It is quite the experience, reading about the doughty souls whose intrepid forays into hostile, albeit beautiful and unknown lands caused them huge deprivations through the physical and mental exertions required to mount their expeditions into the Arctic and in the search for the Northwest Passage, in the late 18th, and throughout the 19th Centuries.  Their bold and costly exploits paved the way for a greater understanding of and appreciation for the lofty and inspiring nature of a frozen climate that was once a thriving greenspace on Earth.

They are remembered through readings of the exacting notebooks they left behind recounting their trials and tribulations and their occasional triumphs.  But these explorers from Britain, Norway, Russia, Denmark and America would never have been able to achieve those occasional triumphs without the aid and assistance of those people who had preceded them by thousands of years, and who had, through ancient migration, settled in that vast, white land of the midnight sun and unending dark days.

"But the Arctic chart memorializes more than men of rank, power, blood or property.  The real immortals, whose names are sprinkled throughout the Arctic on bays and bights, capes and channels, are those who dared and sometimes died so that the map might take form." *

The names of Franklin, Back, King, Dease, Simpson and Rae; Belcher, Penny, Osborn and Kellett; McClure McClintock, Collinson and Amundsen; Kane, Hall, Greely and Peary; Sverdrup, Nansen, Nares and Bellot, Hepburn and Ross and Parry, among others illuminate and distinguish the map of the Arctic. 

"What of Akaitchoo, the chief of the Copper Indians without whose presence all would have perished?  One searches the map in vain to find his name.  And where are the Eskimos, without whom no white explorer, from Parry to Peary could have conquered the frozen world?  Where is the name of Tookolito?  Or Ebierbing?  Their names are not write large on the chart of the Arctic; you will not find them in an ordinary atlas. Hall's name is there in bold type - but could he have found the Frobisher relics without them?  And where is Kalutunah, Hayes's companion, or Hans Hendrik?  No type at all for them.

"To the Innuee, the kabloonas were no longer superhuman beings who came from the sun or the moon but men like themselves with human weaknesses and failings.  To the kabloonas, the Innuee were no longer disgusting savages, indolent and ignorant, desperately in need of a Christian civilized upbringing.  But the gap still needed to be closed, as the map shows, for the haunts of the original people continued to bear the names of the strangers - and still do today." *

  
"This didn't bother the originals.  These squat little men who fed John Ross's company in the gulf of Boothia, who cheerfully extended their hospitality to Parry and Lyon at Repulse Bay and Igloolik, who taught Rae, Hall and Peary how to exist under polar conditions, gave no thought to such white concepts as fame, ambition, or immortality.  ... Nor would it concern them for an instant that their names should be left off the maps of the Arctic; after all, they had their own names for the snowy peaks and the frozen inlets that formed their world.  It is not their loss that the map ignores them; it is our own." *


*The Arctic Grail - The quest for the NorthWest Passage and the North Pole. 1818 - 1909; Pierre Berton