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Ann Meekitjuk Hanson
I can say one last piece about who we are. A lot of our ancestors were whalers, either Inuit or coming from Scotland, Ireland or America. That is our legacy.
When I first talked about our ancestors being whalers, would they be Inuit or white men, it didn't matter who they were, because even if they were white they are still our ancestors. We need to respect who they were. I respect who they were, because they were whalers. I have heard stories of how and what they did, because I have relatives who were my ancestors who used to be whalers. We need to respect our history, I respect the history. Up to today we are still here because of our ancestors. This is very important to know about for us, Inuit, in our land because whalers were our ancestors. This is still with us today. Let us respect our history and respect who we are today because of those whalers. Thank you.
W. Gillies Ross
My name is Gil Ross. I’ve been a teacher for 35 years, and I’ve been studying whaling in the Canadian Arctic since 1964. I’ve written a few things about it. I’ve interviewed a few Inuit in Pangnirtung, and it’s a subject of deep interest to me, and I hope to you.
Whaling was one of the most interesting industries in the world. It extended probably around the globe. Whalers were hunting from the Arctic down to the Antarctic. They were hunting in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. The whalers went virtually everywhere. The participating countries are also interesting. A number of countries, mostly in Europe, but also the United States, Japan and some others, were involved in whaling. It was an international activity that was geographically very widespread.
From the point of view of Northern Canada, the story starts at the time of Jacques Cartier, there had been a fishery down in the Strait of Belle Isle, called the Grand Bay whaling ground. In the 1540s, they were whaling off the Labrador coast, and then, starting about 1610, in Spittsbergen. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, whalers began to investigate this territory here. The name for the whole thing is the Davis Strait whaling grounds or the Davis Strait whale fishery (even though the whale was not really a fish).
This was monopolized by the Dutch, with a few German and other countries involved. In the 1700s, they whaled for more than a century along this coast. Later, the British came into the picture and whaled along what they called the west side, the coast of Baffin Island. For a whole century, the Dutch and a few British ships were confined to this Greenland coast, but they killed a lot of whales. They made thousands of voyages, up to about 1802.
British whalers pressed farther north in the 1800s. Ice distribution was the limiting factor for a whaling ship’s itinerary. This is the middle of May. Ships had no problem coming around Cape Farewell and up into Davis Strait. They normally came first to the ice edge, because the whales liked to locate themselves near the edge of the floe of pack ice, to feed.
About the 1st of April, ships would get here. There was spray freezing on the rigging. The temperature was low. Conditions were atrocious. It was a very dangerous fishery. As the season went on, this ice edge would migrate back as a result of melting. By the middle of May, the ice edge is there, and the ships could go farther north.
The Honourable Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, Commissioner of Nunavut, explains how Inuit ancestors were whalers, would they be Inuit, Scottish or American, and that this heritage is something to be proud of. Professor W. Gillies Ross describes the beginning of the whale hunt in North America firstly in the Strait of Belle Isle and later heading North along the Labrador Coast and up to the Spitsbergen islands until the whalers pursued their prey in the Davis Strait from the early eighteen century.
W. Gillies Ross
By June, they could advance right up to there.
They had to keep close to the Greenland coast because the ice in here is composed of individual floes of various sizes. These flows move with the currents but they are also affected directly by winds. At the same time, there is an area of open water called the North Water, a polynya which remains icefree, up here. The problem was get there. That usually wasn’t done until July. In July, this ice barrier would relax and the ships could go into the North Water, where there was hardly any ice, and then make their way to Pond Inlet. For some ecological reason, Pond Inlet seems to have been a gathering ground for whales in June and July. And it was a very productive fishing ground.
One more point about the ice: the whalers did not go into the deep fjords early in the season because they were blocked by ice. They were solid with landfast or thick ice. That fixed ice was a barrier. They couldn’t even get into Pond Inlet in the month of June. They would stop at the fast ice edge, the floe edge, put their ice anchors in the ice, lower their boats and go out whaling from there in the boats. Sometimes there were 20 or 30 ships at the floe edge off Pond Inlet, all with their boats out, little flags waving, making signals, following the whales, harpooning them and towing them back to the ship.
Many whales were wounded and died later. One man, in 1823, described the smell as incredible. He said everywhere you could look you could see the spouts of whales alive at the surface but there were also bodies of whales drifting around.
That was the first destination. The only way to get there was by this north around route, because, when the ice melts, the very worst place for ice in the Davis Strait-Baffin Bay area is along this coast. If you look at the ice distribution in August, around the middle of the 19th century when the climate was considerably colder than it is now, you would find something like that in the middle of August. It was very dangerous to try to get into the coast. If you did get into the coast, because of the ice, you couldn’t get into the fjords, you couldn’t get into land, you couldn’t make contact with Inuit and establish a shore station.
They would make their way down here through the ice floes very carefully. If they got the opportunity, they would put in here at Durban Island, around September. That was the last stop. They would send the boats out once more for whales because the whales were moving down this coast. They were following the whales.
Professor Ross explains that as the ice was receding in the Davis Strait because of warmer temperature in July, the whaling ships could penetrate deeper in the Strait until they reached the North water polynya. Dozens of whaling ships would then hunt in the Pond Inlet area where the whales were abundant and sailed South to Durban from where they departed for their home port.
Dorothy Harley Eber
I am Dorothy Harley Eber.
I had the great good luck to go up North in 1968 to interview a lot of the people who were alive then, who had been on the whaling boats and knew whaling stories. One of my grants was from the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and all my interviews are actually archived there today. One summer I went to Kimmirut and Cape Dorset to interview people and then the next summer I went up the Hudson Bay coast and to Arviat and Chesterfield Inlet and a number of places I’d never been before in the Keewatin area. I had the chance to talk to some of these people who were all pretty elderly and I felt that I was just in time to get stories of the whaling days.
I think the whaling days were so important to the Inuit; that period influences people up to this day.
The Scotch whalers came in 1817. There were two vessels that came across Baffin Bay and that were around the Pond Inlet area. After that, because those two vessels found so many whales, there were tremendous numbers of whalers that arrived each year.
For a number of years they rock-nosed down the coast and then they eventually discovered Cumberland Sound where they found that they could winter over by freezing in their vessels. There was whaling there for many years, eighty years or so. Later, they established the shore stations which altered Inuit life totally too.
W. Gillies Ross
No ships got over to the west land until 1819 or 1820. There’s a line like that: before 1820 and after 1820. It was the voyage of Sir John Ross into Lancaster Sound that drew attention to the fact that there were whales over on the west side. It showed people how they could get there. Formerly, it had been regarded as an ice barrier and impossible to get through. Strangely enough, there are a couple of references that indicate that maybe in the 1700s the Dutch were getting across to Baffin Island here in the narrow part. It’s 200 miles wide, you can see across it. There are a few early maps that indicate that they went over there occasionally.
In 1820, and new whaling routine was established. It’s a counter clockwise circuit of Baffin Bay, Davis Strait, with a final stop here at Durban Island. That was one itinerary. At that time Cumberland Sound was not used because it was not known. It was not on the maps. It was only vaguely known from the explorations of John Davis, 200 years before. But no whalers got there until 1840. William Penny, a Scotsman, went in there in 1840. He knew about it because he had been talking to Inuit at Durban. He was born in Peterhead but he sailed from Aberdeen. This place at Durban was the last stopping place for whalers before they went back to England and Scotland. It began to attract Inuit from Cumberland Sound.
The one Inuk he was most interested in, Inulluapik was from a place on the south coast, Qimmiqsut (Nimigen Island). He and his family had travelled all the way around Cumberland Sound and Cumberland Peninsula, in an umiak made out of walrus skin, to take up residence at a place where they could see the whalers on an annual basis. Penny took Inulluapik back to Scotland and brought him back the next year on a different ship and returned him to his home at Qimmiqsut. But before 1840, that was not a part of the whaling routine.
Dorothy H. Eber narrates how she got the opportunity to conduct oral history research in the Eastern Arctic at a time when the last Inuit with whaling experience were still alive. Professor Ross describes the counter clockwise routine of whaling ships in the Davis Strait until William Penny guided by Inulluapik sailed into the Cumberland Sound in 1840.
Pushing Through the Davis Strait Ice floes
The Whalers from Before
an extract from the book Saqiyuq
I only heard about the whalers from before, from stories a long, long time ago. I never actually lived with them or saw them. In the old days, before I was even conceived, there were whalers who would visit Inuit in their camps. I heard about them from the elders when I was growing up. Between Igloolik and Pond Inlet, that is where the whalers were.
There is a story that was told to me. I was with my husband and we were visiting his mother, his real mother. My husband and his mother were separated when my husband was a child. He was just a baby when she moved away. They lived apart and didn't meet each other until many years later when they were both quite old. My husband was raised by another woman, his father's wife. My husband and I, we went to see his real mother not too long ago. He started asking her questions about his ancestors. He could never accept the fact that he had Qallunaat blood in him, so when we met her after all those years he confronted her. He asked her why she was half Qallunaat, why she had a Qallunaat father. My husband, he wanted to ask her that. He never liked the Qallunaat blood that was in him, so he confronted his mother and asked her why he had a Qallunaat grandfather.
My husband's mother, when he asked her that, told us about a whaler called Sakkuartirungniq who was up here for awhile. He was a Qallunaaq and he had lots of children up North. My husband's mother was one of his children. That is the reason why my husband has Qallunaat blood in him. We were asking my husband's mother some questions because he wanted to find out, he wanted to know. Before she answered she started laughing. She said, Those whalers that came up here, they were just men! and she told us how there were no women whalers. Lots of the whalers were married and had children already in the South, but they left their families in the South for many, many months to come up here to work catching whales. They stayed up here for a long, long time.
She told us how the whalers back then travelled with sails, since they didn't have motors. I have seen pictures of whaling boats, and the ends of the boats are pointed and they have sails on them. Sometimes when the ships were frozen in, they would stay all through the winter and when the ice melted, they would go back to their towns.
My husband's grandfather's name was Sakkuartirungniq. The Netsilingmiut were the ones who named him. His English name was George Washington Cleveland. When my husband asked his mother why her father was Sakkuartirungniq, she answered, "Before the whalers, there were no Qallunaat men up here. Then the whalers came."
She explained how Inuit had never seen Qallunaat before the whalers. They brought pots and beads and rifles from the South, and the Inuit started trading with them. The whalers would put their things out and ask the Inuit men to trade the women they were living with for a rifle or a pot or some beads. They would trade. They didn't think about having Qallunaat-blooded children – they traded their wives for things like rifles and pots. My husband's grandmother was happily married. It was her husband's idea that she should go to the Qallunaat, and then she got pregnant. That is why my husband is Qallunaat-blooded. He has Sakkuartirungniq's blood. I guess my children do too.
Lots of Inuit had the Qallunaat whalers' children. It was the husbands' idea to trade their wives for stuff. My husband's mother remembered meeting somebody from Igloolik whose father was also Sakkuartirungniq, so he was her half-brother. Sakkuartirungniq was a famous whaler who moved around a lot, so there were lots of women who had his babies. He had children all over the place; not in Pond Inlet but in South Baffin, Pangnirtung, and the Hudson Bay and Keewatin areas. He had lots of children in the Keewatin area. Myself, I know of four other Inuit besides my husband's mother who are also Sakkuartirungniq's children. Only two of them are still alive. They all have separate mothers. One time I was in Iqaluit and I found out there was someone living there who was named after Sakkuartirungniq. He was one of his grandchildren, just like my husband. I have seen this man lots of times when I have gone to Iqaluit.
My father, Arvaarluk, told me a story once when I was a child. He told me about how when he was young and he lived in a sod-house, they were given tea, tobacco, and biscuits from the whalers. He said that he only used the rifles and the bullets that the whalers gave him. At that time the Inuit didn't drink tea and eat biscuits, they ate Inuit food from the land. The tea, biscuits, and tobacco, he didn't know what to do with them. He put them on the shelf above the sleeping mat and left them there. Every time the sod-house began dripping from the roof, they would get wet and when the Qallunaat food started to rot, so he threw it away.
A lot of times when Inuit would receive things from whalers, they would get confused and not know what to do with the stuff. My grandmother told me about how back then they didn't have any knives. Ulus were made of stone at the time, and every time they had to sharpen an ulu they would use rocks. To find out if it was sharp enough, they would hold it up high and see if the sun shone through it – that is what they used to do. When the ulu was clear and thin at the end, then they would know that ulu was sharp. My grandmother said that when the whalers brought knives in, they didn't know what they were. They didn't know that steel could be very sharp, even if it was not clear or thin. There weren't any Qallunaat around back then to tell them about steel. That is what my grandmother told me. That is what she knew from before.
Yes, my grandmother, Kaukjak, used to tell me jokes and stories about whalers. I can remember being a child in her sod-house. After my grandfather Nutarariaq died, and my father went out hunting, Kaukjak used to take care of us. I remember all of us children, we would all be lying in bed together before we fell asleep, and my grandmother would lie beside us and tell us stories about the whalers. She didn't remember all that much about the whalers, but she told us a story about how one day she was given beads. A whaler brought them to her house. She said she was very afraid of Qallunaat. She was very afraid at the time, and she thought that the whaler was giving her the beads because he wanted to have sex with her. She was with her children in a tent not far from the ship, and he arrived at the tent with the beads. He walked in the door with the beads. She said she remembered staring at the beads and being terrified of this Qallunaaq. My grandmother said she remembered how he stood in the doorway, and she looked up at him; she just stared at him and didn't move. She was scared! She said that the whaler was nervous and red and that after a while he sensed that she was afraid so he left her with the pot of beads. He left in a hurry. She had never seen beads before, so she put them in a bag and took the pot. When she was telling the story she used to motion with her hands how big the bag was.
There were a lot of beads in that pot and my grandmother said she was so happy to have received them. They were different colours. She said that at first she thought they were food, so she started chewing them. She put them in her mouth and then spit them out. After a while she took out a beautiful sealskin she had been saving and sewed the beads onto it. That is what she told us.
She told us this story because the pot that the beads were in was still around when I was a child. She was so old then. She used to tell us the story about the pot because it was unusual to have a pot at the time. There were no Hudson's Bay stores, no trading posts when she got it. She got the pot from the whaler that day, and many years later when she was my grandmother telling me stories, that pot was still her prized possession. She kept it until the day she died.
When my grandmother told me this other story, I was shocked! She said that sometimes the whalers ran out of food from the South and then they would eat whale meat and maktarq. Since they couldn't get the Hudson's Bay Company foods or Qallunaat food, they would eat Inuit meat. They used to help each other back then, the Qallunaat and the Inuit. Inuit people would make caribou clothing for the Qallunaat, and the Qallunaat would have their own dog teams. They lived and talked just like us after they had been here for a long time.
At that time there were no interpreters. Some of the whalers would learn Inuktitut, and the Inuit who were working with them would start speaking English. They would start speaking English even though they didn't go to school. After working with Qallunaat, they would learn English. We used to call people who could speak two langauges tusaaji. Inuit, they lived a miracle life in the old days. They knew what Qallunaat food to eat and what not to eat. If they thought that the food was bad for them, they wouldn't eat it. They wouldn't touch it. Not like the Bay foods now.
My grandmother said that the whalers used to have small boats, tiny boats that they used to go hunting. They would row the boat and they would sing songs. It was the Qallunaat who would sing and the Inuit learned those songs. I think Inuit had an easy time learning whalers' songs and music. The whalers would give them candies or sweets and even if they were frozen, they were still good. There was no pop at the time. Sometimes when the whalers would come, they would bring big barrels of molasses. They would make wine out of it and they would drink wine. Once in a while, not all the time, they would make a big barrel of wine. The whalers who were up here, at times they acted just like the Inuit.
They used to have great dances back then, the whalers and the Inuit, but not drunk dances. They would dance, but with an accordion. They were all very happy. In the igluvigait, on the decks of the ships, or in the qaggiq, they would dance. After a hard day of work they would dance. In the summertime they would dance outside. The whalers would bring record players up, and they would wind up the record player and put the needle on and play the record. They would dance away until it had to be wound up again. That is how they danced. Towards the end it would slow down. The records they had, every time they would drop them they would break into small pieces. I guess they were not made like today's record players. The songs and music that the whalers had, we knew those songs quite well when I was a child, even after the whalers had left. We used to sing whaler songs. We still sing them today. That is what it was like back then, when the whalers were up here. That is what my grandmother used to tell me. That is what I have heard.
Apphia Agalakti Awa
In Saqiyuq
McGill Queen's University Press
Edited by Nancy Wachovitch
The Davis Strait Fishery
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The Scottish whaler Maud moored near an iceberg
Even though the whale is not really a fish, there was what was called a whale fishery as early as the time of Jacques Cartier, in the early 16th century. This was the Grand Bay whaling ground, in the Strait of Belle Isle, between Newfoundland and Labrador. In the 1540s there was whaling off the Labrador coast, and then starting about 1610, whalers moved east into the Greenland Sea and the Spitsbergen area. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, they began to investigate the Davis Strait whaling grounds where they whaled for more than a century.
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Inuit aboard the Scottish Whaler S.S. MAUD
The whale hunt was monopolized by the Dutch at this time, with some North Germans and other countries involved. Later the British entered the picture and whaled along what they called the west side, or the coast of Baffin Island. But for a whole century, up to about 1802, the Dutch and a few British ships made thousands of voyages to the Greenland coast where they killed a lot of whales.
British whalers pressed farther north in the 1800s. Ice distribution was the limiting factor for a whaling ship's itinerary, but ships would come around Greenland's Cape Farewell and up into Davis Strait. They would arrive around the first of April, when conditions were atrocious with the temperature cold and spray freezing on the rigging. It was a very dangerous fishery.
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Reflections of the Scottish whaler Maud
They normally sailed first to the ice edge where the whales liked to feed, and as the season progressed, this floe edge would migrate backwards as a result of melting. By the middle of May, with the ice edge receded, the ships could go farther north, and by June, they could advance right up into Davis Strait. They had to keep close to the Greenland coast because the ice in the strait is composed of individual floes of varying size which move with the currents but which are also affected directly by winds.
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A look aloft at Crow's Nest on the Scottish Whaler MAUD. April 1889
Pond Inlet seems to have been a gathering ground for whales and had very productive fishing waters in June and July, but the problem for the ships was to get there. The whalers did not go into the deep fjords early in the season because they were blocked solid with landfast or thick ice. That fixed ice was a barrier. They couldn't get into Pond Inlet in the month of June, but in July, the ice barrier would relax and the ships could go into the open North Water. This is a polynya, or an area of open water which remains icefree. From here, where there was hardly any ice, the ships could then make their way to Pond Inlet.
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North Baffin
The whalers would stop at the floe edge, put their ice anchors in the ice, lower their boats and go out whaling in them from there. Sometimes there were 20 or 30 ships at the floe edge off Pond Inlet, all with their boats out, little flags waving, making signals, following the whales, harpooning them and towing them back to the ship. Many whales were only wounded and died later. One man, in 1823, described the smell as incredible; he said everywhere you looked you could see the spouts of whales alive at the surface, but there were also bodies of whales drifting around.
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A Circumpolar View
In August, they would make their way back down through the ice floes very carefully, following the whales. We can guess that around the middle of the 19th century, when the climate was considerably colder than it is now, it would have been very dangerous to try to get in to the coast. If you did get in, you couldn't get into the fiords because of the ice, and so you couldn't get onto land and make contact with Inuit and establish a shore station. However if the whalers got the opportunity, they would put in at Durban Island about September. This was the last stop, and here they would send the boats out once more for the whales which were moving down this coast.
From an interview with W. Gillies Ross, Ph.D.
Professor emeritus of geography, Bishop's University