"A FLOATING TRADING POST IN THE FAR NORTH - HUNTING SEALS IN THE COMPANY OF ESKIMOS"
The following is a transcription of the fifth 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, May 11, 1924:]
A FLOATING TRADING POST IN THE FAR NORTH - HUNTING SEALS IN THE COMPANY OF ESKIMOS
Something in Northland Draws a Man Back So Captain Cleveland Discovers
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 one more Sunday, crammed with unusual incidents and many thrills. The fifth story, presented herewith, is entitled,
A Floating Trading Post
There is something about the north that draws a man back. It can’t be explained. It is just that something “gets” you. I have spent the best part of 31 years in the Arctic. I had been ten years there without a break when I came home last summer. Yet I look forward to the expiration of my leave in June, when I shall return to Repulse Bay to stay eight years longer.
I looked forward with the same zest to going back after my return with the Scots in 1908 and my brief winter at home. I was completely happy when I began my five years command of the floating trading post, the Ernest Williams, in 1909. No ghosts from out my past experience, no presentiments of starving times or dangers ahead arose to chill my eagerness.
It was like greeting an old friend to steam in on the doughty Active and find the Williams riding at anchor where we had left her, still wearing icicles and snow from her winter garb. There was real greeting of old friends when the Eskimos swarmed up in their boats to welcome back their adopted tribesman.
Despite my protests that I would not need a crew, my employers, Kinnes & Company of Dundee, had sent with me the usual complement of three, a cook, a carpenter, and a harpooner. A year with my crew only strengthened my original opinion that they were a needless expense. When the Active next came in I asked her to take back a message suggesting that they be withdrawn. A year later the suggestion was carried out. The men were glad to go, for the north hadn’t woven its spell around them. I missed them only once, and then sorely, but that comes later in the story.
Could Handle It Alone Then
If trading with the Eskimos had then reached the proportions it has now, I might not have dispensed so readily with my assistants. At that time I could easily handle alone the exchange of trade articles for the furs and walrus skin the Eskimos brought to the ship; in the summer it was the old routine of going north for whaling and catching walrus. The Active saw to it that her yearly trips were profitable, regardless of what I collected for her to take back. On her way up she left miners at Lake Harbor on Hudson Straits, some 800 miles south, to dig mica until her return, and she collected walrus from southern Eskimos along the way.
The Williams was much roomier than any house could have been, but there was no other advantage to me in having a floating trading post. In a way it was a disadvantage. There is no harbor at Repulse Bay. The Williams was berthed in the best place we could find for an anchorage - a shallow expanse bounded by four of the Kickerton Islands, but open to the currents that flowed between them. She rocked gently above her anchors in summer, but in winter was held firm in a vise of ice. To avoid risk of losing our anchors when the ice went out in the spring, we drew them up as soon as there was ice thick enough to hold the schooner still. If the ice broke gradually in the spring, all was well. We could heave the anchors over when she began to drift, and she would hold her own against the shifting currents. If the ice went out with a rush, there was nothing to do but give her head and let her go - no anchors could hold her.
Pack Ice Carries Off Ship
The ice was still firm when we started for the whaling grounds the first spring after my return, the Eskimos, Scotty the harpooner, and I, leaving the ship in charge of the cook and the carpenter. We made the outward trip over the ice, hauling our boats by dog team. Two months later we returned by water towing our dogs and sleds and laden with the spoils of our summer work.
As we slipped into the channel between two of the islands, we looked eagerly ahead for sight of the Williams. The familiar contours of the barren land came into range, but we saw no masts. A widening afforded an unobstructed view of the anchoring place of the schooner between the four islands. The water rippled blue, cold, and empty. The Williams was gone.
Our oars slumped. “In the deil’s name, skipper, whaur’s the ship?” shouted Scotty from the rear. My own voice sounded strange to me as I flung back that he knew as much about that as I did. Remembrance of the years of hardship I had endured when the Francis Allen failed me, flashed through my mind. Impossible, I answered my thoughts. The cook and the carpenter never voluntarily have deserted Scotty and me. Perhaps some accident had befallen the vessel.
I signaled my crew, and we rowed toward the opposite shore. Skin tents on the far edge of Rabbit Island came into view, reassurance that the Eskimos we had left behind were still there. We hallooed. Men appeared, hastened to the water’s edge, and rowed to meet us. They quickly relieved our anxiety. They explained that the big boat was still there, the coblooners aboard had moved her, that was all. They would lead the way.
We followed into the channel between hilly Lookout Island and Rabbit.
Lost Both Anchors
Tied fast from shore to shore of a cove in the side of Lookout Island hidden from view by Lookout Hill until we were upon her, the Ernest Williams rode the shallow water. She had lost both anchors. When the ice went out a few weeks after I left the schooner it went with a rush. The cook and the carpenter dropped both anchors in an attempt to keep the Williams from being carried away. The anchor chains snapped like twine and the Williams was swept out toward Fox channel. There the current subsided and the two men managed to get the schooner into the cove where she awaited my return.
News more distressing than the loss of the anchors awaited me. The men who had guided us to the ship had waited silently, with characteristic Eskimo patience and courtesy, until the cook and the carpenter had finished their explanation. They came up and asked whether I could come with them. The evil spirits had sorely affected their camp on Rabbit Island, they said. As many persons as one could count on both hands five times had come down with a strange illness and died. Most of them were young persons and children. Many were ill even now. Their angikoks had tried to drive the evil spirits away, but the spells were not strong enough. No doubt with aid from myself and Keedluk they could banish the illness.
Here was need for prompt action. The anchors could wait. I am no physician, and I had none but the simplest medicines. From the Eskimos’ description of the illness, I guessed that an epidemic of dysentery was raging, but I was not sure, and I would have had nothing to give for it had I known. I ordered flour, kerosene, and a few staple provisions put in my boat, and set out immediately for the island. The cook and the carpenter were astonished that the Eskimos had given them no inkling all summer of their trouble, but I was not. Eskimos do not ask help of strangers.
Fights Epidemic Without Medicine
I found conditions on the island wretched. It had been used as a camping spot almost continuously since the Williams arrived three years back. Lacking running streams, the Eskimos drank from pools of melted snow gathered in the hollows, which had been standing all summer. They buried their dead beneath piles of stones on the same island. Emaciated, feverish sick children were drinking from the polluted pools and eating seal and walrus fat as a regular diet when I arrived.
I sent for water from another island, boiled it, and mixed it with flour to make a thin, gruel-like paste. I ordered that the children should have nothing else for food or drink until I gave permission, but I had to disguise this simple measure elaborately with angikok ceremonial to give the Eskimos confidence in it. I wore my angikok belt, and went through the ritual for exercising evil spirits. What I had done was a fumble in the dark, but the prescription worked. My patients began to mend, and there were no more deaths. My fame as an angikok grew accordingly. The wails of mothers spending ten days of mourning in the seclusion of their tents died away. The fathers did not mourn. Among the Eskimos mourning is left to the women.
I persuaded my fellow tribesmen to leave Rabbit Island by telling them that it was infected with evil spirits. They believed that, but they laughed and thought I was joking when I tried to teach them the principles of sanitation.
The next spring I gave the cook and carpenter instructions to cover all emergencies I could think of, and again went north over the ice. I went several [illegible] to Beacon Island to cache there the bulk of our provisions for the whaling season, and proceeded with Keedluk, the harpooner, and the usual complement of Eskimos with their families directly to Maluxeetuk. We took two boats and supplies for two weeks on our dog teams. Maluxeetuk is on the north shore of Lyon Inlet; Beacon Island lies near the south shore of Gore Bay, which is the next bay below the inlet. It is only a matter of a day’s sail under fair conditions from Maluxeetuk to the island.
Seal Hunting Was Good
Seal hunting was good at Maluxeetuk. The seal spirit was looking out for us with a goodly number of his millions of eyes acquired through the centuries in which the Eskimos have followed the custom of dropping an eye of each slain seal through the ice as an offering for that very purpose.
The time came to go to Beacon Island to bring up the rest of our supplies. We had no taste for living exclusively on seal meat when white man’s food was within reach. Keedluk and the three other men of my crew went with me as a matter of course. The Eskimo never separates himself from his family when he can avoid it, so our boat carried in addition three women and a half a dozen young children, two of them babes in arms. We stowed the last of the salt pork and hard biscuit - all the food there was left - in our boat. Our comrades who stayed behind counted on getting enough game to take care of them until our return.
The evening before we set out the pack ice which eternally whitens Fox channel, rocked lazily several hundred yards from shore, glittering in rainbow colors. During the night a south wind came up and pushed the pack nearer land. We thought little of the change. A land wind would soon carry the ice out again.
The next morning as we rounded the long point which separates Gore Bay from Lyon Inlet the pack moved closer in. The great thickness of the ice below the water line prevented it from pushing all the way to land. It stuck on the sloping bottom where shallow water begins. Thus a narrow channel was left for us, between a wall of ice on one side and the rocky land on the other. Our progress became difficult and slow. The channel narrowed so that we had to take down sail and pole and row, according to the width and depth of the water. At low tide the channel ceased to exist; our keel rested in shallow mud.
Children Eat First in Famine
Taking advantage of the night tide as well as the day, we crawled along for several days. Our voyage lengthened beyond all expectations, forced as we were to skirt every one of the hundreds of irregularities of the shore line. From the moment the closing in of the ice on the first day warned us that it might be long before we reached our cache, we set aside all the little food we had for the children. Children first, always, is a law of the Eskimo code. Even the nursing mothers refused to eat. Everything that was handed them they hoarded for the older children. At that the children received short rations. Sometimes they wailed that they were hungry, but on the whole they were amazingly patient and brave.
The fourth day brought us to the abrupt termination of the slender channel. The tide no longer made any difference. The ice ahead had jammed even with the land, and farther on had piled up on the shore. It stretched as far as the eye could reach like a series of mountain ranges cleft by deep, narrow ravines. We could no more cross it on foot than our boat could thread a way among its labyrinths. Still many miles from our goal, for we had barely entered Gore Bay, we pulled the boat ashore and made camp, the Eskimo families occupying a single tent, one man and I the shelter of the boat.
At Least Had Water
There was no game. The lack of open water kept seals from approaching shore. What scant scraps of food were left were doled out to the children. We grown-ups were famished, but we at least had water to drink. Running streams on the mainland supplied us. The Eskimos remembered that a coarse grass with an edible root grew near the spot where we had camped. We spent our days roaming the bare slopes in search of these roots. It took miles of walking to collect a small mess of them. We had kerosene and matches in our boat, and with dry moss as fuel built fires to boil the roots. They contained no nourishment, but they filled the vacancy within us and stayed the pangs of hunger. The only living creatures that came our way were snowbirds, so small that when we shot them they were reduced to a bullet hole and a few feathers. The women and children spent hours trying to bring them down with stones. The moment a bird fell a woman would strip it of feathers and break it open with her fingers. The next second her child would have disposed of it in two bites. No one thought of stopping to cook the tiny things.
Four days, five days, a week, ten days passed, and still we remained marooned dragging ourselves more wearily every day in search of roots. The solace of tobacco and the persistence of calm, mild weather lessened our suffering, yet we grew to hate the calm. Wind, and wind only could break the barrier of ice which held us. A land wind rising on the eleventh night awakened us with its raw blast, but it cheered as well as chilled us. The night was bright enough for us to watch the reluctant retreat of the ice before the wind.
The next morning the stubborn pack was perhaps an eighth of a mile off the land. It still forbade our crossing in a straight line from where we were camped to Beacon Island, but the continuing wind promised that we might safely resume our skirting of the shore. That we did with all the energy left in us. The channel widened constantly, and a day and a half brought us to the island and the cache. We fell upon the food like wolves. We gorged so that we deserved to be violently ill, but we were not. Perhaps the roots we had eaten had fortified our digesting against this sudden plenty after long abstinence.
During our day’s rest on Beacon Island the ice moved out as swiftly as it had come in, and the water was soon clear for our return journey to Maluxeetuk by the shortest route. Our comrades had not suffered in our absence, for they had been able to catch fish in the salmon river and had taken an abundance of game. They had become anxious about us, but the ice pack had hemmed them in as it had us, preventing their coming in search of us.
Handles Ship Single Handed
When we returned to the Williams weeks later, the Active was in and the cook, the carpenter, and the harpooner made ready to return to Scotland. Scotty’s vivid account of our starving time did not heighten the regard of the other two for the country; they counted themselves fortunate to get away before any such ill luck befell them. I wished them Godspeed, and soon was again alone with the Eskimos.
I was no longer, as I once had been, the only white man in the country. During the five years I was master of the Ernest Williams, Captain Stoner, Arctic agent of my old employers, and his crew were in and out every year, but for all I saw or heard of them in a friendly way they might have been in Jericho. I had not forgotten the bitter words that led up to the fight Stoner and I had over the boat he wanted to burn; I did not doubt he knew that on my return home I had definitely checked up his lie about having burned the $25,000 worth of skins and furs left at my old post. The quarrel between us was of his making, and I left it to him to make the first move to patch it up.
The Williams was to go back to Scotland when I did in August of the fifth year. My instructions were to sail her to Cape Fullerton, 420 miles south, where the Active would meet us with a crew to man the schooner for the ocean trip. When the time for departure rolled around I had quite a passenger list for Fullerton. The most tried and true of my friends among the natives had been my shipmates since my white crew left three years before. They had assisted me with ship’s routine during the winters, and I hoped that they would be some help on the way to Fullerton. Their families were to accompany us, and we were taking along their dogs and sleds, so that they could transport back to their camp the supplies the Active would have for them. The prospect of a voyage on the big ship, so much larger than anything on which they had traveled before, appealed to their fancy. As so often happens, the anticipation was pleasanter than the reality.
Even the Eskimos were solemn as the anchors of the Williams were hoisted up on creaking chains for the last time. The schooner looked strangely naked with the big deckhouse torn away to make room for handling the sails. The canvas came out of its lockers clammy after its several year’s storage. With a mighty cracking and groaning the Williams answered the wind; she seemed to be taking a deep breath as she reawakened to life as a ship. A fair breeze carried her out of Repulse Bay into the ice dotted water of Fox channel. As if sympathizing with the regret I felt at leaving the region which had become home to me, the pack of Eskimo dogs in the whaleboat we were towing howled miserably, and the wind died to a calm. The tide swung up towards Big Island, off the coast to Southampton.
The water was everywhere so deep and the night grew so overcast that we did not struggle to resist the swing of the current. Under the shelter of a cliff on the side of Big Island we dropped anchor. After an hour the wind came up. Snow began to fall and the night grew thicker. The wind blew toward Big Island. It swelled to a gale. Our cliff was no longer a protection; it speedily became a menace. The Williams rolled so that she dipped water and threatened to scrape her masts against the rock.
To avoid being swamped and crushed against the cliff, I was forced to sail out into the storm. How I wished for even one man of that white crew I had shipped back to Dundee. My Eskimos were willing, but inexperienced and awkward. I had them haul one anchor up entirely and lift the other to the 30 fathom shackle to hold us steady while I hoisted the jibs. The moment the wind pointed our nose away from land I ordered them to slip the anchor; we could not afford to delay long enough to haul it up. The Williams rounded the point of Big Islands with so little margin to spare that I could touch the cliff with my hands as we passed. The next moment we were careening through the sea under full sail. I dared not leave the wheel to direct the Eskimos how to take in canvas. We blundered through heaving pack ice. It was so dark I could not see the ice until we were almost upon it. I dodged ice all night long. Morning came blowing a living gale. As we grazed a monstrous ice pack, I caught a glimpse of a great gray sea sweeping over the whaleboat in which Johnny Bull’s wretched dogs had weathered the night. A pup perched on the gunwale was flung high, then swallowed in the foam, and the boat disappeared forever.
Comments and Questions:
* Most sources refer to this vessel as the Ernest William not the “Ernest Williams” as Cleveland does in this article. (He also misspells the Francis Allyn as the “Francis Allen”.)
* Cleveland claims to have left Hudson Bay with the Scots in 1908, followed by a “brief winter at home,” before beginning “five years command” of the Ernest William in 1909. However, a variety of news reports suggests that he remembered this incorrectly. According to news reports at the time, Cleveland left Hudson Bay for Dundee in late 1905, and returned to the US that December. Several independent sources (like the book Whaling and Eskimos by W. Gillies Ross) state that the Ernest William left for Scotland in the autumn of 1910, having been in Nunavut since 1902. Therefore, Cleveland probably skippered the Ernest William from 1906 until 1910.
* Where are the Kickerton Islands, where the Ernest William was anchored? (Including Lookout Island, Rabbit Island, and at least two other islands…) I assume it is not too far from (and east of) Repulse Bay.
* Is anyone familiar with this famine (c. 1907) which Cleveland said killed fifty people on Rabbit Island? Or have you seen references to it in books?
* We can assume that some of the children on the trip to Beacon Island with Keedluk were Cleveland’s biological children. By 1908 Cleveland had fathered Ittuliaq and Hannah Siksik (and perhaps Nangaat Issigaitok and Siusarnaat?) with Taututtiaq; as well as Qiatsuk (with Kasugiaq); Qinnguq; and Mary Arnaquatsaaq (with Oleepeka.) Perhaps some of them were aboard on this journey? Before Cleveland left in 1910, he also evidently fathered Elizabeth Inukpaujaq (with Valerie Qalingaq.)