Jamie Florence’s Arctic ordeal – Part 1

In 1914, Capt. Henry Toke Munn, an eccentric Brit, established a fur trading post at Sannirut on Bylot Island near present-day Pond Inlet.

Whalers and traders called the place Button Point.

For a fur trading enterprise, his company had an unusual name, the Arctic Gold Exploration Syndicate, for Munn was also obsessed with finding gold in the eastern Arctic as others had in the Klondike.

The “captain” in Munn’s name was a military title earned in the Boer War in Africa. To the Inuit, he was known as Kapitaikuluk — the little captain.

Another captain also figures in this story. He was Capt. Joseph-Elzear Bernier, recently retired from the service of the Canadian government where he had captained the exploration ship, Arctic.

The Inuit had bestowed a similar name on him but it meant just the opposite of Munn’s moniker. They called Bernier Kapitaikallak. It meant “the stocky captain,” for Bernier was a powerful, barrel-chested man.

In the same year that Munn built his post at Sannirut, Bernier opened a rival post at Pond Inlet.

Munn himself wintered at Sannirut that first year. The following year he was replaced by James Booth from Peterhead, Scotland. In 1916, he went home and was replaced by another Peterhead man, Jamie Florence. Munn outfitted him with provisions for only one year.

The same day that Florence arrived in northern Baffin, another independent trader, Robert Janes, from Glovertown, Nfld., also arrived and built his own trading post at Tulukkaan, the mouth of the Patricia River.

The field was becoming quite crowded — there were now three rival trading posts in a relatively small area, all competing for the trade of a small Inuit population.

Munn’s man, Jamie Florence, was 46 years old when he arrived at Button Point. But this was not his first experience of the Arctic, having sailed on whalers out of Peterhead since he was 12.

For some years he had been agent at Kekerten Station in Cumberland Sound. The Inuit there called him Surusiviniq — the one who used to be a child, which was an appropriate name for an adult whom they had known since he was a boy. He was thoroughly familiar with the Inuit of Baffin Island and experienced in trading with them.

In 1917, with war raging in Europe, Munn’s little ship, the Albert, was unable to reach the company’s posts in the Arctic. Jamie Florence had to spend an unexpected second year in the Arctic on slim rations.

The Arctic Gold Exploration Syndicate trading post at Button Point. (Photo from Scott Polar Research Institute, P-72-15-119)

At one point in his lengthy stay in the North, Jamie Florence had a fight with his rival, Robert Janes, known to the Inuit by the peculiar name of Sakirmiaq — the closest they could come to pronouncing “second mate,” the role which he had had on an earlier voyage to the area. That fight was probably in late 1917, and it was over food.

When Florence realized the Albert would not arrive with supplies for him, he paid a visit to Patricia River and appealed to Janes, who was still well-supplied, for rations enough to last him until his relief ship would arrive the following summer.

Janes replied that he would be only too happy to provide Florence with food sufficient to tide him over but that there would, of course, be a charge for this favour.

The cost, Janes informed an incredulous Florence, would be 50 per cent of all the furs Florence had taken since his arrival a year earlier.

Florence was incensed by this demand and refused to agree to it. Janes remained adamant that that was the only condition under which he would part with any of his foodstuffs. A fight ensued.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police heard of it a few years later, far to the south in Chesterfield Inlet. There, Sgt. W.O. Douglas took a statement from an Inuk who told him a story that he had heard from another man.

He told that Takijualuk, a Pond Inlet native whom the traders knew as Tom Kunuk, had stopped Janes from killing another white man at Pond’s Inlet (as Pond Inlet was then known).

The other white man was Jamie Florence. Janes had had him on the floor and was holding a knife over him when Tom ran in and pulled him off.

Inuit memory lives long. More than 70 years later, a respected elder in Igloolik, Noah Piugaattuk, told the same story. He described how Janes threw the other man to the ground and pinned him with his right arm while drawing his knife with the left.

Tom Kunuk, whom Piugaattuk knew only as Takijualuk, was an assistant and interpreter for Florence, and he yelled for Janes to stop the attack. Piugaattuk explained Takijualuk’s motives thus: “He said that he did not want a white man to be killed in the land of the Inuit.”

None of the traders in question left any record of this altercation. Munn, in the book he wrote about his experiences, noted only that Janes was “a very difficult, unreasonable fellow” and he had had trouble with “my man” during their years in the Arctic.

Dejected, Jamie Florence returned to Button Point empty-handed. Inuit recall that he lived out the remainder of his stay in the Arctic largely on tea, of which he had a plentiful supply, and seal meat, supplemented in the spring by birds’ eggs. After his meals, they remember, he used to fill his pipe with tea and settle down for a relaxing smoke.

The next year, 1918, was also a bad year for ice and the Albert again failed to reach Button Point. It wintered in Halifax, where it would outfit for another try the following year.

Jamie Florence was left to face his third winter in the High Arctic without fresh supplies. Munn could only hope that he had survived the two previous winters, but he had no way of knowing.

In the days before radio communications made the North more accessible, one went very much on the blind hope that all had gone according to plan.

In my next column, the ordeal of Jamie Florence continues.

Taissumani is an occasional column that recalls events of historical interest. Kenn Harper is a historian and writer who lived in the Arctic for more than 50 years. He is the author of “Minik: The New York Eskimo” and “Thou Shalt Do No Murder,” among other books. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.