"SPENDING A WINTER AMONG THE ESKIMOS – ADRIFT ON A BIG FLOATING ISLAND OF ICE"
The following is a transcription of the second of six articles Cleveland wrote (with writer Minna Littmann) for the New Bedford Sunday Times during his year’s leave of absence from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1923-4.
See my notes at the end.
[From the New Bedford Sunday Standard, Apr. 20, 1924:]
SPENDING A WINTER AMONG THE ESKIMOS – ADRIFT ON A BIG FLOATING ISLAND OF ICE
Isolated from His Lonely Post Captain Cleveland Needs Must Accept Hospitality of Natives – Long Days Without Food or Drink a Harrowing Experience of Attempted Return
Captain George G. Cleveland, Vineyard whaleman and Arctic trader, has told the story of his adventures in the far north to Minna Littmann of The Standard staff. They will appear for four more Sundays crammed with unusual incident and many thrills. The second, presented herewith, is entitled:
My Arctic Exile Opens
Had I guessed what hardships lay ahead of me, what terrible days and nights on the Arctic ice, and beyond them, what long exile from civilization, I would probably never have started on my yearly whaling expedition from Wager Bay in the summer of 1902. As it turned out, I would have been no better off had I stayed at my isolated post, but that was hidden in the future.
It was four years that summer since I had last seen a white man. Four years back the sailing schooner Francis Allen had set me ashore among the desolate granite hills at Wager Bay, a deep inlet cleft in the western boundary of Hudson Bay. The trading post I founded there was the farthest north white man’s habitation of its time, only 70 miles below the Arctic Circle, and all of 1,200 miles north of York Factory, the famous post of the Hudson Bay Company.
I had lived four years in my snow-banked hut in that frozen wilderness, absolutely without human companionship except when Eskimos drifted in to the post to trade. That is, I was alone ten months in the year, for I spent two months every summer land-whaling with the Eskimos. During the long winters, three and four months passed at a stretch without my even laying eyes on an Eskimo. The only living creatures I saw were the animals I trapped, wolves, ermine, fox, and polar bear. Besides my trapping and occasional trading, cooking, and sending, my only diversions were watching the play of the Northern Lights and reading for the hundredth time my Bible and the few books and magazines I had brought up with me.
Early Years Were Lonely
It’s long since I’ve been lonely in the North – the life and the country have “got” me – but those early years were lonely, and worse than the loneliness was the anxiety. I had made a contract to stay five years in Wager Bay. I was to trap and trade furs and collect whalebone. The stuff was precious at $5.25 a pound; the use of steel has made it worthless now. My employers were to send a ship once a year to bring me supplies and to carry off the year’s yield of Arctic treasure, but for reasons which aren’t part of this story, the yearly supply ship failed to come. The stores for one year put ashore with me when the Francis Allen landed me in Wager Bay were all I ever received, and the Francis Allen was the last white man’s boat I ever saw there.
Naturally I never started out light-hearted on my summer whaling expeditions. Every summer I hoped against hope for a boat from home, and I wanted to be on hand when she arrived. But it was go whaling or starve and I went every year despite my anxiety about the boat.
We took two bowhead whales worth $10,000 in whale bone at Maluxeetuk, the Eskimo whaling grounds on Lyon Inlet, that summer of 1902. The luck was good so far as the whaling went, but the mild weather which prevailed that season proved very bad luck indeed for me.
Trapped by Drift Ice
The Eskimos and I always journeyed to the whaling grounds on foot, with a baggage train of dog sleds, starting early enough to reach our destination before the precious six weeks of open-water whaling weather began. The return was managed by sail in the whaleboats before the ice closed in for the winter. The weight of the whalebone, and the necessity for a speedy return to hunting grounds so that the Eskimo might complete their winter garments before severe weather, made it undesirable to go back on foot as we had come.
That summer of 1902, although we started back as early as usual, we found the water passage already blocked. The almost windless summer had allowed the ice to accumulate and freeze solidly in the channels. I couldn’t get Eskimos to make the much longer land journey back to my post with me at that season. They didn’t dare take the time. I couldn’t go back to my post alone. It looked as though I would have to spend the winter with the Eskimos and be grateful for the chance. So I headed south with the party on foot, helping the dogs drag the sleds weighted down with my heavy boats and great bundles of whalebone. About the middle of September we reached the camp site the Eskimos had chosen on Repulse Bay. My post was many miles farther on.
Started in February
I lived with the Eskimos from September until the following February. Early in that month my faithful young friend Keedluk and his adopted son agreed to start with me to the post from which I had been absent so long. The son was an orphan boy of twelve, whom we called Tommy. Keedluk had a wife and two small children, but not even the young woman herself considered that any reason why he should not go off on a dangerous trip with me in mid-winter. Neither did anyone consider it out of the way that a lad as young as Tommy should be called on to undertake a journey likely to involve many hardships. Such trips are part of every Eskimo’ boy’s training, and Tommy would have been astonished and hurt if he had been told to stay with his foster mother at the camp.
We set out early one morning after a good breakfast of frozen meat. We had no premonition then of how long it would be before we tasted food or drink again. Our equipment consisted of very little – a gun apiece for Keedluk and me, two long-bladed Eskimo knives of the sort known as punards, and a hatchet, a sled loaded with the frozen meat which was to be our sole food, and a team of 12 Eskimo dogs.
It was clear and calm when we started, but warm for that time of the year – about 45 degrees below zero, which meant we might expect snow. The usual winter temperature is about 65 below. Repulse Bay is long and narrow. When the weather is calm, solid ice fills it to its mouth. It was our plan to cut across the ice-filled bay in as nearly as possible a straight line to Beachy Point, on the opposite shore, and then to follow the shore ice straight to my post on Wager Bay.
Then Came the Snow
The calm weather ended very shortly. The wind freshened, and snow fell like a blanket. The wind increased to a gale, blowing from the land in the direction of the great bay to the east. We fought our way steadily ahead, blinded by the snowflakes and breathing so hard from our exertions that we had no breath to waste in speech. The hours dragged on. We had struggled forward, floundering, choking, and wordless, fully 12 miles, or almost half way across the stretch of ice from point to point of the bay, when Keedluk broke the silence. The Eskimos rarely show excitement, and his voice was quiet as he called to me, “Shukwahtee!” Shukwahtee is my name in Eskimo. It means “boat-steerer.”
“Shukwahtee, I think we had better lose the meat.”
“Why?” I asked, trying to seem as calm as Keedluk.
Keedluk extended his arm in its ungainly fur covering and pointed with his long knife to the southward. Looking in the direction of the blade as a gust of wind blew an opening through the flurries of huge snowflakes, I caught a glimpse of an ominous narrow black line some miles distant, a long gash at the edge of the white expanse between us and Beachy Point.
Drifting Out to Sea
Open water! The ice on which we were traveling was breaking away from land. The steady wind blowing form the land was forcing the frozen mass which filled Repulse Bay out to sea. It was making an island of the huge stretch of ice we had hoped to use as a bridge across the bay, it was remorselessly cutting us off from reaching shore in the direction we were headed. There was no knowing where that huge floe would drift, carrying us with it.
“Ice breaking. Better throw meat off sled so you can ride. We turn back way we came, I think. Perhaps reach island in time if we run fast,” came the quiet voice of Keedluk.
There was indeed a sportsman’s chance that we might reach the Kickerton Islands, a small group lying several miles off the mainland from which we had started, before the ice broke away from them as it had from the opposite shore and left us hopelessly stranded on the frozen floating mass. If the ice drifted in the direction it usually did, it might catch on the island as it went out to sea. Our hope rested on that chance.
I trusted Keedluk too well to question his judgment about the meat. Keedluk and Tommy knew I couldn’t possibly keep up with them in a race, and our lives depended on running at top speed. No white man who hasn’t been more thoroughly acclimated to the Arctic than I was at that time can begin to run as fast and as long as the Eskimos can. Our provisions had to be sacrificed that I might ride. As self-controlled as his father, Tommy stood beside the whining dogs, watching our faces and listening. He said not a word, but at a nod from Keedluk slid the frozen meat off the sled.
The next moment we were off. I ran as much as I could to spare the dogs; then crouched on the sled to avoid falling exhausted in an attempt to keep up with Keedluk and Tommy, and was whirled on by the swift-footed animals. We plunged steadily through the blinding snow. The roughened ice gave a fairly firm foothold. On, on, on we sped for our lives. We never stopped a second until the islands loomed in sight. Our hearts leaped as we glimpsed them, then sank. There were the islands, visible at intervals through a steamy vapor. But between us and them, beneath that vapor, lay at least 300 yards of open water, like cold steel in the fading light. The ice pack had drifted the wrong way for us. It was not touching the islands.
It would have been madness to try and swim those 300 yards of icy water. The chill would have proved deadly almost instantly. We were hopelessly cut off from the islands unless we could hew a block of ice from the mass on which we stood to serve as a raft to float us ashore.
The ice at the edge of the open stretch of water was thin and new. If it had been old and solid, we might have had a chance. Nevertheless, we were far from giving up. Keedluk and Tommy worked frantically with their knives, and I with my hatchet, hacking at the thickest part of the ice on which we stood. We fought with all our strength to cut off a cake large enough to float ourselves, the sled, and the dogs, to shore. But the pieces we succeeded in separating from the mass were too thin to bear the weight. They buckled and threatened to dump us all into the water as soon as we got them loose.
Five Days Adrift Without Food
We kept up our heart-breaking hacking until dark. The night and the snow together shut in around us like a thick veil. Keedluk stopped hacking. “We better go back and look for the meat,” he announced. We were panting and puffing from our efforts. Our boots were soaked with icy water which had bubbled up through the buckling ice. Luckily for us, it was too salt to freeze easily, or we would have been done for, with frozen feet added to our other troubles. We hadn’t realized until then we were hungry. We weren’t cold, despite the wind and the heavy wet snow, for we’d been exercising violently for hours
Keedluk was right. We could not hope to accomplish anything more in the darkness on the edge of the brittle new ice. We faced about and started to retrace the 12 miles we had come. All we had to guide us was the wind, and heaven knows how many times it had changed since we threw off the meat on the ice. Our sled runners had left no tracks. The snow formed slush the minute it touched the ice, and had been falling heavily all the afternoon. I have no recollection of how long we trudged through the darkness, keeping close together so as not to lose one another. We never found the meat. When the search for it grew hopeless, we stopped to rest. We unharnessed the dogs, turned the sled on its side for a wind break and crouched down behind it on the ice. The dogs huddled close together. They couldn’t lie down for there was no dry place to lie on. Once in a while we turned the sled over and let them crouch on it. We began to feel bitterly cold. Worse still, the ice about us started to break. Every few minutes it cracked on this side or that, or beneath us. We kept moving to solid places and turning our sled up again, and the ice kept yawning and forcing us to move.
Light Was Dim
That night passed and a faint gleam of light marked the arrival of the second day, but it soon vanished. The second day and night passed, and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth wore on without bringing us relief from our peril. All the while the light was so dim that we dared not trust ourselves to move on; we merely groped a few feet to the right or to the left to avoid new gaps in the ice. There was no reason to think that we could find our way in that gloom to a safer spot than the place where we crouched in the midst of the Repulse Bay ice floe. Without food or drink we clung together, moving only to dodge the ice cracks. The dogs licked the snow off their coats to assuage their thirst. We tried at first, against our better judgment, to collect a few mouthfuls of snow off the side of the sled, but the wind blew so that we could get very little. Although snowflakes satisfy the thirst of the Eskimo dog, they only aggravate the thirst of a human being.
On the fifth night while the snowflakes were still so large that we couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead, there came a sudden and important change in our surroundings. The crackling ice began to pile. Its movement, accompanied by groaning and cracking, told us we could not be far from land. The piling was a sign that the floe has struck the shore. Our hopes rose again. We harnessed the dogs and set out, walking in the opposite direction to that in which the ice was piling, knowing that we would thus approach land. It was rough going. Keedluk and I walked ahead to find a path. Tommy trudged close behind, guiding the dogs and lifting the sled over the roughest places.
Ice Crevasse Swallows Sled
The stillness had been broken only by the sound of the sliding, snapping ice and a whine now and then from the dogs, when without warning we heard a shout of distress from Tommy. Keedluk leaped back over the rough ice just in time to cut with sharp strokes of his knife the harness by which the dogs were fastened to the sled. The sled was lost. A huge cake of ice, folding over on itself, had swallowed it, and would soon disgorge it noiselessly into the black water below. Keedluk’s quick action – he lost no time unsheathing his knife, for an Eskimo always carries the blade bare in his hands, even when he is driving a team – saved the dogs from being drawn under after the sled. Tommy had jumped lightly out of harm’s way.
We walked all night, scrambling and balancing on the [illegible] at last of our direction. Next morning the snowfall stopped, the sun came out, and we saw land ahead, unmistakably land. It was some time later that we found out where it was we had come ashore. We had drifted out into the Welcome and back into Repulse Bay. We actually left the ice at the very point we had headed for when we left the Eskimo encampment.
Our first thought when we set foot on land was to find drinking water. We trudged on as fast as we could go in our exhausted condition, and about a mile from the coast came upon a large inland lake. As was to be expected in midwinter, the ice on it was seven or eight feet think. We had no tool to break a hole through the ice except that hatchet of mine. The Eskimos have a kind of drill with which we could have got to water in a few minutes if we’d had one along. But he hadn’t, so we took turns with the hatchet. We had to start breaking a hole six feet across on the surface to make a hollow to retrieve the ice we threw out as our excavation grew deeper. The work wasn’t as hard as one might think, for the extreme cold made the ice very brittle.
Touch of Drops a Torture
At the end of about two hours we reached water. The lower end of our hole was very small, but the water gushed up through it and filled the basin we had made full to the level of the surrounding ice. We scrambled out of the hollow just in time to avoid being soaked. The next second the three of us were lying face down on the edge of the pool, moistening our tongues and lips. The touch of the first drops was torture. The water was so bitterly cold and our mouths were so swollen that we could swallow only a little at a time. We lay there until nightfall, drinking slowly and resting.
As dark came on, Keedluk brought up the subject of something to eat. He suggested slaughtering one of the dogs. I had no craving for food, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him to kill the animal. He wouldn’t kill it without my order. It meant no great suffering to him and Tommy to go longer without food, for as I have said Eskimos are accustomed to long fasts. So we decided to wait. Still foodless, we dug a hole in the side of a snow bank, just large for the three of us to crawl into, scrambled inside, and closed the entrance with snow. Sitting as close to each other as we possibly could, we passed the night. I must have slept, but I have never been colder in my life. Not at any time during the previous six days had I been so chilled to the bone.
Awakening early the next morning, we each took a good drink from the lake – the hole we had made had only lightly frozen over – and started on the march again. Our destination was the Eskimo camp from which we had started seven days before. Foodless, sledless, and, worst of all, gunless, for we had lost our muskets in the breaking ice, we dared not attempt the much longer journey from Beachy Point to my post. We planned to stop on the way at one of the Kickerton islands, where Keedluk at cached some meat and a sled the previous summer.
We walked all day, our dogs trailing us, and at midnight reached the island. Keedluk and Tommy struck out in one direction for the pile of rocks where the food was cached; I started in another which I believed was shorter. Some of the dogs followed them; the rest followed me.
Hunting for Food
After I had walked a mile or two I realized that my dogs were deserting me. I looked back and saw them some distance in the rear. The leader was tugging at something near a pile of rock. “He’s found the cache,” I told myself exultantly. I hurried to the spot where he pawed and tugged, surrounded by the other dogs. He was eating meat when I arrived. I pushed him and the other dogs back from the rock pile, got down on my knees and reached into the hole he had nosed out. My hand touched something that felt like frozen meat. I twisted and tore a piece off and put it between my lips. The second it began to thaw I was conscious of an indescribable nausea and revulsion. I spit the morsel out hastily before I had swallowed a single fragment. I had narrowly escaped eating human flesh. The next morning I learned that beneath those rocks lay the body of an Eskimo who had been buried there the previous summer.
They Found Real Cache
That same night my Eskimo boys found the real cache. There was an abundance of polar bear meat – Nanook – and white whale skin, a great delicacy in the Arctic. It was frozen solid and partly decayed, for it had been placed there in the middle of the summer and had alternately thawed and frozen for a long time. But the Eskimos prefer putrid meat to fresh, and I must confess that I have learned to eat it without distaste. We hacked off great hunks with my hatchet, and passed them to each other. The freezing cold acts on meat almost like cooking, driving all the blood out of it, and frozen raw meat is not bad when one has become accustomed to it in the far North. My, how our spirits rose. We laughed and talked for the first time in days as we chewed and tugged at that meat. I doubt if anything has tasted so good to me in my life since as the first few mouthfuls. After that it wasn’t so appetizing, for our stomachs had been too long without food.
We built a snow house that night and got a few hours sleep. The next morning we pushed on to the Eskimo camp, taking with us the extra sled which had been cached on the island. The little colony saw us long before we saw them, and came running out to meet us. They were surprised to see their men back so soon, and me with them, but they showed no impatience to hear what had happened. As we told our story they listened attentively, making no exclamations except an occasional “Wah-gud-toonga!” which is equivalent to “Do tell – you don’t say so.”
None of the Eskimos were willing to set out again with me to my post at that time. They wanted to wait a month, until the ice had grown stronger. About March 1, I got an escort. We made the trip across the ice of Repulse Bay this time without the slightest trouble. We carried only enough provisions for the trip. Six days travel by dog sled brought us to the post. We approached it some time after midnight of the sixth day. Looming white against the starlight sky was the lonely house to which my thoughts had traveled so many [illegible.] Would I find a message there that the ship had arrived during my absence, the ship from home? Had it taken away my store of furs and whalebone and left me a new supply of food and trade articles? I could hardly run fast enough towards it. Within about 20 feet I stopped short, in consternation. What had happened? The doors and windows were wide open, and the interior, so far as my Eskimos and I could make out, was filled solidly with snow to the height of the tops of the windows.
The next morning we shoveled the snow out of the post. The place had been stripped clean of every article and supply that made it possible to live there. Three boat loads of southern Eskimos had come in the summer and carried off everything in the house except my hoard of furs and whalebone, which was now as useless to me as it was to them. Food, tobacco, clothing, my trunk of personal belongings, knives, and what little furniture I had, all were gone. There was not so much as a match left.
The nearest white man was 1,200 miles away at the Hudson Bay Company’s trading station at York Factory, far to the south. It was impossible for me to stay at my post with no supplies and no articles of trade in the frail hope that a relief ship might come some months hence. I could not go to York Factory alone, and no northern Eskimo would go there for me or with me. In years past the Indians to the south had come north, massacred, raided and carried off the women of the Eskimos. Since that time the Eskimos lived in terror of the southern neighbors. I did the only thing there was left for me to do. I turned my back on my plundered post and went to live with the Eskimos.
Next Sunday Capt. Cleveland describes the devil dances of the Eskimo “angikoks” and his life as a member of Keedluk’s family.
Notes:
1) The “wife and two small children” of Keedluk (aka Qillaq/K’illak) were undoubtedly Tabitia Taututtiaq (aka Taututsiak / Tooteecheak / Tautoocheak) and their daughters Ittuliaq (aka Iktuliak / Ituliaq / Itulliaq / Etuliak), born about 1901, and her younger sister Hanna(h) Siksik. Both of these children are said to actually be Cleveland’s biological children. Cleveland also appears to have had at least one other child about this time by another Inuit woman: Matthew Qinnguq (aka Kinnguq, Kinnuq, Kringo, "Madeye") said to have been born about 1900-05 in Wager Bay. I haven’t learned who his mother is.
2) Who was Keedluk’s adopted son, “Tommy”?
3) Ever heard of “Maluxeetuk, the Eskimo whaling grounds on Lyon Inlet”?
4) Have you ever heard of this knife called a “punard”? What about the drill he says was used to bore through ice?
5) Have you heard of Cleveland’s name “Shukwahtee”? Is his translation of “boat-steerer” accurate?
6) Was Cleveland accurate in calling “white whale skin” “a great delicacy in the Arctic” during these times?
7) What was this expression “Wah-gud-toonga” in Inuktitut? Is there a better translation?
8) Is Cleveland accurate in his description of the negative relationship between the Inuit of the Repulse Bay area and the natives in the south?