Taissumani, March 19

Aullaqiaq, the wife of William Duval, at the wheel of the Albert.

KENN HARPER

Last week I wrote about the voyage of the small vessel Albert to Pond’s Bay, under the veteran whaler, James Mutch. This week I’ll tell about Mutch’s trading with the Inuit there.

Mutch thought the Inuit of Pond’s Bay drove a hard bargain, their skills no doubt learned through decades of dealing with Scottish whalers during the brief High Arctic summers.

“The real Pond’s Bay Eskimo,” he wrote, “had been coming and going all winter, trading a fox-skin when they had one, but always wanting nearly the home value for it for anything they might bring. They had an idea that seal-skins were worth more than ten times what they were sold for in the London market…. When a bear-skin was brought, though it was small, a telescope or a gun was asked for it…”

Winters were hard for the Pond’s Bay Inuit, and Mutch attributed this to the paucity of sled dogs. “Without dogs,” he noted, “they cannot all get to the best hunting-ground, and even at the best ones, I can hardly say that I have seen thus far, nor have I heard of, any good catches of seals.”

He thought many of the men were reliable and conscientious hunters, but that there were also many indolent and lazy individuals who lived off the results of other people’s efforts. He described them collectively as “a happy go-lucky race” and said that “it takes many hungry days, and dark ones, to drive out all their fun.”

The first summer that the Albert was in the harbour which bore its name, whaling and trading were poor. Mutch wrote about it:

“We did not have much chance to make a good fishing as the pack came in on the boats. And the only time the whales came the ships [i.e. larger ships] were there to help catch them. The Eclipse got one at the time referred to. And the Diana one. And we got one but small, then long after the Eclipse another but very small. We got one on the 19th of June.”

In writing about the narwhal tusk trade, he noted that “the best I have seen is 8 feet long and about 18 lbs. They have heavy bodies at that weight of horn and lots of blubber.” He also took a few white whales and walrus.

The year 1905 was an even poorer one for whaling and hunting from Mutch’s station. “My years catch has been the worst I have had yet,” he wrote. “No whale bone at all, as I had only, or was only able to save about 50 narwhals out of 150 we shot, i.e. the ice took the others away from us. And the winter was so bad they got but a few seals, and we only managed to salt 218. We had 22 bearskins, 13 walrus hides and almost 280 lbs of narwhal horns – that’s the voyage of 1905.

In the fall Mutch took passage back to Scotland aboard another Dundee whaler, the Eclipse, leaving the Albert and its crew to winter and continue whaling and trading the following year.

“The Albert was left in a harbor,” Mutch wrote, “men to look after the stations, and to whale till the ice made, and get the boats ready for the spring whaling which begins about the last of May, and to put the boats down whither (sic) I be back in time or not. If the whaling is good for the Albert she will be home this year to get a engine of some kind into her. That was the arrangement about a month ago…”

Mutch returned the following year, again travelling on the Eclipse, commanded by Captain W. F. Milne. Fred Cameron had been in charge of his post during his absence.

But plans had changed and the ship did not go to Scotland to be refitted with an engine. Mutch and the crew remained in the far north for one more winter. In 1907, Mutch finally moved the little ship, Albert, out of its comfortable harbour, its home for three winters, and took it back to Scotland.

The following year Mutch purchased the little vessel from Mitchell’s Dundee Pond’s Bay Company and, with some associates from Peterhead, formed his own enterprise, the Albert Whaling Company.

Thus ended the four-year adventure of Mutch, his ship, and the Cumberland Sound Inuit who had pioneered whaling from a fixed shore base in the High Arctic.

As a whaling venture, it hadn’t been terribly successful. Commercial bowhead whaling in the Arctic was nearing an end, morphing into a hunt for beluga, narwhal and walrus, and into trading for skins and tusks, and even that was a dicey proposition.

There were unexpected effects of this adventure on the Inuit of Pond’s Bay. The Cumberland Sound Inuit, the Uqqurmiut, had had contact with Christianity – the Blacklead Island mission station, where many of them had lived in Cumberland Sound, had been established some years before the northern voyage of the Albert.

Some of the Uqqurmiut, though not all, had already adopted Christianity. Many were literate in syllabics. And so the message of Christianity and the gift of literacy would have been passed on to the Tununirmiut during these years, long before the arrival of any white missionaries, an unexpected legacy of James Mutch’s venture.

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.