Three

The Early Qablunaat

When Captain Christopher Middleton sailed his ship, the Furnace, accompanied by the Discovery, under the command of William Moor, through the mouth of what he named Wager Inlet, in July 1742, he was in search of the Northwest Passage. This was the first party of qablunaat to enter Ukkusiksalik. So confident of success were his masters at the British Admiralty that his orders included advice on how to conduct himself should he encounter Japanese shipping.

Both Middleton and Moor were actually Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) men. Middleton, the senior of the two, went to sea as a boy seaman, served with privateers before joining the HBC in about 1720 as a second mate, and rose to command within five or six years. He quickly became one of the most trusted captains in the HBC fleet. At least sixteen times his ships made the round trip from Britain to Hudson Bay, delivering supplies and men, returning each time with a load of fur pelts. He was an accomplished mariner and a capable astronomer, among the first navigators to calculate how to determine a ship’s longitude at sea using a sextant and chronometer. In 1726, Middleton published a paper on the magnetic variations in Hudson Bay, which ultimately led to his appointment as a Fellow of the Royal Society — just the man to lead an expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, it would seem.

The HBC was not at all keen about this endeavour, as there seemed to be no advantage to the Company’s business; in fact, there was a real possibility that it might undermine the Company’s monopoly. As the Governor of the HBC at the time, Sir Bibye Lake wrote to shareholders, the expedition “might affect their Property and be Prejudicial to the Company in their Trade.”[1] A noted parliamentarian at the time, Arthur Dobbs, argued strenuously in favour of pursuing the search for the Northwest Passage along the west side of Hudson Bay; he was convinced by fragments of data about tidal currents, ice movements, and whale sightings that this must be where the passage lay. He strongly resented the HBC’s monopoly and campaigned vigorously against it, as he lobbied in favour of a new expedition with people “who I believe will undertake it chearfully [sic], as they are convinced it will be a national Benefit.”[2] In the end, he convinced the admiralty to take up his proposal, and he further convinced Captain Middleton to abandon his long-time employer and accept a commission with the Royal Navy in order to lead the expedition — in fact, the first of many naval expeditions that Britain mounted in search of the Northwest Passage. Middleton’s younger cousin, William Moor, followed his mentor.

On June 8, 1741, the two ships left England, many among the crew press-ganged into service on the docks, to sail across the North Atlantic into Hudson Bay. It was too late to conduct explorations that same summer, so Middleton headed for Fort Prince of Wales (at present-day Churchill, Manitoba) where he hoped there might be some advantage offered by the Hudson’s Bay Company post, notwithstanding his strained relationship with Chief Factor James Isham. Ten of Middleton’s men died of scurvy that winter. Others, severely frostbitten, lost their toes to amputation. Middleton freely dispensed alcohol to gain favour with his own men, as well as some of the HBC men and the post Indians. The next year, Isham reported to the HBC Committee in London that Middleton had been “a Very Troublesome Guess [guest].”

On July 1, 1742, the Furnace and the Discovery were laboriously cut free from the ice and set sail to head north up the west coast of Hudson Bay. Middleton was taking no chance of being too late this year. Rounding a headland, which Middleton named Cape Dobbs after his main promoter, the two ships were threatened by shifting ice at the mouth of a large inlet.* Carried by the swirling currents, his ships at risk of damage by the ice, Middleton found his way into what appeared to be an endless passage he named after Sir Charles Wager, First Lord of the Admiralty. Effectively trapped inside by the ice jam at the inlet’s mouth, Middleton ordered the ships’ boats over the side to pursue exploration of this most promising inland sea. The strength of the flood tide racing into Wager Inlet suggested to Middleton that there must indeed be a way through to another ocean if one were to sail west from this ice-bound passage. His boats explored the interior, under the command of Lieutenant John Rankin (hence Rankin Inlet, somewhat farther south on the Hudson Bay coast), who described the harrowing experience of being swept by the tide in and out of the inlet’s mouth surrounded by huge chunks of ice. Rankin ultimately reported back that at its farthest extent, a small waterfall emptied into the inlet, bearing semi-fresh water. At this, Middleton correctly concluded that Wager Inlet was a bay, not a strait.

The maps of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries showed the indentation in different ways, penetrating inland to varied extents, and named it variously Wager Inlet, Wager River, Wager Water, and simply “the Wager.” In the end, map-makers settled on Wager Bay.

In early August the ice cleared enough for Middleton to break free and sail farther north, toward what he named Repulse Bay, where again he believed the sought-for passage might be found. But on August 6, he wrote in his ship’s log that “to our great Disappointment we saw the Land from the Low Beach quite round to the Westward of the North which met the Western Shore and makes a very deep Bay. Thus our Hopes of a Passage that way were all over.”[3] He turned his ship’s head for home and sailed for England, convinced that there was no passage to the Pacific from the west coast of Hudson Bay.

Arthur Dobbs did not accept this conclusion, however, and aimed his vitriol now against Middleton, accusing him of incompetence, of falsifying his reports, and of conspiracy with his former employer, the Hudson’s Bay Company. Dobbs argued that there must be a passage because Middleton had seen whales in Wager Inlet of a sort not previously seen in Hudson Bay, which must therefore have come from the Pacific Ocean. Dobbs also bribed Lieutenant Rankin to perjure himself and declare that Middleton had indeed falsified his findings. Dobbs’s campaign effectively ended Middleton’s career, though the record shows that not only was Middleton correct about Wager Bay, he ought to be further credited for his extremely accurate maps of the Hudson Bay coast.

Not one to give up easily, Dobbs engaged William Moor to lead a private expedition back to Wager Inlet. Although Moor had written unequivocally in his journal in mid-August 1742 that “there is no Passage into the other Ocean between Churchill and the Latitd 67°N,” and then back in England wrote to his older cousin about the “cock-and-bull story” being disseminated by Dobbs, he apparently changed his mind. Perhaps when Dobbs offered him command of the new private expedition, along with a piece of the action, saying Moor was “very sober and carefull [sic] and will also be an Adventurer [subscriber] himself,” that tipped the balance. Temporarily, at least, Moor switched sides in the controversy.

In May 1746 two ships departed from England under William Moor’s command, the Dobbs Galley and the smaller California. Moor imagined winning the twenty thousand pound prize put up the year before by Parliament for “discovery of the Northwest Passage.” As a mariner and explorer, or as an expedition leader, Moor was not the equal of his older cousin Middleton. However, in the summer of 1747 he sailed farther into Wager Inlet, far enough to report that “we had the Mortification to see clearly, that our hitherto imagined Strait ended in two small unnavigable Rivers.” With that, he limped home to face the wrath of Dobbs who, inevitably perhaps, turned on him immediately.

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We know that Middleton’s expedition encountered Inuit on the shores of Ukkusiksalik, but little more about the event. This was almost certainly the first contact between Ukkusiksalingmiut (“the people of Ukkusiksalik”) and qablunaat (white men), however fleeting. It was a hundred years before there was more contact for the Ukkusiksalingmiut, and much the same for most of their broader cultural group, the Aivilingmiut. Edward Parry spent the winter of 1821–22 frozen in near Repulse Bay, where he had substantial contact with local Aivilingmiut, including a woman named Iligliuk, who provided Parry with one of the earliest documented Inuit-drawn maps. In the summer of 1836, Captain George Back, fresh from his successful descent — and subsequent ascent, all in a single summer — of the Back River two years before, was sent by the admiralty in the HMS Terror to find Wager Inlet and use it as a jumping-off point for an overland expedition to the mouth of his previous expedition’s river. The Terror did not make it to Wager Inlet, became stuck in ice close to Repulse Bay, and just barely limped back to Ireland the following year. Another HBC man, a hardy Orkneyman named John Rae, stayed among the Aivilingmiut in Repulse Bay during 1846–47. He learned from them, and as a result became one of the most capable Arctic explorers of his time. Then the American Charles Francis Hall arrived along this same coast in 1864 and stayed for several years. His was the next ship to sail into the mouth of Wager Inlet. He documented a wealth of local knowledge during his time with the Aivilingmiut, and his published record confirms that Inuit lived and hunted in Ukkusiksalik at that time.