Ebierbing (ca. 1837-ca. 1881)

Abstract

Ebierbing, called "Joe" by the many whaling men and explorers who knew him, was a small and diffident man, but in the course of a hard life he consistently displayed remarkable strength, courage, and fortitude, as well as unswerving loyalty to those non-Inuit "kabloonas" who came to depend upon him. Foremost among those who benefited from Ebierbing's loyalty was the American explorer Charles Francis Hall. Hall first met Ebierbing and his wife Tookoolito, known as "Hannah," at the mouth of Frobisher Bay in the autumn of 1860. Some years earlier, Ebierbing and Tookoolito had been taken to England by a whaling captain. There they had learned some English and had converted to Christianity; .... For Hall, a neophyte explorer on his first venture into the Arctic, they were God sent. In the two years that followed they introduced him to the ways of the Inuit and taught him how to survive in the far North. When they were not on the road with the remorselessly energetic Hall, they were able to find peace and quiet at the home of whaling captain Sidney Buddington and his wife at Groton, Connecticut. They came to consider Groton their home, in fact, and when they returned with Hall from his second expedition, Ebierbing bought a house and land there. Hall's second expedition, like his first, was a futile search for supposed survivors of the Franklin expedition almost twenty years after it had disappeared. In five arduous years of roaming in the areas of Roe's Welcome Sound, Repulse Bay, Igloolik, and King William Island, he accomplished little but his own survival, and in that accomplishment Ebierbing and Tookoolito again were his mainstay. ... The Polaris expedition was a disaster. Hall died early on, possibly murdered by its chief scientist, and with his death the morale of the expedition collapsed. In the spring of 1873 the ship's captain, Sidney Buddington, headed the Polaris southward. Caught in ice during a storm, he ordered abandonment of the ship. Nineteen members of the expedition, including Ebierbing, Tookoolito, and their adopted child, found themselves marooned on a floe when the partly unloaded ship suddenly drifted away. According to George Tyson, the ranking officer in the marooned party, in the incredible six-month drift on the ice that followed, everyone depended on Ebierbing. "We survive through God's mercy and Joe's ability as a hunter," he wrote in his journal. At the official investigation of the expedition held after both Tyson's party and the men aboard the Polaris had been rescued, Ebierbing and Tookoolito were questioned. And during his interrogation Joe revealed the depth of his feeling about Hall, saying at the end: "Captain Hall good man. Very sorry when he die. No get north after that. Don't know nothing more." But he did go north again - twice more in fact. While Tookoolito remained in Groton grieving the loss of their adopted child, Ebierbing sailed with Captain Allen Young on the Pandora in 1876, a British expedition in search of the northwest passage. ... Ebierbing returned from the Pandora expedition to discover that his beloved Tookoolito had died. He remained in Groton briefly, then set out north again, this time with Lt. Frederick Schwatka in his search for records of the Franklin expedition. ... When Schwatka returned to the United States, Ebierbing stayed in the North. ... He died somewhere in the Arctic soon after the conclusion of the Schwatka expedition. ...