The Last of the Gentlemen Adventurers: Coming of Age in the Arctic. Edward Maurice Beauclerk

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 steamed away from the island well before dark, heading due north toward Davis Straits and Baffin Bay. At the very top of Baffin Island we were to turn west towards Pond Inlet, at that time the most northerly of the Hudson’s Bay Company posts.

      Before the light faded altogether, I went to the stern of the Nascopie to watch the ship’s wake streaming behind us, just as Ian and I had done that first evening out on the St Lawrence River. There were no little townships drifting by, no comforting lights twinkling along the shore or summer lightning forking above rolling hills. Here was only steely grey, incredibly cold-looking sea surging behind us, tipped with long ribbons of hostile foam, while abeam of us the last of the Button Islands passed, black, jagged and with no redeeming feature. I wondered where those other apprentices who had gathered at Euston station that June morning were now and mourned the loss of my friend. Then the captain altered course slightly and a chill damp wind, probably from the northern ice fields, drove me back to my cabin.

      The cabin was above a propeller, and as the ship rose and fell to the motion of the sea, so the shuddering vibration swelled and faded in an uneven rhythm. As by far the most junior person on the ship – for there were no other apprentices or post staff of any kind – it was reasonable to expect that the worst cabin should be allotted to me. Somehow, though, the shuddering noise served to increase my growing conviction that nobody really wanted me in this arctic world and the probability that a home would be found for me at the very last post, only because there was nowhere else left, did nothing for my self-esteem.

      Our route between Baffin Island and Greenland was one which had been followed by seamen and navigators for more than three centuries, probing restlessly northward then westward among the islands, searching endlessly for the passage which would take them more easily to the riches of India.

      Some people believe that the Vikings reached the shores of Baffin Island twelve hundred years ago, but if they did, the expeditions were not recorded and nothing has been discovered to suggest that they ever lived there. It was not until the idea of a short route through to the orient began to exercise men’s minds that serious exploration of this inhospitable area began.

      As far back as 1497 Henry VII of England commissioned John Cabot to search for a passage, and the explorer is thought to have sailed along the Labrador coast. Forty years or so later, Jacques Cartier attempted to succeed where Cabot had failed but found only impenetrable ice. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who felt strongly that the journey was possible, inspired others to try by his writings, but was himself drowned while making the attempt in 1583.

      Also in the sixteenth century, John Davis made a study of the strait which separates North America from Greenland and joins Baffin Bay to the Atlantic Ocean, though he did not try to push through to the west. The strait now bears his name, and possibly as a result of his findings, Martin Frobisher, a noted navigator of his day, believed that he could find the elusive passage. He became sidetracked when, turning westward too soon, he entered a deep bay in Southern Baffin Land, which took him nearly three hundred miles inland but ended in a range of steep hills. From this bay Frobisher saw some rocks that glittered in the sun. He thought it was gold, and although his find turned out to be iron pyrites, it did not discourage him from arranging two later expeditions to explore the other arms of the bay. He never did find the gold which he had thought to be there, but he did much useful work mapping the bay which was subsequently named after him.

      Henry Hudson considered that the navigators of the sixteenth century had all sailed too far to the north, and to prove his theory decided to aim westward between the mainland and the southern coast of Baffin Island. At the western end of the straits, he came out into a wide sea. His crew, superstitious and apprehensive of some unexpected disaster, did not wish to go any further, but Hudson, confident that he was already in the western ocean, insisted that they continue on his course. The men’s fury when they discovered that he had led them into a wide bay which had no exit was such that they mutinied, and Hudson, together with his son and seven loyal members of his crew, was cast adrift in a small boat СКАЧАТЬ