My Eskimo Friends (1924)

II CHARLTON ISLAND is the deep-sea anchorage of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur ship which annually comes out from England. Here, in summer, is the rendezvous for fur men from hundreds of miles around, who come with their half-breed servants and Indian crews in small “York” boats for their year’s mail and goods for their post trade. The place was thronged when we arrived, for the fur ship lately come had cleared again for England. A young Scotchman, just apprenticed to the trade, played his bagpipe to the delight and wonder of the visiting Indians, half-breed longshoremen, and a group of Eskimo migrants of years before from the far-off barrens of the Great Whale Coast, three dumpy little men, their solemn-faced wives, and bashful troop of miniature Jap children. There was also a grizzled white-haired old factor just returned from his first furlough in thirty years; the company’s Arctic pilot who had lately navigated a Danish brig through the icefields of Hudson Strait; and the master, mate, and crew of the above-mentioned brig, which, badly wracked by ice, now lay abandoned half-heeled on the beach hard by. Her master, pulling on his long pipe of porcelain, habitually paced the wharf in clattering sabots, deeply distressed over his good ship’s inglorious end. When I explained to the chief factor my plan of travelling northward, to my dismay he said that such a journey at this 7