Inuit Adrift – The Rescue

Last week I wrote of the incredible drift on an ice-floe of a party of white sailors and two Inuit families, from northern Greenland through Baffin Bay, down Davis Strait and into the North Atlantic, where they continued to drift southward, well off the Labrador coast.

The heroes of this incredible journey were Joe Ebierbing (Ipiirvik), his wife, Hannah, and the Greenlander, Hans Hendrik.

On April 28, 1873, heavy waves made the remnants of their ice-floe unsafe. They abandoned it and once again took to the ship's boat that they had taken when they had abandoned the ship Polaris six months earlier. That afternoon, from the unsteadiness of the storm-tossed boat, Joe shot three bladder-nose seals which he and Hans hauled into the boat.

Later that afternoon, their hopes soared, only to plummet again, when they saw a steamer in the distance, a sealing vessel, heading south-west.

But the crew aboard the steamer didn't see them. George Tyson, the only American on the floe, was nonetheless optimistic. There would be other ships. It was sealing season for Newfoundlanders whose vessels would be plying the waters off Labrador. There might also be whalers. That evening they made camp on another small ice floe and burned seal blubber to attract any vessels that might be in the vicinity.

The next day they spotted another steamer. Everyone took to the boat again and the men rowed steadily for an hour in her direction. But although the sealer remained in sight for most of the day, and another one appeared late in the afternoon, the hapless ice floe party remained invisible in the vastness of the North Atlantic.

On the last day of April, Tyson, catching a nap in the boat, was roused by the shouts of the watchman crying, "There's a steamer! There's a steamer!"

A sealer had materialized through the heavy fog, not more than a quarter mile away. Tyson sprang to life, ordered all the guns to be fired and everyone to set up a simultaneous shout. At the same time Hans took to his kayak and paddled furiously to intercept the vessel before it could once again disappear into the fog. This time, luck was with them. The steamer turned its bow in their direction.

But Hans paddled on, calling out in his broken English, ‘American steamer,' by which words he meant to tell the sealers that the American steamer, Polaris, had been lost.

The startled Newfoundlanders on board gazed from their deck into the fog-shrouded waters, thunderstruck at seeing an Inuk in a kayak alongside. They took him aboard and, following his garbled instructions, steamed to the rescue of Tyson and the ice-bound party. Hans tried to tell them where they had come from, but the Newfoundlanders could not understand him. It didn't matter. In a few minutes, the sealer was alongside the tiny ice-floe.

The vessel was the Tigress from Conception Bay, under Captain Isaac Bartlett. Tyson resumes his story of the rescue:

"Two or three of their small seal-boats were instantly ­lowered… The crews got on our bit of ice and peeped curiously into the dirty pans that we had used over the oil-fires. We had been making soup out of the blood and entrails of the last seal which Hans had shot. They soon saw enough to convince them that we were in sore need. No words were required to make that plain.

"Taking the women and children in their boats, we tumbled into our own, and were soon alongside of the Tigress. We left all we had behind, and our all was simply a few battered smoky tin pans and the debris of our last seal."

Thanks largely to the heroic hunting efforts of Joe and Hans and the leadership of George Tyson, this party of 19 men, women and children, had drifted for more than six months over a distance of 1,500 miles through some of the most treacherous waters in the world with no loss of life. It is one of mankind's greatest yet little-known stories of the will to live and of ultimate survival.

And it ends on a note of humour. On stepping aboard the Tigress, Tyson was surrounded by the curious sealers, all peppering him and his party with questions.

"But," noted Tyson, "when they asked me, ‘How long have you been on the ice?' and I answered ‘Since the 15th of last October,' they were so astonished that they fairly looked blank with wonder."

Finally one of the sealers, staring at Tyson with "open-eyed surprise," blurted out a question:

"And was you on it night and day?"

For the first time in over six months, Tyson roared with laughter.

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.