One morning in August 1999, on the west coast of Boothia Peninsula in the high Arctic, three men prepared to set out from a rough camp to honour the explorer John Rae. We were going to erect a plaque marking the spot where, in 1854, Rae discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage—the only channel then navigable. A few days before, in the town of Gjoa Haven, roughly 115 kilometres southwest across Rae Strait, we had attached the aluminum plaque to a waist-high stand of welded steel, creating an unwieldy unit that weighed at least 15 kilograms. Now, as we broke camp, the Inuk Louie Kamookak fashioned a rough sling out of a sweatshirt, and we agreed to take turns carrying this awkward creation to its destination “traditional Inuit style.”
While the two southerners stuffed last-minute items into our day packs, Kamookak picked up the plaque and set off across the tundra at a pace I immediately pronounced unsustainable. He had covered a kilometre by the time we two...
Ken McGoogan, who has written extensively on the fur trade and Arctic exploration, recently published Celtic Lightning: How the Scots and the Irish Created a Canadian Nation.
Advertisement
Advertisement