For some weeks before the third July we were to live in Port Burwell, Nick and I had been watching daily for the arrival of one of our supply ships, the SS Bay Rupert which had brought us in and had brought supplies the second July, or the SS Nascopie. We really were beginning to need new supplies, and we were anxious for our annual mail delivery, with the newspapers, magazines and new books which we thought would be coming.
It is hard to imagine the surprise we felt when one day there hove into sight an oversize yacht, the CGS Stanley, reinforced as an ice breaker. We boarded her and it took some little time for us to realize the story we were told.
First, our long-awaited supply ship, the SS Bay Rupert, with all our mail and equipment aboard, had run aground off the Labrador coast and was reported a total loss. Second, the Stanley was loaded to the gunnels with the most extraordinary cargo we had ever hoped to encounter, not to mention a few dozen men all duly documented and attested as official representatives of the Canadian government.
It appeared the Canadian government had accepted the idea of having someone establish three air bases in Hudson Strait. One of these was to be at the eastern entrance of Port Burwell, and was to be known as Base A. There was to be another at the centre of the south shore of Wakeham Bay, and this was to be known as Base B; and Base C was to be the name of the establishment at Nottingham Island on the western entrance to the strait.
Perhaps to make this project more clear one must go back a notch or two in history and find that some fifty years ago a western Canadian dream had visioned that the old seaway of the North could be used again if there were first built a railroad to Port Nelson. This railroad was started but never completed. A little modern progress and a great deal of political pressure became enmeshed through the growing pains of the West. The Westerners force a demand not to be denied, and that was to carry this railroad to a more favorable seaport. Action was taken at last and a thousand-mile track was laid to Port Churchill. This place has a natural harbor and is much more sensible in showing possibilities of development into a tremendously important Hudson Bay port. Meanwhile difficulties of engineering arose, difficulties of transporting grain, the purpose for which the railroad was being constructed. This railroad cut, having overcome tundra and muskeg, granite and rock, finally ran into a mountain side, and this mountain throughout its height and width was composed of manganese. It has to be a mere earnest of the wealth of minerals which lie hidden in the North.
From the railroad, ships going from Port Churchill must sail north and east eight hundred miles to reach the North Atlantic. The Federal government of Canada became convinced much good could be served by taking seven airplanes, a number of steamships and approximately fifty men into this section, and letting them take up residence along the strait coast. These men were gathered from various departments of the government. There were six air pilots; nine first-class mechanics and riggers; three doctors, one for each base, and there was to be a radio man at each base appointed from the Department of the Marine. In addition, there were two radio men at each base from the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals (Army), and at each air base a Mounted Police was stationed to represent the last word in law in these unsettled districts. This last was to have someone who had already learned something of the country and, as in the case of myself, someone who could become official and unofficial interpreter of language and of native customs to the newcomers.
The expedition was in the North to fly, to map and to chart this little-charted coast line of Hudson Strait, which at Nottingham Island is forty-seven miles in width and at Port Burwell fifty-three miles, with the widest part at Ungava Bay, where it reaches almost four hundred miles from shore to shore. Within the two bottle necks there were to be reported movements of ice, natural or unnatural phenomena which might be peculiar and indigenous to the region. And each of these men who were arriving was supposed to be a specialist in his department.
This was really a brilliant idea if properly carried out. It is still a brilliant idea which eventually will be carried out, and in fact, must be if the trend of population is to be scattered from the congested areas, and the full resources available are to be utilized. The dream of navigating northern waters has always been feasible, the problem now is to make it entirely practicable.
The Arctic waters never freeze completely over, so the danger of navigating, strangely enough, is not in winter when ice is fast along the shore and reaches out fifty to sixty miles, while there is very little ice moving. This leaves open a broad lane of "black" water which is comparatively safe to shipping. The great danger comes in spring, summer and fall when the ice loosens and floats as an ever-present peril to ships and men.
The possibilites of the Hudson Bay railroad and the old sea route has a grandeur because of the immensity of the plan. It will bring the north central United States, western and central Canada one thousand miles closer to Europe. Quite as close as any of the present great Atlantic seaports, although lying a thousand miles west and inland. Port Churchill to Liverpool is three thousand miles: New York to Liverpool is three thousand miles; but Port Churchill lies straight north of Omaha, which is thirteen hundred miles west of New York. It is a problem that science, aided by native philosophy and the good sense of the white man, can solve.
The answer is still in the future, because science must still overcome the barrier of shore ice so that ocean-going ships may load quickly and the year round. When that is done the trend of commerce will be to the north. The realization of this is a responsibility because of the far-reaching effect upon the two great western nations of the North American continent.
Now ships were coming from the St. Lawrence ports and their passengers carried instructions to study the upper end of the great seaway which sailors have already used for close to three hundred years, but with an amazing lack of recorded knowledge of the condition which have been met.
A day or two after the arrival of the government ship, the Stanley, there steamed in the SS Larch. On this there came more men and freight, among the last a tractor being unloaded. This was to be the power to help in building the air base. Nick and I looked at each other and thought of the construction of the Police Post, where every inch of timber had been lifted by our own pairs of hands, with the aid of the natives we had impressed into service, willing but inept at the start.
Next to appear from the ship's hold were two airplanes, both Fokker monoplanes which were knocked down and had been carried in crates, and which we found were to be reassembled at Port Burwell. The airplane pilots, army-trained men, were boasting of a new compass in the equipment, the earth inductor, which was accounted to be foolproof even in this type of country. The biggest argument in favour of this compass was that Lindbergh had used it on his Atlantic crossing. We two policeman just sat and "sawed wood." They could not draw us into arugment on compass or anything else, but we did a lot of thinking. We had been two years in this north eastern country, the first white men in this particular settlement, and we knew everything could go wrong, and more than that we knew that the wisest of men could be proved a fool.
It took ten days, with every native working whom we police could muster, to unload the supplies and equipment for the air base. And to tell the truth, we policeman felt a trifle resentful at this invasion of our small kindom of several hundred thousand square miles. We did not welcome so much civilization all at once. The North moves slowly and is a fickle jade. She is only kind to those who learn to love her; she has no patience with those who assault her dignity, and she will not submit to the rape of her secrets. The North must be wooed gently and patiently before she may be won.
But another disturbing factor was to come. Brought in on the Stanley was a communication for me from Ottawa headquarters which, since the Arctic is a volunteer service, requested that I transfer myself as Mounted Policeman and attach myself at Base A airplane headquarters. As soon as the air base was ready, I removed my belongings up there from the detachment home. I did not like doing it, but it was all a part of the duty.
Several of the men on this new expedition irritated Nick and myself almost beyond bearing. They came in very much with the air of knowing everything. Later we felt a bit sorry for some of them, but several could have saved themselves and us quite a lot of unpleasant experiences had they heeded what we had to say.
There was exhibited to us with pride a small lake motor launch, and privately we policemen laughed at it, and we openly warned those handling it that the thing was useless for these waters; but in this case and in several others our words were just so much wind. That launch cracked to eggshell within the hour when one of our lesser winds came up, rushing down the gully that lay behind the Post. These same men persisted in anchoring a dainty little Gypsy Moth plane in our harbor. "That reconnoitering plane will be destroyed," we warned. But the Gypsy stayed where she was, but only for a matter of minutes, for down the flume made by the formation of the hills at the Post, came one of our summer breezes of fifty miles an hour, and the Gypsy Moth was picked up like a butterfly and no part of it was ever seen again.
But the expedition settled in, and to a certain degree conquered their objectives. They built a small light power plant, and terrified the natives when they first saw the lightning chained and imprisoned in a little glass bulb. There was no difficulty in getting the natives to obey our injunction that they were not to go near the power plant.
There seemed to be no end to the luxuries supplied by an unstinting government, and whether or not such expensive expedition were necessary, it has all helped in the future program of development. Mistakes were made, and always must be under such circumstances, but the outstanding feature of the personnel was their ability to adapt themselves to a strange new world.
In process of unloading there were some minor tragedies and many humorous incidents. The officer in command felt the time lag heavily, and by way of recreation he became interested in the wielding of a harpoon, and other customs of the Inuit. The motors of so many launches frightened away the seals from the harbor, but I had told this officer to hold himself rigid in the bow of his boat, poise his harpoon and wait for a seal to rise. I watched with some amusement, for I was confident there was not a seal within miles, but I saw him throw the harpoon and wondered what he could have seen. By some fluky accident a baby seal had risen, and the officer caught the little animal. We never told him that this feat of his was the sheerest accident. One of the doctors at another base made a bulls-eye hit on a walrus as he shot with his rifle, was tremendously pleased with himself, and then was very much surprised and chagrined to find there was no walrus, for, of course, it had sunk.
Very peaceable was this group of enterprising men who had shattered the solitude and joined the world Nick and I had made for ourselves, and only one of them risked his life in the first weeks of their residence, and he did this every day. He owned a saxaphone, and probably hoped to be able to play it some day. He must have thought the wastelands of the North were to offer him opportunity to practice. In the summer it was all right, but as it came to winter time and we had upward of two hundred dogs around the Post, it was not so good. The bleating, wailing notes of the saxophone was a signal for the yowling, howling, screaming and screeching dog chorus of our semidomesticated wolves to start. They were unable to stand the rasp of this music on their nerves. Peveril added his plaint, and I shared the feeling of the dogs as to the saxophone, but bowed to inhibitions and forbade myself the luxury of howling. Kirkcaldy was lucky to come out of the North alive, and he brought out his sax with him.
The air pilots at Port Burwell's Base A flew every possible flying day, but they found it hard to battle the elements. Man had not chained the blizzard nor learned to ride the north wind, and for a great part of the time the pilots had to stay grounded. They made conscientious reports, and were truthful as they saw conditions, but flying at five thousand feet above the ice, they could not know the dangers and hazards of the ice field below them. That danger was not apparent, since they had not crossed the terrain on foot as had the natives and the Mounted Police. I fear the reports were not really as exact as those fine young men thought, all honour to such hardy young pioneers as they were.
One notable accomplishment of the eighteen months use of resources and intelliegence of over one hundred men, with thirty-nine of them wintering in with us, was that though they returned to civilization with loss of ships and loss of planes, they returned without the loss of one life. This means that, to men out to conquer the North, the North is not so deadly as people have been led to believe. But had it not been for the major role in heroism played by one Inuit especially, and others in supporting parts of one of the great dramas of the North, in the saving of men's lives, this tale would not have been told.
There came the day when the mobile expedition left our Post for Wakeham Bay and, having left their supplies and men at that base, went further to Nottingham Island. And then we seemed to have a continuous stream of vessels coming through our customs that summer, for many extra tons of fuel were required for refueling the expedition's vessels, and it is difficult to compute the tons of foodstuffs which had to be brought in for close to fifty men.
The first of our disaster came with the wreck of the SS Canadian Raider. She had been sent north with freight, and was to anchor in the little bay at our Port Burwell. It was not a wise move, but Nick and I had become numbed more or less at the reception of our advice on such things as anchoring a ship which would be cumbersome to handle in a bay that was subject to such winds as we had now become accustomed to. None of the head of the expedition had experienced one of our storms, and we could not convince them that the blow which had swept the Gypsy Moth plane before it was just a summer zephyr. They argued, and rightly too, that a ship as big as the SS Canadian Raider could easily stand up to a wind like that. We pointed out the chances of a gale, especially as it was now several weeks later in the season, even if it could still be counted as summer.
"You're not the captain of the ship," was the last word of the official, and I let it go at that, and until now I've never had an opportunity to say, "I told you so."
The first night the Canadian Raider lay at anchor there did come up a heavy gale, and the ship being hard to handle in the space available, with a heavy sea and tide running, she dragged her anchor and dashed against the rocks. There was a gaping hole punctured in her side.
I was still sleeping at the Police Post, so that when Nick roused at the whistling of the wind, it was to find me up and already getting into storm togs. I hadn't forgotten that I was the Mountie attached to the air base, and of course, if any of the expedition were to get into trouble, the little job of getting them out of it would primarily be mine.
A few of the natives had already gathered on the shore, and the Raider was taking a bad beating by the time Nick and I got to the water's edge. Someone aboard the ship was sending up a flare; and going along to the temporary dock I found Bobby, Nashula and Ee-ay-atok had anticipated possible orders for they were getting small boats ready.
Nick and I took command, and with the natives dodged the surf, put off in the small boats, and by dint of muscle and the seaworthiness of our craft, plus the native instinct for avoiding disaster if humanly possible, we succeeded in reaching the helpless big vessel, and rescuing the crew. But it took all night. In an interval between trips to shore and ship, I had set other natives to breaking up wood from the crates and packing cases that were piled up to the lee side of one of the headlands, and we made a fire. The sailors shivered round it as we brought them ashore, while some of the air base men had the wit to start our Post stove roaring so that there was a plentiful supply of boiling water for the tea and hot ration of rum we were able to hand out.
Before dawn and the fall of the wind, the captain of the Raider and we had come to the decision that he should take a skeleton crew and try to run the Raider up on a small beach close to the Police Post. They were successful in this maneuvre the following day, so that the ship stayed on the beach the entire winter season. The captain of the ship, the chief engineer and five other men made plans to winter in with us, and when, weeks later, the Hudson's Bay Company's SS Nascopie arrived, the others of the crew were reshipped aboard her and returned to Canada proper. The SS Nascopie is a grand old veteran of the Arctic Ice. She had brought us a duplicate of the lost supplies which had been aboard the Bay Rupert and from the last named ship they had managed to rescue some of the mail bags. Altogether we were sitting pretty for the time being.
But Nick and I sighed together, "Wheyanna," in genuine regret for our peaceful white pastures which were now thronging as marts of commerce, or so it seemed. We actually had become a metropolis overnight, and we had to protect these white men from the natives, not that we expected to have any difficulty there. Our standing with our own particular tribes of natives whom both of us knew, and those others with whom I had associated, assured us a good measure of success should any trouble arise. The truth is, good fellows as all these strangers within our gates might be, and actually were, our heaviest task was to protect them from their own ignorances of the country they were seeing for the first time.
There was another thing which bothered Nick and myself quite a bit. These fellows coming in naturally had that feeling of superiority which the white man carries wherever he goes. That's all right and I'm with him, but in a region like northeast Baffin Land, to keep sanity and to keep life itself, there must be adherence to much of the native lore and the native way of doing things. And we had to protect the native from the white man.
Suppose some of these chaps were to get drunk; suppose one them should do such a thing as to make free with a native girl; well, suppose anything.
"Damn it to hell," said Nick, in a moment of exasperation which was decidely unusual for him, "we'll be putting up traffic signs before this thing is done with."