Arctic Obsession. Alexis S. Troubetzkoy

island,” Frobisher ordered the erection of a small house of stone and mortar, fourteen feet by eight complete with a wooden roof, an experiment to see how such a structure might weather an Arctic winter. Three hundred years later, it was discovered still standing.

      All attempts to find gold in the mass of stone carried home came to naught. Five long years passed before the specialists investigating the material reluctantly agreed that the black rock contained no gold. So disheartened was everyone with the disappointing results — investors, refiners, the queen and above all, Frobisher — that further expeditions to the Arctic came to a temporary halt. The vast heap of Baffin Island stone was crushed and put to use in the construction of country roads. A princely sum totalling £20,160 had been spent on Frobisher’s three attempts — an enormous amount when one considers that the cost of building the Gabriel was £83. And such was the disappointing conclusion to the earliest European effort to exploit the Arctic’s natural resources. All the while, the veil of the Arctic Siren continued to envelop the coveted Northwest Passage.

      The three Inuit hostages brought to England by Frobisher — a male, a female, and an infant — created a sensation. Londoners flocked to view “the savages,” and their every aspect was enthusiastically commented upon and discussed. The pathetic captives, however, were not long for the world; all died within months of landing in the strange land. An autopsy on the man showed that two broken ribs had punctured a lung, which “had excited inflammation and the condition of the lung had, in the course of time, become putrified as a result.”[7] Their misfortune was to have fallen into Frobisher’s hands all because of the enmity that had coloured the exchanges following the disappearance of the five crew members. What had happened to the lost shore party? Did the sailors go astray on their own, perhaps jumping ship? Or had the men been kidnapped by “the infidels”? Whatever the case, the Baffin Island natives were believed to have been involved.

      And what of the natives — whence had these people come and who were they? How did these tenacious folk manage life along the ice-encrusted shores of the Arctic’s frozen expanses, in that harshest of all climates?

      For starters, it should be noted that in bygone days all peoples of those regions were called Eskimo or Esquimaux — literally, “eaters of raw meat.” The term, however, was found to be pejorative, and today the native people of northern Canada, Greenland, and the north slope of Alaska are referred to as Inuit, the native word for “men.” The other group of Eskimos, the peoples of Siberia and the Pacific shores of Alaska, falls under the name Yupik.

      Frobisher’s Inuit were descended from settlers who had migrated to Alaska from Siberia after the end of the Ice Age eleven thousand ago. At the time, the Bering Strait separating North America from Asia continued to be bridged by glacial ice. Solid evidence shows that today’s Inuit share a common ancestry with the Mongols and quite likely with the Koreans, as well. Around 1000 A.D., a migration of the peoples inhabiting western Alaska took place — a movement east with an eventual fanning out to various parts of the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. These people of the so-called Thule culture displaced those already there, a distinctive tribe of large, strong, and innocent peoples called Tuniit, identified by archeologists as being of the Dorset culture. The origins of the Tuniit are not understood, but artifacts have been uncovered in the Canadian Arctic that are nearly identical to those found near Lake Baikal and elsewhere in Siberia. Since the Russian finds are eighteen thousand years old, Canadian archeological evidence points to the Tuniit as appreciably predating the incursion of the Inuit. (The oldest settlement in North America today having a continuous history of unbroken human habitation is the Alaskan village of Port Hope, 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the Chukchi Sea — some two thousand years old.)