When we got as far as Toronto we had got halfway there.
A boring train ride took us to Ottawa late at night, so that next day was free for Canada's National Art Gallery and shopping for warm clothes, calorie-packed emergency rations, and whisky in unmarked plastic bottles for smuggling
into the booze-free High Arctic in order to induce Bajan sleep in the bright nights. Art enthusiasts who can face my un-arty articles may be relieved to learn that in the magnificent Art Gallery of the Capital of Canada (a
Gallery which took a full four hours for our rapid critical inspection) I repeated the enquiry made at the B arbados Garrison, finding only two recognisable penises, among the hundreds of Canadian pictures. The eighteen and
three-quarter male organs scored in Barbados' tiny but interesting display may perhaps indicate something other than a difference in ambient temperature. But what?
Early next morning we were off, on a large three-jet job which
seemed far too big for the population it served, but all was clarified when we packed into less than half of the cabin. The most important flier was the freight.
In the first hour the Canadian Shield of ice-scoured granite below
us showed lakes and rivers and forest. The next hour showed the same thing but with ice and snow. Beyond that the trees disappeared. Not even grass was to be seen, or inferred..
Our first stop, Iqualuit, near the southern end of
Baffin Island's huge length of a thousand miles, has Government offices, sport-fishing and mining. Of more interest to us was a shop with a wide selection of Inuit Art, but we had to run there, buy quick and run back before the jet
left without us. We just had time to notice the terminal building, in a style resembling the submarine architecture of our beloved British High Commission, but painted a dazzling yellow, the same as the runway markings. An extra
nought or two had crept into the order for that paint.
Resolute was our last jet stop, an airway centre for the Far North with its long runway and its powerful radiotelephone.
Places in North America very often go by their
ancient Indian names, like Chicago, Toronto, Miami, Mississippi, Missisauga. But in the Artic, those intrepid but foolish English naval types, searching for the North-West Passage to China and Japan gave everything the names of
Admirals who might help their own careers, or of warships which got beset in the ice and crushed, or beset and survived the winter. HMS Resolute and its subsequent Bay seems to have been one such. Melville was the name of an
Admiral, now of a big island, Baillie-Hamilton now the name of a small one. The Inuit will tell you the correct names for places, but you won't find Inuit names on most maps.
Resolute was where we waited for our two
stopping-planes, the Twin Otters, with wheels for runways and skis for snow and ice, which had been chartered for the twenty of us to get to our ten tents. They turned up eventually and sprang quickly into the air.
Landing on
the sea ice was quite another matter, the ice being decorated with pretty ice-castles, twenty feet high, at frequent intervals. Our pilot made four exploratory passes over the landing area, then a trial landing at adequate
air-speed (so he told me) to find out whether the ice was thick enough to bear the weight of the plane. Up we went yet again after that, coming down once more to look carefully for any cracks. A final safe landing at pass
number seven. Out of the plane and Ugh! happily uncrashed, into the freezing wind.
Our large, fifteen-foot, double-walled canvas tents had already been pitched, and the kerosene heaters lighted. But Isaac Newton's principles of
physics were in inexorable operation. The lovely hot air went straight to the top of the tent, while the cold air stayed remorselessly at ground level, where snow refused to melt into toothbrush-water, and where we slept, fully
dresed, on romantic musk-ox skins, with sleeping-bags, eiderdowns and night-caps. Night-caps both woolly and liquid.
Our Inuit hosts were some fifteen in number, with about the same number of children, and when we
all crammed into our communal eating tent, luxuriously furnished with tables, with benches and with food and coffee, it got distinctly hot; glasses and cameras and binoculars instantly steaming up. The air-conditioning lay just
outside.
Our camp-ground was superb; a flattish gravel beach about fifteen feet above sea-level, with no sand or mud. It had been in use as an Inuit summer camp-site (so the dating said) for over two thousand years. Just
behind it lay some graves, where the gravel could actually be dug for the purpose, and a plateau of high, snow-covered hills, which had once been the floor of a sea. In front lay the ice, stretching across the mouth of a fjord a
hundred miles long and twenty-five wide. Our hosts' home village, Arctic Bay, lay on the other side of the fjord, thirty miles away across the ice, ice soon to be melted into sea-water.
The edge of the floe ice was our
playground where we watched for seals (one needed every day for the dogs and for the delicious raw, warm liver for the Inuit, their children and Leacock), for walrus and the unicorned narwhal, for bearded seal, so seldom seen above
water, so often dominating the Arctic hydrophone, for the elegant bear of the Pole, so tigerish and so unstriped. But the floe edge was mostly inaccessible, guarded by square miles of rackety, piled-up ice, interspersed by
treacherous lagoons of wandering, geometrical, icy floes, where the children jumped gaily from one hazard to another. A sharp, clear edge of the ocean was what we wanted, and just five miles away it was there. Our diaries began to
be filled.
Next day was a snowstorm and language lessons, but the following day our guides with their telescopes found good floe edge twenty-five miles away. About 11.30, well after breakfast, in normal Inuit Summer Time,
our convoy set off. As the most ancient of the group and the only fellow whose wife needed a stick on the ice, I had grabbed two places (on the floor) in the Rolls-Royce of sledges, a plywood chariot with plastic windows still
transparent, and decorated in a genteel manner with window-surrounds of chintz curtains. But never a spring, whether coil or carriage, in sight or feeling. As the sledge leaped over a ridge or a bump the front of it took happily to
the air. Alas, each time it proved necessary for it to descend. Each time it was a thackering whack on the rock-hard ice. Whack (not a soft wham), brack, headache, For twenty-five miles endured with a cheerful smile and with jokes
whose originality suffered a low declension.
We got there. Bright sun, no wind, a sharp edge to the ice, water absolutely calm, birds to keep us amused, whales for serious collection, a naturalist to produce small Arctic animals
from the water, a brilliant marksman for a guide, who brought down a large goose on the wing with (I mean it) one rifle shot, a sea to invite us to do some kayaking and even to persuade some of us (in dry suit, mask and snorkel) to
see what it was like for humans under the ice. Surely you must envy us. Our hydrophone told us how noisy it was for animals with good ears under the ice and I was able to get a recording. A seal for the dogs, high tea for the
tourists, and we got all the way back to camp for dinner by two a.m. in the bright, sunny morning. What a marvellous Arctic day!
