78 The EconomistApril 14th 2018
T
HE spot Louie Kamookak most wanted
to see was one he had heard of when he
was seven or so. He and his family were liv-
ing out on the land then, in the northern-
most parts of Canada, in canvas tents,
hunting seals. One bedtime his great-
grandmother Hummahuk told him a story
of her own childhood. Her father had tak-
en her to the north ofKing William Island
to get driftwood, and there on a gravel
ridge they had also picked up brown
things, dark things: musket balls, spoons,
forks, a silver dinner knife. She also re-
membered a big chain, or a big rope, going
from the beach into the ocean. This image
intrigued young Louie even more, for at the
end of such a chain there surely had to be a
ship. It stayed in his head from then on.
On King William Island, just by the
North-WestPassage, stories abounded of
the qallunaator white men who had come
looking for the fabled north route to Asia
or, after failed expeditions, for each other.
Sir John Franklin had led three voyages; his
last, in 1845, ended in the slow loss to the ice
of both his ships, HMSErebusand HMSTer-
ror, and all their crews. Dozens of search
parties found no trace of them. Until 2006,
almost no people from the south thought
to ask the Inuit about their disappearance.
But Inuit elders, though they had no writ-
ten history, knew of many clues.Mr Kamookak spent his life gathering
these. His method was simple. He visited
local elders and listened while they spoke.
Compared with tales of Amundsen, who
had forced a ship through the North-West
Passage in 1906, the Franklin stories were
weaker, bits and pieces. A mast rising out
of the sea, then a whole ship seen against
the sunset. One ship sinking quickly, the
other staying afloat through two winters. A
party ofqallunaatdragging a large boat on
a sled. Desperate survivors blundering
into Inuit tents, their faces black and the
flesh gone from their gums. The arrival of
white men had brought two of the coldest
winters ever known, and cannibal spirits
still haunted parts of the coast.Words on the wind
One scene especially struck him. A hunt-
ing party had seen from a distance a cere-
mony involving white men and big bangs,
like gunshots. It seemed to be a burial, but
not in the Inuit way of leaving the body out
on the land, wrapped in caribou skins, as
his great-grandmother had been left. This
was the burial of some shaman who,
when the hunters ventured near, had
turned to a slab of stone. He felt it must
have been Franklin, who had died in June
1847: placed in a vault below a tall wooden
structure which other Inuit had wrestedfrom the ground for sleds, but which had
probably been a cross.
In the way of oral history there were no
names, no dates. His next job, therefore,
was to match the spoken fragments with
place-names—Mercy Bay, Starvation
Cove—and with texts. He had few of those,
but school had got him interested in read-
ing, and one of his grandfathers, a white
man who worked for the Hudson’s Bay
Company, had been a Franklin searcher
and written articles about him. He could
start there. After a lucky meeting with
Cameron Treleaven, an antiquarian book-
seller from Calgary, he was sent a whole li-
brary of explorers’ accounts. His ram-
shackle house outside Gjoa Haven, with
hot water drawn from a camping stove,
also had the best internet connection in
town. Here he read and read.
In the summers he also went out on his
snow machine orATVto look for traces left
behind. With his trapper’s knowledge, he
guided other searchers as he bounced over
the rocky tundra and along the shore. He
found a few tantalising things: a length of
ancient, foreign rope in a circle of stones,
and a shaman’s belt on which hung a rusty
pair of pocket scissors. Year by year he re-
lived the ordeal of the trudging, starving
sailors and the route they might have taken
southwards to grassier country, as well as a
sense of where the ships had gone down.
Instinct, as much as learning, led him to
guide the Canadian government searchers
to Erebusin 2014 and, two years later, to Ter-
ror. The official team had no idea for a
while which the first ship was. With a huge
grin, he knew at once: Erebus.
By this time he was himself an elder,
passing on stories to the young in his deep,
emphatic way, always word for word the
same. Few things delighted him more than
taking students out on the land in the sum-
mer, squeezing his bulky frame into a tent,
eating dried fish and fried bannock (with
Cheez Whiz as a favourite extra), recount-
ing the lore of the past. Some mysteries had
been solved but others remained, none
more powerful than that burial of the sha-
man. If it was indeed Franklin it might
bring fame to Gjoa Haven, and jobs for the
young. It would also allow Franklin’s body
to be returned to England, honouring him
as an ancestor should be. He always imag-
ined that he had been a good man.
For all his searching, he had never
found the spot. But possibly his great-
grandmother had. On that same journey
when she had found the silver dinner
knife, she had seen a mound that was the
length of a human, and a stone with
strange markings. The others would not go
near it, or talk of it. Only her fading memo-
ry remained, in words that were blown
away across the tundra. For him they were
as tangible and forceful as any printed
page, in anybound book. 7To Franklin’s grave
Louie Kamookak, Inuit oral historian and tracer of Sir John Franklin’s lost ships,
died on March 22nd, aged 58ObituaryLouie Kamookak