“THEY’RE NOT INUIT; THEY’RE NOT HUMAN,” WAS HOW A WOMAN, BADLY SHAKING WITH FRIGHT, FIRST REPORTED THE ARRIVAL OF THE LAST SURVIVORS OF THE FRANKLIN EXPEDITION AT A REMOTE ARCTIC HUNTING CAMP.
HOW INUIT IN THE 19TH-CENTURY COPED WITH A REAL-LIFE INVASION OF THE UNDEAD
It was easily one of the most unearthly and chilling visions that had ever struck the land that would soon become Canada: eight or nine lurching figures, their eyes vacant, their skin blue, unable to talk and barely alive.
It was sometime before 1850 at a remote Arctic hunting camp near the southwest edge of King William Island, an Arctic island 1,300 kilometres northwest of what is now Iqaluit, Nunavut. And these “beings” had seemingly materialized out of nowhere.
“They’re not Inuit; they’re not human,” was how a woman, badly shaking with fright, first reported their arrival to the assembled camp.
They were all gathered in an igloo. The men of the camp were away seal hunting, leaving only the women, children and one old man.
As the group tried to process the terrifying reality of what they’d just heard, the crunching footsteps of the strangers got closer.
“Everyone got scared. Very, very scared,” was how the Gjoa Haven shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq described the encounter to historian Dorothy Eber in 1999. The story was included in Eber’s 2008 book Encounters on the Passage.
These Inuit were among the most isolated people on Earth. Although they knew of Europeans, they had never met a white person.
Finally, as the footsteps stopped just outside the igloo, it was the old man who went out to investigate.
He emerged to see a disoriented figure seemingly unaware of his presence. The being raised no protest when the old man reached out his hand to touch its cheek. His skin was cold. “I’ve never in all my life seen a devil or a spirit, these things are not human,” is how Inuit oral history records the old man’s first thoughts.
The figures, of course, were the last survivors of the Franklin Expedition. They had buried their captain. They had seen their ship entombed by ice. They had eaten the dead to survive.
And now, they were 5,000 kilometres from home, in the last days of a futile bid to escape the Canadian Arctic on foot.
Historian Dorothy Eber called these attempts “the death marches.”
A renowned chronicler of Inuit culture, Eber spent decades travelling the North and collecting Inuit oral history. Her 1970 book, Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life, is credited as the first book to be published in Inuktitut after the Bible.
In the 1990s, Eber turned her sights on getting the Inuit perspective on the age of Arctic exploration. What emerged was a cornucopia of stories detailing ghostly encounters with doomed men.
“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.
And it’s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that discharged columns of death onto the ice.
“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors that day on King William Island.
The figure’s skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.
“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by Qayutinuaq.
The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so the Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.
But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — refused to eat the cooked seal and soup offered to them.
When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.
Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.
The true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.
The Inuit had left in such a hurry, they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.
The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.
It would cause a scandal in the U.K., when the first evidence returned of what had befallen Franklin’s men.
It was Scottish explorer John Rae who returned from the Arctic with Inuit testimony that the expedition had descended into madness and cannibalism.
No less than Charles Dickens would lead a crusade to discredit Rae, accusing the Scot of trusting “the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilized people, with domesticity of blood and blubber.”
In 1854, Rae made a return trip to the Arctic. He was horrified to discover that many of his original Inuit sources had fallen victim to an outbreak of influenza, likely sparked by the wave of Franklin searchers combing the area.