August 31, 2007
Taissumani
Padloping, From a Small Boat
KENN HARPER
This month marks an anniversary for me. Forty years ago, as a naïve and curious young man, I embarked with my young family in a Peterhead boat manned by an Inuit crew for Padloping Island, about sixty miles south of Broughton Island (now Qikiqtarjuaq.)
I had taught at Broughton Island the previous year, my first year in the Arctic. In 1966, that community had a population of only about 250 people. About a dozen non-Inuit lived there - teachers, an administrator, a mechanic, and the Hudson's Bay Company manager and clerk, some with wives, some single.
At the other end of the island, separated by a long road and a dangerous switchback trail up a mountainside were the Qaqqarmiut - the people who lived on the mountain, as the Inuit called the small contingent of about twelve DEW-liners, all men.
But this was not quite the Arctic for which I had hankered. I despaired of learning to speak Inuktitut with a dozen English speakers around. And the job of a teacher in those days was to teach all subjects in English. As isolated as I was, I wanted more.
Learning that Karl Kristensen, the teacher in the one-room school at Padloping, would be leaving at the end of the school year, I applied as his replacement. It would be the opportunity of a lifetime. This would put to shame the one-room country school I had attended as a boy - it was small, but hardly isolated. But Padloping - now that was remote. And its population was only 34. So I sent in my application, and waited, and hoped.
Since Broughton Island got infrequent plane service, all messages of any urgency from the government offices in Iqaluit (then Frobisher Bay) were sent by "telegram" over the two-way radio to the Hudson's Bay Company manager, who relayed them to the government administrator, who passed them on to the staff.
One day Bob Pilot, the administrator, arrived at my classroom door with a telegram from the education office - I was being offered the job in Padloping Island. Bob also had a recommendation - that I shouldn't accept it. It was too small, too isolated and had too few services for a small southern family.
Not accepting it was the farthest thing from my mind. I jumped at the chance. I would be the settlement's only teacher, as well as its administrator and medical dispenser. There was no church (I would learn that a lay minister conducted services every Sunday in my classroom) and no nursing station. Neither was there a store. All our supplies would have to come in by the medical ship, the C. D. Howe, the only vessel that put in to the isolated island.
At the end of the school year in Broughton Island, my wife and son and I headed south for a well-deserved holiday. But in late August we were back, anxious to reach our new home. There were no float planes in Frobisher Bay, and there was no airstrip in Padloping, so we headed off on the familiar route to Broughton Island by DC3. There, the administrator had arranged for us to continue to Padloping with Iqaalik (Ilkalik) in his Peterhead boat.
Perhaps it was because I was so young, but I thought Iqaalik to be quite an old man. A shock of white hair sat atop his weather-worn face. His eyes twinkled as if in remembrance of some past pleasure and he was quick to show a smile. We felt supremely confident in the hands of this "ancient mariner." (He can't have been as old as I thought, for he lived another three decades.)
The trip took a day, with a stop for tea on an uninhabited island. Finally we passed around the protected south-western end of Padloping Island. It was late evening, almost dark, when we got our first glimpse of the few lights that marked the tiny settlement that would be home. Padloping's diesel generator supplied electricity only to the school and its two apartments. The Inuit houses, all eight of them, were lit only by lanterns.
In his novel, Youth, Joseph Conrad wrote a moving passage about a young man approaching Java by boat, in his case a rowboat: "And this is how I see the East. I have seen its secret places and have looked into its very soul; but now I see it always from a small boat."
I wasn't rowing, like Conrad's protagonist. I was traveling in the relative comfort of Iqaalik's Peterhead boat. But the first sight of the few small flickers of lantern-light as we rounded the point and approached Baffin's smallest and most remote community is etched forever in my memory.
And that is how I see Padloping. I see it always from a small boat.
August 24, 2007
Taissumanni
The First Inuktitut Word List – Part 2
KENN HARPER
Last week I reproduced the list of seventeen Inuktitut words collected on Frobisher's first expedition to the Canadian Arctic in 1576. This week, I'll take a closer look at these words.
Let's consider first the words about which there can be no doubt as to meaning. The stems of these words, and in some cases the entire words, are easily recognizable as modern Inuit words. I will not dwell on the endings that have been appended. In some cases they are a second person singular adjectival ending, as one would expect if the sailor pointed to something of his and asked what it was, for example, your hands, your nose.
The easily recognizable words are:
Argoteyt, a hand = aggaak - hands
Cangnawe, a nose = qingak - nose
Keiotot, a tooth = kigutit - tooth
Chewat, an eare = siut - ear
Callagay, a paire of breeches = qarlik - pants, or qarligiik - pants
Attegay, a coate = atigi - inner parka
Coblone, a thumbe = kublu - thumb
Teckkere, the foremost finger = tikiq - index finger
Ketteckle, the middle finger = qitiq&iq - middle finger
Mekellacane, the fourth finger = mikiliraq - third finger
One of these may be ambiguous. Thalbitzer noted that cangnawe may be from either qingaq - nose, or qaniq - mouth. Indeed the sound seems more close to the word for mouth than to nose. One can imagine a situation in which the sailor was pointing to, rather than touching, the object and some confusion arose.
The words left to decipher are these:
Arered, an eye
Mutchater, the head
Comagaye, a legge
Atoniagay, a foote
Polleuetagay, a knife
Accaskay, a shippe
Yacketrone, the little finger
Four of these are relatively easy.
Mutchater, given in the list as "the head" is more readily intelligible when the initial consonant is changed to "n" and when the final consonant is changed to "t". The word can then be seen to be nutchatet. In modern Inuktitut, this word is nujatit - "your hair". The sailor interpreted this as being the word for "head" rather than "hair."
Thalbitzer in his analysis provides linguistic reasons why arered can be equated with isit - your eye - in today's language, ijiit.
Similarly he equates yacketrone with the Greenlandic eqerqune - on your little finger. In modern Inuktitut this would be iqiqqune, from the word for little finger - iqiqquq.
The word polleuetagay is from pilaut or pilauti, meaning a knife.
That leaves three:
Comagaye, a legge
Atoniagay, a foote
Accaskay, a shippe
Stefansson has suggested that comagaye is derived from kamik - boot. Dorais has further suggested kamegik - a pair of boots, which today would be kamigiik. One can imagine the sailor pointing to the lower leg, covered with a high boot, and assuming the word given to mean leg rather than boot.
Thalbitzer has also suggested that atoniagay is derived from a word he gives in Greenlandic spelling as atorniagai - the one he uses. Again, Stefansson has found this implausible and suggested that the word comes from atungaq - boot sole.
But Thalbitzer's explanation, slightly modified, makes more sense. Imagine that the sailor, rather than wearing the boot while eliciting the term, is, instead, holding it. Perhaps motioning to signify his intention to put it on, he asks his Inuit informant its name. The informant may have given him a word - aturniagait - meaning "that which you are going to use" or "that which you are going to put on."
This leaves one word: accaskay - a ship. Thalbitzer is silent on this word. Stefansson and Dorais each made suggestions, both implausible. Indeed Stefansson calls his own suggestion "mere speculation" and notes, "One might say almost anything while looking at a ship." The word remains a mystery.
Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
August 17, 2007
Taissumani
The First Inuktitut Word List
KENN HARPER
In 1576, on Martin Frobisher's first voyage, Christopher Hall or one of his seamen collected a list of 17 Inuktitut words.
These words have been analyzed by a number of scholars, among them William Thalbitzer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Louis-Jacques Dorais.
The list is the earliest Inuit vocabulary list to be collected by Europeans.
One must remember that Europeans had no knowledge of Inuit at this time, and that the sailor who collected the word list, as interested as he might have been in the new people he had just met, was undoubtedly a monolingual speaker of English. He would have equated the sounds he heard from the Inuit with sounds with which he was familiar in his own language, and written them clumsily in an orthography based on the English of his time.
He would have pointed to objects or touched them and asked what they were. Thus, the word list is naturally be top-heavy with nouns and deficient in verbs.
He would have been unaware that the Inuit language, unlike English, is a highly inflected language, and he would therefore not have recognized endings on words and would have assumed the naming feature of the word or utterance to be everything he heard, including any ending.
Indeed he would not have known what constituted a word. He would have been unaware of what to us is an old adage - that in Inuktitut a word can be a sentence. This describes in simple terms the structure of Inuktitut in which a sentence - or an utterance - can be built up by adding numerous suffixes to a base word.
Given the differences between the uninflected English language of our English sailor and the highly inflected and unrelated language of his mysterious Inuit informants, the miracle is that we can decipher any of the words on the list. In fact, we can decipher all but one, and learn something of the structure of the Inuit language of southern Baffin in the late 16th century.
The list collected was appended to Christopher Hall's account of Frobisher's first voyage, under the title "The language of the people of Meta incognita."
It is as follows:
Argoteyt, a hand
Cangnawe, a nose
Arered, an eye
Keiotot, a tooth
Mutchater, the head
Chewat, an eare
Comagaye, a legge
Atoniagay, a foote
Callagay, a paire of breeches
Attegay, a coate
Polleuetagay, a knife
Accaskay, a shippe
Coblone, a thumbe
Teckkere, the foremost finger
Ketteckle, the middle finger
Mekellacane, the fourth finger
Yacketrone, the little finger
The first scholar to comment, although briefly, on this word list was the Alaskan missionary Francis Barnum in his "Grammatical Fundamentals of the Innuit Language as spoken by the Eskimo of the Western Coast of Alaska."
Unfortunately, as the title indicates, Barnum had no direct experience of eastern Canadian dialects and restricted his comments on the Frobisher list to the following: "Some of these words are interesting from the fact that they show the difficulty of the first attempt at obtaining a vocabulary, owing to not knowing the grammatical structure of the language, and to the mistakes arising from mutual miscomprehension."
The first scholar to comment substantively on this word list was the Danish scholar, William Thalbitzer. The list has subsequently been analyzed by the explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and the linguist, Louis-Jacques Dorais.
Next week - A closer look at the words and their meanings.
Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
August 10, 2007
Taissumani
Five Missing Men
KENN HARPER
On Aug. 20, 1576, five sailors from Martin Frobisher's ship, Gabriel, went ashore at Frobisher Bay. Five days later, Frobisher gave up hope that the men would return, and set sail for England. Michael Lok, one of the explorer's backers, wrote that Frobisher, having heard nothing of or from the men, "judged they were taken and kept by force."
What happened to these five white men four centuries ago?
The British assumed that they had been captured, held against their will, and probably murdered. But over two centuries later, Inuit oral history told a different tale.
In 1861 Charles Frances Hall, exploring in Frobisher Bay, heard a story from an ancient Inuit woman, Uqijjuaqsi (whose name he spelled Ookijoxy). Hall wrote:
"Oral history told me that five white men were captured by Innuit people at the time of the appearance of the ships a great many years ago; that these men wintered on shore (whether one, two, three, or more winters, could not say); that they lived among the Innuits; that they afterward built an oomien (large boat), and put a mast into her, and had sails; that early in the season, before much water appeared, they endeavoured to depart; that, in the effort, some froze their hands; but that finally they succeeded in getting into open water, and away they went, which was the last seen or heard of them."
Hall took the story down in haste through a less-than-skilful interpreter, and recognized that there might be some inaccuracies in his account. In the book he wrote about his expedition, he noted:
"I have put down here only a part of what I recorded in my journal at the time, and, consequently, much of it will be found to have been the result of some slight mistake in what I then understood."
Talking with Uqijjuaqsi later, this time using the Inuit woman, Tookoolito, as interpreter, he added to the information he gleaned about this missing party.
The white men had apparently gotten along well with the Inuit, and especially with one man, whose name Uqijjuaqsi remembered as being "Eloudjuarng." He was, Hall wrote "a great man or chief among the Inuit. Tookoolito described him as being "All same as king."
When the white men were about to set out for home, Eloudjuarng composed a song wishing them a quick and safe passage, "and he caused his people, who were very numerous, to sing it." But the white men failed in their attempt to flee the country, and "finally froze to death."
Robert McGhee, an Arctic archaeologist and historian, felt that neither the English assumptions about the men's capture and murder nor the Inuit belief that they had been accidentally or purposely marooned, seems entirely plausible.
He suggests that the Inuit may well have wanted to steal the ship's boat, wood being a very valuable commodity, but that they would have no other reason to hold the men hostage. Moreover the account by Michael Lok does not speak of violence but rather suggests that the Englishmen may have acted voluntarily.
McGhee suggests this possibility: "Perhaps we should try to imagine the motives of the five sailors, young men who for ten weeks had endured the cramped quarters of a cold, wet, pitching ship. They had lived on bad food and worse beer, and had slept huddled together on the hard deck of the tiny forecastle. They had been subject to the discipline of a captain famous for his temper and impetuous actions. For the past few days they had come to be acquainted with the most extraordinary people they had ever met, smiling strangers who brought them fresh fish ... dressed in warm furs, were eager to trade furs and ivory objects that could easily be sold for a profit at home in England, and introduced the sailors to their shy, tattooed, and charming wives and daughters. An invitation to come ashore and further their acquaintance, as well as to walk freely on the dry tundra and drink clean water from a stream, may have been too enticing to resist."
McGhee suggests that the sailors may have stayed ashore longer than they intended and perhaps feared punishment from their volatile commander for disobeying orders. The Inuit, for their part, would have discussed the merits of acquiring the valuable wooden boat.
"The fate of the sailors," McGhee wrote, "would have been entirely dependent on the nature of the camp leader. If the traditional Inuit stories are to be believed, the men may have been fortunate in encountering a leader who not only spared their lives but made sure that they survived in the community. However, he may not have possessed the power to have the boat returned to Frobisher's ship, and the subsequent kidnapping of an Inuit man would likely have put an end to any talk of compromise."
McGhee has offered a plausible scenario, but after the passage of over four hundred years we will never know with any certainty what became of Frobisher's five missing men.
(I have quoted at length from Robert McGhee's writings, with his permission.)
Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
August 3, 2007
Taissumani
A 1576 Hostage-Taking in the Arctic
KENN HARPER
It didn't start out as an abduction.
Martin Frobisher set sail from England in 1576 on the first of his three Arctic voyages, in command of two vessels, the Gabriel and the Michael. The voyage was sponsored by the Muscovy Company and its purpose was to find a Northwest Passage to the riches of the far east. On August 11, the Gabriel entered Frobisher Bay. (The Michael, which had become separated from the Gabriel, had turned back for Britain.)
From an island near the head of the bay, Frobisher and Christopher Hall surveyed the body of water that, despite its progressive narrowing, they thought was the sought-for passage west. Then they spotted objects moving in the water at a distance:
"And being ashore, upon the toppe of a hill," a contemporary account related, "he perceived a number of small things fleeting in the Sea a farre off, whyche he supposed to be Porposes or Ceales, or some kinde of strange fishe: but coming nearer, he discovered them to be men, in small boates made of leather."
Frobisher and his men were about to be part of the first documented encounter between Englishmen and Inuit.
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The Englishmen retreated to the safety of the Gabriel, while the Inuit made land. Hall then went ashore with the ship's boat, a white flag waving to show his peaceful intent. He invited one Inuk to come to the ship and left one sailor ashore.
At this point each side had a hostage. The Inuk was fed and given wine and when he returned to land he reported that he had been well-treated. The English hostage returned to the ship. Nineteen more Inuit arrived and boarded the ship. They showed no fear of the Englishmen and seemed familiar with ships. It is probable that they had seen Europeans before.
The two groups traded. The Inuit brought fish and meat as well as seal and bear skins, and received in return bells, mirrors and other trade objects.
Frobisher attempted to hire one of the Inuit men as a pilot to guide him through the passage he thought led to the west. But there was probably misunderstanding about this on both sides.
Five of Frobisher's men were dispatched in the ship's boat to take the man ashore to get his kayak. Instead of putting him ashore in sight of the ship, they rowed around a headland where three of them went ashore with the man. The boat, with two men in it, then was seen offshore and Frobisher made signs that they should return to the ship. The boat disappeared again behind the headland, presumably to pick up the other men. Frobisher's five men were never seen by Englishmen again.
A few days later, the man who had been the first to board the ship some day earlier, approached the vessel in his kayak, no doubt to trade. He was cautious, but Frobisher lured him close to the ship with a bell. He dropped the bell into the water, but out of reach of the Inuk.
Then Frobisher lured him closer, by ringing a larger bell over the side of the ship. As the Inuk reached for the bell, Frobisher seized the man's hand, then grasped his wrist with his other hand and lifted the man and his kayak out of the water and onto the deck of the ship in one smooth motion.
A chronicler of Frobisher's voyage wrote that the man bit his tongue in two. Frobisher held the man hostage for a time, hoping to exchange him for his five missing men and his much-needed boat.
But the Inuit who came near the ship in their kayaks did not offer up the five men. With the loss of his ship's boat and some of his most able-bodied men, Frobisher gave up his mission. On Aug. 25, with the unfortunate Inuk still on board, he turned sail for England.
The hostage was now a captive and could be used to prove to Queen Elizabeth I that Frobisher had reached a far-off land.
They reached London on October 9, where the Inuk became the talk of the town. George Best described him as "this strange infidel, whose like was never seen, read, nor heard of before, and whose language was neither known nor understood of any."
Unfortunately this nameless captive did not survive long. He died in London and was buried in the Church of St. Olave, a church that still stands near the Tower of London. The church records, however, do not record the burial of the Eskimo and so he remains nameless, the first recorded casualty in a clash of cultures in the Canadian Arctic.
Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
