Part 15 (1/2)
250 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
vessels had been traversing for 240 years, the Company established its first Eastern Arctic post dedicated to trade with the Inuit. A treeless notch at the top of the Ungava Peninsula, the tiny harbour had been visited three centuries earlier by Henry Hudson and named Wolstenholme, after one of his financial backers. The HBC Factor placed in charge of the new venture was Ralph Parsons, who would quickly become a dominant force in the Company's northward expansion. Born at Bay Roberts on the west sh.o.r.e of Newfoundland's Conception Bay, Parsons was schooled at the local Church of England academy, then went to Labrador as tutor to an HBC Factor's children. He joined the Company himself as an apprentice at Cartwright in 1898 and spent six years commuting between Rigolet and North West River, the wilderness posts once managed by Donald Smith. Given only a week's notice to get the expedition to Wolstenholme organized, Parsons arrived at the desolate spot aboard the Company's supply s.h.i.+p Pelican, and after instructing his accompanying carpenter to start building the post, set off in a dinghy with two Inuit boys to seek customers. Finding none, they put in for the night sixty miles along Hudson Bay's east coast, and while they were asleep their boat and provisions were washed away by the tide. They had no choice but to walk back across hilly terrain, circuniventing the fiords that serrate the coast. The rocky ground cut to shreds first their boots and then their feet. Staggering along the tundra for four days, exhausted and starving, the two boys gave up (but were rescued later) while Parsons was reduced to crawling on all fours as he approached Wolstenholme. He waited at the new post a full two years before the first customers showed up. ”Snowing fast, very tough wind,” he noted in his journal on April 20, 1909. ”This place should have been called 'Windhome' or something worse. Great place for a lunatic asylum, that sort of thing would pay.” Once the ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 251.
N.. 58 rALL AND WINTER CATALOGUE, 1910~1911
Attractive Styles in Ladies' Fur Sets
9.5~ i
976.
.00 35.00.
105.0 4,.
AN Ll N UUA B-OW,.
Advertis.e.m.e.nt in HBC cataloglue, fall-winter 1910-11
Inuit found Parsons, the trade grew briskly, and by the summer of 1911 he felt confident enough to establish the Company's first Baffin Island post at Lake Harbour on the opposite side of Hudson Strait. Within the next eighteen years, Parsons inaugurated a dozen more posts (including Cape Dorset, Pangnirtung, Pond Inlet and Port Harrison), and a further twenty HBC stores were opened while he was in charge of the Eastern Arctic.
Parsons ruled over an immense empire with the righteousness of a latter-day Cromwell. The Company was everything to him, not just his job but his religion. He even made sure that the licence plates on his Newfoundland- based automobile always bore the 252 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
numbers 1670, commemorating the year of the HBCs founding. He married Flora May House in 1918, and they had a son born the following year. After his wife died in childbirth the year after that, Parsons never remarried and wore a black tie for the rest of his life. ”He was naturally reserved, independent, self-con trolled,” recalled Archibald Lang Fleming, first Anglican bishop of the Arctic, who knew Parsons intimately. ”He also had amazing powers of detachment and never appeared to be surprised no matter how unexpected or absurd a report or incident might be. These qualities enabled him to rise step by step in the company's service until he became Fur Trade C ommissioner in charge of the whole extensive and complicated transportation system. . . . He raised the whole tone of the fur trade. He was ruthless in his determination to stop drunkenness and immorality, not perhaps because of any deep religious conviction, but because he knew that these spelled ruin to both trapper and trader.” Reflecting on that same single-track mentality in less kindly fas.h.i.+on, Captain Henry Toke Munn, who had run a trading post at Pond Inlet before being bought out by the HBC, commented in his memoirs: ”The Company is a hard taskmaster and Parsons serves it with cold-blooded efficiency. He had been a Company trader at Lake Harbour, on Baffin's Island, for some years, and knows the Eskimos well, but I do not think he has ever understood them. He neither likes nor dislikes them, but regards them merely as instruments to serve the great Company.”
THE HBUS NORTHERN COMMERCE expanded gradually, with the Inuit trading in polar bear pelts, Arctic wolf and weasel skins, white whale hides (processed into shoe laces), the occasional find of mica (used for electrical insulators) or garnet crystals from Lake Harbour, eiderdown from Cape Dorset, and sealskins, used to make ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 253.
school satchels, boots and windbreakers. But such items were all incidental to the fox. The sharp-eared, fluffy amtrial that fed mainly on the remains of caribou brought down by wolves or the leavings of seal caught by polar bears lived everywhere north of the tree-line, often win- tering on floes. Unlike its more wary red or silver cousins foraging in the forested south, the Arctic fox is less clever than it looks. The animal's most noticeable feature is its tail, a portable Linus blanket that can be used in close encounters to blind attacking predators but more commonly serves as a heating pad when the fox is curled up against the cold, guarding its exposed nose and footpads from the frost, acting as both a wrap and a respirator. Before the white man's arrival, the Inuit had little use for fox pelts because they are too flimsy for clothing.
Their only application was as a hand or face wipe-a kind of furry Kleenex-or for tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs on children's clothes. The foxes' meagre back legs, their meatiest part, provided little nourishment.
Too curious for its own good, the Arctic fox has an unerring instinct to investigate any physical change within its field of vision. Trappers tell of foxes watching from a distance while they are setting a trap; the moment they're out of sight, the animal is already poking at it, often the victim of its iron jaws. If the fox doesn't freeze to death in the trap's deadly embrace, trappers kill it by diverting the animal's attention with an outstretched hand and when it lunges, hitting it across the snout with a snow knife, so that the stunned animal can then be removed from its leg-hold.*
An alternative trapping method was used in capturing wolves and even polar bears. Small seal bones were filed to sharp points, then bent into a U shape, the ends loosely tied together with sinew, and the whole thing wrapped in apiece ofmeat, which was allowed to freeze. Awolfwould gulp down the package; once inside its stomach, the meat would thaw and the bone would spring out, piercing the animal's stomach, causing a speedy death.
254 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
Valuable and relatively simple to catch though the white fox was, it had one drawback as a staple for the Inuit trade: its appearance in the North was subject to irreg-ular birth rates, peaking quadrennially according to the life cycle of the lemming, the fox's main diet. HBC posts would collect five thousand pelts in a good year and a hundred in a down-cycle season.*
Since the Inuit had become dependent on the white man's goods, the fox trade became essential. But few realized how fundamentally the switch from hunting to trapping would disrupt their traditional society.
BEFORE THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY moved into the North, Inuit life had followed specific seasonal patterns based largely around sea animals. Frozen water was a form of liberation because dog teams could whiz sleds along its smooth surface at much faster and safer speeds than over the fissured terrain of the tundra, allowing families to visit one another and to hunt together. Summers were spent at temporary fis.h.i.+ng camps established at river mouths where the Arctic char wiggled towards their sp.a.w.ning grounds. The catch was stored for dog food; then, with in a month, the hunters were out in their kayaks, after seal. In October there was fis.h.i.+ng from stone weirs at river mouths and seal hunting through breathing-holes in the ice. Much of this catch was used to fuel dog teams during the inland hunt for migrating caribou. Since the average Inuit family and its dogs consumed forty pounds of meat a day, this often caused a serious logistical problem. An inland Inuk had to kill at least two hundred caribou annually to keep his family and dogs alive. The constant search for food in a
*A record 30,000 white fox pelts were exported from the Canadian North by the I IBC in 1943.
ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 255.
land with severely limited resources meant that each family had to hunt over a large area. Except for the temporary shelters thrown up to hold the traditional family reunions early each autumn, there were few real settle- ments or communities. The Inuit lived on the hunting trails or in temporary, widely dispersed fis.h.i.+ng and sealhunting camps. Inuit life was nomadic, coastal (except for the caribou forays), proud and independent.
In those early days, the Inuit lived in small, related family groups sprinkled along the coastline, and their visits to HBC posts were usualiv limited to two a year. In the dead of winter, the head d each family would arrive alone by dog team to trade and renew his essential supplies; in summer, whole families would come to greet the annual HBC supply vessel and mingle with kinfolk. Like the whaling s.h.i.+ps, the Company's posts were there providing goods, but their presence was incidental to the seasonal rhythm oflnuit existence. As the fur trade accelerated, such FIBC supplies as rifles, hatchets, needles, matches, tea and tobacco became necessities instead of supplements, and everything changed. To satisfy these essentials, the Inuit had to abandon their subsistence inode of life and concentrate on the only ”cash crop” there was: fox pelts.
This s.h.i.+ft from the primary role of hunter to trapper involved a radical switch in the aboriginals' sense of selfworth. Unlike trapping, hunting-especially of seal and polar bear-was a test of manhood, a dignified and courageous occupation in which each family celebrated the day's bounty. To be a hunter was to be an Angut-”a Man, preeminently.”
The fox had to be trapped in winter when fur was at its prime, which meant abandoning most of the seal and caribou hunts. That in turn meant not only having to change social customs but also having to buy from the mc the clothing and tools previously obtained as byproducts of seal and caribou kills. To 256 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
Inuit bunter witb frozen seal at Igloolik
maximize their trade and retail selling opportunities, the HBC encouraged the concentration of the Inuit into villages or settlements. The location of few HBC posts was chosen by aboriginals; sites were picked for their prox- imity to safe supply-s.h.i.+p anchorages and their nearness to areas where the abundance of Arctic fox promised profitable commerce. At least once, the HBC moved whole Inuit communities to their trading posts; in 1934, ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 257.
fifty-three Inuit volunteered to be transferred (with their 109 dogs) from Cape Dorset, Pangnirtung and Pond Inlet to Dundas Harbour on Devon Island in the High Arctic, where the Company had set up a new store.*
T] IE FIRST PRIMITIVF POSTS RALPH PARSONS planted in the Eastern Arctic- consisting of a trading store, twin warehouses and a staff house (which was the only heated structure)-set the physical pattern for the HBC's northern presence over the next four decades. The buildings were makes.h.i.+ft, slapped together and not insulated. Painted or limed white on the outside, with green trim and black roofing (changed to red in the 1930s), the compounds stood out from those of such later arrivals as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who customarily occupied quarters in two tones of grey, and most missionaries, who chose brown. The inside walls of the HBC stores were unpainted and there was no attempt at decoration except for the Coleman lamps and dog chains suspended from the ceiling.
Merchandise was divided into three categories: provisions (flour, cornmeal, jam, baking powder, sugar, tobacco, tea, candles and matches); dry goods (canvas and duffel, tartan shawls, inirrors, toys, yard goods and the utilitarian panties known as ”joy-killer bloomers”); and hardware (rifles, ammunition, files, traps, knives, pots, pans, hand-powered sewing machines, and coal oil or kerosene). Since few customers could read, colours were important in
*Later ma.s.s transfers, based on Ottawa's absurd excuse of using the Inuit presence as a symbol of Canadian sovereignty, occurred between Port Burwell and Coral Harbour on Southampton Island and from Port Harrison to Resolute on Cornwallis Island and Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island, well north of any other habitation.