Arctic cruising: Surprise highlight of Canada's Northwest Passage

On an epic voyage through the Northwest Passage, this traveller encountered a surprise twist.

I last saw Beechey Island in 2018. A nondescript, low-lying and windy place high in the Canadian Arctic, it’s famous for the line of four graves that punctuates an otherwise featureless coastal plain. Three of the graves belong to crew members of the lost Franklin Expedition of 1845. The other, to one of the many souls sent in vain to find them in the decade that followed.

What happened to Captain Sir John Franklin, his crew of 128 and his ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror on their quest to navigate the Northwest Passage – that dreamt-of route from Europe to the riches of the East – was the Arctic’s most enduring mystery. Finding them became a Royal Navy obsession.

Five years ago, sea ice prevented a landing here. Instead, marooned on our ship, John Geiger, CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, painted me a picture of the headstones I was squinting at through borrowed binoculars on our crowded bow.

“You know, Barry,” he said in a whisper, “no one had seen these bodies in 138 years until my colleague Owen Beattie (forensic anthropologist) came here in 1984 to exhume Torrington’s body. He said his eyes were a ghostly, milky blue, and he was still dressed in his grey cotton shirt. He almost looked conscious.” Owen said to his friend: “John... he stared right at me!”

John Torrington was a 20-year-old Royal Navy stoker. His shipmates, Royal Marine William Braine and seaman John Hartnell, were still by his side, as was Thomas Morgan, able-bodied seaman on HMS Investigator, buried here around eight years later, in 1854.

Grave markers on Beechey Island.

Now, at last, here I was, too, thanks to Hurtigruten’s latest most sophisticated polar expedition ship MS Fridtjof Nansen, which had sailed through some mercifully ice-free waters. I was standing by Torrington’s grave above the very bay where Sir John Franklin’s Erebus and Terror would have been anchored before vanishing into history.

Beechey Island is a holy grail destination for anyone with even a passing interest in the history of polar exploration, and is on the itinerary of every Northwest Passage journey. It was sites like this, along with the old Hudson’s Bay Company trading hut in Nunavut, the whaling station on Herschel Island, and others, that I imagined would be the defining moments of this epic 26-day voyage from Iceland to Alaska. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It was a twist I never saw coming. What left its mark had nothing to do with the faint echoes of 100 years of European encroachment. Not trading posts or lost ships or whaling stations or even coffins. I came here looking for relics. But it wasn’t the dead that touched me. It was the living.

Expedition at Beechey Island, Canada. Picture: Hurtigruten

The Arctic is never the same twice. Polar bears or walrus haulouts might be plentiful one year, hard to find the next. Musk oxen are often either too close for comfort or a smudge on a white horizon. Migratory routes vary and are seasonal. Sea ice comes and goes. But there is one thing that never comes and goes: the Inuit. The people who call this place home.

They live in welcoming, scattered communities, like Pond Inlet, Cambridge Bay, Resolute and Gjoa Haven – more than 50 outposts comprising over 70,000 people. The Canadian government began creating these towns in the 1950s. In just 30 years, the Inuit went from igloos to modernity.

The story I thought I’d write began to go out the window on day three when I wandered out to the ship’s bow to photograph a passing iceberg. That’s when I met David King.

Pond Inlet, Canada. Picture: HX

A professor in the Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies at Trent University in Ontario, David is not Inuit, he’s Canadian. But he is beloved by Canada’s Indigenous communities because he was the first to expose the shame of Canada’s residential school program – taking Indigenous children from their families, and from everything they knew, to be “educated and assimilated”. Canada’s Stolen Generation.

David King’s research took him into the dark recesses of the National Archives in Ottawa, unearthing documents that people knew were buried there, and were happy to keep that way. In time, he became such an annoyance that the Canadian government cut off his funding. “We do not support the work of David King”, they said.

He wasn’t intending to lecture on the subject, but so many guests approached him asking about what he’d found that, in consultation with Hurtigruten staff, he decided now was the time to speak openly about it. No more journals, no more academic papers. Face to face with a live audience. For the first time.

Meeting locals at Pond Inlet, Canada. Picture: HX

Peter Ittinuar was also here, grandson of the famed Danish explorer, Peter Freuchen, who amputated his own frostbitten toes. Canada’s first Inuit MP, Ittinuar voted against his own party over plans to split the Indigenous territories into two. Two heavyweight champions in the fight for dignity and justice. We were a fortunate bunch.

It’s important to credit Hurtigruten for this – they don’t just sail Inuit waters. For decades, they’ve forged relationships with local communities throughout the north in ways simply too numerous to mention.

Peter was often by David’s side. Two peas in a pod they were, huddled in conversation and always chatting with guests, who were eager to corner them at every turn. David’s lectures were so well attended, the ship’s expedition team was sent scrambling for extra chairs.

Gjoa Haven, Canada. Picture: HX

David told me he had to be careful not to share too much. His research was a journey into the hearts of families he’d come to know. Emotions were still raw. He wore dark glasses because of a stigmatism, but I knew they also helped in hiding his tears. We listened to his stories of the residential schools – the unmarked child graves, the abuse, the suicides, the lie the children were told that the diets their families fed them made them sick. Few of us came prepared to cover our own eyes. Guests openly wept.

Then came what was, for me, the most unexpected thing of all: the Inuit attitude to adoption. I’m adopted. I’ve known it all my life. We’re told we’re special because we were “chosen”. I loved my adoptive parents, was loved back unconditionally, and had a wonderful childhood.

In the West, adoption carries a stigma, but here it’s just another topic of conversation, like hunting or fishing, or how to carve pan handles from a Musk ox horn or build a snow shelter in a blizzard.

In the High Arctic, no one survives on their own. You join communities or you perish. If a couple are approaching old age and are childless, they might be given a child so they won’t grow old without someone to look after them. If a couple cannot conceive, or loses a child, they may be given a baby.

The Explorer Lounge on MS Fridtjof Nansen. Picture: HX

Inuit children are never unwanted, are never a burden, they are gifts. Adoption, rather than a way to help with unwanted pregnancies, becomes instead a loving, selfless act.

It’s rare that a landscape takes second place to the people who inhabit it. Inuit principles of qanuqtuurniq (be innovative and resourceful), pijitsirniq (provide for family), inuuqatigiitsiarniq (respect others) and avatittinnik (respect the environment) are all threads in a complex tapestry of social customs that touched us all in our own ways.

It was a journey into a region and into a people, communities bound together by whole-of-life philosophies that have seen them not just survive but thrive on these frozen tundras and, in the process, become one of the Arctic’s most enduring treasures.

The writer travelled to the Canadian High Arctic as a guest of Air Canada and HX (Hurtigruten Expeditions).

Originally published as Arctic cruising: Surprise highlight of Canada's Northwest Passage