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- Before the Arrival of the Europeans
- Enoosie Nashalik, Pangnirtung Elder Dr Douglas Stenton, Director of Culture and Heritage for the Government of Nunavut Akaka Sataa, Iqaluit Elder
Enoosie Nashalik, Pangnirtung Elder Dr Douglas Stenton, Director of Culture and Heritage for the Government of Nunavut Akaka Sataa, Iqaluit Elder
Enoosie Nashalik
I think it\'s very good today, because we know about our history today. Our ancestors liked the way they used to be and we know about it today. Today, I think that the world seem as if its tangled and confused. In the past they were doing fine, all they did was to hunt for survival and they knew what they were doing even they never knew of who God was but they knew something. I\'m going to say something that is not related to his question. I said that I don\'t know anything about shamans, but some shamans are good shamans that were able to heal a sick person and that time there were no doctors, some were able to practice sorcery, some were able to kill. There were good shamans and there were bad shamans some were able to predict to get food and some would have animals as their spirit.
Doug Stenton
The group that preceded contemporary Inuit are known to archaeologists as the Thule. Based on many years of archaeological research the Thule culture is seen as originating in the north Alaska area and there are a number of hypotheses about why the populations began to move eastward into Canada and Greenland. It’s generally said that this occurred around a thousand years ago, although there is some current opinion that it may have been around 1200 AD when groups initially migrated eastward. Research suggests that the hunting of bowhead whales figured prominently in that move, but it probably wasn’t the only reason. Populations around the world have moved into new areas throughout history, so in this case there could have been other sorts of population pressures and changes that would have encouraged such a migration.
The Thule, who were probably organized in family-based groups, moved eastward and relatively quickly, over several generations, came to occupy most of what is now Nunavut and Arctic Canada and even further south into Labrador and Quebec. We see in many aspects of material culture and other types of activities that the Thule were the biological and cultural ancestors of contemporary Inuit. We can also see those early connections with Alaska stylistically in the archaeological remains, from designs and engravings on artefacts and that sort of thing.
The hunting of the large whales was a very prominent aspect of Thule subsistence and social organization for the early generations, perhaps for the first couple of centuries that they were in the area. There would have to be a great deal of collaboration; if you’ve seen a bowhead whale, you can see that they’re very impressive creatures and that it would require a great number of people, organization and structured leadership for the hunt to be successful in order for the group to survive.
Akaka Sataa
I\'n not sure where my great grandparents, their brothers and sisters came from or where they lived but I\'m sure that they did not live in one place. We would go to different places for wintering when the land froze but before it froze and people who didn\'y have boats would not leave their camps.Dr Douglas Stenton, the head archaeologist of Nunavut who excavated multiple ancient camp sites in the region explains the importance of whale hunting for the ancient Inuit culture called by archaeologists the Thule culture. Two Inuit elders, Akaka Sataa and Enoosie Nashalik, discuss the traditional way of life.
- Dr Douglas Stenton, Director of Culture and Heritage for the Government of Nunavut
In extenso, Part 1 of 2
Dr Douglas Stenton, Director of Culture and Heritage for the Government of Nunavut In extenso, Part 1 of 2
The group that preceded contemporary Inuit are known to archaeologists as the Thule. Based on many years of archaeological research the Thule culture is seen as originating in the north Alaska area and there are a number of hypotheses about why the populations began to move eastward into Canada and Greenland. It’s generally said that this occurred around a thousand years ago, although there is some current opinion that it may have been around 1200 AD when groups initially migrated eastward. Research suggests that the hunting of bowhead whales figured prominently in that move, but it probably wasn’t the only reason. Populations around the world have moved into new areas throughout history, so in this case there could have been other sorts of population pressures and changes that would have encouraged such a migration.
The Thule, who were probably organized in family-based groups, moved eastward and relatively quickly, over several generations, came to occupy most of what is now Nunavut and Arctic Canada and even further south into Labrador and Quebec. We see in many aspects of material culture and other types of activities that the Thule were the biological and cultural ancestors of contemporary Inuit. We can also see those early connections with Alaska stylistically in the archaeological remains, from designs and engravings on artefacts and that sort of thing.
The hunting of the large whales was a very prominent aspect of Thule subsistence and social organization for the early generations, perhaps for the first couple of centuries that they were in the area. There would have to be a great deal of collaboration; if you’ve seen a bowhead whale, you can see that they’re very impressive creatures and that it would require a great number of people, organization and structured leadership for the hunt to be successful in order for the group to survive.Dr Douglas Stenton, the head archaeologist of Nunavut, tells the story of the migration of the Thule Inuit, the ancestors of current day Inuit. He discusses the importance of social cohesion needed to successfully hunt and manoeuvre a bowhead whale.
- Dr Douglas Stenton, Director of Culture and Heritage for the Government of Nunavut
In extenso, Part 2 of 2
Dr Douglas Stenton, Director of Culture and Heritage for the Government of Nunavut In extenso, Part 2 of 2
By the 18th century, when the European and North American whalers came in force, they encountered Inuit populations who were expert hunters of every northern species that you can imagine. It is questionable whether by that time whale hunting played as prominent a role as it did in the early days of the Thule arrival in Nunavut. That’s not to say that the pre-modern Inuit no longer had the skills or knowledge to hunt those animals. Many things may have reduced the availability of the whales in some way by this time, such as restrictions in the range of the bowhead or change in climate conditions with more ice in certain areas. But when we get into the early ethnographic period, other animals had become the mainstay of hunting activities and diet: ring seal, caribou, walrus, other seals, for example. The very large baleen whales were probably still taken, but there had been a shift.
We know from the early ethnographic period, from the work of David Damas and others from the 1800s, that we have these large iglu communities built out on the sea ice for most of the winter, where they were hunting ring seals right at the breathing holes. Again, this required a very complex organization and social structure, but what you see is a shift away from the sedentary sod and whale bone houses to a much more mobile situation with a different species being hunted for subsistence purposes for most of the year.
The Thule, like the Inuit today, would have had a very intimate knowledge of the animal cycles and seasons of their availability and where they would be concentrated, but we see in the archaeological record that the pre-modern Inuit had more of a reliance on such things as migrating caribou herds, for example, particularly in the fall. We see the hunting of seals, walrus, and perhaps some of the smaller whales, and perhaps a larger whale if one presented itself.
In my experience, especially with a Thule winter house where I’ve done a lot of excavations, these houses contained a lot of material and what some books call gadgets. These were very intricate composite weapons for everything from clam digging to bolas for taking birds, harpoons and lances for fishing; there was really nothing beyond the technology and skills of the Thule.
The shift away from the Thule culture might be difficult to reconstruct accurately, but if we look at the Thule, we see that they had the capability to be highly mobile. Archaeologists refer to nomadism as mobility and look at how mobile these groups were. The Thule had the qajaq (kayak), umiak, qamutik and dog teams; they had all this technology that allowed them to be highly mobile. In any season of the year they could go pretty much anywhere they chose to go, for social purposes or for hunting purposes or for whatever reason. There were few, if any, barriers to their travel on land and water. But in very general terms, the changing environmental conditions appear to have played a prominent role in the changes on the types of wildlife that were harvested, and in the numbers and organization of people at different times of the year. When bowhead whale hunting played a very big role, the amount of food was enormous; a single bowhead would mean thousands of kilograms of meat, blubber and bone. All of these things could sustain any number of families through a winter quite easily, so they could remain more sedentary over the winter should they choose to do so. In the summer the groups are ordinarily more mobile, they go to the river to get the fish when they’re coming in, to get eggs from the ducks and geese. They had to have a certain amount of mobility for this, as many species are migratory and you have to be where they’re going to be.
In that change we see archaeologically and ethnographically that there was an abandonment of the Thule winter sites or villages. By the time the early ethnographies were being written the Inuit population had a different settlement/mobility system. While whales could still be taken, there were now large snow camp villages which were themselves mobile. You had a group, and you spread out for a period of time, and when the seals had been hunted out the whole camp could pick up and move to another location on the fast ice. We see quite a change in settlement and subsistence and in the number of people involved from the classic Thule migration to many generations later and several centuries later.
The general theory is that the arrival of the Thule came with the medieval warm period. There may have been reduced ice in many areas of Alaska at that time, expanding the range of the bowhead whales and creating some changes in how they could be hunted. In Alaska the bowhead were hunted from leads in the flow edge whereas here it was open water hunting. But by a few centuries later we get the little ice age and more extensive ice, probably thicker ice in some areas. This would have the effect of reducing the availability and access to the large whales that people may have relied on generations before that, so we see the shift to the hunting of caribou and many different species of seals, although the ring seal was the staple in most areas of Nunavut.
By the time we’re getting into the ethnographic period there may actually have been larger groups. There may have been a certain requirement for that so that you could monitor as many breathing holes as possible. If you have six or seven families together, you would want as many of those breathing holes to be monitored as possible to increase your chances of success in the hunt. It’s interesting to consider that a small Thule winter village could have a population of thirty or thirty-five individuals and that you could have that many or more in a snow house community. In the one case, because you were hunting bowhead whales which provide large quantities of food, you could have forty people and sustain them, and in the other case, in the ethnographic period, you may have needed a larger group but you could still get as much food to sustain them. That’s an interesting parallel.Dr Douglas Stenton, the head archaeologist of Nunavut, describes the sophisticated technology generated by the ancient Thule Inuit culture for all their activities and particularly for transportation. He also discusses the shift in their subsistence economy from hunting whales to smaller games.
- Davis Strait
- Honourable Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, Commissioner of NunavutW. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s UniversityPart 1 of 3
Honourable Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, Commissioner of NunavutW. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s UniversityPart 1 of 3
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, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s University
Part 2 of 3
W. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s University Part 2 of 3
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, Inuit Oral History researcher
W. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s University
Part 3 of 3
Dorothy Harley Eber, Inuit Oral History researcher W. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s University Part 3 of 3
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.
- Cumberland Sound
- Honourable Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, Commissioner of Nunavut
W. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s University
Part 1 of 11
Honourable Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, Commissioner of Nunavut W. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s University Part 1 of 11
Ann Hanson
There was a good thing about having whalers as ancestors. Being an Inuk means to be able to learn something in no time at all.
When the whalers first came up here, they used to bring all sorts of different things. One of them was the accordion. They brought it with them on their ship. The voyage was so long coming up North that when they had nothing to do, they played it.
It was the first time that Inuit had ever seen an accordion player and heard the music. It didn't take very long for Inuit to learn how to use it. Leah Nutaraq told us stories about the whalers. She was one who caught up with the whalers in Cumberland Sound.
When the whalers arrived, Inuit went to see them. There were quite a few people on the ship as it was big. There was a white man carrying an accordion and he played music and sang, and the Inuit started to like hearing him sing. The man asked the young children to dance but they were shy. Leah Nutaraq wasn't a very shy person at the time, she was 8 years old. As the man started to play the accordion and asked again the children to dance, none went up but Leah, thinking that she might receive a gift. That was one of the stories that Leah told.
While talking about the accordion player, there were a lot of people in Kimmirut, it was not only in Kimmirut, who learnt how to use an accordion. I heard about my mother playing as well, I could play it, but not very much.
W. Gillies Ross
Cape Mercy, on Cumberland Sound, is approximately 150 miles from the mouth into the head of the gulf.
During the winter, the edge of the ice would be south of the Sound. This is consolidated ice floes, and fixed ice attached to the coast. After you’ve got floes concentrated but in motion. This is fairly stable. The whales would come up to this ice edge. They may even have wintered at the mouth of Cumberland Sound. As the season went on, and the spring melt occurred, this ice edge would retreat, and the whales would enter the gulf. But at that time the whalers were not there.
The Inuit told Penny and others that there were two times to catch whales at Cumberland Sound: May and September-October, because in the summer they go out and north and they come back in the fall.Ann Hanson tells how the Inuit learned to play accordion from the whalers and that most Inuit women used to play it. Professor Ross explains how the Cumberland Sound is covered with ice in winter. The Inuit told Captain William Penny that the only two seasons to catch whales in the Cumberland Sound were spring and fall, as the whales migrate north during the summertime.
- Meeka Mike, Outfitter, translator and Inuit activist Part 2 of 11
Meeka Mike, Outfitter, translator and Inuit activist Part 2 of 11
Meeka Mike
Being a tranlator, I used to ask questions to elders. I grew up with my parents and grandparents. They were worried about what children were being taught at school. I remember wondering if everything was going well with the Qallunaaq government system when Pangnirtung was becoming a community.
Becoming older, I used to ask my parents how did we live before the Qallunaat arrived? When we started going to school, we were told that we were going to school for a good reason: to have a better and easier life. I wondered what kind of better life was there? We had to go to school so that we may have jobs, have more things and not running into problems. This was the Qallunaaq life style and we did not know their culture or where they came from. My parents especially wanted to keep the Inuit life style alive and they told me that we ate because we hunted for food. That made me understand better the school system which said that we were going to have a better life with no sickness, and that is how we have to live now and we were told that Inuit sickness was not good. I thought about how we lived when I was a child and when there was no Qallunaat. I thought of how good it used to be before the white people arrived. I would not be here today if we had a terrible life back then and if there was very bad sicknesses. Then I would not be here today.
When some Qallunaat were interviewing the elders, I understood that Inuit had a good life, and that they survived the sicknesses that the Qallunaat had introduced here. Inuit almost vanished from Cumberland Sound because of that.
When Mark (Stevenson) and I were researching and counting the qammait in Kekerten we counted about 40. There used to be many Inuit back then, we did not count all the qammait but we estimated that there would have been about 400 Inuit in Kekerten back then. The Qallunaat had recorded that there were about 400 to 500 Inuit. There were Inuit as well in Tinijjut near Pangnirtung. Inuit were scattered around the sound. I asked Mark before, how many there would have been if the Qallunaat did not bring sickness up north, he said that Inuit almost vanished.
I know the people from Pangnirtung and where they came from and even those that I don\'t know of, I was told of their family and relatives, brothers and sisters. So we counted them all and estimated that there would have been about 1200 to 1400 people in the 1800\'s. We estimated the children to be about 240; today we have 300 children. In those days the whole population of Inuit would have been about 1400 altogether. They were dying off when the Qallunaat were first coming up here. This was so uncomfortable to discover, knowing the estimated number of Inuit at that time. We were afraid to loose our land thinking that someone will take it away from us. That was a concern. Today 100 years later, the population of Pangnirtung is approximately1400 to 1600 people.Meeka Mike grew up in Pangnirtung and worked with the anthropologist Mark Stevenson when he was completing an oral history project about Kekerten Island, a former whaling station. She questions here the impact of whaling on her home community.
- W. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s University
Dorothy Harley Eber, Inuit Oral History researcher
Part 3 of 11
W. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s University Dorothy Harley Eber, Inuit Oral History researcher Part 3 of 11
W. Gillies Ross
In the 1840s, the whale hunt was not very successful until people began to think about it and came up with the idea of spending the winter in Cumberland Sound.
That wintering in Cumberland Sound was the invention of an American crew, the crew of the McLellan, who put a dozen men ashore at Qimmiqsut. A square, stonewalled building still exists there that I am fairly certain is the house in which they lived. They used Inuit methods, they adopted Inuit clothing, but of course they had their whale boats and their whaling harpoons and their whaling gear. They caught approximately seventeen whales in one winter, all in the following May.
Penny was the next one to winter there at Nuvujen. He wintered on board his ship. He had some experience in this, because in 1850 he commanded a search expedition for Sir John Franklin. He took two ships into Lancaster Sound, Barrow Strait, and they spent the winter frozen in the ice with other ships, all looking for Sir John Franklin. That gave him confidence, and he said. “Why don’t I do that in Cumberland Sound?” And he did, with great success.
His system immediately took advantage of Inuit labour and expertise. The whaling crew had their whale boats but they found if they put one or two whale boats under the control of Eskimo crews, they were very efficient. They did not pay them, not in money but in manufactured articles such as food and tobacco and so forth.
There are ruins of Penny’s whaling stations at Kekerten. There is now a historic park there. From a base up at Kekerten, Penny had his whale boats and whaling crews taken out to the edge of the ice. At that time, it was 20 miles away. They took all the whaling boats and some tents. They lived in the tents, cooking their own meals. When they spotted whales in the waters, they would go out to catch the whales. They would bring them back to the floe edge, which is firm, butcher them in the water at the floe edge, take the blubber off, load it on Qamutiit and take it back to Kekerten to be stored on board the ships. He had 22 dog teams in Qamutiit going back and forth every day. It was when he thought of wintering there that he had his big success. That example was followed by many other ships, and brought in a completely new epoch of whaling.
Dorothy H. Eber
Near Cape Haven, which was one of the whaling stations, there was a place at Singaijaq where some wooden houses were left abandoned after the whaling ended. When the people who had lived at Singaijaq departed and left the houses vacant, they left their squeezeboxes there, in fact they left many of them. They left them there all winter because they were afraid they would get broken as they travelled around. Then at some point in the year when they were passing through the Singaijaq area, a lot of families who were going hunting in different areas would stop there and they would have music and dancing all night with the squeezeboxes!
People left their squeezeboxes in these houses there until about 1939, when they really understood the whalers weren’t coming back. Then the Inuit started taking down the wood from the cabins and using it for tent floors and so forth. I interviewed one woman whose mother had left her squeezeboxes there in the cabins, and she told how they eventually took the two squeezeboxes away. One got ruined, she said, because the children just broke it up, but the other one remained in good shape for a long time. That music that was heard onboard vessels and in camps was so important; people still play the squeezebox in Nunavut.
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. Then the Americans joined them and started whaling there too. A lot of Inuit either worked for the Scots or for the Americans.Professor Ross explains how the American crew of the whaler McLellan realized that they had to winter in Cumberland Sound to be successful. They did in 1851 and harvested 17 whales. William Penny followed and built a permanent whaling station at Kekerten. From that point on, whalers relied more and more on Inuit for their whaling operations. Dorothy H. Eber tells the story of Inuit keeping their accordions in a wooden construction at Cape Haven, long after the whalers were gone.
- Andrew Dialla, Interpretor/Translator, tour guide
Part 4 of 11
Andrew Dialla, Interpretor/Translator, tour guide Part 4 of 11
Andrew Dialla
When I was a little boy I always knew I was not a real Inuk, my skin is white and when I started going to school they would have us take showers with other kids. Billy and I had white skin while the other kids were very Inuit looking with nice tan skin. That was when I started to realise that we have a Qallunaaq ancestor.
I used to ask my mother who our grandfather was, and she used to say that our grandfather was a great whaling ship captain. That my dad's father was a white man; that our grandfather was a white man from Scotland. My mother used to talk about that and she would show us a picture. We always had a picture where he was wearing sailors clothing and a cap and holding a cigar. A good looking man. Apparently, he was our grandfather according to what our mother told us. Our father never spoke about this, only our mother would tell us the story that he was our grandfather and that his name was Taylor. My mother said our grandfather was from Scotland and that he would come to our area and would give things to my father. He would bring things for dad, things for his son, like clothing and food and even a gramophone at one time.
I was basically obsessed with him, I would try to think of how could he not, and why didn't he ever come back. Did he die over there? We had no idea. Do we have relatives over there? Did he remarry over there? Or did his ship sink and he died that way? Maybe there was no way to find him? That is what I always thought.
My father never told us anything about his father; it was like we never had a grandfather from our father’s side of the family. But only through our mother's story did we find out. As I was growing up I always used to think, maybe there is a way to find the people he used to work with. Our grandfather has probably passed away by now, maybe if I can find a child of one of his fellow seamen, I would be satisfied. That would be enough for me to find someone who could tell me something about what kind of a man was my grandfather.As a young child, Andrew Dialla realised that he and his brother had a paler skin than their school mates. Talking to his mother, Andrew realised that his grand-father had been a Scottish captain named, John Carrington Taylor. For many years of his life, Andrew kept writing in Scotland and kept searching for his distant family.
- Andrew Dialla, Interpretor/Translator, guide
Part 5 of 11
Andrew Dialla, Interpretor/Translator, guide Part 5 of 11
Andrew Dialla
We used to be told that our grandfather was a white man from Scotland. I used to be obsessed with finding out whatever happened to him. I truly wanted to know this when I was growing up. When we went to school in Iqaluit, it was great to have access to a greater number of reading material. We had ready access to many more books. Books documenting the old whaling days. That was when I started finding out what they had been doing in our area. That was when I started looking for addresses to newspapers in England and Scotland and did that for many years. Whenever someone from England came into town and whenever someone from Scotland came into town I always went to them and asked them if they knew of any addresses of newspapers in their town, so I could write to them. So I wrote a bunch of letters over the years basically introducing my name and mentioning who my grandfather was, and asked if any relatives were still alive. But I never received any replies. The only reply I ever received was from one retired Minister, who sounded like an old man by the name of Gavin. He was the only one to ever write to me but it was not a good letter. All he said was that the name Dialla is a bastardisation of Taylor! A name that was taken by a fatherless boy. The Anglicans only told me this bad thing, so I didn't like them after that. I decided to search somewhere else. Whenever I travelled around and found people with the surname Taylor, I would always ask them if they knew their ancestry, maybe we could be related. But years later I realised that there are a great number of Taylors in the world, very many Taylors. I realised how naïve I had been. That I thought I could meet a fellow Taylor after so many years of separation.
It was only when the internet became a reality that I started getting some answers to my quest. There are many ancestor search sites available for those who want to look for people from their past. They are very good sites but they did not help me with my search. Each site would say they found so many names, but if I wanted to open any of them, I would first have to give my credit card number and pay for it to open it. It was very discouraging for a while.
But one day I found a great site where there was a list of newspaper addresses in one page, a listing of numerous newspaper addresses. So I wrote to all of them, I think there were more than 20 addresses, and sent each of them the same letter. Stating that my name is Andrew Dialla and that my grandfather was Captain John Carrington Taylor and said that if you knew him or if your grandfather knew him I would love to hear what kind of a man our grandfather was. But no replies seemed to be coming so I just waited and checked once in a while to see if new ancestry search sites had opened up.
But two years ago, in the month of December, I received a letter from Scotland, from England actually. The letter was from a John McGuinn and as soon as I opened it I read "John Taylor was my grandfather and I grew up at his house." When I read that, I was extremely overjoyed and even yelled out! However in the same letter he also said that he doesn't really believe his grandfather would do something like that because he had been a very good man, and probably would not have done that with an Inuit person. But, we had two pictures of our grandfather, the man that we acknowledged to be our grandfather, because we knew he was our grandfather. So we had the two pictures. I first digitized them and emailed them to John McGuinn, those two pictures. When he wrote back, this is what he wrote, "I opened the pictures and at first I did not really believe you that it is my grandfather, but when my mother, this is what John wrote, when my mother and my wife looked at them my mother right away said, That's Daddy." It was very exciting to hear that! I had already told John " if you do not believe me, a sample of my blood can be taken or a scraping taken from my mouth so that a DNA test can be done to see if we are related. But after I sent the pictures, John wrote back saying there is no need for a blood test, you are my cousin! I was very happy to hear that. So, he is my cousin now, we always refer to each other as cousins now.After years of writing letters to England and Scotland searching for the family of his grandfather, Andrew Dialla finally got an answer. John McGuinn of England answered back, writing that he was the grandson of Captain John C. Taylor. John and Andrew discovered that they were cousins!
- Meeka Mike, Outfitter, translator and Inuit activist
Partie 6 de 11
Meeka Mike, Outfitter, translator and Inuit activist Partie 6 de 11
Meeka Mike
My name is Meeka Mike. I was born in Pangirtung. I used to work at Kekerten Island before it became a historic park. I was working with Marc Stevenson, the anthropologist/archeologist. He used to interview the elders who were born in the times of the whaling days. We used to work there digging the qammait sites of certain families. I was there when the elders were in their 80s and 90s. They were being interviewed about the whaling days, when the whalers used to come up to Cumberland Sound.
I did many things as a young person. There were a few of us who were hired by archeologists to do the digging of the qammait of the families that used to live there. When we weren't working, we used to go to the elders when they were looking around the sites. I approached them and asked them where my grandmother's and father's relatives used to have their qammait and they showed me.
There were about 35 to 40 qarmait that we counted. I had interviewed the elders but did not record them. I was doing that was on my own time.
Figuring out the number of qammait at the time, there would have been about 100 people living there. There were 300 to 400 people in the mid 1800s.
Our job was to excavate certain qammait, to excavate the walk ways, and to ask questions to the elders about what they thought when they were being interviewed by Mark Stevenson. He worked with all the translators and us. It was very interesting to hear about the whaling days and the methods they used, and how they were organized. Some of the parts when the men were hunting in the winter time at the floe edge for bowheads were interesting too. There were a lot of things I learnt. Mostly men usually had the knowledge. It was interesting. There were many polar bears that would come by when we were excavating. That was every day or every other day that polar bears would come but this was in the second year. We also had falcons arriving and they always landed in the same spot.
They also took us to sites in Qaqqaliarvik, the site seeing mountain, to tell us a story about how they used to hunt belugas, right down to the coast. That was about 200 feet down. They also brought us to the sites where the ships went and told us what had happened to those. There was one wrecked ship that we were able to see during low tide but we weren't able to touch it. The one right off Kekerten was visible. It was covered with dirt so it was hard to see. I haven't been there in a long time, so it's difficult to say what condition it's in now.
There were stories of how everyone helped each other when the Inuit men were out at the floe edge hunting bowhead without the Qallunaat whalers. The whalers used to hunt at their camps. There would literally only be women in the Inuit camps except for boys and children. The floe edge the floe edge varied over the years. It varied each season. They said that Cumberland Sound was the favorite place for the whales because of the open water, so the hunting occurred year round depending on the conditions in mid winter.Meeka Mike tells of what she learnt during the Kekerten oral history project conducted by the anthropologist Mark Stevenson.
- Meeka Mike, Outfitter, translator and Inuit activist Partie 7 de 11
Meeka Mike, Outfitter, translator and Inuit activist Partie 7 de 11
Meeka Mike
The elders were asked questions about how it has changed Inuit life style when the Qallunaat arrived to hunt whales. They talked about the sickness that they brought and how the women went hunting seals during spring at the floe edge while the men were hunting bowhead whales. Inuit were not only hunting whales, they hunted anything and everything that they could catch, especially if it was useful to make oil. Because of that, they were able to trade for snow knifes, canned food, tobacco, tea bags. The women were not only fed, they had responsibilities as well. They were brought with the men to sow clothes and trade them. There was some extra clothes ready for the men in case something bad would happen to them. The Inuit kept the Qallunaat alive by helping them keeping warm and by doing other things that we don\'t know about.
The metal tools were mostly talked about. They used to talk about a harpoon gun, or an explosive gun, that was a dangerous gun. They talked about the things they had seen for the first time such as food that came from the Qallunaat.
The time the Inuit converted to Christianity is when the missionaries came to the North to convert the Inuit into believing in God. I cannot remember everything about how Inuit lifestyle was. It is not practiced anymore. Converting to God was one of the things that they used to talk about when things started to change.
People need to know about the whalers who came here to hunt whales and about the Qallunaat first arrival. Our children need to know and understand that. They need to respect Inuit life style and what was important to Inuit. Today is not the same as when I grew up. There are convenience stores and more services for them. They can play more games. They need to know the connection between the Inuit and Qallunaat including those stories that were good stories about where they had lived. We were always taught about the land where our ancestors lived before, and we still visit the places where they used to live. Even if we didn\'t get to all of them, we were always told how and where they used to live. Inuit need to know about the whalers who came up here and that it is not true that the Qallunaat were the first ones to explore the North.Meeka Mike explains the importance for younger generations of Inuit to learn about the way of life of their ancestors and their first encounters with Qallunaat and whalers.
- Etuangat Aksayook (1901-1996), Cumberland Sound elder Courtesy of Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Part 8 of 11
Etuangat Aksayook (1901-1996), Cumberland Sound elder Courtesy of Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Part 8 of 11
Etuangat
Interviewer:
You grew up when there was whaling activity still happening at Kekerten. Can you tell us what you remember about the Scottish and perhaps the American whalers? Maybe if you start from when they first started coming to your area, what do you remember about the whalers?
Etuangat:
I never knew the Americans, I only heard about them, even though their old building was close by, even the beds were still there, they were in the attic above, that is what was left when I came around. I remember them a little bit but not very much. They had their sleeping area in the room above. I never had anything to do with them. Stories were all what was left of them and they didn\'t have any American Qallunaat left at that time.
Interviewer:
So how was the whaling station set up at Kekerten?
Etuangat:
With the other group that I had experience with, their gear, every summer during the beginning of August, would all be gathered and put into containers and dried up. All of the equipment in the boats, the whaling equipment would be put together. I started to realise that this is what was done every year. The boats would be brought to the front of the house and emptied of their content which was put into barrels. The boats would be placed in a neat row beside each other. Some people would be left behind to work for the whalers, not many people though, not even ten people. The people that were meant to work would be left behind on the Island. The people left behind would paint the boats because they had already been used during the spring hunt. They would just leave the boats there until the ships ariived, and I remember seeing the ships. Those few people would be the only people working at the station during the summer, all summer long, sometimes it would be only 6 people.
Interviewer:
The whalers that came from Scotland, did they only come here during the summer when it was boating season, or did they stay here all winter long?
Etuangat:
They never stayed over winter when I was there, although I heard they used to stay during the winter before I was born. But today, well, apparently I was born when some whalers were over wintering but other than that, I never heard of any whalers staying during the winter. But I was born when they were staying for the winter.
Interviewer:
Do you remember approximately how old you were, or were you a teenager when you started going with the whalers?
Etuangat:
I was not even a teenager then, I was still too young to go hunting by myself, but I was starting to hunt animals with the other guys. I was only hunting by going along with other hunters as their helper. I was made part of a whaling crew because they didn\'t have enough men. So they were trying to teach me. The boss man, he was trying to teach me, Angmarlik.
Interviewer
Angmarlik?
Yes, Angmarlik
Interviewer:
Was Angmarlik always the leader of the whalers?
Etuangat:
Yes, when I was there, he was always the leader, even when there were Qallunaat around, but they mostly seemed to just look after the white man\'s food.
Interviewer:
The Qallunaaq?
Etuangat:
Yes, the Qallunaaq, he didn\'t seem to be managing the whaling or sealing gear, or even the ammunition. It was only Angmarlik that was the real leader when it came to outdoor equipment.
Interviewer:
When you started noticing the whalers when you were still a little boy, what did you do when they were whaling?
Etuangat:
When they were whaling before I became a part of them, I was just a normal little boy doing what normal little boys do, and although I started taking part in hunting, I came around when their equipment was in very bad shape.....................Etuangat Aksayook (1901-1996) recalls the presence of the last Scottish whalers at the Kekerten whaling station at the beginning of the last century.
- Etuangat Aksayook (1901-1996), Cumberland Sound elder Courtesy of Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Part 9 of 11
Etuangat Aksayook (1901-1996), Cumberland Sound elder Courtesy of Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Part 9 of 11
Etuangat:
The rifles were in bad shape; I had to use my late father\'s old rifle, but could not use it all the time because it usually had no ammunition. I was made a part of the whaling crew when I didn\'t have much rowing experience, I wasn\'t even fully grown up yet and during those days rowing was the only way to travel. I must have ridden in a boat that was rowed but it was a hard part of being a part of the crew.
Interviewer:
They would hunt whales with no engines?
Etuangat:
Yes, I did not see any boats with engines when I was a boy, only when the annual ship came in and her small boat had an engine, did I finally see an ordinary boat that had an engine.
Interviewer:
How did the whalers catch up to the whales with no engines, when they were hunting them?
Etuangat:
Those whales would not try to get away if they didn\'t notice anything when they were not moving around and haven\'t noticed anything; they just float still, although they would be moving a little bit, when the weather was not windy. When they were not trying to get away and they just moved very slowly we could just go close to them. When they went below the surface we would wait for them to resurface. Do you understand the word qamajuq?
Interviewer:
I have no idea what qamajuq means.
Etuangat:
Waiting for it to resurface, hoping for it to resurface. They would have everything ready at that time, the harpoon would be set up with the line and harpoon tip attached. Everything would be ready and they would just wait. When the sea was very smooth with no wind, we would have to use paddles instead of oars because the whales can hear oars if they splash too much.
Interviewer
So they would paddle slowly towards it?
Etuangat:
Yes, while it is afloat, when the sea was flat calm they would get it like that, by paddling. However if the sea was not calm and had some waves they would use oars instead. I was part of a group that was told to just row! They had us row very hard while the whale was still afloat. One time I was part of a crew and the whale we were after was right there beside us, I was made to move from my position which was in the place where the ropes were kept. I had to move and someone took my place there. Here I am starring at the whale and they keep telling me \"harder!\", but I kept glancing at the whale, and they kept telling \"Just Row! Harder!\" Maybe because I was too young at that time? I was too naive. Then the whale was right there very close to us and he shot it, and he could harpoon it as well if he wanted to. Then the line would start going and take a while to reach the end which was tide up to the top of the bow in a slip knot that was also attached to the main long rope. The main long rope was threaded through a loop on top of the bow of the whale boat. But when the first line ran out, there was a tremendous tug.
Interviewer:
From the sudden pulling?
Etuangat:
Yes, from the sudden hard pulling of the whale, and we would be no where near the line when the knot reached the loop at the bow, the driver of the boat would be busy keeping the line in order, the line is running through the length of the boat, he would just hold it down like this.
Interviewer:
So he just held it like this?
Etuangat:
Yes, he would do this, because the line is going like this, the line would run through here, while this part was going like this, and meanwhile there is another man getting water from the sea and pouring it onto the rope.
Interviewer:
Pouring water?
Etuangat:
Yes, he would keep getting water from the sea, and whenever he slowed down there would be a lot of smoke coming from the part of the boat where the line went around it and it would really be moving fast. The other boat would be with the boat with the whale right away so that it doesn\'t get left behind, yes.
Interviewer:
So the only person to harpoon the whale would be Angmarlik?
Etuangat:
Someone else, Kullu, Kullu got that one.
Interviewer:
What was Angmarlik\'s position?
Etuangat:
Yes, he was a part of it, he would become a part of it, and he had been a harpooner for a long time.Etuangat Aksayook (1901-1996) discusses the art of hunting bowhead whales.
- Simatuk Michael, Reporter, Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Joavie Alivaktuk, Tour Guide Courtesy of Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Part 10 of 11
Simatuk Michael, Reporter, Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Joavie Alivaktuk, Tour Guide Courtesy of Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Part 10 of 11
Joavie Alivaktuk
Joavie:
I will explain to you what was done here by stopping in different places. I will slowly tell you the story I heard from our elders.
Interviewer:
Let\'s do that.
Joavie:
I tell the story to people including Qallunaat, it is mostly Qallunaat that come here although some Inuit come here too, but Qallunaat are more numerous during the summer, but Qallunaat don\'t come here in the winter.
Interviewer:
So people don\'t live here anymore?
Joavie:
No, no one lives here now, but close by there is an outpost camp where people live all winter, but it is not part of this island.
Interviewer:
It\'s got mosquitoes aye?.
Joavie:
It is one of those places where there are usually many mosquitoes, it is an old settlement, and there is a lot of growth here. Like I just said we will be stopping in places and I will tell you about them, but first of all I have to inform you, like I inform the Qallunaat visitors. In this place I must ask you not to pick up anything that looks old, because whatever was left behind here, we want it to be seen by future generations. They are owned by everybody. I also ask people not to discard garbage anywhere; there is a waste basket in the boat. We have to try to keep our land clean and not see things like this, or bones. The intention is to keep them there forever, and I ask people not to walk off the boardwalk because there are sensitive artefacts just below the surface. I will talk to you as we go along.
The whale oil would be sent out by ship, in those days the oil was the reason for whaling. This area was a main work area and these are baleen that are ready to be shipped out all lashed up, and things always need to be repaired so this person is fixing something. There are also boats there lying upside down, whaleboats. We can see the boards they used to pull them onto shore later, we can go look at them down there. When we make our stops you can ask me any questions you have.
Interviewer:
Yes, what about the people that worked on shore, Inuit used to be the helpers for the Qallunaat? Or, were they chosen first, or were they already here, how did they all end up here together, the Qallunaat whalers and the local Inuit?
Joavie:
When people lived here before the whaling, they had an Inuk leader, the leader of the people. That is the way it was here. It was not just the Qallunaat that hunted the whales, nor was it just the Inuit that hunted the whales. They hunted the whales together, by helping each other. The Qallunaat whalers were not very interested in the meat, but the Inuit who lived there were, especially the maktak (whale skin). But the Qallunaat whalers were after two parts of the whale, the blubber and the baleen. Now here, these things, we can use them to imagine what our ancestors used to do. Down there..............I will tell you the rest down there, and there are other things over here too.
Interviewer:
Now in Kekerten we can see the things that were left behind, the things people used to use and the way they used to live, now these things in front of us, these bones, are they bowhead whale bones?
Joavie:
Yes, these are bowhead whale bones; there is a shoulder blade of a small one and part of its lower jaw. We can see that it is sawed, that is because in those days whale bone was used for things. They would make tent poles out of them and sled runners and cross pieces. Later on when Inuit started the co-ops they would collect bones to carve so they could make some money. That is why there are very few bones at Kekerten. The Inuit also used the bones.A guided tour of the old Kekerten whaling station, nowaday a Nunavut Territorial Park.
- Simatuk Michael, Reporter, Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Joavie Alivaktuk, Tour Guide Courtesy of Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Part 11 of 11
Simatuk Michael, Reporter, Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Joavie Alivaktuk, Tour Guide Courtesy of Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Part 11 of 11
Joavie:
Yes, the baleen was used for the manufacture of umbrella ribs, in making whips for horses, and corsets for pressing in your stomach. Maybe those Qallunaat that were fatter than others wanted to look thinner and that is why they used corsets. They are not used around here. The blubber would be removed and this area would have been used for processing the blubber. The large pieces of blubber would be put into these kittuunnaqs (large square pots), that is what they were called....kittuunnaq, so it would be used for the large pieces. During this time of year, if a whale was caught, and before the ship arrives, they kept the blubber in those square pots and waited for the oil to seep out. This process would take a longer time. They would always put the larger pieces into those. But the blubber would be processed using these two cauldrons, they would boil it in a camp fire after cutting them into smaller pieces. This process took a lot faster than the square pots. They would then put the rendered oil into barrels and then shipped to the Qallunaaqs land. They would then process it into oil to be used as grease for machinery and processed into lamp oil and some of it would be processed into soap. It was processed into different things. The whale bones were also used by the local Inuit. They used them for qamutik runners and cross pieces for qamutit, and also for tips of paddles. So the bones were used around here and the meat would be taken too and sometimes they would cook it in a campfire and also dried and used for food by the Inuit. The dogs would need to be fed too so it was also used for dog food. So the whole whale and all its contents would be used in the past. They hunted the whales before the oil explorers came here, only after the advent of oil exploration did whaling come to an end.
Interviewer:
What is this?
Joavie:
Also over here, we will see other things, those are where people used to work at.
Interviewer:
What about this, it looks like an old tenting place, is this an old house foundation?
Joavie:
Yes, the Americans used to work here, it was where the Americans had their building, and it was also a home for their workers and also a place of work. We are now at the place where the Americans had their building. There is a flag here too but it not very visible here. They were here in 1860 when the Americans had 26 pretend stars on their flag, today they have 52 pretend stars because they have 52 states.
Interviewer:
What about this, is this an old qammaq place?
Joavie:
Yeah, it is an old qammaq place for Inuit. The person who used to live there now lives in Pangnirtung. Now you probably wondered about where the old buildings went. This place where we are right now is an old qammaq place that was made out of old ships and the old work buildings. In those times Inuit, our ancestors picked up whatever they found, pieces of wood and they would never leave them behind if they moved away to another place. This qammaq was also made with some of the wooden parts taken from old ships and also from what the Qallunaat left behind. Those metal parts are from old ships and some parts are from old Qallunaaq buildings. Some of them are no longer here, when they moved away to another place, they took them with them.
Interviewer:
What about this one, when would it have been left behind?
Joavie:
Perhaps around 1925 and part of 1926 when they no longer lived here, it was left behind.
Interviewer:
Whose old qammaq place was this one?
Joavie:
It was the first qammaq for our dear elder in Pangnirtung, Etuangat, he was born here and spent his childhood here.A guided tour of the old Kekerten whaling station, nowaday a Nunavut Territorial Park.
- Hudson Strait
- Honourable Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, Commissioner of Nunavut Part 1 of 2
Honourable Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, Commissioner of Nunavut Part 1 of 2
Ann Meekitjuk Hanson
I heard stories about Kimmirut as well. I used to live there. I was born outside of Kimmirut. I was talking about my ancestors helping those whalers who came up here to hunt whales.
Kimmirut was one of the first settlements when the whalers first started coming up here. We hear stories of how they wanted Inuit to help them, no wonder they knew how to hunt and knew where to go to hunt and they knew the land, rivers, lakes and everything else around them. That is why they helped the whalers to stay alive even if they would have been lost or starving or freezing if Inuit didn\'t help them.
The men were not the only ones who helped; there were women who did all the work for the dogs. The women also did sewing qamit and clothing and were brought along while the men they were hunting by boat.
At the time, when they were expecting and hoping for the whalers to come back when summer was coming. While waiting and expecting for their return people would gather around in one place to wait for a ship. They would gather on a hill and a person would be waiting and looking on top of that hill to see if a ship was arriving. People would be taking turns staying on top of the hill.
Our ancestors were able to smell a ship smoke even if they could not see the ship yet and they would know that the ship would arrive in a day or two. That was one of the stories that were told.
It used to be so interesting to hear stories when we were children from our elders because they would talk about their past and ancestors. I mentioned Ani Kimilu and Johnnibo and Kallaarjuk. Kallarjuk\'s father was a whale hunter as well who was the captain of a ship. I am not sure if Kallarjuk\'s father was with the Scottish or the Americans. But as far as I know he had a qallunaaq father and we know that our relatives and ancestors were whalers as well.
It is very interesting to hear stories about the whalers who were in Kimmirut at that time even up to today. We had a relative named Timilaaq and he used to tell funny stories about the whalers in Kimmirut and about what he was told.
There was a time when Inuit wanted to get things from the white people, things like cups, tea kettle, harpoons with steels and or blankets, anything that came from the white people, they even traded their women to those who were the captains or who ever owned a boat or even to a regular white person. When a white man wanted to use a woman at that time, he used to ask her. Timilaaq used to tell a story about trading for tobacco, blankets and things that came from the white people. When he told that story, we thought that was funny.People from Kimmirut have an history of working and mingling with the whalers. Ann Meekitjuk Hanson lived in that community and as a child heard a lot of stories about the whaling days.
- W. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s University Fred Calabretta, Curator of the Mystic Seaport Museum Dorothy Harley Eber, Inuit Oral History researcher Part 2 of 2
W. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s University Fred Calabretta, Curator of the Mystic Seaport Museum Dorothy Harley Eber, Inuit Oral History researcher Part 2 of 2
Fred Calabretta
The opening of Hudson Bay to whaling in 1860 was a major event. Although there were two New Bedford ships, the captains were both New London whalers. One of them was Christopher Chapel, who had been on the McLellan (a continuation of the link to the McLellan). From 1860 until the end of the whaling era in New London, in the early 1890s, Eastern Arctic whaling accounted for half of the voyages and income. It helped to keep whaling alive locally.
Captain George Comer was born in 1858 in Quebec. Very little is known of his early years. Apparently his father was a sailor who disappeared at sea shortly after George was born. His mother was originally from England, and for reasons we don’t understand she ended up in the States. She evidently had very difficult times.
George Comer then grew up on a farm, doing farm work until he turned 17, in April of 1875. At that time, for reasons that are not clear, he left the farm, walked to New London and shipped out on an arctic whaler. This was the beginning of his whaling career and his career as a sailor, and was also his introduction to the Arctic.
Comer got his opportunity to sail as captain for the first time in 1895, on the Era, the ship on which he had so much experience. He went to Hudson Bay, and there he specialized. Voyage after voyage, he returned to Hudson Bay.
He gathered plants in Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait in the early 1890s. He began to focus on what eventually became his life’s work, which was the study and documentation of the Inuit. He started informally by collecting a few things and trading for cultural objects. 1897 was a turning point in Comer’s life. In that year, a man named Franz Boas, who was the founding father of North American anthropology, a huge figure in that field, contacted Captain Spicer, looking for information about the Inuit of the Eastern Arctic. Captain Spicer told Boas he was retired and referred him to Captain Comer.
Boas said, “Take photographs. Make sound recordings. Take plaster life masks of Inuit faces.” In this way, the documentation became comprehensive. Comer kept detailed written notes of Inuit traditions. He collected stories, oral history, information about the Franklin Expedition, drawings, maps, anything it was possible to collect. Most of what he collected went to the American Museum of Natural History. By about 1907 or 1908, they had the largest arctic collection in the world, most of it acquired by Comer and by Robert Peary. This established Comer as an anthropologist. He continued to make profitable voyages as a whaler, but he added this second career.
Dorothy H. Eber
There was a wonderful person, Leah Arnaujaq. of Repulse Bay - descendants still live there- who was on the whaling ships in her youth. She used to talk a lot about the American Captain George Comer, although she was more acquainted with the Murray brothers – the whaling captains Alexander and John. Apparently she was a daughter of Alexander Murray, but she told me she had closer contact with “Cross-eyes” - John Murray who had a cast to his eye. Comer’s Inuit name was angakkuq , shaman, because he astonished everyone with his photographs which he took on board his vessel (Comer’s photographs are a remarkable documentation of Inuit life of the time.) and she told me, “Oh, Comer, the angakkuq! He could make these photographs appear just out of a piece of paper! He was a very good man to the Inuit”. These different captains, Comer and John and Alexander Murray, each had their own people when the ships were up there, and while the Inuit were friendly with each other, because most of them were related, they didn’t get together much while whaling was going on. ‘The captains were always a little afraid that the other captains might take some of their men. Because of the competition they weren’t enemies, but they weren’t too friendly either.’According to Gillies Ross, the Hudson Strait was more a transit zone for whalers than a whaling ground. Fred Calabretta explains that once whalers started building whaling stations, they relied increasingly on Inuit for their whaling activities. Dorothy Eber tells about the American whaling station of Akuliak in the Hudson Strait and how Johnnibo met his death there.
- Hudson Bay
- W. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s University
Part 1 of 2
W. Gillies Ross, Professor emeritus of Geography, Bishop’s University Part 1 of 2
W. Gillies Ross
The first voyages to Hudson Bay took place in 1860. I came across one reference to a voyage into Hudson Strait in 1857, but I don’t know anything about it. Exploitation began in this territory in 1860. It had already been attempted farther south by the Hudson Bay Company, but not with their ships wintering. They made oneseason voyages up from Churchill and back. That didn’t work out very well, so the American whalers wintered there.
The Americans set up certain facilities ashore. When a ship was frozen in, they had to have a storehouse ashore to store extra food in case there was a disaster on the ship. They stored whale products there. Most of the ships would set up a few buildings, storehouses, on shore.
This is the era of George Comer, the most famous of all the Hudson Bay whal ing masters. He put his boat in at Cape Fullerton, in Fullerton Harbour, and then whale boats would cruise all the way up to Repulse Bay and back, looking for whales. They had special covers over the whale boats so that they could sleep inside the boats. They would haul them up on the ice and sleep inside. They would also cook inside them. They were like mobile homes.
Their whaling area was rather limited. There were only about 200 American and Scottish voyages into Hudson Bay. Fewer than 800 whales were killed. It is a small chapter in the story of whaling but it was very important for all these Inuit groups there. It was like a magnet drawing people to Repulse Bay, or Marble Island, or wherever the whaling happened to be taking place. The important thing was not simply that they were centralized, but that the Inuit were having day-to-day, face-to-face contact with white people and their material goods. The goods were flowing into Inuit society. These groups, Iglulingmiut, Netsilingmiut, Qairnirmiut, Aivilingmiut, they were not too friendly to one another before the whalers came, but they realized they could achieve something by cooperating in mixing genially, so they did. In this way, some of the barriers between Inuit groups were broken down or dissolved. People from the Caribou Inuit would work for a whaling ship at Repulse Bay, right up to Foxe Basin, with Iglulingmiut.
There was a completely different group, the Sallirmiut, who were living on Southampton Island. In 1902, all but four of them were killed by a disease introduced by the Scottish whaling ship, the Active.
The Americans believed they had the right to enter Hudson Bay. The British government said it was a closed sea. “It’s part of our territorial waters. The Americans should not go in there.” But the Americans still kept on coming in. In those days there was a 3mile territorial limit off coasts. But that was of no importance because the whalers had to do something ashore. They had to go ashore to hunt musk oxen and caribou, build their storehouses and contact Inuit. They were on the land that was under the aegis of the Hudson Bay Company.
In the late 1800s, 1892 I think it was, the Hudson Bay Company chartered a whaler and sent it from London into Roes Welcome Sound to compete with the American whalers. They didn’t get along very well with the Americans but there was no hostility.Compared to other whaling episodes, the Hudson Bay whaling period was not very important. At the most, explains Gillies Ross, approximately 800 whales were slaughtered there from 1860 to 1915 for a total of about 200 voyages. But it has been a very significant encounter for Inuit who were living close to this last arctic whaling ground, as whalers at that time relied mostly on Inuit for their operations.
- Fred Calabretta, Curator of the Mystic Seaport Museum
Dorothy Harley Eber, Inuit Oral History researcher
Part 2 of 2
Fred Calabretta, Curator of the Mystic Seaport Museum Dorothy Harley Eber, Inuit Oral History researcher Part 2 of 2
Fred Calabretta
The opening of Hudson Bay to whaling in 1860 was a major event. Although there were two New Bedford ships, the captains were both New London whalers. One of them was Christopher Chapel, who had been on the McLellan (a continuation of the link to the McLellan). From 1860 until the end of the whaling era in New London, in the early 1890s, Eastern Arctic whaling accounted for half of the voyages and income. It helped to keep whaling alive locally.
Captain George Comer was born in 1858 in Quebec. Very little is known of his early years. Apparently his father was a sailor who disappeared at sea shortly after George was born. His mother was originally from England, and for reasons we don’t understand she ended up in the States. She evidently had very difficult times.
George Comer then grew up on a farm, doing farm work until he turned 17, in April of 1875. At that time, for reasons that are not clear, he left the farm, walked to New London and shipped out on an arctic whaler. This was the beginning of his whaling career and his career as a sailor, and was also his introduction to the Arctic.
Comer got his opportunity to sail as captain for the first time in 1895, on the Era, the ship on which he had so much experience. He went to Hudson Bay, and there he specialized. Voyage after voyage, he returned to Hudson Bay.
He gathered plants in Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait in the early 1890s. He began to focus on what eventually became his life’s work, which was the study and documentation of the Inuit. He started informally by collecting a few things and trading for cultural objects. 1897 was a turning point in Comer’s life. In that year, a man named Franz Boas, who was the founding father of North American anthropology, a huge figure in that field, contacted Captain Spicer, looking for information about the Inuit of the Eastern Arctic. Captain Spicer told Boas he was retired and referred him to Captain Comer.
Boas said, “Take photographs. Make sound recordings. Take plaster life masks of Inuit faces.” In this way, the documentation became comprehensive. Comer kept detailed written notes of Inuit traditions. He collected stories, oral history, information about the Franklin Expedition, drawings, maps, anything it was possible to collect. Most of what he collected went to the American Museum of Natural History. By about 1907 or 1908, they had the largest arctic collection in the world, most of it acquired by Comer and by Robert Peary. This established Comer as an anthropologist. He continued to make profitable voyages as a whaler, but he added this second career.
Dorothy H. Eber
There was a wonderful person, Leah Arnaujaq. of Repulse Bay - descendants still live there- who was on the whaling ships in her youth. She used to talk a lot about the American Captain George Comer, although she was more acquainted with the Murray brothers – the whaling captains Alexander and John. Apparently she was a daughter of Alexander Murray, but she told me she had closer contact with “Cross-eyes” - John Murray who had a cast to his eye. Comer’s Inuit name was angakkuq , shaman, because he astonished everyone with his photographs which he took on board his vessel (Comer’s photographs are a remarkable documentation of Inuit life of the time.) and she told me, “Oh, Comer, the angakkuq! He could make these photographs appear just out of a piece of paper! He was a very good man to the Inuit”. These different captains, Comer and John and Alexander Murray, each had their own people when the ships were up there, and while the Inuit were friendly with each other, because most of them were related, they didn’t get together much while whaling was going on. ‘The captains were always a little afraid that the other captains might take some of their men. Because of the competition they weren’t enemies, but they weren’t too friendly either.’In this video clip, Fred Calabretta introduces the most famous American whaler in Hudson Bay, Captain George Comer. Comer gained such a notoriarity because of his long experience as a whaler in the Hudson Bay, but also because he worked closely with the anthropologist Franz Boas of the New York Museum of Natural History in collecting Inuit artefacts and oral history. Dorothy Eber had the opportunity to meet Hudson Bay elders who had known Comer. Inuit called him Angakkuq, the shaman, because he took pictures and could make people appear on paper.
- Whaling Ports
- Scotland
With Iain Flett, the City archivist of Dundee
Scotland With Iain Flett, the City archivist of Dundee
Iain Flett
I’m Iain Flett of the Dundee city archives, of Dundee Scotland. We’re on one of the oldest ports in Scotland. It was a free port going back to about 1200. There was a lot of interest in European trading but the interest in whaling began when the UK government started giving subsidies both for the white fishing and for the whale fishing at the end of the 18th century. From customs records, we can track how important this was. The government didn’t charge tax on the whalers because they were so keen for them to go to the whaling grounds. From the beginning of the 19th century, whale oil was important for lubrication and for light. As they imported this very coarse material, jute, from the Indian subcontinent they found the only way to soften it was to use oil, preferably whale oil. From the middle of the 19th century, whaling and the jute industry went hand in hand.
Of course it is now an ecological disaster because [after] they hunted the whales out of existence in Greenland, they went to the Antarctic and hunted whales out of the Antarctic. Then the whalers came back with seals instead.
By the middle of the 19th century, this was a very industrious and prosperous city. In some ways it was a re-creation. Dundee was the second most prosperous borough in Scotland after Edinburgh before the sack by the Cromwellian troops in 1651. In some ways, it went into decline after 1651 and then it developed trade with Europe again, particularly with India during the jute trade. Through jute, and through the heavy industry associated with that, by the middle of the 19th century it had again developed into a very important east coast harbour.
Shipbuilding was important because very specific strengths were required for the whale ships. The hulls of the whale ships had to be very elastic but hard, so that, when the ice closed in, they would keep on bouncing to the top of the pack ice. They wouldn’t be crushed, as the first expeditions were. They started a very specialized boat building.
A lot of Dundonians now feel that they’ve lost touch with their heritage, in that the Dundee port is now a wharf port along the river. If you walk outside this building you will find the name Shore Terrace, yet you look at the shore and there’s nothing but approach roads for the Tay Road Bridge. If you stand at the approach roads to the Tay Road Bridge, you can see where the whalers would have come in 100 years ago. In some cases, it’s very sad for schoolchildren because they’ve lost that link with the past. They no longer see an active harbour, in the middle of the city which they can connect with that wealth of the past.
I think it [whaling] was almost like going off to war, because they were waving these whaling boats away and they would never know if they would come back safely. Whalers were long shallow boats with harpoons in them. It was extremely dangerous. One flick of the whale’s tail and you’d be killed. If you ended up in the water, you’d last for about two and a half minutes before you froze to death. To them, it was an act of bravery for these young boys especially to go away in the whaling boats. Of course they’d be away for two or three winters before they could get back again. Coming back, if they had caught a whale, while the whales were in abundance, there would be riches. We’ve looked at how the Shetlands called the whalers “da merry boys,” the happy men, because they’d come back from the whaling season very rich indeed. And very smelly.
Dundee wasn’t such a center for processing baleen, but other whaling ports were. The demand for whalebone for stays, as they’re called in Scotland, which are corsets, meant that because of fashion, the whale was doomed as well.
Mostly, crews were recruited locally, in Shetland and in Peterhead, because Shetlanders were brought up with the sea. There is the tradition of being a crofter-fisherman. In Shetland you still have the design of the rowing boats that were the same as the Viking rowing boats that came over in the 12th century. They had a very low prow. Shetlanders have had a long tradition of being very good seafarers. Also, in Orkney, [with] the Hudson's Bay Company, you also have the tradition that Orkadians and Shetlanders were great seafarers. In a rowing boat, in a gale, they could manage to work their way through.
There must be a few Inuit buried here in the local cemetery. The question is how to track them down. Twenty years ago someone did come to the office, trying to find his family. There’s this wonderful tradition of hospitality amongst the Inuit. They would welcome these [Scottish] crews, who were overwintering and stuck in the snow, and give them shelter and hospitality. Children came as a result of this. Then these children and grandchildren would come over here expecting a welcome. Unfortunately, they faced a very frosty reception. There was not the understanding that their ancestors had been looked after over a harsh winter. It’s all that’s wrong with Scottish Presbyterianism. There’s not the idea that their ancestors had been loved and looked after and given shelter in a harsh winter.Iain Flett draws a broad picture of the City of Dundee history as a major international port. Whaling played an important part in this prosperity, especially in the last part of the nineteen century when the jute industry required whale oil to process the natural fiber. Iain Flett explains how the Inuit were hospitable to stranded Scottish whalers in the Arctic.
- Scotland
Fiona Riddell, Assistant Curator at the Arbuthnot Museum in Peterhead
Scotland Fiona Riddell, Assistant Curator at the Arbuthnot Museum in Peterhead
Fiona Riddell
My name is Fiona Riddell. I’m the curatorial assistant at the Arbuthnot Museum in Peterhead. I’ve been here about five years. I’m very interested in the whaling era and in trying to put things together so our heritage isn’t forgotten.
Peterhead was built on whaling. There is a saying that Peterhead was built on whale blubber and guarded by whalebone. It really was a very, very poor community, through the fishing. People were just going out in little boats, unable to make a living. We imported whale oil to start with, and then realized that it was more profitable to go and get it ourselves, so in 1788, a little ship, the Robert, set out from Peterhead to do the whaling.
They didn’t make anything of it for about 12 years. They decided it wasn’t really working. It was crewed by Englishman, so it wasn’t really in their best interests to build up Peterhead. They were going to forget all about it. Then they decided to put some Scottish crews from Peterhead on it, which they did. As a result they came back with a bumper ship.
They never really looked back after that. More and more people got in on the act. The Robert was replaced by the Hope, a very famous ship. It started from there, and [Peterhead] built up to the top premier port for the whaling at that time. Peterhead never looked back after that.
Our height was about the 1850s, and after that, it started to wane. Then the herring came in. After that, they decided it was safer to go out in the little boats, easier not to leave their families and be away for months on end. And really it’s just Dundee. It’s easy to go out from there.
The Robert went up to what we call the high Arctic, to Davis Strait and Baffin Island. They only took on a quarter crew from here, from Peterhead itself. They went up to [Lerwick] and took on another quarter, but most of their crew… She [the Robert] went up to the High Arctic because that’s where they knew the right whales were. Those were the ones they hunted. They were called right whales because they were the right whales to catch. They moved very slowly, and when they were harpooned and eventually died, they floated on the surface. They didn’t sink. So obviously they were easier to put aboard.
There were a few shipbuilders here, building the whalers. The coopering was also attached to it. The coopers went on board the whaling ships as well to make the barrels so that they got the blubber home. Coopering was a very important trade. They made the barrels before they went, stored them all on board, and filled them up as they went along. But they brought cooperers with them so that if anything happened to the barrels they were able to sort them.
The Grays took some Inuit home. They lived with them. They were paraded about the town. Peterhead was so small. People never left Peterhead. They just worked hard and tried to make a living. So these in-comers were quite new to them and were something to see. [In Peterhead there was] no television, no papers really. A lot of them [Peterhead residents] were illiterate. Unfortunately they [the Inuit] died here due to diseases that we had, colds and such that which we managed to fight off. But the Inuit had no resistance to them. They are buried in the Peterhead graveyard. I know some of them went up to Balmoral to meet Queen Victoria. Whether they were the Peterhead ones, I couldn’t really say, but Queen Victoria did meet quite a few of them.
The Active was built here. When the ship owners realized that the English were not really making anything of it [the whaling], they decided to put Alexander Geary (who had been mate on the Robert for a number of years) as captain, and he was very successful.
When the Robert got too small, they built the Hope. She is a very famous whaler. She did very well. That’s when it started. The Hope II came in and the Perseverance, all the way through to the Windward, which was built in 1890. It was our last ship, and it was also sailed by the Grays. The Grays were such a big dynasty here. When the last of the Grays died, the whaling died. The life just went out of Peterhead for that. But then the herring came in.
Dundee bought most of the ships because they were made so strong. We did foray into steel ships. Being in the arctic, they decided that steel was the way forward, steam and steel. There were two [steel] ships built, the Empress of India and the Inuit. They were both steel ships, and both were lost on their maiden voyage because the ice was just too much for them. It squeezed them. Where timber will move, the steel ships didn’t. They just cracked and they were lost. There were only ever two made.
Steam was the way forward for them, to power through the ice. They sent away for the steam engines, and put them in the ships. They tried to refit the ships out of season so that they were ready for the next season. A lot of them went to two seasons. They went to the sealing, between February and May, and then the whaling, from March right through to September-October. They had to be back before the ice froze them in. Unfortunately some of them did get caught in the ice with sometimes disastrous consequences.
There was a lot of that [whalers having sexual relationships with Inuit] about because the men were away from home for so long. The Inuit very kindly lent them their wives. Lots of babies were born, but these children, you knew they weren’t Inuit. You knew they were of mixed blood. A lot of them, they [the Inuit said they] had Peterhead faces because they just knew that they were truly Inuit. But they were accepted into the Inuit families. As far as I’m aware, there was never any kind of “No, you don’t belong to us.” The Inuit just accepted them all. They only saw their fathers when they came back to the fishing.
How many of these men told their wives [about this] when they got back home has never been documented. Personally, I do not think they would. What tha dinna ken das na herm ya. [What you don’t know won’t hurt you.] Certainly, in the arctic, there was no shame to it. They were very good, but you really knew that…Fiona Riddell, Assistant Curator of the Peterhead Arbuthnot Museum, makes a brief description of the involvement of this small north-east Scotland harbour into the whaling industry from 1788. She recalls the importance of the Inuit co-operation for Scottish whalers who spent months and sometimes years so far from home.
- Scotland
Visiting the Discovery with Earl Scott in Dundee
Scotland Visiting the Discovery with Earl Scott in Dundee
Discovery: Earl Scott
I am Earl Scott. I am a guide on the Discovery and I am also a guide at Verdant Works. I take people from all over the world to come and see our wonderful ship, a great attraction which Dundee is famous for.
This ship was actually bought in 1905 by the Hudson’s Bay Company of Canada and they used it as a cargo ship. It went from Canada to London sailing their fur and pelts. It was lent to the French government in 1914, during the First World War and it was used way up in Russia. This is built in the style of a whaling ship. The hull had four different layers of wood.
This is winter, this is summer.
They did not know what to expect down at the South Pole. Because Dundee was so well renowned for building famous wooden whaling ships which went up to the Arctic, so they thought: ‘Well, it would be better having the knowledge of the Dundee ship builders and go for their ship rather than get a metal ship which might burst.’
The next expedition was going to the Falkland Islands, all to do with whaling. That came back in 1927. After that it was 1929 to 1931, that was the third expedition, which was going back to Antarctica all to do with checking various things on that continent. It came back in 1931 and then stayed on the Thames embankment, as a training ship for sea scouts and sea cadets.Earl Scott is a guide at Verdant Works and on the ship Discovery in Dundee, Scotland. He explains here how the vessel Discovery was built on the model of a whaling ship. She sailed to Antarctica with Scott and was eventually purchased by the Hudson Bay Company who used it to transport cargo from Canada to London.
- Scotland
A Visit of Verdant Works in Dundee
With Iain Sword
Scotland A Visit of Verdant Works in Dundee With Iain Sword
Iain Sword
The jute is growing out of the ground so it is thick and quite hard up to the tip where it is thin and much softer. Feel it up there it is a bit hard but when it is all pressed together it is literally that hard. Then with a twist when you put on the tension, the fiber will slide past each other and they will pull on each other and that will give the grip that will allow you to spin it tight.
Dorothy H. Eber
Do you know why the Dundee vessels kept whaling after all other vessels? It was because they needed the whale oil for the jute factories there.
Iain Sword
Dundee was an important port 800 years ago and traded mainly with Europe and the Baltic sea. Probably around the middle of the fifteen hundreds Dundee was easily by far the second city of Scotland. Very rich city.
Interviewer
Was it bigger than now?
Iain Sword
No, not bigger than now but much richer. But a lot of things happened. Both sides of the civil war sacked Dundee, ruined Dundee. Within a few years it was also sacked with the plague and the city was almost wiped out and had to start again and never got back to its former richness although at the height of the textile industry, probably at the time of the American Civil War a few of these textile industry owners were hugely rich.
Dorothy H. Eber
When I went to Scotland, I interviewed the current Mr. Kinnes, that firm is still there. They’re still in business, only now their business is not whaling. They’re supplying the oil rigs with supplies! I met Mr. Kinnes, and he said, “Do you know why the Dundee whalers were so involved in the whale hunt and kept on whaling for so long?”, and I said, “Oh, yes”, and he said, “No, you don’t!”. And then he told me it was because of the Dundee jute industry.Iain Sword is a guide at Verdant Works, a former textile plant in Dundee. He explains the importance of the jute industry for the prosperity of Dundee in the second part of the nineteen century. Dortothy H. Eber explains how the transformation of the jute required whale oil to soften the fibres of the plant allowing the Dundee whaling industry to thrive until the end of the nineteen century.
- New England
Fred Calabretta, Curator of Collections, Mystic Seaport Museum
Part 1 of 4
New England Fred Calabretta, Curator of Collections, Mystic Seaport Museum Part 1 of 4
My name is Fred Calabretta and I’m curator of collections at Mystic Seaport. I’ve been here for many years. One of my great interests and passions has been the study of Eastern Arctic whaling and especially New London’s involvement in the whaling there.
New London had a long tradition of whaling, going back to the colonial period before the revolutionary war. The whaling industry in New London peaked in about 1845. The whaling agents and ship owners there were very prosperous, and they began looking for new whaling grounds. Before the American Revolution, they had visited the Davis Strait grounds, but there had been a 50- or 60 year lapse. A group of owners decided that they would try to visit the Davis Strait and Cumberland Sound area again.
They purchased a ship called the McLellan, fitted her out for arctic whaling, and in 1846 sailed for Davis Strait and Cumberland Sound. That voyage was a very important one. It marked of the renewal of American whaling in the Eastern Arctic and established the dominance of New London in whaling activity and as a foothold for New England whalers in the region once again. It set the stage for extensive relationships between the New London whalers, the arctic explorers, and the Inuit.
Eastern Arctic whaling differed from more traditional whaling. The whalers were now hunting bowhead whales for the first time, where traditionally they had primarily hunted right whales and sperm whales. Their destination was relatively close to home, so less time was required to get to the whaling grounds. Because of the environment, they didn’t have to worry as much about desertion. This was a problem on whaling voyages in other parts of the world, but in the Arctic a sailor was much less likely to jump ship. Very often, he would have nowhere to go, so that wasn’t a risk. They didn’t have to worry about putting copper on the bottoms of ships to prevent ship worms, because the water was cold.
A major milestone occurred on the McLellan’s last voyage.
The McLellan made seven voyages. She was a very important ship, not just because she was the first. She was literally a training ship for important whaling masters who came later on. Sydney Budington, George Tyson and Christopher Chappell all sailed and learned on her decks. The McLellan was like a school ship.
On the McLellan’s 1851 voyage, the captain decided to try something different and left a group of men behind to winter in the Arctic. These were the first American whalers to deliberately winter in the Arctic. The party included Sydney Budington, who became very important later on. They survived the winter, a major reason for which was the assistance and cooperation of the Inuit. From them, they learned arctic survival, what to eat, how to dress, and how to protect themselves from the cold. So, in about 1851, the relationship with the Inuit really began in earnest.
The relationship with the Inuit was important because it influenced both the whalers and the explorers. The men on that voyage, in the group who stayed, learned to live like the Inuit who had transferred that knowledge to them. Explorers like Charles Francis Hall came to New London where he talked to and learned from these men who had overwintered in the Arctic. Thus there is a direct connection to these Inuit survival techniques that date back to the McLellan group.
Initially there was not a formal relationship between the Inuit and the whalers, although there was some informal trade. The Americans would provide manufactured goods and in exchange they would probably get furs and clothing prepared by the Inuit women, but it was a not a major exchange.
Eventually, within about 15 or 20 years, the Americans established whaling stations in the Eastern Arctic, especially in Cumberland Sound and also in Hudson Strait. Once the whaling stations were established, the role of the Inuit became more important. They had working relationships with the stations and were a presence there on a regular basis. That was an important extension of the relationship between the American whalers and the Inuit.Fred Calabretta is the curator of collections at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. He tells the story of the arctic voyages of the McLellan, a New London whaling ship. The 1851 last voyage of the McLellan was especially successful when part of her crew wintered in Cumberland Sound to take advantage of the early spring hunt. From then on, whalers and explorers imitated that method until the end of whaling at the turn of the last century.
- New England
Fred Calabretta, Curator of Collections, Mystic Seaport Museum
Part 2 of 4
New England Fred Calabretta, Curator of Collections, Mystic Seaport Museum Part 2 of 4
This interrelationship expanded, and dependence on Inuit cooperation grew. By the time of Captain George Comer, who was the last New England Arctic whaling captain, the relationship was very extensive and very sophisticated. At this point the Inuit generally had more whaling experience than Comer’s own crew and they were manning many of the whale boats. By this time the whaling industry had been in decline for many years and there were fewer and fewer experienced whalers in New England. Now when someone like Captain Comer sailed North with a crew of 14, there may have been only two or three men in the crew, probably the officers, who had ever been on a whaling voyage before.
The dependence on Inuit increased. A large number of the whales taken in those final years, from the 1880s to approximately 1910, were taken by Inuit boats and crews. In exchange they received trade goods or boats. The boat was the ultimate trade good; it was the largest, most expensive and most valuable item. There are photographs of the Era in winter quarters taken in 1903, and in them you can see ten whale boats on the ice. The Era could only carry about five, which means that the other five of those whale boats belonged to the Inuit. The Inuit were beginning to acquire whale boats.
By Comer’s time, not only were the Inuit manning the whale boats, they were also providing services as guides. They drew maps, they assisted with survival, and they provided caribou meat and other food and fish for the American crews, which helped to prevent scurvy and save lives. The other two critical commodities were furs and ivory. The women made caribou suits and sealskin boots for the men. This clothing was warmer than anything they could bring from the States and it was essential for survival.
A very highly developed system of trade had evolved by Comer’s time, and he brought extensive trade goods with him. Inuit received trade goods that were very valuable to them, particularly hunting related items such as rifles, as well as cartridges and ammunition. They also received metal cooking utensils, small telescopes to help them locate game, and many other objects.
By this time, the whale products were less and less valuable. There was money to be made in the baleen trade but whaling in general was not very profitable. They didn’t even bother taking the oil from the whales if it wasn’t convenient. The baleen, which was a plasticlike, flexible substance in the mouth of certain whales, was used because there was a market for it in many products: women’s clothing, buggy whips, springs for carriages, and things like that.
In order to make the voyage pay, Comer and others began to trade much more extensively for furs such as fox, wolverine, wolf skins, whatever they could get. The fur trade became so important that, in the last two years of his career in the North, Comer’s ship was owned by a fur company based in New York City rather than a whaling agent or whaling company. They also collected whatever ivory they could, such as walrus ivory and narwhal tusks. By the end of the whaling era, and by the end of Comer’s career, he was as much a trader as he was a whaler. The relationship with the Inuit reached its maximum point at that time.
Eastern Arctic whaling became extremely important to New London and the entire south-eastern Connecticut region. New London led the way. It had always been important, but Eastern Arctic whaling helped keep it alive. Locally, whaling peaked in 1845, but it continued for about another 50 years because of Eastern Arctic whaling.
The opening of Hudson Bay to whaling in 1860 was a major event. Although there were two New Bedford ships, the captains were both New London whalers. One of them was Christopher Chappell, who had been on the McLellan (a continuation of the link to the McLellan). From 1860 until the end of the whaling era in New London, in the early 1890s, Eastern Arctic whaling accounted for half of the voyages and income. It helped to keep whaling alive locally.
Whaling had a great influence on the local area, including its economy and cultural fabric. The local hospital in New London was built by whale ship owners. Cemeteries and other buildings and civic institutions were developed with money from whaling agents. A great number of people were involved in the whaling industry: not only the whalers themselves, the men who went out on the ships, but also the shipbuilders, the sail makers, the caulkers, the men who made barrels, the shipwrights who made harpoons, the chandlerers and the merchants who provided food and other goods and clothing. Whaling was enormously important in New London and south-eastern Connecticut. That influence came to an end with the last voyage in 1892.When George Comer became a whaling captain in 1895, whalers relied very much on Inuit to catch and process the whales. The whaling crews on the ships were then much smaller and most of the sailors had no experience at all in whaling. A flow of commercial good would circulate into the Inuit camps.
- New England
Fred Calabretta, Curator of Collections, Mystic Seaport Museum
Part 3 of 4
New England Fred Calabretta, Curator of Collections, Mystic Seaport Museum Part 3 of 4
Captain George Comer was born in 1858 in Quebec. Very little is known of his early years. Apparently his father was a sailor who disappeared at sea shortly after George was born. His mother was originally from England, and for reasons we don’t understand she ended up in the States. She evidently had very difficult times; she appears in different census records and also in the records of almshouses, which are poorhouses. She had a very challenging time making a go of it. She traveled around, bounced from place to place, found employment where she could as a washerwoman, and spent time at these poorhouses, which were very unpleasant places in the early 1860s, all of this with George in tow. He had a very difficult youth.
When George was around eight or nine years old, his mother placed him in an orphanage in Hartford, Connecticut. She was unable to support him. He was there for a few years, and he did receive a little bit of an education but then he was placed with a foster family in East Haddam, Connecticut. East Haddam is located about 35 miles from Mystic, on the Connecticut River. It was a farming town at that time. George Comer then grew up on a farm, doing farm work until he turned 17, in April of 1875. At that time, for reasons that are not clear, he left the farm, walked to New London and shipped out on an arctic whaler. This was the beginning of his whaling career and his career as a sailor, and was also his introduction to the Arctic.
It was a one year voyage. The captain of the ship was Captain John O. Spicer. Spicer was a very important figure in Eastern Arctic whaling, so Comer had connected with a very important mentor and teacher on his very first voyage as a 17 year old.
It is interesting to note that he left arctic whaling for a period of time. He continued to go to sea but he became involved in the sealing industry based in south-eastern Connecticut. It involved the hunting of seal elephants for oil and seals for their furs. Most of the activity was in the southern Indian Ocean and south Atlantic. That was a brutal industry with terrible weather conditions. It was very dangerous and he almost drowned on a couple of occasions. But he did very well and he moved up through the ranks, becoming an officer, first as third mate, then second mate, then first mate. He was thriving as a sailor in difficult conditions. His sealing experience was very good training and it prepared him for what was to come later, in the Arctic.
In 1889, he made the first of three annual voyages to the Arctic with Spicer on a schooner called the Era. Later on in Comer’s life, the Era would become very important. After these three voyages with Spicer he then made another voyage to the Arctic on a ship called the Canton, which is very much like Mystic seaport’s Charles W. Morgan. Finally, New London got out of the whaling industry and sold the Era, which was their last whaler, to a firm in New Bedford.
Comer got his opportunity to sail as captain for the first time in 1895, on the Era, the ship on which he had so much experience. He went to Hudson Bay, and there he specialized. Voyage after voyage, he returned to Hudson Bay.
From very early on, he had a dual interest. He was a sailor, a sealer and a whaleman; that was his life. But along the way he developed a passion for the natural world, for wildlife, animals and plants. He became interested in learning more about them and studying them. This is a very fascinating pursuit for someone with little formal education. As early as the 1880s, he was collecting bird specimens for Yale University. Today, specimens collected by Comer are among the earliest bird specimens in the Peabody Museum at Yale University. He was making his mark in science as early as the 1880s.
He continued those interests as he moved north. He gathered plants in Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait in the early 1890s. He began to focus on what eventually became his life’s work, which was the study and documentation of the Inuit. He started informally by collecting a few things and trading for cultural objects. 1897 was a turning point in Comer’s life. In that year, a man named Franz Boas, who was the founding father of North American anthropology, a huge figure in that field, contacted Captain Spicer, looking for information about the Inuit of the Eastern Arctic. Captain Spicer told Boas he was retired and referred him to Captain Comer.
Boas contacted Comer, asking him if he would collect materials on his next voyage. Boas gave Comer a shopping list of items to collect. Twenty-seven months later, Comer returned with a substantial collection of Inuit objects. He collected them very systematically and they were well documented. He invited Boas to come to his home, where Boas was dazzled by the collection. He wrote a memo to the director of the American Museum of Natural History saying that he had acquired a wonderful collection, many items of which had never before been seen in any museums in North America or anywhere in the world, and all of which were collected by Captain Comer. It was an extraordinary acquisition.
In this way, Comer established his relationship with Boas and the American Museum of Natural History, founding a second career for which he had no formal training. For the next 20 years or so, he had a very strong relationship with the American Museum of Natural History and he continued to collect for them.
For Comer’s next voyage, Boas said, “Take photographs. Make sound recordings. Take plaster life masks of Inuit faces.” In this way, the documentation became comprehensive. Comer kept detailed written notes of Inuit traditions. He collected stories, oral history, information about the Franklin Expedition, drawings, maps, anything it was possible to collect. Most of what he collected went to the American Museum of Natural History. By about 1907 or 1908, they had the largest arctic collection in the world, most of it acquired by Comer and by Robert Peary. This established Comer as an anthropologist. He continued to make profitable voyages as a whaler, but he added this second career.Fred Calabretta tells the fascinating story of Captain George Comer who was born in Quebec in 1858, grew up in an orphanage and foster home and ended up on Captain John O, Spicer whaling ship at the age of seventeen. George Comer was a very curious man. Mentored by Franz Boas, he developed a career as an anthropologist of the Inuit.
- New England
Fred Calabretta, Curator of Collections, Mystic Seaport Museum
Part 4 of 4
New England Fred Calabretta, Curator of Collections, Mystic Seaport Museum Part 4 of 4
This established Comer as an anthropologist. He continued to make profitable voyages as a whaler, but he added this second career.
One key aspect of his voyages, which helped make all this possible, was the long wintering period. Typically, he would go north for 27 months. The whaling activity would stop in September of the first year, and they would begin preparing winter quarters. From September or October until May of the following year, there was very little whaling activity. The ship would be in winter quarters, giving Comer a wonderful opportunity to closely observe and work with and come to know the Inuit as he did. Much of his success was based on the fact that he had a very deep respect for them. It wasn't just a working relationship, the Inuit were not just employees or trading partners, they were people who mattered to him. Because of that, mutual respect developed, and he had tremendous access to them and their lifeways. He was able to observe shamanistic angakkuq ceremonies inside illuit (iglus), and photograph them, which had never been done. He had this access because he was respected and had this wonderful relationship with the Inuit. This relationship continued through his last whaling voyage in 1912.
He continued to go to sea after the whaling had ended. He participated in an expedition to Greenland sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. It was called the Crocker Land Expedition. That party became stranded in Greenland for a couple of years and Comer took that time to do some archaeological work, which he had never done before. He located some early Inuit occupation sites and began collecting archaeological material, without any training. He was just scraping off the surface with the understanding that there were different layers and that the older material would be below. The area he excavated is still referred to as Comer's Midden and it is still considered a very important archaeological site in the North. The findings were published by several people, including Clark Whistler, who was a very important anthropologist. Without extensive training, Comer continued to expand his anthropological work. Today, Comer's Midden
Comer was in his late 50s when he returned from that expedition and he was close to 60 when World War I broke out. He wanted to serve his country, so he joined the navy as an officer. He was not captain of the ship he was assigned to, the U.S.S. Radnor; it was awkward for him because he was used to being the boss, but he did what he could in the navy.
After his naval service, Comer had the opportunity for one last voyage to the North. An ethnologist by the name of Christian Leden was organizing an expedition to Hudson Bay to study the Inuit and to look into the possibility of establishing trading stations. They acquired a vessel called the Finback, a private yacht that they reinforced for arctic travel.
Comer was the captain of the voyage. From the beginning, it was not a happy one. The crew was terribly inexperienced and barely sober, and on one occasion, one of them threatened Comer with a pistol. Comer apparently beat the man substantially. Also, Comer was in poor health and wasn't feeling well. He thought Leden was arrogant, and they didn't get along. Comer wanted to be the supreme authority on the ship, but he had to share authority with Leden, which didn't work out.
However, Comer did get to Cape Fullerton, and he did see his old Inuit friends. Shortly after arriving there, the Finback was wrecked in Fullerton Harbour. Exactly how that happened, I'm not sure, because Comer had been in and out of the harbour more than anyone alive, and he knew those waters very well. It wasn't a crisis, though, because there were steamers in and out of Hudson Bay by then, and the party was rescued. That voyage gave Comer one last opportunity to see his Inuit friends. That was very important to him, and it was his primary reason for going on that voyage.
Comer's work was very comprehensive, and he collected information in many forms. He took photographs, made plaster casts, and wrote detailed information in journals. Because this information was so comprehensive, we are able to put together interesting profiles of specific individuals. That was quite unusual for that time. We can gain a little bit of understanding about certain individuals with whom Comer had close relationships, which is a valuable aspect of his work.
The whalers had, as did American immigration agents at Ellis Island, a habit of simplifying names for their own convenience. They had a very difficult time speaking Inuktitut, although Comer certainly could to some degree. So they gave Inuit the kind of American names they could handle. One of these people was Tasseok, known by the whalers as Harry. Comer knew him for at least 20 years. He was recognized as the leader of the Aivilingmiut, the people most closely associated with Comer throughout his career. Harry was the leader of a boat crew, and was an excellent carver who made many of the ivory carvings and other items collected by Comer. He was a highly-respected individual whom Comer knew for 20 years. Comer truly had not just a working relationship, but a meaningful friendship with Harry.
There was a woman known by the whalers as Shoofly. She was the wife of an Inuk known as Ben, who was also a good friend of Comer's. Shoofly became Comer's companion in the North for many years. There are many photographs of her. She is not referred to very frequently in his journals, and the reason for that may have been that Captain Comer had a family in East Haddam and proper society in New England at that time would have frowned on his relationship with Shoofly. But it was culturally accepted in the North. As long as these things were open, agreeable and acceptable to all parties involved, it was not looked upon in a negative way. Comer did have a relationship with Shoofly.
There were other Inuit with whom Comer had a close relationship. One time, Comer fell through the ice a long distance from the ship. Ben pulled him out, kept him warm and took him back to the ship, essentially saving his life. Comer appreciated these things. When Ben died, Comer mourned.
Melechi was another Inuit whom Comer knew well. He produced many of the carvings and other materials that Comer collected. There was a group of about 30 or 40 Aivilingmiut whom Comer knew very well, and we know a lot about them because of his detailed record-keeping. He took census records, so we know how much they weighed, how tall they were, how old they were, and we know about their family relationships. Comer also made these extraordinary plaster-cast life masks so that we can actually see their faces in 3D. This is a wonderful window to the past and a wonderful connection to these people and is symbolic of Comer's legacy.
George Comer had a lot of respect for Inuit. His closest companions during the seventeen years when he went wailing in the Hudson Bay were certainly Nivisinaaq (Shoofly), Ippaktuq Tasseok (Harry), Melichi, Ben who once saved his life and so many others. He made his last whaling voyage in 1912, but, after the First World War, he came back on the Finback at Cape Fullerton on an expedition.