Maurice seemed disinclined to take a country wife himself, although there was no shortage of applicants. His background, he wrote, was the reason for this: ‘My upbringing, both at home and at school, had run along very strict lines of morality.’ But as he acquired what could be called a new background, he also began to acquire a very different sense of morality, one that was closer to an Eskimo’s than to an upper-middle-class English person’s. Meanwhile, he was falling in love, albeit with a culture rather than a woman, and when he at last decided to take a wife, you could say that he was consummating his relationship with that culture.
In the spring of 1934, he was put in charge of the Frobisher Bay Post at Ward Inlet. This post was considerably more isolated than Pangnirtung and likewise had no doctor or nurse. Soon he was dealing with an epidemic, which, although never officially diagnosed (there isn’t even a mention of it in the usually thorough HBC records), was probably a virulent form of influenza. The stress of being forced to treat the sick and the dying more or less by himself seems to have taken its toll, and by August he was back in Pangnirtung with a condition described by the local medical officer as ‘an affection of the heart’. I suspect the reason he doesn’t refer to this ailment in his book is that it was insignificant beside the deaths of those he had come to know and love.
Maurice’s narrative ends with his departure from Frobisher Bay, but his life with the Eskimos did not end there. After a year’s furlough in England, he returned to the Arctic to manage, respectively, the Sugluk Post in northern Quebec and the Southampton Island Post. At the latter post another epidemic struck. This new epidemic was almost certainly mumps – an indication that White Men were giving the Eskimos their diseases as well as their trade goods. At one point Maurice wrote in his journal that ‘every single man, woman & child in the place is now sick’. At least five of them died. But it could have been a lot worse. Thirty-five years earlier, the Sadlermiut, a Southampton Island tribe that had had almost no contact with the outside world, were wiped out completely by an epidemic of dysentery introduced by a single Scottish whaler.
In 1939, Maurice left the Arctic to serve in World War II. When the war was over, he did not go back to the geography that had claimed his heart and that now persisted in sending its ghosts his way. Nor did he ever go back except in the writing of this book. He died in 2003 at the age of ninety, and in his last year he worried that the use of the word ‘Eskimo’ in his soon-to-be-published book might be construed as patronizing. For he had nothing but admiration for the people now commonly referred to as Inuit (the pejorative term for them in the 1930s was ‘Husky’, not ‘Eskimo’). ‘They have taught me so much,’ he remarked in one of his final letters, and this book is a testimony to those teachings.
If Maurice were to visit Pangnirtung today, he might see a cruise ship anchored offshore and its passengers eagerly looking to buy something, a soapskin carving or maybe foxskin booties, for their mantelpieces. At Ward Inlet, he would find a few scattered boards, all that remains of the old HBC post. In Iqaluit, the capital of the new Inuit territory of Nunavut, he might see one or two descendants of his Frobisher Bay friends shivering on the streets, members of the town’s burgeoning homeless population. The irony of a formerly nomadic people becoming once again, after a fashion, nomadic would not escape him. Nor would the fact that Iqaluit, despite its relatively small size (pop. 6,500), suffers from a number of modern urban maladies – drugs, muggings, auto thefts, gang fights. Picking up the local newspaper, the Nunatsiaq News, he might read about an eighteen-year-old arrested for dealing heroin and realize with a start that the boy was the grandson of a hunter he knew in another lifetime.
By now our visitor would have seen enough to know that what he had written is in fact an evocation of a lost world.
LAWRENCE MILLMAN
Cambridge, MassachusettsDecember 2004
‘… and when my fiord has no seals and
the flame of the lamps burns low, I will visit my friendly Spirit in his igloo behind the wind …’
From the drum song of Padluapik,the Medicine Man
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