Taissumani: July 1, 1860 — Burial at Sea: The Death of Kudlago

KENN HARPER

In 1860 Charles Francis Hall began making plans for his first expedition to the Canadian Arctic. In New London and Groton, Connecticut, he met the whalemen who held the key to his success.

One of them was Captain Sidney O. Budington, who offered Hall passage. Budington had whaled off southeastern Baffin Island, and had been in the habit of taking Inuit he worked with south to spend a winter with his family. Through him, Hall met one such man, whose name Hall recorded as Kudlago, who was spending that winter in Groton. Hall befriended the man, expecting that he would be able to use him as an interpreter and guide in the north.

On March 8, Hall briefly addressed a meeting of the American Geographical and Statistical Society on his plans, the first of many formal lectures that Hall would give on the Arctic. Although the main speaker was Dr. Isaac Hayes, a veteran Arctic explorer who was then planning an expedition to the High Arctic, Kudlago, who accompanied Hall, was the biggest attraction for the newspaper reporters in attendance, who mangled the spelling of his name variously as “Cudlockdchue” and “Cudlouchdchdue”.

Hall’s spellings of Inuit names were extremely unreliable and it is often dangerous to hazard a guess as to what was really meant. But perhaps in these newspaper spellings we have a closer approximation of the actual pronunciation than in Hall’s own rendering. Comparing both spellings, I think his name was probably Kallaarjuk. But I’m not certain, and so I’ll continue to use “Kudlago” for this account.

Hall described Kudlago as “a remarkably modest and unassuming man.” Kudlago was “quick to learn, and… never expressed surprise at anything. He looked upon the works of civilization with interest, but never with wonder.”

Hall wrote: “One day, while riding in the cars toward New York, a boy passed through distributing circulars, giving one to Kudlago. He took it, looking attentively to see what others might do, and then, as they did, so, to all appearances, did he! Others held the circulars up before them and read. Kudlago held his up before his eyes and appeared to read. Though he could not read a word, yet he looked learned. Solomon may have been wiser, but surely not sharper than Kudlago.”

In mid-May, Hall and Kudlago both sailed north with Budington on the whaler, George Henry. For Budington it was a whaling voyage. For Hall, it was the New Franklin Research Expedition. For Kudlago, unfortunately, it was a voyage of death.

In the early part of the journey, Hall got to know Kudlago well. Unfortunately, the man took ill. He caught a severe cold as the ship passed through the fog-shrouded waters near Newfoundland. His condition deteriorated quickly, to the point that he was unable to spend much time talking with Hall at all. The crew pitched a tent on the deck for him, and shot eider ducks so that Kudlago could eat their hearts and livers raw. But their efforts were for naught. His health steadily worsened.

Kudlago knew he was near death. In his last days he talked of his home and family in Baffin Land, and his hope that he would see them once more. “His prayer,” Hall wrote, “was that he might arrive home, and once more look upon his native land — its mountains, its snows, its ice — and upon his wife and his little ones; he would then ask no more of earth.”

In the early morning of Sunday, July 1, off the Greenland coast, still about 300 miles from home, Kudlago spoke his last words. They were in the pidgin whaler jargon that Inuit used to communicate with whalers in the eastern Arctic. Hall recorded the man’s pitiful question. “Taku siku? taku siku?” he asked hopefully. (“Do you see ice? Do you see ice?”) Then the Inuk, who had gone to Groton as a reward for his service to Budington, passed on to his eternal reward.

At Captain Budington’s request, Hall took part in Kudlago’s burial at sea. The entire ship’s company gathered for a solemn service to pay their last respects to the popular man. Hall read a section from the Masonic Manual and, after a prayer from the same work, Kudlago’s shrouded body was consigned to the deep.

Hall was a deeply religious man who saw the hand of God in everything. He had earlier described the first iceberg he saw as “a mountain of alabaster resting calmly upon the bosom of the dark blue sea… Its fashioning was that of the Great Architect.” An hour after Kudlago’s body had slid into the sea, Hall gazed back to the ocean grave. “A snow-white monument of mountain size, and of God’s own fashioning, was over it,” he wrote. Hall sketched the iceberg and named it “Kudlago’s Monument.”

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.