Taissumani, June 10

Blacklead Island.

KENN HARPER

Last week I wrote about the shipwreck of the Dutch vessel, Jantina Agatha, near Blacklead Island. The Dutch captain and five crew members, Rev. E. W. T. Greenshield and the German ornithologist, Bernhard Hantzsch, had to spend an unexpected winter at the Blacklead mission station, poorly supplied.

The entire party lived in the tiny mission quarters with Greenshield, the only one who could speak the Inuktitut language. He was concerned greatly about food, feeling that what they had salvaged wuld be enough to feed only one man for a year.

By mid-winter, the food situation was desperate. The Inuit of the island hunted and provided the white men with food, primarily seal meat, but sometimes there was not enough for all. But no metter how little the hunters caught, the white men were always remembered.

The sailors slept long into the mornings during that desperate winter, both to forget their hunger and to save coal. By late spring, they were getting two ship’s biscuits and a few bowls of seal broth a day. Later this was reduced to one biscuit and an occasional piece of seal meat. They had long since exchanged their European clothing for Inuit sealskin garments.

Other than hunger, the greatest hardship was excruciating boredom. They socialized with the Inuit. One evening they taught the Inuit to play musical chairs.

In the dead of winter, they constructed a billiard table, made of a door with a blanket stretched over it. Cushions were made from wire and the down of eider ducks. An Inuk made the balls from whale-rib and the cues of wood, tipped with walrus ivory and india rubber. Billiards was a popular pastime for a while.

But the months seemed as years. At many points in this winter of hardship, they feared for their very survival. They thought of home, in the sure knowledge that everyone there will have thought them dead. This knowledge weighed heavily on them.

One wrote in his diary, “It is to die here. For there is nothing here.” Even as spring approached, they all knew that if a ship did not reach them that summer, they would probably not survive another winter.

Amazingly, throughout all this, the German ornithologist, Bernhard Hantzsch, jealously guarded his own supplies, which he had managed to save from the Jantina Agatha before it sank. It was his plan to go inland in the spring, through to Foxe Basin on a three-year expedition, and he refused to share his supplies with any of the shipwrecked sailors.

But not only did he refuse to share, he also insisted on eating with the sailors out of the common rations, while saving all his supplies for his own trip. The sailors felt that they had a right to Hantzsch’s supplies, as they had salvaged them from the sinking ship.

They threatened the scientist with harm, and he begged Greenshield not to leave him alone with them. Finally he agreed to give up some biscuits and a little tobacco. One of the Dutch sailors refers to him with understatement in his diary as “not a greatly beloved man in the small colony.”

Later, while travelling with Inuit in the interior of Baffin Island, en route to Foxe Basin, Hantzsch would have an unpleasant surprise. Along with his other supplies, he was carrying a number of cases of canned food.

Upon opening a case, he discovered that the desperate Dutch sailors and surreptitiously opened some of his cans, removed the food, and replaced it with stones to provide the expected weight, before returning the cans to their cases.

On April 23, 1910, Hantzsch left Blacklead with his supplies and Inuit guides on his quest.
Before we follow him on his journey across Baffin, though, I will tell how the missionary and stranded sailors returned to Europe and the little-known generosity of the Dutch queen. Next week…

Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.