So far as one could tell, the internal arrangements of the house had not altered greatly down the years. At the back of the dwelling, the sleeping space was spread with deerskins, on which the women sat during the day and where the sleeping bags, also of deerskin, were unrolled at night. At each end of this space, in the homes of the better hunters, a woman tended a seal-oil lamp, which provided warmth for the home and for cooking, beside lighting the house.
The oil lamp consisted, as it still does when used, of a slab of soapstone, scooped out to form a shallow dish, which was tilted slightly and filled with small pieces of whale or seal fat. Along the front of the dish, a strip of moss was carefully laid to make a wick, which, when lighted gave off sufficient heat to melt the fat behind, causing it to flow into the bowl, soak into the wick and keep the lamp burning.
It was the woman’s task to see that the bowl of the lamp had a good supply of blubber and to keep it poked forward evenly, so that the whole wick would burn smoothly to give maximum light and heat. The cooking pot or kettle hung over the lamp, fixed in position by various methods according to the type of house in use. The condition of the lamp was one of the tests of the ability of an Eskimo housewife that one could apply immediately upon entering a home.
Kilabuk told me that our island refuge had never been used as a campsite because it was very small and the tiny harbour which we had entered was the only shelter from the open sea. There had been quite a large camp, however, on the mainland opposite, at the entrance to the fiord, and the people had used the island as a burial ground.
The rain stopped before darkness fell, so I decided to go out for some exercise and get my bearing. At the far end of the island, a walk of about a mile over rough ground, there was another small flat area, similar to the one on which we had camped. Along one side of the area there were piles of rocks, which had the appearance of having been placed there deliberately.
Among the boulders and stones I came across a rusted mug which had practically disintegrated, and one or two other things so decomposed as to be virtually unrecognizable. This was probably the burial ground, for the Eskimos buried the personal belongings in the grave alongside the body. The hunters had their knives, spearheads and like possessions placed with them, as well as their drinking mugs and other essentials. Women had their sewing materials and trinkets that they must have treasured during their lives in the grave with them, and children had the toys with which they had played.
I wandered about this grim spot for a while, then blundered over a shallow hole filled with bones, and though these might well have been the relics of animals, they gave the place a scent of death and myself an uncomfortable feeling that I was desecrating somewhere better left in peace.
Great care had to be exercised when burying the dead so that the spirit did not become separated from the body. For a spirit angered in this way might bring harm to the camp. The spirit was thought to remain with the body for a short period after death, but a hole had to be left among the burial rocks, so that it could come and go at will to enable it to find another home.
A spirit recalled to guard a child through infancy had to be treated with proper respect. Thus, if a man’s father returned to watch over a grandchild, the baby had to be assumed to be a mature person, able to make its own decisions as to how to behave, or what to eat. The parents could not punish the child simply because it did not defer to their wishes, but were restricted to the giving of advice or offering persuasive argument in an attempt to control its behaviour. If the family became angry because of disobedience, the guardian spirit might easily become offended and leave, which might cause the child to suffer a serious misfortune or even to sicken and die. When their offspring reached young adulthood, the parents could begin to take them in hand, for by then it was thought that the spirit with which they had been born would take over guidance, so that it no longer mattered whether the guardian left or stayed on in a secondary role.
The desolation of the little graveyard seemed in keeping with this island of grim black rock, and fitting for the final resting place of the people who had led such a hard and comfortless life.
In this area of Baffin Island, the Eskimos had been in contact with English and American sailors for seventy or eighty years. Cumberland Gulf had attracted the early whalers as a suitable base from which to hunt, and there is no doubt that the impact of these hardy men, with their new equipment for hunting, was very considerable indeed.
Previously, the people had been stuck in a more or less Stone Age period of development, caused not by lack of enterprise but rather by the harsh nature of their existence. The materials for making more efficient weapons were not obtainable in their country, while the climate was unsuitable for food production. The simplest fluctuation of conditions could mean the difference between life and death, for they had no means of controlling the variations of wind and weather.
With such implements as they had, they developed an art in hunting and a patience in enduring, without which they could not have survived. To these men, with such rudimentary possessions, the first whaling ships must have appeared as veritable Aladdin’s caves of undreamed of treasure. The knives of steel. The guns that thundered death so fast that the eye could not follow. The little sticks that gave a flame. The pots and pans. The food that was not meat or fat or fish. The cloth and clothing not made of furs or skins. There was no end to the wonders of these ships, for nearly everything they used was new to the Eskimo people.
Very gradually life became a mixture of the Stone Age and the modern. The new equipment cost money, more than most people had from work or trade. First of all, the lance and bow gave way to the rifle, but the whalers had nothing to improve upon the lamps that the Eskimos had always used, nor did the homes of skin or snow give way to wood or canvas for many decades, though only in the most distant and remote places do the people still use the skin tent and snowhouse today.
Without crops of any kind to give them flour or cereals, the Eskimos depended entirely upon being able to kill the wildlife of the country for food. By far the most important single item was seal meat, raw, boiled or frozen, fresh, high or putrid, it mattered not. Every particle of the seal except the bones was utilized. The skins for clothing or tent making, the fat for heating or cooking and the meat for food.
According to the season or place, other food was sometimes available. Fish from the river, sea and lakes. Ducks and geese. Walrus and polar bears, though the dangers of hunting either of these powerful antagonists without a rifle were considerable, and from the stories of the old days, it was certain that few hunters of any account did not have some scar from an encounter with a polar bear.
To the limited food variety, the whalers at once added flour, and though the people could not always afford to buy it in the early days, it came high on their list when they had anything with which to trade. Tobacco also became a much sought-after item of trade for both men and women.
Unhappily, in those days the sailors brought disease as well, in particular tuberculosis. There does not appear to be any record as to when this illness developed among the people of the Arctic. Explorers of the mid nineteenth century speak of them as suffering from the ‘bleeding sickness’. The only certain thing is that the first germs were brought in by the men who came from the south.
Nowadays the scourge has been brought under control, but in the days before the Second World War, the Eskimos had no defence against its ravages. Circumstances were such that a family of five or six had to exist closely together in the very restricted space of a tent or snowhouse, without cleanliness or hygiene. They used the same drinking vessels and spat thoughtlessly on the floor of their homes.
Once introduced, the disease spread steadily, even in this land where habitations were so widely separated, for it required only one hunter to travel further afield than usual for the plague to infect a new community, until there was hardly a family on Baffin Island that did not have at least one sufferer.
We did not wake early the next morning, perhaps because we had not really expected the wind to have