Melanie McGrath - The Long Exile - A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic

Taking his tent, his rockhound kit, canoes and an Indian guide, the 26-year-old Flaherty paddled along the Mattagami River north, across some of Canada's toughest portages, then followed the Moose River as far as the Hudson Bay trading post at Moose Factory in James Bay, a broad finger off the southernmost curve of Hudson Bay. At the factory, he stopped briefly to resupply, then took a boat to Chariton Island and hitched a ride on a schooner going north to Fort George. There he came upon an encampment of Inuit who guided him to the Hudson Bay post at Great Whale, otherwise known as Kuujjuarapik, a tiny settlement on the tree line, at the edge of the Barrenlands.

Flaherty was used to wilderness, but no wilderness he had ever experienced matched this. The Barrenlands made the deep, silent forests and rugged hills of his childhood seem as safe as apple orchards. He felt the flinty, lichen-painted sweep of the tundra and the great expanses of sea and ice and sky as a swelling in his chest. The starkness of the place enthralled him. It was as though every step further north was a footfall on a new discovery. The tundra rolled out, empty and uncompromised, all around him. If any land could be said to be the antidote to the diseased, corrupted, famine-ridden Ireland of his ancestors, it was here, where there were none of the tired overlays of human history, only the shallow sun and the shadows of low clouds chasing along the rock. Nowhere, not even in northern Ontario, had Flaherty felt more free.

He took on some Inuit guides at Kuujjuarapik and was soon as captivated by them as he had been by their land. These men understood the Barrens in a way Flaherty had never understood Michigan or lower Canada. Only now, in all this emptiness, did he begin fully to comprehend the fullness around him. He watched these men pull their living from it. He saw them moving over the fearsome weft of ice and stone as if it were a carpet and across the sea as if it were a lawn. He had grown up a witness to the demoralisation of the Indians who lived to the south. But these Barrenlanders were different. They still seemed in possession of a raw, unquestioning confidence, a strong, visceral simplicity which had long been lost at the tree line and, further south, in the hubbub of the cities. This huge, open terrain lived in them. You could not separate them from the environment, as the Indians had been separated from theirs. Without the Barrens, they would cease to exist. It dawned on Flaherty that he was witnessing something unique and precious, a window into an older and, perhaps, a better world.

The Inuit were not the first people to visit the Arctic. That accolade belongs to the Indians. As early as 5500 BCE, Indians had been moving from the forest on to the tundra in summer, following the migration routes of caribou, and they continued to move seasonally on to the Barrenlands for the next 2,000 or 3,000 years, until a change in the climate drove them back down south. It was not until some time between 3000 BCE and 2200 BCE that the Inuit crossed the Bering Strait, which was then a land bridge, into what is now North America, and spread eastwards until, by 1000 BCE, they had reached Labrador. The Inuit were the first people to occupy the Arctic permanently and they brought with them two technologies essential to their survival there, the bow and arrow and the kayak . From time to time they encountered Indians and when they did there were skirmishes, but for the most part they lived, untroubled, for 2,000 years or more until around 1000 AD when they had contact first with Vikings then with European adventurers, the best known of whom was Martin Frobisher, who arrived on Baffin Island in 1576 looking for gold. By the seventeenth century whaling ships from Scotland and North America were making regular forays into Arctic waters and overwintering in Hudson Bay. There they set up whaling camps to which the Inuit were drawn by the promise of paid work and by metal knives and, later, by rifles.

The Inuit were friendly towards Robert Flaherty, perhaps because they sensed his admiration for them. He was genial and gave off an air of integrity without ever being stiff or formal. Unlike most qalunaat he seemed genuinely keen to learn Inuktitut and the Inuit at Kuujjuarapik quickly got the sense that he saw them as equals and understood that, in the Barrenlands, it was they and not white men who were kings. His good manners, amiability and his fiddle-playing all helped endear him to them, as did his willingness to pay for the guiding and hunting they did for him. In the long history of contact between whites and Inuit, he was, they could see, someone quite rare. White men like Flaherty were hard to find in Inuit country.

From Kuujjuarapik, Flaherty continued north, and, after four months of travelling, he finally reached the Nastapoka Islands in January 1911. He and his guides set up camp and he began immediately to explore, digging through the hard-packed snow for rock samples and documenting everything he saw with photographs. He also took pictures of the men and women he encountered along the way. In their company, he began to feel both recognised and exposed. Their resilience, their competence and their good humour touched him. More than that, he felt drawn to their wildness and after only a few days in the Nastapokas he began to sense his destiny lay not in the rock but in these people and the way they made him feel.

After returning to Toronto to report his findings, Flaherty almost immediately found an excuse to go back up north. This time his aim was the Belcher Islands, an obscure cluster of rocks off the coast of Cape Dufferin, just south of the Nastapokas. The cape occupied an area the size of England and had a population of 200 Inuit, some of whom hunted walrus out on the Belchers. On the Nastapoka trip he had been told of the existence of a large island in the Belcher group whose tall blue cliffs bled when scraped and this suggested to Flaherty the presence of high-grade iron ore there. The island did not appear on any of the maps and there was no mention of it in any navigation charts, but Flaherty had witnessed the precision with which the Barrenlanders memorised their landscape and were able to recall its contours. He decided not to believe the maps but to put his trust in the Inuit instead.

The following year, he set out in the 63-foot sloop, Nastapoka , but was forced back to Kuujjuarapik by bad weather. Running low on supplies, he sailed south to Fort George to restock and when the sea froze over some months later he took off once again, this time by dog sled, intending to cross the Ungava Peninsula to Cape Dufferin, then complete the remainder of the journey to the Belchers on the sea ice. That far north, he figured, the ice would be stable. He was wrong. The ice proved so turbulent that year that Flaherty had to abandon his original plan. Instead, he decided to cross the Ungava Peninsula and try to reach Fort Chimo, or Kuujuak, on the eastern side. It was a crazy plan. Ungava was an unmapped, treeless tundra the size of Norway. No white man had yet crossed it from one side to the other, partly because travelling in the interior was exceedingly dangerous. Away from the coast, the only available food, aside from the odd Arctic hare, lemming or fox, was caribou and the caribou populations had been radically reduced since the introduction of rifles to the region. The adventurer Albert Peter Low had recently been forced to turn back from the Ungava interior to the coast on the point of starvation and Flaherty had none of Low's experience.

Undaunted, Flaherty hired three Inuit guides, ‘Little’ Tommy, Tookalok and Wetallok, and the four men took off on three dog sleds. For several days they followed Wetallok until the guide finally admitted that he had no idea where they were but had been too proud to say. Poor weather set in and the men, weary and hollow with hunger, had no choice but to stop and dig in. Over the next few days, frostbite got to them, snow blindness followed close behind, but they could do nothing except sit inside their snowhouse waiting for the storms to clear, making mental lists of the dogs they would eat and in what order. Flaherty wrote in his diary that the temperature fell so low the dogs vomited from the cold. The four men survived, but did not reach the Belchers.