Boundless by Kathleen Winter

Author:Kathleen Winter
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2014-08-22T17:15:07+00:00

THAT NIGHT, ON board our vessel, I saw that our ship’s map now situated us north of Baffin Island, whose southern edge bore the Latin name Meta Incognita. The name was bestowed by Elizabeth I when Britain sent Martin Frobisher to find Arctic gold, long before Franklin. It implied a place beyond known limits, an unknown region to which humanity aspires in a philosophic sense. It thus evaded any connotation of a gold grab, hiding avarice behind a beautiful name that evoked how all of us wish we saw the world. Meta Incognita implied that state interest in Northern exploration was lofty: gain lay beyond any notion of money. As Meta Incognita persists on Canada’s map, so the idea of a romantic, unattainable North remains in us even as governments accelerate efforts to establish sovereignty there.

I had witnessed Canada’s military presence around Pond Inlet, Dundas Harbour, and other points on our route, and now began to see it as inseparable from historical campaigns whose quiet motivations lay veiled behind stories with more public appeal. Canada had recently begun to set much store on publicizing an invigorated and expensive search for the Franklin wrecks, while quietly using the same search technology to pursue soundings of the Arctic seafloor for data needed by oil consortiums, mineral concerns, and military interests. But the romance of the Franklin story was what made the news headlines. I began to question my own response to the North. Was the mysterious energy of the land real, or was my perception of it a romantic remnant from Franklin’s day? What right had I to hold on to a romance — a lie of old kings and new leaders — to justify centuries of raid masquerading as an eternal hero’s quest? My passage on the ship placed me inside this question. No matter how well-meaning the passengers, could we claim to stand apart from questions of invasion, privilege, and trespass?

Yet I felt a thrill — we all felt it — at being among the few southerners who’d ever set foot in what we call the Far North. The notion of beyond, our Meta Incognita, was still part of our consciousness. We were not Bernadette Dean or Aaju Peter, who lived in the North and whose people had done so longer than any British explorer with insufficient pantaloons, lost ships, or lonesome graves. How strange to experience being “beyond known limits” while realizing this very notion was a dream. Even the word “North” began to dissolve: once you were here, that territory became something else: unnamed, and real unto itself.

We were a moving, borderless collection of our own dreams and imagination, and the place acted on us with shifting meanings that altered with the hours. There was a mutability about our time in the tundra, rock, ice: solid forms that colluded with each other to act more like thought and water.

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