Twenty-Nine

The Whaling Era

Octave Sivaniqtoq offered an account unique among the former residents of Ukkusiksalik.

As the story goes, there were [whaling] ships around the Cape Fullerton area. The captain of one ship was told about the whirlpool [at the mouth of Wager Bay], so he went to investigate. They made sure the ship was watertight, so that it wouldn’t let in any water. They checked the hull in all places. The captain got all the crew inside the ship, all of them, and watertight, and he himself was just at the mast. When they went to the whirlpool, the ship was pulled down, right down to the bed of the sea. It wasn’t very deep, so it went down to a certain point where it just stopped, and the ship was inside the water at the whirlpool and the captain was on top of the mast. They were there until the whirlpool started turning the other way around, as it switched between high tide and low tide. When the whirlpool started turning around they went back afloat. Then the captain knocked on the mast and the crew was happy to get out of there.

This is one of very few direct accounts in the oral history from Ukkusiksalingmiut describing the activity of the whalers. We do not know who the whaling captain in the story was. Perhaps it was George Comer, master of the Era, who sailed these waters more than any other, and showed great interest in interactions with local Inuit, to the extent that another whaler called Comer “native crazy,” a moniker often repeated in the historical literature, true or not. He undoubtedly heard tales of the big whirlpool from his Inuit helpers, so perhaps he decided to investigate.

The first whalers arrived on the west side of Hudson Bay in 1860. British explorers had reported many whale sightings in northwestern Hudson Bay, “as is no where else to be met with in the known world.”[1] With these reports in mind, the American whaling captain Christopher Chapel, in the Syren Queen, accompanied by his brother Edward in the Northern Light, pushed farther west into Hudson Bay than had any previous whaling ships. Said Chapel: “I expect to find whales and get a good cutt this fall & find a good winter quarters …”[2] They over-wintered near Depot Island, south of Wager Inlet, and the next summer enjoyed a very successful hunt.

There is an oral-history account of these two whaling ships, the first qablunaat ever seen by some Inuit living in the area of Depot Island at the time. George Comer recorded that an Inuk named She-u-shor-en-nuck, when he first saw the ships, “could only think and compare the masts to sleds having been stood up but in telling this to the other natives they all went up on a hill and looked and concluded it must be the white man’s ships which they had heard of.”[3]

The Northern Light took home twenty-one thousand pounds of baleen that year alone, more than any previous American ship had ever achieved in the eastern Arctic. These Arctic whalers came in pursuit of both the oil and the baleen and, gradually over the years, expanded their commercial activity to include trade with the Inuit they met and often engaged to help with the whaling. Initially, the whale oil was used in lamps, both in Europe and in the U.S. This purpose was eventually served by petroleum products, but whale oil continued to be used in the manufacture of paint and perfume, among other applications. Whale oil greased a lot of the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. The baleen, on the other hand, became the most important product of the hunt. The curtain (called “bone” by the whalers at the time), which hangs in the bowhead whale’s mouth to filter the edible morsels out of the sea water, became flexible enough when heated to bend and twist, so that springs, umbrella staves, corset stays, and fishing rods could be fashioned from it.

Following the success of Chapel’s season, roughly fifty more ships sailed into the area between Chesterfield Inlet and Repulse Bay over the next ten years, firmly establishing this as a prime hunting ground. Activity ebbed and flowed over the next few decades, increasingly involving local Inuit, most particularly the Aivilingmiut. In 1903, the population of Aivilingmiut was estimated at 138 along this coast, many of whom had contact and often employment with the visiting whalers. It is reasonable to surmise that this also involved the Aivilingmiut living in and around Ukkusiksalik. We know that by the early 1900s — by which time the Scottish whalers had arrived in their steam-driven ships to join the Americans, who were still using sailing vessels — at least fifty Inuit men were working for just two of the American ships, as hunters during the winter and as whale-boat crews in summer. Inuit labour was essential to the success, indeed even the survival, of the foreign whalers.

Over the winter of 1909 to 1910, the Ernest William anchored just inside the mouth of Wager Inlet, and others occasionally followed suit in subsequent years, but this was unusual. Depot Island, near Cape Fullerton, at the southern limit of the Aivilingmiut territory, was the most popular location for the ships to over-winter. Breakup came earlier at the offshore islands than in the bays along the mainland coast, freeing the ships to get to work on the summer’s whaling.

The whalers sailed up and down in Roes Welcome Sound, mostly concentrated in the stretch from Cape Fullerton to Wager Inlet. When the lookout in the crow’s nest sighted a bowhead or right whale, several whaling boats were launched to pursue the chase. These boats, twenty-six to thirty feet in length, were each manned by six men, including the harpooner. They rowed after the whale until the harpooner could launch his weapon, thereby attaching the boat to the whale by means of a long rope which was allowed to run out from the boat as the whale thrashed and dove. When it surfaced again, the boats’ crews were ready with lances to complete the kill and then tow the carcass back to the ship. It was a highly dangerous procedure. Many Inuit served in these whaling boats.

An American trader, George W. Cleveland, was landed from the whaling ship Francis Allyn in July 1900 on the north side of the entrance to Wager Inlet. He was to establish a new shore station there on behalf of the Thomas Luce whaling company, based in Massachusetts. The trade for sealskins, walrus ivory, polar bear, and muskoxen hides had been added to the whalers’ role. Cleveland, with help from local Inuit, built a twelve-by-twenty-four-foot warehouse. By his own account, it “was a case of getting among the Eskimos or starve.… I was taken among them as one of their own brethren.”[4] Sivaniqtoq recalled that his mother, Navaq, lived with these early traders before he was born, originally as their cleaning lady and later as a companion for Igalik (“person with glasses”), one of Cleveland’s assistants. Inuit knew George Cleveland as Sakuaqtiruniq (“the harpooner”). He operated at Wager for four years and eventually moved everything farther north along the Hudson Bay coast to build a post for one of the Scottish whaling companies at Repulse Bay. Later he established a station at Cape Fullerton for a New York furrier, then worked variously as a free trader and for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He continued living in the region until the 1920s and died in 1925. He sired many children during his time among the Aivilingmiut, so there are undoubtedly many in the region who can boast the bloodline.

Between 1860 and 1915, there were a total of 145 whaling voyages into Hudson Bay, about 105 of which over-wintered at least one year. The last of the whalers to visit this region was George Comer in the A.T. Gifford, shipwrecked in 1915. That marked the end of the era that had ushered in a new way of life for the people of Ukkusiksalik.