Frozen Moments

"Their skins were black and the meat above their teeth was gone; their eyes were gaunt. Were they tuurngait—spirits—or what?” So a present-day resident of Iqaluit recounts age-old impressions of the last members of the Franklin expedition—a recollection passed for generations through her family. “It was a bedtime story,” she says of this snippet of lore.

To non-Inuit, it may seem remarkable that such transient impressions should be preserved so long in legend, but the accuracy of this oral history has often been confirmed. American explorer Charles Francis Hall, for example, waylaid on Baffin Island in 1860 while seeking evidence of the Franklin tragedy, realized that the legends he was hearing from his hosts provided key information, totally absent from written records, about encounters their ancestors had with Martin Frobisher almost three centuries earlier.

Are the stories of today’s Inuit as useful a guide? In Encounters on the Passage...