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Gary
Social climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
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Mar 27, 2018 - 12:30pm PT
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I like to read books on polar expeditions like The Arctic Grail on hot summer days.
Ha! I spent weeks, during an incredible hot spell, at the Huntington Beach library reading about the search for the Northwest Passage. Franklin's story was the most interesting, but Verne's novel was pretty cool, too.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Apr 14, 2018 - 03:12pm PT
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From this week’s The Economist...
Louie Kamookak died on March 22nd
The Inuit oral historian and finder of Sir John Franklin’s lost ships was 58
THE spot Louie Kamookak most wanted to see was one he had heard of when he was seven or so. He and his family were living out on the land then, in the northernmost parts of Canada, in canvas tents, hunting seals. One bedtime his great-grandmother Hummahuk told him a story of her own childhood. Her father had taken her to the north of King William Island to get driftwood, and there on a gravel ridge they had also picked up brown things, dark things: musket balls, spoons, forks, a silver dinner knife. She also remembered a big chain, or a big rope, going from the beach into the ocean. This image intrigued young Louie even more, for at the end of such a chain there surely had to be a ship. It stayed in his head from then on.
On King William Island, just by the North-West Passage, stories abounded of the qallunaat or white men who had come looking for the fabled north route to Asia or, after failed expeditions, for each other. Sir John Franklin had led three voyages; his last, in 1845, ended in the slow loss to the ice of both his ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and all their crews. Dozens of search parties found no trace of them. Until 2006, almost no people from the south thought to ask the Inuit about their disappearance. But Inuit elders, though they had no written history, knew of many clues.
Mr Kamookak spent his life gathering these. His method was simple. He visited local elders and listened while they spoke. Compared with tales of Amundsen, who had forced a ship through the North-West Passage in 1906, the Franklin stories were weaker, bits and pieces. A mast rising out of the sea, then a whole ship seen against the sunset. One ship sinking quickly, the other staying afloat through two winters. A party of qallunaat dragging a large boat on a sled. Desperate survivors blundering into Inuit tents, their faces black and the flesh gone from their gums. The arrival of white men had brought two of the coldest winters ever known, and cannibal spirits still haunted parts of the coast.
Words on the wind
One scene especially struck him. A hunting party had seen from a distance a ceremony involving white men and big bangs, like gunshots. It seemed to be a burial, but not in the Inuit way of leaving the body out on the land, wrapped in caribou skins, as his great-grandmother had been left. This was the burial of some shaman who, when the hunters ventured near, had turned to a slab of stone. He felt it must have been Franklin, who had died in June 1847: placed in a vault below a tall wooden structure which other Inuit had wrested from the ground for sleds, but which had probably been a cross.
In the way of oral history there were no names, no dates. His next job, therefore, was to match the spoken fragments with place-names—Mercy Bay, Starvation Cove—and with texts. He had few of those, but school had got him interested in reading, and one of his grandfathers, a white man who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, had been a Franklin searcher and written articles about him. He could start there. After a lucky meeting with Cameron Treleaven, an antiquarian bookseller from Calgary, he was sent a whole library of explorers’ accounts. His ramshackle house outside Gjoa Haven, with hot water drawn from a camping stove, also had the best internet connection in town. Here he read and read.
In the summers he also went out on his snow machine or ATV to look for traces left behind. With his trapper’s knowledge, he guided other searchers as he bounced over the rocky tundra and along the shore. He found a few tantalising things: a length of ancient, foreign rope in a circle of stones, and a shaman’s belt on which hung a rusty pair of pocket scissors. Year by year he relived the ordeal of the trudging, starving sailors and the route they might have taken southwards to grassier country, as well as a sense of where the ships had gone down. Instinct, as much as learning, led him to guide the Canadian government searchers to Erebus in 2014 and, two years later, to Terror. The official team had no idea for a while which the first ship was. With a huge grin, he knew at once: Erebus.
By this time he was himself an elder, passing on stories to the young in his deep, emphatic way, always word for word the same. Few things delighted him more than taking students out on the land in the summer, squeezing his bulky frame into a tent, eating dried fish and fried bannock (with Cheez Whiz as a favourite extra), recounting the lore of the past. Some mysteries had been solved but others remained, none more powerful than that burial of the shaman. If it was indeed Franklin it might bring fame to Gjoa Haven, and jobs for the young. It would also allow Franklin’s body to be returned to England, honouring him as an ancestor should be. He always imagined that he had been a good man.
For all his searching, he had never found the spot. But possibly his great-grandmother had. On that same journey when she had found the silver dinner knife, she had seen a mound that was the length of a human, and a stone with strange markings. The others would not go near it, or talk of it. Only her fading memory remained, in words that were blown away across the tundra. For him they were as tangible and forceful as any printed page, in any bound book.
This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline "To Franklin’s grave"
https://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21740384-inuit-oral-historian-and-finder-sir-john-franklins-lost-ships-was-58-louie-kamookak-died
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'Pass the Pitons' Pete
Big Wall climber
like Ontario, Canada, eh?
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Apr 14, 2018 - 03:25pm PT
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Thank you! Fascinating. Only 58, so sad.
Big problems in our Canadian north - a "welfare mentality" exists. You reach 18, you get "cash for life". No incentive to become better, only to exist.
Alcoholism and drug abuse are rampant. Inuit are missing a key enzyme that helps white men like me process alcohol - one drink for me equates to like five drinks for them. Alcohol is a controlled substance. Things get bad at the first of the month when they hand out the welfare cheques.
One July 1st in while driving through the reserve south of Pickle Lake, Ontario - driving to a fly-in paddle-out canoe trip, as far north in Ontario as you can go by car - I had to literally drive AROUND natives who were passed out in the middle of the highway! In Pickle Lake, we watched a native lady walk straight into a tree, she was so drunk.
The story of Franklin and his disappearance is one of the great Canadian mysteries. Little by little, we learn more.
TFPU!
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Outside the Asylum
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 18, 2018 - 06:44pm PT
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Maud is well on her way from Kalaalit Nunaat to Asker.
Dean Hadley, the last surviving member of the crew of St. Roch in 1940 - 42, when she made the second transit of a Northwest Passage (the first W - E), has died at age 98.
https://vancouvermaritimemuseum.com/news/dean-hadley-remembered
Then St. Roch did it again, in 1944, from E - W, via Parry Channel and Prince of Wales Strait. But Hadley wasn't in the crew then.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jul 18, 2018 - 10:20pm PT
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In 2008, Mr. Trudeau’s predecessor, Stephen Harper, apologized to indigenous people in the rest of Canada for a residential school program the federal government operated from the 19th century until 1996. A national Truth and Reconciliation Commission later condemned that system as a form of “cultural genocide.”
Ditto U.S. and Australia...
"The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change.” 1887 - John A McDonald. Architect of the Indian Act.
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tooth
Trad climber
B.C.
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Jul 19, 2018 - 07:51am PT
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I spent over a month in Nunavut pulling teeth a couple years ago. Now the Canadian government has to py them weekly, not monthly. They would starve to death otherwise because fridays they get money and go spend it all by Monday. They werre paying $10 for a can of Coke but the Canadian government subsidizes healthy food so it is cheap. I ate the same as at home, for same price. Junk food is in demand and expensive. It also trashes teeth so two year olds never had any of the front teeth remaining. I could only take out the rotting abscessed root tips. They usually didnt let me touch the kids because they played this game where once it got bad enough, the dentist would have to refer them to to Winnipeg for surgery at the children’s dental hospital. Which meant an all expense paid shopping vacation for the mother and kid to the big city. Sick.
If it hadn’t been for the Cold War they would have been left up nrth and not lost their nomadic lifestyle. Now they live in homes at each norad runway along the Dew Line.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Outside the Asylum
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 20, 2018 - 12:37am PT
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Joseph and others are quite right. The French then British colonists often treated the First Peoples abominably, by accident (introduced diseases), deliberately (military conquest) or unintentionally (as my father always said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, e.g. residential schools). The largely repulsive residentials schools being just a symptom of general government neglect and callousness, of the sort that led it to shift numerous families 1,500 km north to Grise Fjord on Ellesmere, just to bolster nominal claims to real sovereignty in the area. And in the bigger picture, the cultures of the First Peoples were often overwhelmed by the incomers.
In most of Canada, it took one to three centuries to really screw things up, so may take a similar time to find a new and healthy equilibrium. First Peoples in urban areas are often doing OK - someone from the Squamish Nation is running for mayor of Vancouver this year, and may win. Likewise, the increased emphasis on teaching and learning First Languages - the Slexwts (Squamish-English) dictionary is remarkable.
As tooth says, remote First Peoples are having a much harder time adjusting - not that they necessarily should have to adjust. They've often lost their traditional cultures, and such southern practices as take their place are often not healthy.
Not simple problems to solve, and it requires effort and good will from everyone. That said, it's an issue which is a bit off thread, and maybe couold be discussed elsewhere here.
I was hoping to stick in this thread with European exploration and activity in the mid and high Arctic and related things, with all due recognition of the natives on whom they often depended. Some of the more recent publications do a fairer job of giving credit to Inuit and sometimes Cree or Greenlander support and knowledge, whether in the 19th century or now.
Some probably heard of the recent deaths of three thrill-seekers at the top of Shannon Falls at Squamish. (It seems fair to describe a group calling itself "High on Life" thrill seekers, given their record.) In any event, the Squamish Nation plans a traditional cleansing ceremony, such as should follow such tragedies: https://thetyee.ca/News/2018/07/17/Squamish-Plans-Cleansing-Ceremony/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=071718-3&utm_campaign=editorial-0718
Fun fact: Reilly is a survivor of Franklin's expedition.
Anyway, back to weird things done under the midnight sun, please.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Outside the Asylum
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 5, 2018 - 07:49pm PT
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Maud has returned to Norway, a century after she left on July 18th, 1918. (18/7/18 - a Symmetry Day!)
Early last night Maud passed Hellisøy Lighthouse and crossed her own trail from 100 years ago. She has finally completed the circle around the North Pole and Maud has returned home to Norway. This morning Maud can be seen outside Bryggen in Bergen before continuing her journey towards her final destination Vollen and Asker next Saturday the 18th of August.
http://www.maudreturnshome.no/
Maud is one of the few surface vessels to have (sort of) circumnavigated the North Pole via a Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route aka Northeast Passage.
I wonder if this will give anyone ideas about raising Erebus and Terror?
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Takk for det, Anders.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Maud in Bergen today
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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Aug 18, 2018 - 10:43am PT
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Attempting both passages will likely become far more commonplace as a result of climate change melting sea ice and GPS navigation.
I wonder about sailing around the entire Americas, perhaps a figure 8 using Panama.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Outside the Asylum
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 9, 2018 - 11:11am PT
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The Soviets, and now Russians, have been using the Northern Sea Route for extensive commercial (and military) traffic since the 1930s. The expeditions of Taymyr and Vaygach from 1910 - 1915 did a lot to chart the area, plus discovered Severnaya Zemlya. And the odd US submarine uses the Northeast Passage, too.
Parks Canada's aim this year is to explore the wreck of Erebus, including Franklin's cabin, to see what can be found. They have about a two week window to work within. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/franklin-expedition-ship-secrets-1.4811820
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BruceHildenbrand
Social climber
Mountain View/Boulder
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Anders,
2 weeks? Do they have enough beer for the entire duration?
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okay, whatever
climber
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Yes, the story of the Shackleton expedition, and the few that managed to survive it in the end, is one of the most remarkable survival stories out there. "Endurance", by Alfred Lansing, is a great read about that ordeal.
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BruceHildenbrand
Social climber
Mountain View/Boulder
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^^^^^^
I think the major point about the Shackleton Expedition is that they all survived it. Some on the Ross Sea party perished(not covered in the book Endurance), but all those with Sir Ernst survived.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Mighty, when is the theme park scheduled to be built?
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