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

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СКАЧАТЬ were allowed to place an approved child there. I think mother must have written to every single benefactor in order to gain places for her children, and she eventually succeeded in obtaining one for each of us, three boys at the boys’ school and our sister at the girls’ establishment.

      The schooling provided was sound, practical and aimed at producing adaptable adults, able to use such common sense as they possessed. Aware of the undoubted benefits of such an education, I would like to be able to record that this was a happy period of my life. Alas, this was not so. From the very start, the school was like some sort of prison. On my second day I quite unwittingly broke some obscure rule, for which the housemaster, no doubt a brilliant mathematician, but lacking in any noticeably human attributes, accorded me a public beating. A suitably sour start to a relationship which was to lack warmth for the next seven years.

      As time went by, my mother began to think increasingly of escape from the situation which had trapped her for so long. The atmosphere in the old lady’s house was not a happy one and my mother longed to go to the other side of the world and start afresh. We had no money, but could work hard and New Zealand sounded like a land of opportunity.

      My brother blazed the trail by setting off just after the General Strike of 1926, helping to stoke the boilers of an ancient coal burner as it steamed across the Pacific Ocean. He was to work on farms in New Zealand, and two years later my other brother followed him. The three of us who were left at home were to wait until I had finished school, then set off together.

      As the time loomed near, however, my prospective life as a farmworker lost its appeal for me. We wrote letters to everybody we could think of to see if they could squeeze me in somewhere else, but the reply was always the same – too young and no qualifications. Christmas 1929 came and went with the problem no nearer solution, but early in the New Year, a chance happening at school provided a possible answer.

      A week or two after the start of term, a visitor arrived to take up a long-standing invitation to spend a weekend at the school as a guest of the headmaster. He was the archdeacon in charge of the missionaries working in the Canadian Arctic territories. The news that the clerical visitor was to give a Saturday-night talk was received with some resignation by the boys, but the archdeacon, whose diocese spread from the tree line right away up to the last few humps of ice at the North Pole, had brought reels of film with him and caught our interest and attention immediately when his operator put the first one in backwards. It was the run of a visit by some Hudson’s Bay officials to a post above the Arctic Circle. A solitary white building crouched beneath towering black cliffs. A door flew suddenly open and two portly city executive types marched smartly out backwards, skilfully negotiated a short but steep slope then performed an incredibly agile backward leap into a motor boat waiting at the water’s edge.

      After this entertaining start, the film’s chief interest centred on the activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Incorporated by Charles II in 1670 as the ‘Gentlemen Adventurers trading into Hudson’s Bay’ and led by Prince Rupert, they had been inspired by the thought of getting into Hudson’s Bay and establishing trading posts ahead of the French. In this they had been successful, so they later extended their field of operation over the whole of Canada and later still to the islands north of the mainland. The remote Arctic establishments could only be supplied by sea and it was the voyage of the tough little Nascopie that the archdeacon had recorded on film. There were hunting scenes, trading scenes, pictures taken under the midnight sun, of polar bears and walrus, of far-away places and people, enough to titillate the imagination of any schoolboy. Moreover, from what our speaker said, it was fairly obvious that this great company employed young people who did not have any special qualifications. I summoned up my courage to confront the authorities and request further details. An interview was arranged with the archdeacon himself. It was to take place in the headmaster’s study on the Monday morning.

      The missionary was looking out of the window at the boys scuttling about in the quad on that wet and windy February morning when I crept into the holy of holies. I thought that he looked rather surprised when he saw me. He said:

      ‘You wanted to see me I believe?’

      ‘Yes sir,’ I replied, not knowing quite how to develop the conversation.

      ‘How can I help you?’

      ‘I wanted to ask about the Hudson’s Bay Company and what age the apprentices have to be,’ I blurted out. The archdeacon looked at me in silence for what seemed to be a very long time. It was fairly obvious that he did not consider me to be the stuff of which ‘Gentlemen Adventurers’ are made. Then he said slowly:

      ‘I think they do sometimes take boys of sixteen if they are suitable, mostly they are rather older. Why do you ask? Are you thinking of applying?’

      ‘Yes,’ I replied. I knew that I should expand my answers but somehow dried up in the face of what seemed to be disapproval. The missionary sensed my nervousness.

      ‘What makes you think you would like the life up there?’ he asked. ‘It’s not an easy place to live in you know. Many of the posts are just one man among the Eskimos and Indians and no other post near enough even to visit.’

      The slight softening of the archdeacon’s attitude released my tongue sufficiently for me to explain our dilemma. He listened in silence. When I had finished he actually smiled.

      ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can understand your anxiety to help your mother and I can probably help you with the company, but you should understand what it is you are doing. What about your exams? Have you taken School Certificate yet? Even if the company ignores such things, you may need some qualifications later in your life.’

      ‘I should take School Certificate this summer, but that would mean waiting until next year. Things would be very bad at home by then.’

      ‘Do you know anything about northern Canada apart from what you heard in my talk?’

      ‘Only what I have read in books.’

      ‘It’s a very lonely life as I have said. The supply ship comes up once a year. At a small post it may only stay for a few hours and that is the only contact with the outside world until the next year. There is just a small house and a store. You will have to forget about cinemas, theatres, dance halls and everything like that. The ship brings up a small amount of fresh food but after that has gone you have to hunt for yourself. There are just six posts on Baffin Island, which is three or four times the size of England, and about fifteen Europeans. The weather is generally cold, except for a week or two in the summer. Sometimes in the winter the temperature goes down to forty below zero. Some posts have a wireless receiving set but they don’t work very well because of the distance from the stations.’

      The archdeacon made this little speech as though determined to counteract the favourable impression created by his film show.

      ‘What about doctors?’ I asked, more from nerves than for any other reason.

      ‘On Baffin Island there is just one doctor. Usually if people become ill they have to do the best they can with their medicine chest.’

      I was more careful with my next question.

      ‘What sort of animals do they hunt?’

      ‘Seals,’ he replied without enthusiasm. ‘Some deer. Ducks. Polar bears. Fish of course, salmon trout mainly and cod further south. Walrus and the larger seals for feeding the dogs.’

      It seemed pointless to ask any further questions. After all the months of searching for a way out of our dilemma, the providential arrival of the archdeacon with his news that the Hudson’s СКАЧАТЬ