In the Empire of Ice by Gretel Ehrlich

Author:Gretel Ehrlich
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2010-06-15T21:00:00+00:00

WILLIAM EDWARD PARRY was given the task of finding a passage to Asia by the British Admiralty. The Napoleonic wars in Europe had ended, and Trafalgar, having grown bored, asked the navy to map the world and seek a shorter passage to Asia. Northwest Passage mania emerged quickly.

In 1824, on a second expedition to find the Northwest Passage, Parry and George Lyon sailed two ships, the Fury and the Hecla, up the wide waters of Foxe Basin. As winter came on, they anchored near the walrus-hunting village of Igloolik. By late summer the ice in the strait named for their ships was already three feet thick and the land was fog shrouded. For the next ten months Parry, Lyon, and their crews lived adjacent to 200 Inuit hunters and their families, going hunting with the men and taking Inuit “wives” for the season.

The Iglulingmiut, the local villagers, thought Parry had come looking for the remains of his mother, since their legends told of white people being the progeny of a marriage between a woman and a dog who lived on Qiqertarjuk, an island near Igloolik. The villagers helped Parry build an ice wall around the Fury to protect it, and drew accurate maps of the Melville Coast, assuring him that a passage existed, though, because of the ice, he was never able to find a way through to Asia.

George Lyon took to village life. In the Private Journals of G. F. Lyon he gave meticulous descriptions of the seminomadic hunters he came to know in scenes of both filth and splendor: “On the 25th of September 1822 I landed to visit my old acquaintances and found their huts in a most filthy state, owing to the mildness of the weather, and to their internal warmth: the water was dropping from the roofs, the ice had melted on the floors, and the juices of thawing and half-putrid walrus flesh, with other watery inconveniences, had made large sloppy puddles in the low entrances, through which we were obliged to crawl on our hands and knees.”

Winter houses were made of bone and sod; igluit (the plural of igloo) were connected by low tunnels that fanned out like stars. They were built with walrus-ivory snow knives on the sea ice near the breathing holes of seals. Farther down the coast Lyon described a house made of freshwater slabs of ice: “Toolemak’s dwelling was a perfect octagon and so transparent that even at some paces distant it was possible to distinguish those who stood within it one from the other; yet at the same time, it was so airtight, as to be completely warm.”

Parry and Lyon enjoyed their new Igloolik friends and admired the ingenuity of their clothing: the deerskin mittens, double sealskin boots with walrus-hide soles, and “summer frocks” made of duck skins with the feathers worn next to the body.

Lyon reported that the women of Igloolik softened the bird skins by chewing them and stretching them on racks to dry. They made whalebone pots, ivory ornaments, gear for bows, fishing lines, and harnesses for dogs.

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