Mike and Akpalialuk visit Scotland – Part 2

The Albert sailed from Pond’s Inlet on Sept. 20 bound for Peterhead.

It was a harrowing voyage. Three days out, pack ice was sighted. The following day, Capt. John Murray succeeded in clearing it but young ice was already forming in the leads and open water.

On Sept. 29, the vessel put in to Godhavn on the Greenland coast for water. Danish authorities generally enforced a rule prohibiting ships’ crews from coming ashore, but on this occasion the governor turned a blind eye to the rule and permitted a dance to be held.

One can imagine that Kanajuq Mike and his son Akpalialuk were very interested in meeting the Akukitturmiut, as Baffinlanders called the Greenland Inuit people of whom they had heard but never met.

Beginning in early October, the ship endured a succession of gales in the North Atlantic. On Oct. 18, disaster struck when a fierce southwest gale came up and a heavy sea rose over the ship from the stern.

Captain Murray was knocked off his feet and washed into the scuppers, the drainage openings on the sides of the ship. Unconscious and with a deep cut to the head and his leg broken above the knee, he was unable to make any effort to save himself.

Ironically, remaining jammed in the scuppers may have saved his life for heavy seas continued to sweep over the ship. The mate, a Swede who believed the captain would be washed overboard, left the wheel and lunged toward him but was himself washed overboard and lost.

Captain Murray passed the rest of the voyage confined to his bunk. With three other crew sick, Kanajuq Mike proved his worth as a good sailor and wheelman. The Albert’s compass binnacle and freshwater and kerosene tanks were all swept overboard.

On Oct. 24, three hundred miles west of Rockall, a tiny uninhabited island in the North Atlantic, the ship chanced to meet an American ship from which it took on water, kerosene, meat and coal.

Finally, on Nov. 7, it made land at Tobermory, Scotland, then continued on to Peterhead where the ship arrived “with her sails torn to tatters.”

When the Albert reached hits destination, it had been out from Halifax for four months and 17 days.

Jamie Florence returned home after his three-year sojourn in the Arctic and knocked on his own door at 6 a.m. that fall day. He was accompanied by Mike and Akpalialuk, who would spend the winter at his home.

It had been many years since Inuit visitors had come to Peterhead, a reminder to the townsfolk that the fortunes of their town and of the Inuit had once been tenuously united by the vagaries of the bowhead whaling industry.

The local newspaper, the Buchan Observer, expressed a nostalgic interest in the visit of the two, reporting that they aroused “the greatest public interest and curiosity.”

Both father and son “were hugely tickled with a conventional suit of ‘civvies’ which they donned for the first time.” Proud of their new clothes, the paper said “they regarded each other in vast wonderment.”

They were astonished at the brick and stone houses of the town “and evinced a great love for flowers, a bunch of which the father proudly took away with him.”

The Inuit, father and son, who would return to Baffin Island the following year, passed a pleasant winter in Peterhead. Mike, whenever homesick for someone other than Jamie Florence to speak with in Inuktitut, sought out the company of David Cardno.

“Old Davie,” as he was known to locals, had spent many years in Cumberland Sound in the employ of whalers and free traders and spoke Inuktitut with native fluency. Mike knew him by his Inuktitut name Makpataq, but only by reputation, for Cardno had left Cumberland Sound before Mike’s arrival there.

On his excursions through town, Mike would stop and gaze for hours through the window of the local butcher shop, staring longingly at carcasses hanging there on display. Perhaps he was imagining the caribou of his homeland.

Jimmy Florence’s daughter called Mike “one of the kindest and most grateful men I knew.” She offered a telling comment about his son, Akpalialuk, one which seems especially strange coming from the daughter of a trader.

“The boy was very keen to go to school,” she wrote, “and he would have been easily taught but the authorities would not allow him. He might have been too clever and found out how much his own people had been swindled out of by the traders.”

On reaching Peterhead, Capt. Murray had to have his leg re-broken and set. He then spent a long convalescence in the local hospital.

When Munn was ready to leave for Baffin in 1920, Murray had not yet fully recovered and Munn had to use another captain, Capt. Beaven of Glasgow.

Mike and Akpalialuk were once again signed as crew members for the trip home.

The crew list for the Albert in 1920 has the Inuit father and son’s names written in a confusing manner. Kanajuq Mike’s name is given as Apelapique. His son’s name (number 13) is given as Quilapai. (Photo courtesy of Maritime History Archive, Memorial University)

Ships’ records can be wrong, and caution must be exercised in using them. This year, their names were hopelessly mangled. In fact, Kanajuq Mike is listed as Apelapique,a  distortion of his son’s name; his  age is given as 45 years — four years younger then he had been the previous year!

Akpalialuk’s own name is indecipherable; he had aged a year and is listed as 13. Mike’s position aboard is listed as “O.S.” — Ordinary Seaman. Akpalialuk is listed as “Cook’s boy.”

Some Inuit believe that John Murray was, in fact, Kanajuq Mike’s father, but this is not possible. We can assume from the Albert’s crew lists for both years that Mike was probably born between 1870 and 1875. John Murray was born July 26, 1868, so he is only a few years older than Mike.

Finally, the Albert left Peterhead on June 21 bound for Cumberland Sound. It reached Usualuk in August, where Mike and Akpalialuk had a joyous reunion with family and friends.

They had gifts for loved ones, and souvenirs by which to remember their unusual year away from home.

Above all, they had stories to tell, of meeting Inuit in the farthest northern reaches of Baffin Island and on the Greenland coast, of a harrowing Atlantic crossing, and of a winter in Peterhead, the far-off town where so many of the white men known to the Inuit of Cumberland Sound had made their home.

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.