Chapter 14 ~Time and Tide
The tides in Ungava Bay were so great that they coursed high up to Fort Chimo, thirty miles from the mouth of the Koksoak River. Medium sized supply ships could navigate the channel in summer, despite its shoals, but they invariably carried Eskimo pilots and moved in the river only between half tide and high water.
In the Sealift period when supply ships reached Chimo, they had to anchor in the shelter of mid-river islands and the cargoes were transferred into barges to be ferried ashore. A six-knot current kept sailors on their toes, and captains were warned that no anchorage could be considered safe. All ships had to be ready to move at any time. Mute witness to the dangers was the rusting wreck of the Upshur, which had dragged anchor in a storm and foundered on Big Elbow Island, her back broken and her boilers burst.
Cargo ships had been going up the Koksoak since 1830, when the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post was built on the east bank of the river. One of the early traders at Chimo was a Scotsman named John McLean, who described the place as a “cheerless landscape … as complete a picture of desolation as can be imagined.” He was the only white person living in Chimo at the time – his wife having died there within a year of their arrival in 1837.
His trading post was built of logs floated down the river from forests to the south, and it was built on a marshy plateau between the broad river and a range of low, rocky hills, where the ancient Eskimo tribes buried their dead.
For five years he traded with the Eskimos and the Naskapi Indians of Labrador. He was not only a trader, but an explorer and the first white man to cross the peninsula and the first white man to see the Grand Falls of Hamilton, Labrador, a waterfall mightier than Niagara and with a present day potential of seven million horse power for hydro electric energy. He tried to open an overland trade route to the Atlantic coast but it was not successful, and on his advice, the post was closed in 1842. It was re-opened in 1866, before the advent of rival missionaries in Ungava Bay, with their conflicting and confusing Roman Catholic and Protestant faiths. McLean’s lonely reign in the heathen land probably helped to account for the HBC initials being interpreted by old Arctic hands as meaning, “Here Before Christ,”
It was a warm morning on Thursday, July 21st, full of the promise of a lovely day when George Koneak offered to take us in his canoe across the Koksoak River to visit the old east bank trading post and the old Eskimo burial ground. Few people lived on the east bank any more.
The Anglican church and the HBC trading post were being moved to the west bank, where the Eskimos had gravitated round the airstrip. We accepted George’s invitation, glad of the opportunity to see the other shore from ground level. Looking down on it from the cockpit of Lariviere’s plane it had looked a lovely place of neat white buildings and emerald green grass.
The glorious weather encouraged a number of other people to make the trip and there were three canoes in our party. George held out his hand to help Mrs. Dodds and me into his canoe and we crouched in the bottom of the boat as it moved down the Koksoak against a fast rising tide.
George’s outboard motor began to sputter trouble so he followed the bank quite closely before crossing the swift current at the river’s narrowest point. Suddenly the engine cut out and George moved to the bow, flung the anchor overboard and we sat in the sunshine in a quiet eddy while he scraped carbon off the plugs. The other canoes, darting like dragon flies, were far away to our starboard bow, racing downriver. They noticed we were stopped, changed course and headed towards us to keep a kindly eye on George’s progress. It was typical of the way the Eskimos cared for each other on a journey.
George soon had the motor mended and once more we thudded across the waves on the after keel of the canoe, the bow pointed skywards and high octane fumes billowing in our wake. lt might not have been the proper fuel but it made the canoe cut away like a cannon ball.
White caps seemed to threaten us with swamping as we left the protection of the riverbank, and once in a while George slowed the boat and we wallowed for a moment or two before leaping off again over the wave crests. Several times the motor cut out, and each occasion the other Eskimos came back up river to ensure we were not in danger. By the time we reached the landing place we were soaked to the skin and George, concerned that his passengers were wet, advised me to wring out my trousers and borrow some clothing from Mrs. Ploughman, the trader’s wife.
The grass grew high and green round the old settlement, predatory huskies snarled at us and we had to carry stones in self-defence as we walked along the duckboards to the old store. Because the business was to be transferred to the other side of the river, the stocks on the store shelves were low, but the credit cards of Ungava’s fur trappers were still on hand. There were names like Good Night Willie of Port Burwell, an epithet he earned because they were the only words of English he knew and he used them day or night; there were cards for Daniel Snowball; Peter Partridge; Ned Ungnatweenuk and Jacob Sequaluk, and scores of other men whose lives pivoted on HBC credit from infancy to grave.
I left the old store and wandered along a rocky ridge flanking the river, crossed a steep gully and mounted the next ridge to the east. A pile of stones and timber fragments attracted my attention. It looked like a fallen cairn, I scrambled to the crest of the ridge to add my stone and suddenly saw the cairn was a sepulcher for four very old, decaying coffins, partly covered by boulders.
Three of the coffins had broken under the stress of time, weather and curious creatures. The planks were rough hewn and irregular, bleached by a hundred summer suns and winter snows. In one mound lay the skeleton of a child who must have limped on those Ungava hills before she was laid to rest forever. The femur of her right leg had been fractured and it had knitted improperly, shortening her leg by three or four inches.
I followed the ridge and passed other human remains, porous, roughened and scattered in green banks of lichen and moss. More than a score of blanched human skeletons lay on the lonely hill. One coffin had no nails in it, but it had been bound about with a cooper’s bands, undoubtedly by a craftsman at old Chimo cooperage where fish were salted in barrels and shipped in sailing vessels to England a hundred years before.
When the bodies were buried in the stone mounds in pagan Eskimo fashion, they were probably accompanied by tools, soapstone lamps and sewing kits to take on the eternal journey they expected before missionaries came to teach them about Hellfire, Heaven, Purgatory and Christ. No artifacts remained after the lapse of so many years and the passage of so many people. The sun shone out of a cloudless blue sky. A strong wind kept away the flies and swept the tundra with a fresh breeze out of the North.
Rosemary said quietly, “What a lovely place to be buried, with the sun, the wind and the sky about you.”
We retraced our steps past the clear pools, blue under the sky. The hollows sheltered low tamarack trees with waxen red cones, aromatic as spice. We passed through the newer Christian graveyard, where neat wooden crosses marked the resting places of the converted. The land was swamp, I looked back up the ridge and thought the old pagan people had chosen a far better place on the hilltop.
While waiting for the tide to rise to go home, we sat talking in the house of Rube Ploughman the Hudson’s Bay Company trader. He said he sold fifteen thousand packets of chewing gum to the Eskimos in one year in Fort Chimo.
“Why do you stock so much cola and chewing gum when other foods would be better for the people?” I asked him.
“Because there’s a demand for it,” he said,
“It’s not The Bay’s problem,” said Mrs. Dodds, “It’s the problem of education. The people must be taught food values and tooth care if they’re going to eat non-Eskimo foods.”
The trader said he tried to keep his customers happy, but he sometimes had trouble keeping his White customers in order. Sumer casual labourers often thought they ought to be served ahead of the Eskimos – his regular clients, “Eskimos are our bread and butter in the Hudson’s Bay Company,” he said.
He had a high regard for his “regulars” and plenty of proof of their ingenuity, a boundless Eskimo virtue which has contributed to their survival in the world’s most forbidding climate. One winter, Rube Ploughman was with some Eskimos travelling by dog sled and they stopped for the night out on the ice. The Eskimos found suitable snow and built a snowhouse in which they camped. The dogs were left outside as is customary, the sled was unpacked of its caribou skins, food, tea kettle and two Primus stoves. When they tried to light the stoves to boil tea, neither stove would work, and they discovered they had no pricker or needle to clear the jet. It meant they could have no tea, which they sorely needed, and no warmth in the snowhouse.
One of the Eskimos told the others to wait, and he disappeared down the igloo tunnel and almost at once a blood curdling howl set up from the hungry dogs,
Mr. Ploughman said he was certain his guide had been set upon by the huskies and he seized a knife and crawled down the tunnel. Near the entrance he came nose to nose with the Eskimo.
“In his hand he carried a stiff whisker from the muzzle of one of the dogs. He split a match, wedged the whisker in the split, pricked the Primus and we were away,” said the trader.
He told us of the day three years previously when what could have been a tragedy was averted by the prompt action of the Eskimos when the old East Bank store burned down on a sub-Zero day.
“They grabbed the blankets from the shelves, laid them on the floor and swept all the goods they could reach into the blankets, bundled them up and rushed outside. The rescuers came in through the back door and shuttled out through the front. No more than a hundred dollars’ worth of goods were lost, but the old building was completely destroyed.”
Rube Ploughman was always a busy man. In addition to his shop keeping and trading he was the postmaster and had to frank every letter posted out of Chimo. He had to sort incoming mail and even do service for the Hudson Bay Company’s greatest rivals – the mail order catalogues.
Chain store proprietors in the Outside had discovered the northern market and flooded Mr. Ploughman’s post office (in the HBC store) with mail order catlogues, and when the customers, his Eskimo traders, wanted to buy money orders to pay for his rivals’ goods, he had to sell them the orders over his counter.
To further mortify his soul, he had to sort the incoming parcels and arrange their collection when they were delivered by airmail to Fort Chimo. Not only was he losing business through the catalogues, but as post master he was accomplice in the depreciation of his own trade.
As we sat talking, George Koneak, who had been visiting friends and tending his vegetable garden, sent in a message telling us the tide would be right for the return trip at seven o’clock. There was a rush to Mrs. Ploughman’s generous table. We ate quickly. I exchanged her slacks for my own which had dried on the paling fence in a fresh wind and we trooped down to the ramshackle pier.
The three canoes were afloat and the Eskimos were waiting. The sun glazed the water, the wind and tide were with us and the evening was full of peace. George started the engine, shaded his eyes against the glare and steered a course up the broad stream. Mr. Dodds was waiting for us on the West Bank. There was a crisis on hand.
Elijah, the fisherman at George River had developed all the symptoms of appendicitis and a plane was being sent in as soon as possible. A Land Rover was waiting to rush George Koneak up to the office in time for the radio scheduled for eight o’clock, and we went up with him. Radio reception was clear, George River came in and a rendezvous was arranged for the plane to go in with the hospital nurse that evening, pick up Elijah and bring him back for the journey to a hospital in Roberval.
There was a dash to the seaplane berth. Mr. Dodds and the hospital nurse laboriously hand-pumped fuel from two drums, while the airline agent stood on the fuselage of the plane, guiding the two jets of aviation spirit into the tanks.
The bushpilot, Phil Lariviere, stepped inside a hut at the lakeside, spoke briefly to another pilot and came rushing out.
“Quit that. I’m going to take the Otter,” he yelled and climbed into the cockpit of his friend’s machine which was already fuelled. The unwritten law of the North was at work – “What is mine is yours in emergency.”
The other pilot had told Lariviere not to hang around wasting time, but to “get out from under, and get the beggar to hospital.”
The wind had dropped, and Lariviere made a long take-off run across the lake, pulled the Otter up to tree top height, banked to port and headed for George River while Mr. Dodds returned to the office to relieve the schoolmaster standing by with George Koneak at the radio transmitter.
We had barely arrived in the office when someone dashed to the doorway and the cry went up; “The boats are here. Max Budgell has come.” And there was an exodus, back to the riverside to meet the first supply ships to get through the ice that Summer.
That night, two Eskimos were carried aboard the Nordair passenger plane from Fort Chimo to Roberval. Lariviere had brought back Elijah, the appendicitis case, and Elijah was joined by another Eskimo, Charlie who had ruptured himself unloading cargo from the newly arrived boats. Dosed with morphia, the two men were transferred aboard the twin engine passenger plane, which called at Fort Chimo three times weekly on regular schedule. A radio message was sent to Roberval to prepare for two emergency operations, and by the time everyone got to bed that hectic night in Fort Chimo, the two Eskimos were safely in hospital. A few years previously, neither man could have been dealt with so swiftly and Elijah would probably have died of peritonitis long before he could have reached help.
As it was, both men recovered and returned to the aegis of that most benign of administrators, Sam Dodds, who had tirelessly coped with all the crises and emergencies of the long day.
