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

Flaherty set out again to go north the following year, 1913. In St John's, Newfoundland, he bought a 75-foot topsail sloop, Laddie , and had her rerigged and belted with greenheart to withstand ice. He loaded up his rock hammers, his acids, litmus and sampling bottles and this time he took along a Bell and Howell movie camera, portable lights, film stock and a developer and printer. His photographs had generated some interest in the south and he wanted to capitalise on that. By now, Flaherty was a good deal less interested in iron ore than he was in the ordinary life of the Barrenlanders. Wherever he went, he sensed that Inuit culture had already been compromised by contact with whaling crews and white explorers and he was desperate to film a way of life whose existence was fragile. He begged to be taken along on kayak trips and to be taught how to flense seals and sew clothes from caribou skins. At every opportunity he got out his camera and filmed. On one of his filming expeditions to the interior of Baffin, Flaherty's komatik , dog sled, broke through some rotten ice and his film fell into the water and was ruined but with his characteristic aplomb Flaherty took this setback in his stride. When Christmas came that year, he threw a party and Inuit sledged in from camps two days away at Fair Ness and the Isle of God's Mercy and Markham Bay to see what the qalunaat had to offer. Flaherty treated them all to ‘varicoloured paper hats’ and to tinned sardines. He was delighted by his new friends and, by and large, they returned the compliment.

On 14 August the following year, Laddie sailed into Hudson Bay on a course for the Belchers. A week later the islands hoved into view, exactly as the Inuit had described them: a hand of long, icy fingers the chief of which bore blue spiny cliffs. The Laddie moved towards this largest island but as she did so, a terrific gust of wind roared out of nowhere, blew her on to a reef and tore a hole in her hull. The crew piled into the whaleboat and made for the shore. Flaherty decided there was nothing to be done but to get on with what he had come here to do. Once the prospecting was done, they would have to rely on the little whaleboat to get them across the notorious waters of Hudson Bay back to the safety of Moose Factory. Over the weeks that followed, Flaherty collected samples, labelled and weighed, took pictures and sketched plans of the location and distribution of the iron ore. Then he and his men clambered into the whaleboat, said a quick prayer, and turned south.

Late August/early September is storm season in the eastern Arctic and the little whaleboat was buffeted around like a twig in a stream. It took them ten days to travel the 800 miles south. Several times they considered themselves as near to dead as made no difference. Eventually, the outline of the Moose Factory post came into view and they raced towards it, feeling they were finally safe. When they got close they noticed that the post flag was at half-mast and assumed some dreadful calamity had befallen the post. They disembarked with caution and were greeted by Monsieur Duval, the post factor, dressed in linens and a straw hat, who explained that he had set the flag at half-mast because he missed his beloved Normandy and longed for a little Camembert and a glass of apple brandy and sensed that France and all her loveliness was for ever lost to him.

Before leaving on the Belcher expedition, Flaherty had used his time in the south to court Frances Hubbard, the daughter of eminent geologist Lucius L. Hubbard. Now he returned to her and, despite rumours that Flaherty's affections were not confined to Frances alone, the couple were married in New York City on 12 November 1914, with Frances buying the ring. A friend of theirs later noted that Robert ‘was like a light and [Frances] was like a sensitive photographic plate’. The couple passed their first winter together editing what remained of Flaherty's film of Inuit life and the following spring they showed a rough cut at the Convocation Hall in the University of Toronto, where the picture was met with a wall of polite incomprehension.

By the autumn of 1915, Robert and Frances were apart once more. Robert spent that Christmas back at the Belchers, feasting on pea soup and currant buns and whiling away the time it took for the sea ice to freeze solid teaching the Inuit how to sing ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’. Between times he set his camera rolling. The following September he headed south, with 30,000 feet of exposed film.

The Flahertys worked through the early winter of 1916 and by Christmas they had a rough cut of the new film prepared and printed. This they sent off to Harvard in the hope that the university might screen it and Robert set himself to the business of refining the edit. As he was sitting over the negative one day, concentrating on the frames, a cigarette dropped from his fingers on to the film can, and the film flared, and burst into twists of flame before finally slumping to the floor in a heap of blackened celluloid. It was a bad film, Flaherty said later. He would just have to go back out to the Arctic and make a better one.

But not on Sir William Mackenzie's time. Flaherty's old benefactor had long since turned his real attentions away from Arctic ore to the war in Europe. There was no money to be had for Flaherty's adventures from that quarter and Flaherty had none himself. For a while, he ploughed his energies into the lecture circuit and making babies. Frances gave birth to three girls in close succession: Barbara, Frances and Monica. The new family moved to Houghton, Michigan, to stay with Frances' parents, then found a house of their own in New Canaan, Connecticut. But the empty spaces of the Arctic tapped on Flaherty's heart and he longed to return.

In the early spring of 1920, he saw his chance. At a particularly dreary cocktail party in New York he was introduced to Captain Thierry Mallet of the Révillon Fréres trading company. Flaherty was a warm, convivial man, and he was used to people gravitating towards him, rewarding them for their attention with his rough-tough tales of the kind of pioneer life which already seemed to belong to another, more fascinating, age. Thierry Mallet was no exception. Mallet knew the settings of Flaherty's tales. Révillon Fréres had recently opened posts in the Ungava Peninsula to capitalise on the Arctic fox populations there. The fur trade was picking up after a long wartime stagnation. As Mallet told Flaherty, a good white Arctic fox pelt was now selling at the wholesale fur market in Montreal for C$25 and Mallet's company was feeling buoyant. Its great rivals still needled it, though. The Hudson Bay Company was celebrating its 350th anniversary that year and Révillon Fréres was hoping to outdo its rivals when it came to celebrating its own 200th anniversary in three years' time. Did Flaherty have any good ideas, Captain Mallet wondered.

As it happened, Flaherty did. His idea, he told Mallet, was to make an adventure film about an astonishing group of people living in a world of unimaginable harshness, a world in which Révillon Fréres also operated. It would be the first film of its kind, a genuine trailblazer and he, Flaherty, would be willing to sell Révillon Fréres the rights to it. Flaherty saw Mallet's eyes take on a new intensity. He was in.

A few weeks later, the venerable Révillon Fréres company signed a contract promising Flaherty C$11,000 in exchange for the rights to his as yet unmade Arctic adventure film and on 18 June 1920 Flaherty found himself at the railhead in northern Ontario with some new camping equipment, a canoe, a Haul-berg electric-light plant and projector and two movie cameras. Just over two months after that, on board the schooner Annie , Flaherty ‘let go anchor at the mouth of the Innuksuak River and the five gaunt and melancholy-looking buildings’ of the post ‘stood out on a boulder-ridden slope less than half a mile away’, as he wrote in his diaries.