Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 18

have suddenly listed to starboard, for there was little sign of it there either.... Rather than order the s.h.i.+p to be unloaded of a hundred tons or so of vital cargo, they [the inspectors] seemed to have arrived at a remarkable conclusion: the Nascopie was a s.h.i.+p that listed on both sides at the same time." Fully loaded, the s.h.i.+p would sound her siren and, her pennants flying, cast off lines and steam half-astern to midstream. With all the s.h.i.+ps in barbour blowing their salute whistles, the Nascopie would puff proudly out to the St Lawrence and set course for Labrador. Aboard would be not only HBC executives and post replacements but also red-coated Mounties, explorers, geologists, missionaries, doctors, nurses, postmas- ters and government administrators of every description.

The ninety-day voyage was a race against tides and weather. None of the three dozen or so ports of call had a dock, so the s.h.i.+p anch.o.r.ed off each post while goods were loaded and unloaded from wooden scows. This could be tricky. The HBC's Archie Hunter recalled putting into Chesterfield Inlet on a rough day: "When we arrived no one from sh.o.r.e dared venture out to meet us, with the exception of one hardy soul. Out he came battling the white-capped waves in a Lac Seul canoe until he finally made it to the s.h.i.+p. I still remember his introduction of himself, 'They call me Crazy Mac but you ought to see the rest of them ash.o.r.e."'*

The fox pelts were brought aboard in bales of one hundred, stamped with each trading post's name and a silk-cloth destination label that read: "Beaver House, Great Trinity Lane, London, England." The day of arrival was very special as the residents of each settlement read their annual ration of mail. Then the

Crazy Mac had bv this time been north with the HBC for fifteen years without a furlough. He left that season aboard the Nascopie, got off at Halifax, and promptly married a bishop's daughter.

300 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

The Nascopie loading at Charlton Island, 1933

stevedoring started. "At every port where we stopped," complained Ernie Lyall, an old Arctic hand, "we had to work with the crew and hump cargo all the time. I think that's about the time that 'Heavy b.l.o.o.d.y Cargo' got tacked on to the HBC initials." Local Inult would help out, and some remembered the inagic of those occasions. "The sight of these great vessels entering the world where we lived made thrills go through our hearts," recalled Alootook Tpellie, a Frobisher Bay artist and carver. -This was during high tide and everyone worked as a unit, just like a circus setting up the big tents and other things to get ready for the opening night. There was laughter among the people, a sign of happiness which never seemed to stop as long as the s.h.i.+p stayed." The traders themselves held a less romantic view. The second-best day of the year was when the Nascopie arrived, they said. The best was when she left.

THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 301.

By early September, winter would begin to set in and the stops became shorter, the unloading even more frenzied. Smellie once steamed for an hour past the largest iceberg on record: an ice island a hundred feet high and ten miles long. In those pre-radar days he had to "smell" the presence of ice in fog or in the dark, and his s.h.i.+p didn't always stay out of harm's way. Smellie had three spare propellers on board, and whenever one was damaged, he would back his s.h.i.+p onto some deserted northern beach at high tide, wait for a tide s.h.i.+ft, then change props.

Heading north through Baffin Bay or into the riptides of Hudson Strait, s.h.i.+ps had no protection from the grey swells, mountains of water thirty feet high, claiming the ocean for themselves.

THE NASCOPIE'S IMMEDIXFE PREDECESSOR was the Pelican, a former British man-of-war and slave-chaser, purchased by the HBC in 1901. The 290-ton auxiliary sloop also beat off a German submarine (on August 26, 1918, off Cardiff) and continued in the Company's setvice until 1920. She was joined in 1905 by the Discoveiy, the heavily reinforced exploration barquentine that carried Captain Robert Falcon Scott's 1901-4 expedition to the Antarctic, which made the lost annual supply voyage to York Factory in 1914.

Many a brave Company crew undertook the annual supply voyage, and the HBC even fought a major naval battle to protect its sea lanes, but many more vessels departed than returned.* The last HBCsailing s.h.i.+p to ply the Bay, the three-masted barque Stork, went down in a storm off Rupert House in 1908. Ice crushed the Bayeski~mo, while the Bayrupert piled up on Hen and

*For Aetails of this epic se,.i eripgement, see Company of Adventarel'S, hardco% er, 1),,iges 12 0- 2 5.

302 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Chickens Reef, on the Labrador coast.* The fifty-six-ton Fort Churchill, a ketch that arrived at York Factory in the late autumn of 1913 with a load of coal from Falmouth, England, was left unattended at anchor some distance up the Nelson River. She vanished during a three-day easterly -ale, onlv to be found two years later washed up on one of the Belcher Islands.

The potential for east-west trade across the top of North Arnerica was first demonstrated in 1930. The 1113C , s schooner Fort James (built in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, as the Jean Revillon) had sailed out of St John's to spend two winters frozen in at Gjoa Haven on King William Island. When the 11BCs western-based supply s.h.i.+p Fort McPherson pulled in and anch.o.r.ed near her, it was the first time the North West Pa.s.sage had been bridged-even if by mo s.h.i.+ps-since Amundsens his tory-making crossing of 1903-6. In 1934, when the Fort James was transferred to the Company's western divl'

sion, she went through the Panama Ca.n.a.l and eventually back into the North; she got as far cast as Cambridge Bay-only two hundred miles west of her 1928-30 win tering place. Had she closed that short gap, the Fort James would have been the first vessel in history to cir c.u.mnavigate North America. Both the Fort James and the Fort McPherson as well as the Fort Hearne were later wrecked in Arctic gales.

The Company's maritime experience in the Western Arctic wasn't much luckier. After several sinkings of chartered and purchased vessels, the HBC decided in

*The H13C manager at ""olstenholme had put away his salary for years to purchase a piano, which went down with the Bayeskimo in 192 5. Two years later lie had saved enough to order a replaceruent, only to have it sink aboard the Bayrupen. He found a ncw hobby.

THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 303.

The Baychimo

1920 to build a s.h.i.+p specially designed for the job, the auxiliary wooden schooner Lady Kindersley. Her ribs were mounted so close together that with planking and sheathing the hull had an overall thickness of neariv twenty-two inches, while her how was reinforced witfi thick metal sheets.

She sailed out of Vancouver on June 27, 1924, carrying not only a year's worth of HBC re-supplies but also a powerful government radio transmitter, due to be installed at Herschel Island. Imprisoned by the floes and hummocks off Point Barrow, Lady Kindersle-y had to be abandoned after a month of attempting to free herself.

Other s.h.i.+ps were a.s.signed to the west-coast run, but few hulls could withstand the battering of the ice around Maska's northern coast.

Originally built as a Baltic coaster and taken by the British as part of German postwar reparations, the 11BCs supply s.h.i.+p Baycbimo was the largest vessel to trade in the North West Pa.s.sage. The 1,500-tonner succcssfully completed nine expeditions to 304MUESTFOR QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

the Companys eight Western Arctic posts, but on her return Journey in 1931 she got stuck in ice off Point Franklin, near Point Barrow. Since she was carrying a million dollars' worth of fur there was no question of abandoning her, but when the vessel seemed in danger of being crushed, Captain S.A.

Cornwall ordered the crew to set up a temporary shelter on sh.o.r.e, two miles away. Although some pa.s.sengers and 11BC officials were flown out by rescue planes, the captain and sixteen of his crew retreated to their makes.h.i.+ft dwelling to await a change in the weather, so that thev might free their s.h.i.+p. On November 24, a blizzard howled in. It turned so feroclous the sailors had to close off their little dwelling, huddling together for warmth and comfort, taking turns sitting next to the gasoline drum that had been converted into a stove. When they dug themselves out three days later, the Baychimo had disappeared. She was seen a few months after that drifting alone through pack ice by an Inuk travelling from Herschel to Nome.

Two years later, the Baychinio was boarded by Isobel Wylie flutchinson, a Scottish botanist bound for Herschel aboard the schooner 'Trader. The ghostlv Baychimo had been sighted twelve miles off Wainwright, and the Traders captain had brought his little vessel alongside. "A strange spectacle the decks presented," Hutchinson later noted in her journal. "The main hold was open to the winds, but its half-rifted depths still contained sacks of mineral ore, caribou skins, and a cargo of various descriptions.... Writing paper, photographic films, ledgers of the Hudsons Bay Company, typewriter ribbons-all "-ere here for the taking! In a wooden crate was an unsullied edition of The Times Historv of the Great War in many tomes. Charts of all seas of the world lay scattered upon the decks of the pilot-house.... A breakfast irienu tossed in the doorway indicated that the crew THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 305.

Of the unlucky s.h.i.+p were at least in no danger of starvation, for there was a choice of some six courses."

The 7~ader's first mate determined that the Baychimo's engines were in perfect condition and that all she needed was to have her spare propeller mounted before she could sail away under her own steam, but the weather closed in and the visitors scrambled off the doomed vessel as fast as they could. The sightings continued. In 1936 Captain Parker of the cutter Northland pulled alongside, and in 1961 she was spotted by a party of Inuit between Icy Cape and Point Barrow. A DEW Line supply superintendent from Vancouver named Don Roderick reported seeing her off Cambridge Bay in 1965.

That Mly s.h.i.+p--manned by ghosts or men-could survive the awesome force of the polar ice pack for three decades seems beyond reason, but the H13c's Baycbimo did just that, and since no one actually saw her sink, she may be out there still ...

SCOTTY GALL, THP HBC TRADE R who had been one of the last crew members to get off the Baychimo, reacted to his s.h.i.+p's fate with the typical aplomb of a good Company man. "Pity," he said. "She still had twenty bales of fur on her." Gall was back north six years after the Baychimo disappearance on what would turn out to be the greatest sea adventure of his career. In the spring of 193 7, the Hudson's Bay Company decided to establish a connecting link between its western and eastern operations by building a trading facility in the Central Arctic at the bottom of Somerset Island~ on Bellot Strait. The new outpost was to be named Fort Ross, after the two British naval officers, uncle and nephew, who had first explored the area in the 1820s and 1830s.

The Alascopie's itinerary called for her to pick up some Inuit families 306 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Scotty Gall on theschoone7- Aklavik, 1937

at Arctic Bay for resettlement at Fort Ross, then rendezvous with the small (thirty-ton) schooner Aklavik at the eastern entrance of Bellot Strait.*

*'Fhese were the same Inuit who had been uprooted from their homes at Cape Dorset, Pangnirtung and Pond Inlet by the HBC in 1934 and taken to Dundas Harbour, where the ice turned out to be too tough and thick for either sled or boat travel. In 1936, Dundas Harbour was closed and the Inuit were transferred to Arctic Bay. Now they were being displaced again.

THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 307.

No steel-hulled vessel had ever entered these waters, and no s.h.i.+p of any kind had been here since the visit of Leopold McClintock, the Irish-born Royal Navy captain who found doc.u.ments and relics indicating the fate of the Franklin expedition while on an 1859 sledge journey from his s.h.i.+p, frozen in near the entrance to the strait. Bellot Stra It, where Fort Ross was to stand, had been discovered byJoseph-lZen6 Bellot, a French naval sub-lieutenant, poking around the North mainly because he was in love with S1rJohn Franklin's widowJane, and hoped to gain heroic status by finding her husband's remains. Barely na6gable, the strait was an important link in the North West Pa.s.sage, dividing the Arctic archipelago frorn the North American continent. Scotty Gall, who spent forty-three years in the Company's northern service, had learned his navigation in the Mackenzie Delta. "I knew where all the reefs were; I'd hit every one," he remembered. "Some of the Scotsmen who came north were linguists, others studied the Inuit. I was much more interested in finding out how the aboriginals can travel without any navigation aids. I came to believe they have an inherent sense of direction, reading the sun, wind, snowdrifts or the lichen on rocks." It took Gall twenty years to hone his own instincts and crossing Bellot Strait was his greatest test.

The pa.s.sage is twenty miles long and often less than a mile wide.

Eleven-foot tides flood in from its western end, causing an eight-knot current. just as he was steering the Aklavik into the strait, his engine (a 35-h.p. Fairbanks-Morse) failed; he replaced a faulty fuel strainer just as the little s.h.i.+p was about to run aground. The motor sputtered to life, but it would operate only at half speed. "The current was running pretty fast," Gall recalled, "and I couldn't get much way-on, so I turned the boat around, pointed my nose into the current, which 308 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

gave me more control against side-slips, and we went through the Bellot back-wards!"*

At noon on September 2, 1937, Gall traded his cargo of furs for supplies abo,.)rd the Nascopie, then anch.o.r.ed at Depot Bay, just off the Fort Ross site. The transaction made Gall the first man in history to have turned the North West Pa.s.sage into a commercial reality. He was not impressed. "It's all bunk about the North West Pa.s.sage, it gives ine a pain," said he. "We could have done It any time, and gone higher north. But that was no advantage to us. We wei-e traders, and we went where the fur was. There was n.o.body to the north of us. What the h.e.l.l good would it have done to run right through the Pa.s.sage, when there were no Eskimos, and we didn't have any t--ade there?"

The Nascopie had not found easy pa.s.sage because Prince Regent Inlet, which leads to the strait, was choked with blue ice that year. She had a tight margin of only seven days in which to reach Fort Ross, establish the post, and steam out again to free water. JAV. Anderson and Paddy Gibson, a Chief Trader normally in the Western Arctic, went ash.o.r.e to select the site, having

*Known asacracknavigator, Gall also had tl ie reputation of being the worst cook among the HBC's northern hands. I le couldn't even make a pot of tea,"

recalled Noodv "ood, one of his colleagues. "He'd eat all his meat raw because he was always hurq~ry and couldn't be bothered cooking it -though he usually killed the anintals first. I remember one time, Scotty shot an owl, and his wife cooked it because it was Christmas, and once served on a platter it looked a bit like turkey. When it was put in front of him, Scotty took one bite, and smacking his lips with pleasure said, 'Oy, it tastes like preniasticated Mouse meat to me.' I never had roast owl again."

THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 309.

first paid silent tribute at the cairn left behind by McClintock, the Admiralty sailor who had made five futile attempts to sail through Bellot Strait nearly a century before. HBC carpenter Clem James, aided by two Compariv traders, Lorenz Learmonth and D.G. Sturrock (who had arrived the same day after a harrowing journey from Gjoa Haven, mainly on foot, carrying a sixteen-foot canoe), erected a store, staff building and warehouse. By the evening of September 7, the work had been nearly completed and the HBC flag was raised over the Company's last new post devoted to the fox trade. Learmonth stayed behind (with interpreter-trader Ernie Lyall) as Fort Ross's first manager. The Nascopie landed her Inuit pa.s.sengers, and just before she was due to sail away an I IB(,' hand named Donald Goodyear, incongruously dressed in a three-piece suit, topped off with a fedora (because he was on his way out on furlough), rowed himself ash.o.r.e, determined to help Learmonth finish building the post. The Aklavik tooted her whistle and the Nascopie blew her horn as the s.h.i.+ps parted, headed back to their separate oceans, knowing their meeting had made a four-hundred-year dream come true. On sh.o.r.e, Goodyear was waving his silly fedora and Lyall a dishcloth; Learmonth gave a salute. Fort Ross was in business.

But not for long. In 1942 and 1943 unusually thick pack ice prevented the Nascopie from resupplying Fort Ross, then manned by WA. Heslop, his wife, Barbara, and a clerk named Darcy Munro, who also operated the post's new short-wave radio. "One evening in September [1943], we sighted the Nascopie about fifteen miles off sh.o.r.e," recalled Mrs Heslop. "We thought our worries were over; but it was not until later that we were to realize they were just beginning. For three days we saw her, or her smoke, on the horizon and it was evident she was 310 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

having difficulty in the ice-pack. That was an anxious three days, but we didn't give up until we finally saw her heading north with black smoke belching from her funnel."* Food was so short that both HBC men spent most of their time hunting. By November, a U.S. Army Air Forces plane was sent in to rescue the staff and leave food for the Inuit.

The post was reactivated the following summer, but by 1947 it was clear that Fort Ross was too remote, too expensive and too risky to keep open. It was closed and its Inuit families were moved yet again, this time to Spence Bay, 180 miles to the south. Fort Ross vanished from the Hudson's Bay Companys rosters, but its memory survived. All those involved knew that they had for a brief time been part of a brave experiment on the very edge of the world. Lorenz Learmonth, long after he had retired from the HBC, managed to find commercial pa.s.sage to Bellot Strait. For a week he rummaged around the ruins of that lonely little outpost, pining for the forgotten dreams of a land that seemed to exist north of hope.

CAPTAIN SMELLIE RETIRED IN 1945 and was succeeded by James Waters, who had served as the Nascopies first officer since 1941. On his second run, during the early

*Captain Smellie had intended to stay longer, but on the afternoon of the third day, a group of crewmen led by two Newfoundland lightermen confronted him on the bridge. They issued an ultimatum: if lie didn't turn the s.h.i.+p around by dusk, they would refuse to work it because they feared being frozen in for the winter. Smellie recognized the truth, if not the manner, ofthat advice, headed his s.h.i.+p back to sea, and did not Jay any mutiny char4es.

THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 311.

afternoon of July 2 1, 1947, Waters was nosing the Nascopie into Cape Dorset when the s.h.i.+p struck an uncharted reef off Beacon Island. J.W, Anderson, then in charge of the fur trade's Eastern Arctic Division, was aboard and vividly remembered the grounding: "Das.h.i.+ng out on deck, I could see what had happened, but the tide was falling and notwithstanding the reversing of the engines she stuck fast in a perfectly upright position. Well, I thought, if this is going to be a s.h.i.+pwreck, it is quite a civilized one. . . ." Another witness was Peter Pitseolak, a local artist who had customarily piloted 11BC s.h.i.+ps into Dorset but on this, of all occasions, had been rebuffed by Waters, who thought he could outdo Smellie by bringing the s.h.i.+p in himself A few hours after the vessel went aground, the captain ordered everyone ash.o.r.e in lifeboats, but the mood was still buoyant because it was a beautiful windless day and except for her ten-degree list to stern, the s.h.i.+p seemed unharmed. Anderson and the other HBC managers expected the lightened vessel could be refloated at high tide. Helped by kedged anchors, that was exactly what happened-the s.h.i.+p worked her way off the ree~. But in so doing, she grievously holed her hull. The Arctic waters rushed in, flooding her engine room. At 3 A.M. a gale came up, smas.h.i.+ng the vessel into another rock. She was now down by her bow, her decks at a thirty-degree angle, her screw high out of the water, her bilge pumps useless. At 5 A.M. the order was given to abandon s.h.i.+p.

Captain Waters, standing on sh.o.r.e watching his doomed vessel, asked one of his mates, a colourful Newfoundlander named Willis Warren, to go back aboard and rescue some warm clothes for his wife, who had been travelling with him. "Willis got into a dory Mid rowed back to the s.h.i.+p, climbing tip her stern on a THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 313.

jacob's ladder that had been left hanging there," the I IBCs George Whitman said later. "This was all done to a gallery of smirking Inuit who had been watching the white men make fools of themseIN es, running their s.h.i.+p into a rock. Warren went below into the captains cabin, vanished fi)r a while, then stuck his head out a porthole and waving a pair ot"Mrs Waters's pink bloomers, yelled: 'Would these be what ve wants, Captam?'

The a.s.sembly burst into laughter, with the Inuit dancing out their joy, jumping up and down, wildly clapping their hands. Then the s.h.i.+p lur(hed a little and Warren got out of there fast."

The Nascopie remained poised on the reef for an incredible three months.

Battered bv gales and ice, she showed off her seaworthiness one last time, finallv slipping under at midnight on October 15, 1947. Peter Pitseolak, Cape Dorset's Inuit pilot, quoted her fitting epitaph, voiced by his friend Kululak: "Our big helper lias. .h.i.t the bottom."

CHAPTER 12.

NORTHERN.

GRIDLOCK.

"There was a big war It was between the Bay and the Germans. The Bay won. "

-Octave Sivanertok

A PAINTING OF THENATMTY that hung in the Anglican Cathedral in Aklavik until it burned down in 1975 depicted a crowd of Inuit celebrating the blessed event. Clearly identifiable among thern were a missionary, a Mountie and an Mc Factor.

The theme and juxtaposition were entirely appropriate to the birth of the modern North except that in many of the really isolated Arctic posts, Bay managers frequently handled both spiritual and legal functions on top dtheir commercial mandates. "The real boss of each settlement ~A as the local Bay man," recalled Ed Spracklin, who served in half a dozen posts.

"Everybody came to you for advice, even on family and medical matters.

I was also acting as commissioner of oaths and registrar for family allowances." Bay men were not medically trained and their stores carried only such nostrums as Minard's Liniment, Dodd,s Kidney Pills, Perry Davis's Pain Killer (30 percent alcohol), Carter's Little Liver Pills and Gin Pills (which achieved little except to turn the urine green), but the Factors were often faced with medical emergencies. "One time, this Eskimo interpreter of ours at Cape Dorset got a nick in his left elbow, and it turned septic," recalled Chesley Russell, a

315.