Contacts between American Whalemen and the Copper Eskimos

Abstract

It has often been maintained that the Copper Eskimos did not have contacts with white men between the early eighteen fifties and the first decade of the twentieth century. The earliest recent encounters are generally believed to have occurred in 1902, when David Hanbury conducted explorations on the mainland near Coronation Gulf, and in 1905-06 and 1907-08, when Christian Klengenberg and Captain William Mogg respectively wintered on the schooner Olga at Victoria Island. Stefansson described a whaler's harpoon found by the Eskimos in a dead whale that was stranded in Coronation Gulf, but he believed there had been no direct contacts on Victoria Island before Klengenberg's meeting. Evidence does exist, however, to indicate that American whalers encountered Copper Eskimos during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Captain Hartson Bodfish, who was master of several whaling and trading vessels in the western Canadian Arctic, reported having made contact with these Eskimos long before any explorers had reached the area. These encounters may have begun as early as 1891 because, in the spring of that year, Bodfish, after wintering at Herschel Island, wrote to his mother: "Just as soon as we can get out we are going, and are bound to that undiscovered country that lies to the eastward of us." In 1898, while wintering in Langton Bay near Cape Parry in the steam bark Beluga, he noted in the ship's log that one of his native hunters had left the ship in March to look for other Eskimos, and returned several weeks later with a group of them, and added: "They report seeing lots of seals and whales as they came along the coast in the neighborhood of Dolphin and Union Straits." Bodfish's ethnographic collection, in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, contains at least one Copper Eskimo artifact, an ulu. The ethnographic collection of Captain Horace P. Smith, at the Old Dartmouth Historical Society Whaling Museum, also suggests an early encounter because it contains a musk-ox horn ladle with a copper rivet in the handle; this piece is similar to other ladles collected from the Copper Eskimos, and Smith's only voyage in the Canadian Arctic took place between 1892 and 1894, when he twice wintered the steam bark Narwhal at Herschel Island. ...