season the hunting was bad, the game scarce, the resident angakok might order a general exchange of wives. He might even decree which wife should pair with which husband not her own.
There was also the rather popular game of “doused lights.” The rules were simple. Many people gathered in a house, all of them completely nude. Then the lights were extinguished, and darkness reigned. Nobody was allowed to say anything, and all changed places continually. At a certain signal each man grabbed the nearest woman. After a while, the lights were put on again, and now innumerable jokes could be made over the theme, “I knew all the time who you were because—”
All these practices, evolved over the centuries by an intensely communal people for whom Western notions of “privacy” were unfathomable, lay at the farthest extreme from the hippie utopia of “free love” that flared into brief life in Europe and America in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Nor did the Inuit casualness about sex preclude deep devotion between man and wife. Peter Freuchen had ten fruitful and joyous years with Navarana until she died suddenly in 1921, a victim of the worldwide plague called the Spanish flu.
Over his years in Greenland, Freuchen had formed a deep antipathy for the European missionaries who had so transformed (and, he believed, corrupted) native culture. Now his grief flamed into rage when the minister in Upernavik told him that Navarana could not be buried in the town cemetery because she had died a pagan, nor would he deliver a sermon in her memory.
“It was relaxing for me to be so furious,” Freuchen later wrote. “I told him to go to the devil with his beliefs and his sermons, but my wife would sleep in the cemetery and not be thrown to the dogs. . . . I am glad that I did not strike him. I had the good grace to tell him to get out and let me manage the service.” With a few helpers, he dug the grave himself and laid his beloved into it. A small crowd of Inuit watched from behind houses and rocks, terrified of incurring the brimstone wrath of the minister for those who defied the teachings of the Bible and the dictates of the church.
* * *
Whatever the actual nature of the relationships between the explorers and the “girls” may have been, there’s good evidence that Lemon fell in love with Arpika and that Chapman did so with Gitrude. One entry from Chapman’s diary hints at jealous passion on both sides of the affair, while it is at the same time hopelessly clouded by linguistic confusion. “Gertrude thought I said girls were beautiful in England,” Chapman wrote. “Actually I said I had no girl in England. She wept all afternoon, bless her. I cheered her up but this lingo is hell. She really is a charmer.”
Lemon’s affair with Arpika lasted through most of the year the team spent in Greenland. Near the end of his service with the BAARE, he learned that Arpika had somehow been carrying on a liaison with Knud Rasmussen at the same time. Lemon was deeply distressed by the discovery of his lover’s “infidelity.”
Chapman’s diary is full of endearments for Gitrude and of anguish over her endlessly shifting moods. His biographer, Ralph Barker, argues that the Englishman and the Inuit woman had fallen deeply in love with each other.
Gitrude subsequently married an Inuit man. “I adore her still,” Chapman told his diary a couple of years later. “I shall never find anyone quite like her again.”
What went on between Gino and Tina remains unknowable. If he wrote about the relationship in his diary, those passages have disappeared. Gifted, or cursed, by his extraordinary talent to compartmentalize the various parts of his life, Gino soon turned to what mattered most: the expedition itself, the endless allure of places where no one had been, and the frozen emptiness of the great ice cap.
_____________
† The Inuit who live on Greenland’s East Coast are known as the Tunumiut.