‘What did they do to the pilot?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think that they actually did anything to anybody. There was a great deal of argument as to what had really happened and nobody seemed to know the whole story.’
‘It’s a good thing that it doesn’t happen very often up here,’ Ian said.
‘Oh, round about that time there was a jinx on the company,’ said Bill. ‘Another of the bay boats was lost, the Bay Chimo, but she didn’t sink, not at first anyway. She was trapped by the ice and it seems that she got frozen in during the winter, after they had abandoned her. Later on, she was sighted drifting about in the pack ice, like a sort of ghost ship, somewhere up in the Beaufort Sea, and for all I know she may still be held together by the ice of the Western Arctic!’
Almost as soon as we left Hebron the weather changed and during the night a thick fog closed about us. The captain groped his way at half speed, with frequent blasts of the fog horn, in case any of the wheat boats on their way to or from Churchill were in the vicinity.
We awoke in the morning to find the fog cleared and heard the rattle of the anchor chain going down, signifying our arrival at a post. When Ian and I went out on deck to see where we were, we did not at first believe that we had arrived anywhere. All we could see of the land was what resembled one humped black rock. Bill Ford put us right.
‘Port Burwell,’ he said, ‘and I hope that I never land here for my sins.’
We could see what he meant. This was one of the islands where the Labrador coast straggled off into the arctic seas. Bleak and inhospitable even on a summer’s day, one could well imagine that in the dark grey of the stormy winter the elements would combine to make life as unpleasant as possible.
For once there was little activity, and the dullness of the morning was only enlivened by the arrival of a boatload of Eskimos from the shore. They pulled alongside and one or two of their number came straight aboard the Ungava. The crew made them welcome, then the rest came pouring up the gangway, gabbling away to each other and beaming all over their brown faces. A few of the women wore red or green tartan shawls wrapped around their shoulders, but mainly they were clothed in parkas with deep hoods in which to carry their babies. Underneath they had on ordinary summer dresses made of coloured prints of various designs. Many of them looked as though they had got straight out of bed to come to the ship, and a few as though they had worn their clothes all night. The men all wore parkas with coloured braid round the edges; some had bright knitted head coverings, while one or two sported naval caps with gold straps. The chief man of the boat handled his craft very efficiently.
The stewards produced a large kettle of tea and a box of biscuits and another of the crew brought up a carton of mugs. In a moment the Eskimos were squatting all over the deck downing their tea. Some of the women had brought their babies in their parkas, and every now and then one of them would suddenly run to the side of the ship, to hold baby out over the sea to relieve itself.
They were a happy, cheerful lot and looked to me to fit somewhere between the American Indians and Chinese. When the tea was all drunk, they surged back down the gangway to their boat and chugged off, disappearing round a point of land a few moments later.
Ralph Parsons, the district manager for the whole of the Eastern Arctic, who had himself established most of the posts in the district, arrived in his own Peterhead boat about midday and the ship came to life. Ian and I were sent ashore with the first scowload and were surprised to find that the harbour was just on the other side of the point round which the Eskimos had passed. The little cove was only about a hundred yards in depth, but the opening was quite narrow, so there was good shelter from the open sea.
There was not a lot of cargo to handle as the Nascopie had already unloaded the main supplies, but the goods had to be carried up a long winding walkway as the store had been built on a rise some way back from the shoreline. By now we were becoming quite experienced stevedores and did not provide the ship’s personnel with many laughs. We were also much more speedy, finishing the work in time to go back aboard the ship for a meal.
A surprise awaited us. Ian, myself and another boy were to pack up and go ashore to await further instructions. One of the men who had come up from Chimo with Ralph Parsons gave us the explanation the next day. Ian would not be required as the outpost to which he was to have been sent had sufficient staff, and when the Chimo manager, a Scotsman, heard that I was supposed to join him, he became quite angry and said that he did not want any damned English schoolchildren. Not until much later did I discover that a year or two previously this man had been landed with an English apprentice from a public school who had gone off the rails. At the time, this brusque refusal of my services really upset me for it had never occurred to me that I might not be wanted anywhere.
It was quite obvious that we were not wanted at the Burwell post house either. A small house, built to accommodate two people, it now had to shelter twelve of us, and quite possibly this manager would also have refused us as his ‘guests’ had not Ralph Parsons come ashore to straighten things out. He directed that Ian and I should sleep on the kitchen floor in sleeping bags. Our thoughts went back to the poor apprentice at Cartwright with whom we had commiserated; at least he had had a mattress to lie on.
Next morning we started on our first shore job, painting the fish house. At that time, a considerable amount of dried fish used to be exported to the Catholic countries for food on Fridays and fast days, particularly to those countries which had a peasant population who could not afford to buy fresh fish. Just outside the harbour, round the southern shores of the island, codfish abounded, the Eskimos often gathering a dinghy full of fish in quite a short time. They sold the cod to the company, who employed women to cut them open, dry them and pack them in barrels for shipment overseas. This processing took place in the shed that Ian and I were about to paint. Neither of us had ever handled a paintbrush before, and it was perhaps unfortunate that the colour of the eaves, where we began, was bright red and not some duller colour which might have blended in better with our overalls.
In the evenings the post manager took me out jigging for cod. This simply meant fixing a double-sided hook to a long length of cord, pushing on a small piece of pork fat for bait, lowering it to the seabed, then pulling it up about a foot or so and jigging the line up and down until you hooked a fish. Sometimes we caught a large fish on each barb of the hook, and even on the poorest evening we collected twenty or thirty fish. All the best cod were thrown into the shed for servicing by the women; the rest we took up to the house or used for dog food.
Eventually most of the visitors left Burwell, until we were the last remaining guests, and actually able to sleep in beds. One day Mr Parsons told us that Ian was to stay at Burwell as the apprentice and I was to join the Nascopie when she arrived, to continue my journey northward in search of a home. Ian was sad about this. Burwell was not much of a place, serving more as a summer junction point between Hudson’s Bay, Baffin Land and the far northern islands than as a trading post. There was one consolation. He would be among the first to see the Nascopie the next year and would no doubt be able to get himself moved somewhere more interesting.
The Nascopie arrived one afternoon in late August. The captain intended to waste no time, for there was already a touch of autumn in the air. Once the year’s supplies had been landed, I was told not to delay in getting aboard with my belongings.
Ian helped me down to the jetty with my cases. We had become firm friends through the trials and tribulations of our summer’s journey and saying goodbye to him was harder than I thought it would be. I cannot imagine how he ever came to apply to the Hudson’s Bay Company for a job. He was a timid, gentle sort of person who hated to see suffering either among humans or animals, and it was no surprise to hear a couple of years later that it had not worked out and Ian had gone back to his old Scottish home. I did write to him but he never replied to my letters. Perhaps he just wanted to forget the whole incident.
We