Beads, bones and cairns: Gjoa Haven resident shares local history

Rick Dwyer has lived in Gjoa Haven for nearly half a century.

The 76-year-old former Hudson’s Bay Co. manager and British Army veteran arrived in the Arctic from Scotland in the 1970s and never left.

He married into an Inuit family in Gjoa Haven and remembers the stories they shared, many related to the ill-fated 1845 Franklin expedition. Two ships and their crews were lost for more than a century after searching for the Northwest Passage.

“When I got together with my late wife, Martha Tululik, in 1973, her sisters had these beads,” Dwyer said. “My wife said, ‘We used to dig for beads at our camp down at the Back River rapids in the summer.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, you used to dig for beads?’”

Turns out, the beads weren’t just colourful pebbles.

Dwyer said they were beads made in Venice around 1820 and used for trading, possibly left behind by British explorer George Back’s 1833 expedition to search for John Ross and his crew, who went missing on their second expedition to find the Northwest Passage. (Ross’s ship was crushed in the ice, but he was eventually rescued by whalers and returned to Britain where he was knighted).

Dwyer was also at the centre of another mystery — the so-called Amundsen box, long believed to contain relics from Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen’s time in Gjoa Haven in the very early 1900s.

The tip that it might exist came from Gjoa Haven resident George Porter Sr., who had also worked for the Hudson’s Bay Co.

“[He] had told me that below the Amundsen cairn [erected by Amundsen in 1912], about two or three feet deep, is a wooden box with a narrow metal container,” said Dwyer.

“Inside is a picture that Amundsen left behind of a man called Neumayer.”

With permission from the Nunavut government, Dwyer helped dig up the box.

“[The photograph] was so wet, so I had to press it down under towels and a mattress. And in two days it was bone dry,” he said.

The photograph showed Dr. Georg von Neumayer, a German geophysicist who taught Amundsen about polar navigation and magnetic variation.

Amundsen reportedly left it with instructions: “Whoever finds this photograph is requested to leave it there,” said Dwyer.

“What I didn’t want is someone digging it up and trying to sell it, so instead it’s with the Yellowknife [Historical] Museum.”

Other artifacts he and his wife found include an old musket with its barrel cut away, and a wooden knife authenticated as made in England in 1820. These were discovered in Starvation Cove, where Franklin’s crew perished.

Dwyer’s stories predate the creation of Nunavut in 1999.

He remembers early Gjoa Haven, including a visit from Stuart Hodgson, the Northwest Territories’ first resident commissioner.

Hodgson was speaking to local people, asking whether they wanted to continue living on the land or settle permanently in town. Dwyer’s wife helped to interpret.

Rick Dwyer holds Venetian trade beads believed to date back to around 1820, possibly left behind by George Back’s 1833 Arctic expedition. Also shown are remnants of soapstone pipes and figurine found near a 15-metre deep crevasse west of the Back River rapids. (Photo by Nehaa Bimal)

“What I was surprised to hear was that most old people said they didn’t want to go back and live on the land,” Dwyer said.

“My father-in-law stood up and said, ‘I don’t want to go back to the land. Here in Gjoa Haven, we have a store, we have a school. Without these, life is hard.’”

Some hoped the town would grow. Others spoke about southern medical care they’d received.

“My wife and her parents used to say, if you hear anybody say we were forced from the land, it’s all lies,” Dwyer said. “Those people have never suffered from starvation.”

Dwyer also recalled the day in 1999 when the vote to create the territory of Nunavut was held.

“I went to the community hall in Gjoa Haven when the vote for Nunavut happened, and about 70 people told me their names weren’t on the list. They were really annoyed,” he said.

Though he doesn’t remember who he called when he went to the hamlet office, he remembers the response.

“Whoever it was on the phone said they’d get somebody on it right away, but the vote was to happen in two days. We never heard about it after that.”

Dwyer’s stories of the Back River beads are included in the 2008 book Encounters on the Passage: Inuit Meet the Explorers, written by Dorothy Harley Eber.

 “If I was a writer describing these [stories] I’d say, ‘as far as we know,’” Dwyer said.