Ice Ghosts by Paul Watson

Author:Paul Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

WILLIAM “PADDY” GIBSON, an Irish transplant to the Arctic, was born in Kells Parish, County Meath, about forty miles from Dublin. In World War I, he served in the Imperial Overseas Forces of the British Army. After a brief stint in the Royal Irish Constabulary, he spent five years in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, working mainly on the Western Arctic’s Herschel Island, just off Yukon’s Beaufort Sea coast. Then he moved east to become trading-post manager for the Hudson’s Bay Company on King William Island’s south coast, overlooking Simpson Strait, a narrow gap between the island and the northern coast of mainland Canada. By 1927, he was running the new trading post at Gjoa Haven. Gibson’s arrival marked a turning point for the Inuit, when a nomadic people began to settle. They were brought into a trading economy that almost always favored the qalunaaq buyer over the Inuk seller. Paddy Gibson got around, logging six thousand miles a year by dogsled. He knew the land and its people well and fused with the place, like a ship beset. To Inuit, he was an odd, sometimes frightening presence.

“The first white man I encountered was a man by the name of Gibson. I was terrified of him,” Emily Haloktalik recalled years later.

Inuit hunters used to gather each spring outside the door of Gibson’s small house, which still stands as the original building on King William Island. They brought stacks of frozen carcasses of Arctic foxes, their winter fur still snow white. Buyers prized the pelts for their downy softness to make glamorous hats, stoles, mufflers, and coats. Taken dead from traps, the bodies were stacked on wooden qamutik sleds pulled by dog teams to the trading post. Louie’s grandmother, Irene, was with the other women, on the cold ground, skinning stiff, dead foxes and cleaning the pelts, when she met Gibson. He was soon sleeping with her, but they never married. She wasn’t the fur trader’s only Inuk companion. In his own travels, Kamookak met other Inuit who were Gibson’s progeny, including a son in Cambridge Bay and a daughter in Kugluktuk. They bonded over stories of the dogsledding fur trader who spawned an Irish–Inuit bloodline.

“Gibson didn’t have any wives up here,” Kamookak told me, chuckling at the thought. “Just kids. Gibson just got around. Having kids here and there.”

As the fur trader worked his routes, he followed in the tracks of European explorers, including those of the dying members of the Franklin Expedition. In 1931, Gibson set out from Gjoa Haven on his own expedition to see if he could figure out what happened to Franklin and his men. On the Todd Islands, four islets near the southern coast of King William Island, he found the partial remains of at least four skeletons. He picked out obvious signs that they were once Royal Navy seamen.

“Two of these were found embedded in the soft sand of a low spit running out from the most southerly islet in the group,” Gibson reported in The Beaver, then a popular magazine published by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.