Strange Graves

When the New York Times ran a blog post on its Dot Earth blog about the ballad "Lord Franklin," they chose as an illustration a curious engraving. It comes from a June 1881 issue of the Illustrated London News, and was one of many large plates showing scenes from Schwatka's search for Franklin. This one was captioned: "THE AMERICAN FRANKLIN SEARCH EXPEDITION: GRAVES OF THE COMRADES OF SIR JOHN FRANKLIN." So it would seem an ideal illustration for blog about the famous ballad lamenting the lost of Sir John and his "gallant crew," except for one detail: the graves shown here are certainly not those of Franklin or his crewmembers. The only graves, in the sense of organized burials with grave markers, are those found on Beechey Island; there were only three, until an unlucky crewman aboard the "North Star" joined them to make a party of four. And yet here we see what appear to be sixteen graves, three of which feature enormous columns that would seem to be made of wood or stone -- two obelisks and one cross.

So where is this graveyard -- with a village of igloos and an ice-bound ship near at hand? I think I have a likely answer, but rather than offer it here, I thought I'd "crowd source" the question: whose graves are these, and how did they end up being depicted in such a lovely but mistitled engraving?

(p.s. the version here is scanned from my own personal copy, not from the Times or the collection credited there).

Tima and Chimo

The first use of "Chimo" as a greeting is in Drage 1748, in Hudson Strait: "The Person in the Canoe... shewed a Piece of Whale-bone, repeating Chimo, and moving his Left-hand circularly upon his left Breast..." Andrew Graham in 1768 wrote that the Eskimos "rub their breast with their open hand, calling in a pitiful tone, 'Chimo! Chimo! which is a sign of peace and friendship. Hearne records "Tima" in 1795: "Tima in the Esquimaux language is a friendly word similar to 'what cheer.'" Edward Chappell in 1814 wrote that "Chymo" meant to barter.

These words each derive, in my opinion, from words that have their own discreet meaning, but in this context of being used as a greeting they have merged. George Back (1836-37) suggested as much when he referred to the men he met "vociferating their accustomed 'Tima' or 'Chimo'..." And McTavish in the 1880s wrote, "I bade the majority of the Esquimaux 'Timah,' generally written as 'Chimo'"

Taima (the modern correct spelling of tima - teyma - timah) today means - that's all, that's enough, it's over.

Chimo (which I think traditionally was pronounced Saimo - like Sigh-moe) comes from a root "saimak" which means blessing or peace. Saimaqsaiji means peacemaker. Saimati in northern Quebec and southern Baffin is "flag" - because after conversion Inuit stuck white flags into the snow beside their snowhouses to show that they were Christian and therefore peaceful. The phrase "saimugluk" (used between two people) today is always accompanied by a handshake, but derives from the same root, so it can be thought of as once meaning "Let's be friends," "Let's be in peace."

So the Taima and Chimo of the early white explorers and traders converged. The meaning was one of friendship and peace, with overtones of barter at the time.

None of this helps us understand "Mannik toomee."

Mannik toomee

The image is almost a cliché of nineteenth-century Arctic explorers' narratives: the Kabloonas approach the "Esquimaux" carefully, and the natives, weapons in hand, crouch nervously, never perhaps having encountered white men before. And then, with a cry of "Teyma," "Mannik toomee," or "Kammik toomee"-- all words thought at one time or another to mean "Friend," "Peace," or "Welcome" -- the two parties instantly relax; handshakes are exchanged, and trade goods soon follow. Thank goodness the white people knew what to say!

But of course they didn't know what to say. Most British and American explorers did not know a single word of Inuktitut; if they had phrasebooks, these were often in the wrong dialect, and if they had interpreters these were often Greenlanders whose dialect was -- quite literally -- thousands of miles off. The Brits, and the Americans who followed them, also had a habit of taking any word or phrase spoken to them, interpreting it by context and gesture, and using it in return as a greeting.

Which brings us to "Mannik toomee," subject of part of my last posting. This phrase or something close to it is in the journals of many Arctic explorers, each of whom heard it a little differently; McClintock heard it as "Kammik toomee," Schwatka as "Munnuk toomee," and Hall as "Man-nig-too-me." Taken literally, it seems to be made up of either manik ("here") or kamik ("sealskin boot"), which is followed with tumiq ("tracks"?). In an agglutinative language such as Inuktitut, this could be construed as anything from "there are tracks here" to "here we stand" -- but my knowledge of the language is extremely limited, so I'd leave that to those who speak it, or linguists. The one thing I can say with some certainty is that it doesn't mean "Welcome," which is what the explorers thought it did.

It appears that this is one of those phrases, heard by white men at one point in time, and then re-used as a greeting. Since white men wrote down what they heard, later explorers might well re-use the term. "Teyma," assumed to mean "friend," was noted by Sir John Franklin in 1821, who remarked that it was "used by Esquimaux when they accost strangers in a friendly manner." Later explorers used it too, though at some point they seem to have switched to a variation of "Mannik toomee" -- so the question is, who first heard this expression, and made the assumption it was a friendly greeting?

Here things get sticky. I have a clear recollection that I'd read it was spoken by the angekoq or shaman who, in 1833, tried to keep the kabloonas led by George Back -- who, unbeknownst to Back, had earlier killed three Inuit -- from coming too close. But it's not in Back's, or in King's narrative. It does, however, feature in Inuit oral tradition. Dorothy Eber heard this phrase in a story about nervous Inuit approaching white men, and wrote about it in The Beaver and again in her most recent book. Her informant even offered a gloss on its meaning:

The shaman told his people, 'Maniktumiq' - do it smoothly, not aggressively. The Inuit stood together and said the same word - 'Maniktumiq' - do it smoothly. It was sort of a prayer to a great power, the spirit. All together they began walking gently and smoothly, not agressively.

Eber believed the word was a specialized, "magic" or shamanistic word, used for its symbolic rather than literal meaning -- like, say, the English word "abracadabra" -- and that it may well have been the kind of word used only by a particular band, or even one specific shaman.

I believe this phrase may have been specific to the Utjulingmiut. This was the band Back met near the mouth of the river that would later bear his name, the band whose hunting area was nearest the site of the last Franklin ship, and the band which, due to famine and hostile neighbors, was dispersed to the winds, its survivors often finding refuge with other bands. Eber believes the testimony just quoted referred to Ross -- and indeed a similar scene happened at his first meeting with the Inuit. But where then is any reference to the man with one leg, sent ahead as the most expendable member (and later given a welcome wooden replacement by the ship's carpenter of the Victory)? No, I think this account is a worn-down version of the Inuit encounter with Schwatka's searchers in 1878; here is his version:

They formed a line with bows, arrows, and spears or knives, and, as we moved up to within a few feet, they began a general stroking of their breasts, calling "Munnik toomee" (Welcome).

The association of this gesture with the phrase is noted elsewhere -- but what is significant here is that this band, although from another area, had as its head-man one of the last survivors of the Utjulingmiut diaspora.

Incidentally, this also gives us another reason to suppose that "Too-loo-ark" may have been Franklin -- it was Franklin who picked up on "teyma," and according to Kok-lee-arng-nun, it was "Too-loo-ark" who added that phrase to his greeting:

Too-loo-ark would say "Ma-my-too-mig-tey-ma." Ag-loo-ka's hand shaking was short and jerky, and he would only say "Man-nig-too-me." After the first summer and first winter, they saw no more of Too-loo-ark.

Kok-lee-arng-nun's Tale

One of the most remarkable pieces of Inuit testimony was that given the Charles Francis Hall by a native in Pelly Bay whose name Hall transcribed as "Kok-lee-arng-nun." This old man, nearly blind, had two spoons of Crozier's, and happily volunteered his tales of visiting white men on ships. There was one boat which had been near where they were speaking (this must have been Ross's Victory) and two boats out near "Oot-joo-lik." His tale of visits to these two boats, at first, seemed very clearly to describe Franklin and Crozier, under the names "Too-loo-ah" and "A-gloo-ka."

He described "Too-loo-ah" as "an old man with broad shoulders, thick and heavier set than Hall, with gray hair, full face, and bald head. He was always wearing something over his eyes (spectacles, as Too-koo-li-too interpreted it), was quite lame, and appeared sick when they last saw him. He was very kind to Innuits -- always wanting them to eat something." With this man was his second officer, "Aglooka" -- Kok-lee-arng-nun showed how Too-loo-ark and Ag-loo-ka used to meet him. They would take hold of his hand, giving it a few warm and friendly shakes, and Too-loo-ark would say "Ma-my-too-mig-tey-ma." Ag-loo-ka's hand shaking was short and jerky, and he would only say "Man-nig-too-me." After the first summer and first winter, they saw no more of Too-loo-ark."

There are difficulties with this tale -- much of it seems to match up with Franklin's ships, but other parts of his stories seemed to relate more to Ross's expedition aboard the Victory. Hall himself, after his initial enthusiasm, decided that everything the old man had told him was nothing but memories of Ross. But this, of course, can't be true, for all kinds of reasons (Ross had one boat, not two, he had a full head of hair and was not short and squat, he did not die during the expedition, and many other details, as Dave Woodman has noted in his books). Yet assuming it to be Franklin's vessels leads to problems as well -- most notably that, since as Woodman notes, the Netsilik Inuit had no idea that Franklin's ships or men had been in the northwest of King William Island until they learned of this from McClintock in 1859, it seems impossible that such visits as Kok-lee-arng-nun described took place prior to the 1848 landing. This would date them to some following season, long after the death of Franklin. So who was the bald, lame man with spectacles?

I believe it was, after all, Sir John Franklin himself. First, let us remember the circumstances under which Hall met Kok-lee-arng-nun -- they were nearing an area where they had been warned about hostile Inuit, possibly Netsilik, and known locally as the See-ne-mun-ites. Hall at first worried that Kok's band was one of them. In fact, not long after the meeting Hall would be forced to turn back, mainly due to the fact that Ebierbing, his trusty guide, was too worried about hostile Inuit to go further. There were stories of some Inuit, originally from the area of Utjulik, who had returned home only to be murdered in cold blood. Clearly, the Utjulingmiut had been displaced by these hostilities, as they turned up in all kinds of places far from their home hunting ground; some were among Rae's informants who had passed Franklin relics to him in Repulse Bay in 1854, and I think that Kok-lee-arng-nun, though himself an Arvlingmiut from Pelly Bay -- must have been on good terms with the Inuit of Utjulik, since he had visited there. Both bands likely suffered from the hostile Netsilik, their near neighbors. That at least one of Franklin's ships ended up in this area we are fairly certain -- and yet, up until this meeting, McClintock and other searchers had met only with Netsilik. It seems likely to me that the astonishing wealth left in and near an abandoned ship might well have been the source of the violence between bands, and in the context of that violence, the reason why Kok-lee-arng-nun's group would not have shared their knowledge with any Netsilik. They knew of Franklin's ships, but would not have had the opportunity to return to the place of their meeting him, as it was now controlled by hostile Inuit.

The physical description of Franklin given by Kok-lee-arng-nun matches that of no other explorer known to be in the region. Franklin's expedition was the only one whose commander died, and whose replacement was a man already known to the Inuit. And there is a final reason why I am convinced that Kok-lee-arng-nun's tale relates to Franklin himself, and it is the greeting he described Too-loo-ah and A-gloo-ka using: "Man-nig-too-me." This is not, from what I understand, a very typical Inuit greeting, and in fact the belief that it was one can be traced very specifically to Back's expedition to rescue the Rosses. It was during this journey that, though Back did not learn about it until later, two Inuit were killed by his party. When he met later with other Inuit from the area near the mouth of the Fish River, he could not understand why they were so nervous, or why their head man kept repeating "manik toomee." Back recorded this in his published account, a copy of which would surely have been aboard Franklin's ships. John and James Clark Ross could not have learned of this phrase until long after their sojourn in the Arctic, and could never have used it; that the two men described by Kok-lee-arng-nun did is further evidence to me that they must have been Franklin and Crozier.

Woodman feels that this tale could apply to Crozier and Fitzjames -- but unless Crozier was bald under that cap of his, and put on considerable weight, injured his leg, and had started looking "old" -- I just can't see it. It seems more likely by far to me that Kok-lee-arng-nun's band, under threat by hostile Netsilik, would of course have had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to talk to them about their earlier visits with Franklin.

New theory on the Boat Place

Ron Carlson has just posted a very thoughtful item on the possible reasons for the abandonment of the boat later discovered by M'Clintock to have been facing what he considered the "wrong" direction -- back toward the presumed location of the ships. I think it raises some good questions as to the ways in which we reconstruct both the physical evidence and our sense of the state of mind and morale of the men. I recommend that anyone interested in this question have a look at Ron's blog, and post their thoughts.

Hiatus

I wanted to let everyone who's been following this blog over the years know why posts have been a bit less frequent of late, and why I'm taking a brief hiatus from new postings. My novel, Pyg: The Memoirs of a Learned Pig, is about to be published in the UK by Canongate books; editions in the US, Italy, and other countries will soon follow. Like everything I've done, the novel is a labor of love, and right now I plan to spend most of my energies helping to get it launched. I have a new blog for the novel, and have even done something I thought I'd never do, and started a Twitter account.

But I will not -- and never shall -- leave these regions of thick-ribb'd ice -- the Arctic is in my blood. I will still make periodic postings, and will certainly follow all of those who are out there keeping the polar torch alight. I hope those of you who have followed me here may consider picking up the novel, with the assurance that you will find therein something of the same quality of writing you've enjoyed here.

The Sword of a "Great Officer"

The story is the stuff of old chivalric romances: in gratitude for helping him and his companions survive the winter, an officer of the Franklin expedition presented an Inuk hunter with his most valuable possession: his sword. And then, years later, this same hunter, now grown elderly, presented this same sword to a trader at a Hudson's Bay post, saying it had been given to him by a "great officer." And then the kicker: this sword is still in the archives of the Hudson's Bay company.

But who was this officer? Or was he an officer at all? The details are caught up in the web of interconnected, contradictory stories about "Aglooka." In the tale of the meeting at the 'crack in the ice,' there is a mention of exchanging a piece of seal meat for a "knife." Could this knife have been exaggerated in later re-tellings? In the tale of the "Aglooka" who was sheltered for a winter by Too-shoo-art-thariu, this man offered his rifle in thanks, but Too-shoo was reluctant to accept it, not sure how it worked, and so the man offered his "long knife" -- a word that Tookoolito, Hall's interpreter, believed meant "sword" -- along with "nearly everything he had." The first tale is associated with Washington Bay on King William Island, and must date to an earlier time; it's possible that the later tale may be a garbled or slightly fanciful version of the first.

As to the provenance of the sword in the HBC's collections, it was given by an elderly Inuit man to Robert MacFarlane, the chief factor of the Athabasca district in the 1880's. The date, some thirty-odd years after the Franklin expedition, is sufficient for the description of "elderly" to be given to a man in his prime in 1850. Their archival record reads as follows:

HBC 1226 A,B : MILITARY SWORD; 1830s 
This ornate sword is documented as having been retrieved by Chief Factor Roderick MacFarlane from an Inuit man who claimed that the sword had been presented to him in 1857 by an officer of the Franklin expedition. The letters"W IV" appearing on the blade and hilt refers to King WilliamIV, 1830-1837. "Moore, late, Bicknells & Moore, Old Bond Street,London," have been engraved on the brass ferrule and chape.

This last detail has given rise to speculation that the "great officer" might have been Fitzjames, who obtained his Mate's passing certificate (the prerequisite for the rank) in 1834, well within the reign of William IV. But the promotion itself would have to wait on additional service; he came close in 1837, and finally obtained the rank on 26 January 1838, more than six months after the death of William IV. The dates for most others of Sir John Franklin's officers, however, are even further off the mark (Crozier, 1826; Le Vesconte, 1841; Fairholme, 1842; Hodgson, 1842; Irving, 1843). Graham Gore was promoted in 1837, but was then in the Arctic serving with Back; King William died prior to his return. The only other candidate would be Edward Little, whose promotion in December of 1837 is just barely prior to Fitzjames's. It's possible, in these last three cases, to imagine that the officers' swords might have been purchased at a time when blades stamped "William IV" were in stock, and new ones with Queen Victoria's name were not yet available.

The date of "1857" is certainly remarkable as well -- could an officer have survived that long?

And yet what evidence do we have that the sword was presented to the Inuk by its original owner? None at all -- and indeed, given that so much of the officers' silver plate had been distributed to the men, the idea of a sword being passed to a subordinate -- possibly with the idea of bringing it home as a memorial -- has to be considered. The sense of mission in a man who was charged to return the sword to the family of its owner might account for its being retained so late in the time after the ships were abandoned -- and yet again, why would such a man suddenly give the sword away? Was it in the hope that the Inuk might return it himself someday? Lastly, we have to consider the possibility that the sword was never given at all, but simply taken from a dead body or a cache, traded from hand to hand, and eventually returned with the statement that it was from one of Franklin's officers.

As with so many other elements of the Franklin mystery, this sword -- which at first presents itself as a brilliantly specific piece of evidence -- turns out to be of uncertain provenance and significance, save in the way it has fired the imagination of those who seek answers to the many enigmas surrounding the expedition's disappearance.

Aglooka

Who was "Aglooka"? There's been a great deal of chat about this eternal question over on the Facebook page on the Franklin Expedition, with quite a few new voices. And so, although I'd caution that I don't think that we will ever have an absolute or complete answer, I thought I'd take the opportunity here to ask the question.

Aglooka -- aglukaq in Inuktitut -- means roughly "long strider," and from the point of view of the Inuit, it's a term that could be applied to almost any of the white explorers who sojourned among them. It's been associated, at various times and by various conjectures, with Sir John Ross, Frances Crozier, and Dr John Rae, and in Inuit oral histories, there are stories which -- depending in large part on when one decides the events recounted took place -- could apply to one or more of these main candidates. Some, like Charles Francis Hall, were convinced "Aglooka" was Crozier, and held fast to that belief even in the face of contradictory evidence. Some, like the eminent Franklin expert David C. Woodman, believe it more likely that "Aglooka" was not one of the senior commanders of the Franklin expedition, but rather a minor officer or even and ordinary seaman who took on a leadership role in a small group of survivors. So -- if everyone is ready -- let's review the evidence.

First there is the question of contact with the expedition while aboard their ships. Inuit testimony given to CF Hall tells us of an encounter with an expedition of two ships, one commanded by a bald man who wore spectacles (little pieces of ice) over his eyes, and who suffered some infirmity. He was called Toolooah, and his second-in-command was Aglooka. Some time after the Inuit had visited them, they told Hall that they heard that Toolooah had died, and that Alglooka had become the Esh-e-mut-ta (Hall's phonetic spelling for isumataq or leader). Such a scenario corresponds only with the Franklin expedition, as that of the Rosses -- the only other British voyage to the central coastal area in the period -- had only one ship (The Victory, unless its small coal-tender Kreuzenstern is counted), suffered no death of a commanding officer, and both Rosses were possessed of vast and healthy heads of hair.

Nevertheless, there's a problem when one connects this account to Franklin and Crozier and the Erebus and Terror: During the time they were off the NW coast of King William Island, they apparently had no contact with Inuit, since later Inuit did not, by their own account, know of ships abandoned in this area until they learned of them by way of McClintock in 1859. It's possible that the Inuit who did visit the ships did not, for some reason, communicate their visit to other Inuit bands -- there was some hostility, apparently, between the Netsilingmiut of the Boothia Peninsula who were McClintock's main informants, and the Utjulingmiut whose territory near Queen Maud Gulf put them closest to the final locations of Franklin's ships. Still, on the basis of this discrepancy, Woodman discounts the idea of any contact between Inuit and Franklin's men prior to the ships' abandonment.

We also have Inuit testimony as to witnessing the funeral of some important person near the ships. It's tempting to think this was Franklin's funeral, but when he died the ships were far offshore, separated from KWI by several miles of hummocky old ice. Woodman thinks it was, more likely, the funeral of a different, senior officer, and took place some time after at least one of the ships was re-piloted further south; this would explain the fact that the Inuit who saw it were still unaware of the Victory Point cache or any ships near there. He thinks it may well have been Crozier's funeral, a conjecture which, if true, eliminates him as a candidate for "Aglooka."

Curiously, after these accounts, our next tales of an encounter with a possible "Aglooka" seem to deal with the party of men who left the ship or ship and travelled south and then east along the coast of KWI. Somewhere along that trek, there was an encounter at the crack in the ice, where the white men traded a knife for some seal meat, and "cooked the meat with the aid of the blubber (a foolish waste of good, caloric blubber from the Inuit viewpoint). The Inuit named two of these men -- "Aglooka" was one, and the other "Doktook," the latter possibly an Inuit attempt at "Doctor." They described how Aglooka made notes in a little book, and tried to tell them what had happened to the ships by pantomime. This is perhaps a significant detail, as we know that Crozier, during his time with the Inuit of Igloolik on Parry's second expedition, was said to have learned the Inuit language better than any of the officers -- so why would he resort to pantomime? Then again, the officer did say that he was trying to get to "Iwillik" -- the area near Repulse Bay -- so maybe his vocab was just a little rusty.

We next hear of the finding of "Aglooka" at the Todd Islets, in the form of the body an officer with a gold chain around his neck. Yet the Inuit who made this identification seem to have used the name because they thought this man was Ross!

The last accounts of an "Aglooka" have to do with a man who was an excellent hunter -- so good that he shared food with the Inuit. The description matches Rae, and it's hard to rule him out as a source of some of these stories. Old Ook-bar-loo's cousin, Too-shoo-ar-thariu -- according to her at any rate -- had hosted a group of four men, including this "Aglooka." Aglooka was weak and ill, apparently because he refused to eat human flesh. The others were stronger. Too-shoo allowed them to stay in his igloo and hunt with him for a season, nursing Aglooka back to health. One of the men, not Aglooka, died early the next season, and the other three headed south, apparently planning to skirt the western coasts of Hudson's Bay and make it to Fort Churchill. They never made it; according to Hall's later informants near Marble Island, they may have been killed by sub-Arctic Indians along the way. Before they left Aglooka, who was described as a "great officer," gave Too-shoo his sword.

Hall was, of course, thrilled to think that this Aglooka was Crozier, and always referred to him as such in his diaries. He faced two disappointments: first, that Too-shoo-ar-thariu, when he finally met him in person, denied his aunt's account. Further queries seemed to indicate that Too-shoo was among the men who'd met at the crack in the ice, and that he and his fellow hunters had packed up and left, even as Aglooka ran from his tent begging them to stop. This shattered Hall's faith in the Inuit. Then, hearing the account of the possible murder of Crozier on his way south to Fort Churchill, Hall lost faith that there were any survivors of the Franklin expedition.

Aglooka, or "aglukark" as it is more often spelled, is still a common Inuit surname. The great Inuit singer Susan Aglukark was born in Fort Churchill, the place that Hall's "Aglooka" had sought to reach. And, more recently, when the Inuit of Gjoa Haven retained the services of a lawyer in their quest to protect the contents of the (later found to be empty) box under the cairn near their town, the lawyer they hired also had the last name Aglukark.

So who was this man -- who were these men? The world may never know...

BBC Story on Franklin

I wanted to put up a link to a news account of the Franklin story and modern interest in the same, written by Kate Dailey for the BBC's News Magazine. Ms. Dailey interviewed a number of the regulars from this and other online Franklin sites, including myself , William Battersby, and Tedd Betts -- and I think that the resulting story is accurate, well-written, and informative. It includes not only an account of the Parks Canada search, but of the attempted search using thermal imaging by Ron Carlson. Have a look here to read the full account. Congrats especially to William Battersby, whose distinctive voice narrates the associated slideshow, with great élan.

Still Missing: Erebus and Terror

The news has begun to trickle out that this year, the final year of the three-year long Parks Canada search for the lost ships of Sir John Franklin, has ended without result. Apparently, the special remote-controlled underwater probe brought to the search was unable to be deployed, though the reasons for this have not been made public. Of course I am disappointed, though I am also grateful to Marc-Andre Bernier, Parks Canada's chief of underwater archeology, and all the rest of the team for their efforts.

It's all too easy to give armchair advice -- but I do hope there will be further searches. My own view is that, in addition to whatever government efforts may or may not be funded, the Canadian government, as well as the territorial government of Nunavut, could and should do more to promote searches. The permitting process, under CLEY, should be streamlined in every way possible. A number of promising avenues, such as that proposed by Ron Carlson and discussed on this blog, were turned down due to technicalities, most often the absence of a government-credentialled archaeologist. So why not make such archaeologists available? In Carlson's case, he brought -- and essentially donated to the effort -- his own plane and imaging equipment; why not, instead of simply crassly denying him a permit, the territorial government helped find and place a qualified archaeologist to work with him? The cost to the Nunavut and Canada would be minimal, many times less than that of any of the state-sponsored efforts of these last three years. Another bone I have to pick is that I cannot understand why, given his work over many years on the Franklin mystery, David C. Woodman, has not been invited to participate in any of these recent searches. I believe it's unfair, and wrongheaded, to exclude the one person who knows the Inuit testimony better than any man living.

Lastly, I would observe this: in many human endeavors, it's been found that "crowd sourcing" -- the open and free participation of many in tackling a task -- is by far the most efficient way to solve many problems. If (say) the National Archives at Kew, the Maritime Museum at Greenwich, the Arctic Institute of North America, The Scott Polar Research Institute, Parks Canada, and the National Library of Canada got together, put all their resources on one wiki, including high-res imagery of every document and artifact, and a wiki-editable tag map of the search area, I'd wager that enormous progress could be made. Six very expensive days of federally-funded searching are all well and good, but in my experience, historical puzzles of this level of complexity require many voices -- experts and amateurs, Qalluunat and Inuit, historians and archivists, archaeologists and pilots -- the more voices the better.

(Image of the Muster book of HMS "Erebus" courtesy David Malcolm Shein, from the original at the National Archives, Kew)

Tragedy in Nunavut

I was greatly saddened today to learn of the crash of the First Air Boeing 737 near Resolute, Nunavut earlier today. The plane, one of six 737's in the First Air fleet, apparently encountered some sort of trouble on approach to the runaway at Resolute on a flight from Yellowknife; of 15 passengers and crew, 12 were killed; the other three are in hospital in Iqaluit as of the latest reports.

Nunavut is a vast land. But its population is only around 30,000, making it in many ways more like a town when it comes to who knows who. When I heard the news of the crash, I had that sickening feeling that someone I knew, or was connected with someone I knew, was probably aboard. And this turned out to be true; among the passengers were two granddaughters of Aziz "Ozzy" Kheraj, proprietor of the South Camp Inn in Resolute; one of them is among the survivors. Also on board, and apparently among the dead, was Randy Reid, the longtime cook at the South Camp Inn, whose wonderful cuisine was a great feature of the place. I was a guest at the South Camp in 2004, and enjoyed both the excellent food and the delightful, irascible presence of Ozzy, a true northern character whose career has taken him from the tropics to the Arctic. Word on others aboard has not made it through to the news services, but I have a feeling and the fear that, when the list is released, there may be other familiar names. My thoughts and feelings go out to all those affected in this vast, outspread town known as Nunavut.