Northwest passage 6, Pasley Bay, Thursday September 4, 2025

14:36

Riding in the zodiac

I don’t know that I have that much to say at this point in the day but I have a few minutes before we land so I figured if I wrote down something about the morning I’d have fewer things to remember. We got to sleep in again, YEA! We went down to breakfast just before the buffet closed which was fine since we didn’t want that much anyway. The first talk of the morning was on archeology in the north. I took notes in the little notebook that Craig gave me for my birthday. I wasn’t going to bring it with me because I have my other notebook that I always write in and I knew I’d have lots of space in that one. I’m glad I did because it fits in nicely in my thigh pocket of both pairs of pants and it lives there along with a pen. Lots of times I wouldn’t likely have a notebook with me and now I always have one. I’m not comfortable taking notes on my phone. The only down side is that we’ve been on the ship since Monday and I only have a few more pages left. What I’ll do if we come on future expeditions like this is to make sure I have replacements for the notebook part so I can just swap them out when one gets full.

The talks were really interesting and I may insert some of the information I gleaned from them here at a later point. Right now I don’t have time to do that before we go to shore. The second talk I accessed via the TV in our room. It dealt with Research in the Canadian Arctic and it was clear by the end of it that there is a delicate balance between the governmental institutions that provide funding for the science, the scientists who do the work and the Inuit communities on whose land, and in whose waters the research takes place. That led into the third talk about the Franklin Expedition. Turns out we sailed almost directly over the location where Franklin’s ships were stuck in the ice for two winters and where they ultimately abandoned the ships and set out across the ice.

The ships weren’t found near the place they had overwintered and the question came up of how the ships got from the overwintering spot to the places they were found. David Pelly provided two possible explanations: first that some of the crew returned to the ships and sailed southward when the ice eventually gave up its grip on them. There is no evidence of that in the oral history but John pointed out that in order for the Erebus  to end up where it is it had to go down a very narrow channel and do a fish hook manoeuvre. It is possible that winds and waves carried it down there but it would require all the elements to line up perfectly.

That brings up the second possibility: that the ships were abandoned and wind and waves carried them to their final resting places. John collected oral histories in the 70”s and 80’s and it is clear that the Inuit knew exactly where the ships were. They got wood from the ships and one man’s ancestor told him that there was a hole in one of the ships through which he crawled and he saw dead bodies. At the present time no bodies have been discovered aboard the wrecks, although they continue to be explored. In an agreement among Canada Britain and the Inuit, Britain received 60 of the first artifacts that were recovered by the divers. Canada and the Inuit get the rest unless there is gold or something of extreme value which goes to the UK. Apparently in maritime law, Britain continued to search for the ships and never officially abandoned them even though all the crew walked away from them. The Inuit could lay claim to the artifacts that are in British hands but that path would be costly for not much of a gain. They have chosen not to press their case in favour of shared control, with the Canadian government, of the site and joint claim whatever is brought up from the ships.

The Erebus lies in water about thirty feet deep and the effect of waves and storms has already caused the ship to degrade in the ten years since it was found. Because of this, Parks Canada is putting its resources into salvaging The Erebus before it collapses in upon itself making all items inside the ship unreachable. The Terror lies in deeper water so there isn’t the urgency to investigate that.

David also mentioned that there are hints that the Inuit of Goa Haven knew more about the Franklin expedition than they were willing to share. There may have been certain taboos that the descendants of those alive at the time were not willing to break. Louis K who collected filing cabinets full of oral histories in Inutituit got as much as he could from those he spoke to and certainly more information that would have been given to a white person. It’s one of those things that is tantalizingly close and which we will never be sure of since all of that generation of elders has since died.

22:40

Not sure how complete this will be. I’m tired tonight. We had a great landing. The clouds lifted and we were treated to a blue sky and sunshine.

Nice weather

It was quite chilly on shore. We didn’t have a temperature reading but I’m guessing it was a bit below freezing. There wasn’t much wind and it died down after we had been on shore for a while. Carolyn Mallory was standing at what she called ‘my little oasis.’ Although her thing is plants she knows a lot of stuff about critters too.

Orange lichen = bird poop

She pointed out that there was bright orange lichen on a couple of the bigger rocks near the outside of the circle of vegetation. Those are owl perches. This particular lichen feeds on bird poop so whenever she sees it she knows to look more closely. Within a circle of slightly less than two feet in diameter she pointed out four owl pellets, one of which contained the bones of a lemming; a lemming skull, musk ox poop, and ptarmigan poop. She picked up the lemming skull and allowed us to take photos of it. What small and delicate bones.

Lemming skull

A little farther up the benches there was a spotting scope set up, trained on a group of musk oxen. It was cool to see them, even though I couldn’t make them out with my naked eyes. On all these hikes I think of Niap and the day she told me that if I came across a feather it would mean good luck. There was a white feather lying on the beach just where we took off our life jackets so I took a picture of that.

Lucky feather

Then part way up, there was a small feather standing vertically between a couple of stones. The wind was ruffling it and I thought it was so cool I wanted to get a photo. I got down on my knees, tried various angles, took a few shots, and it was only when I got up that I noticed the feather was surrounded by goose poop. Great! Note to self: pay attention to everything in the frame, not just what interests you.

Feather blowing in the wind + goose poop

On the way back to the beach Aleqa was standing beside a bowhead bone. She said it was probably about 500 years old and showed us how the moss had grown over some of it. Her thinking was that the sea level had been higher and the spot where the bone rested was in fact, near the water line at one time. That makes sense considering where it was in the series of benches. People probably harvested the whale at this spot and had a camp nearby.

Aleqa Hammond, fromer prime minister of Greenland

As I got closer to the landing spot, I noticed a couple of pieces of jawbone. By looking at the teeth my guess is either musk ox or caribou. The teeth were flat for chewing on plants. I haven’t had a chance to ask anyone about it yet. [I didn't get around to checking with anyone.]

Pieces of jaw

Tomorrow we make our last landing on the mainland. From then on we will be on islands in the archipelago. Also tomorrow we will go through Bellot Strait. That was where we got stuck and had to turn back on the previous trip. They suggested at the briefing that we go out on deck for the transit of the strait. Apparently we have to time our entry into it just right because the tides there are pretty strong and If we miss the window we’ll either be going through it like a rocket ship or we’ll be sitting there for hours and hours hardly moving. It’s a pretty good place to see wildlife, including polar bears.

If there are no bears, we’ll do a hike and if there are bears we may pull out all the stops and get everyone into zodiacs to take a look. There’s also some talk about going back into the strait to see if we can find some rocks to match those that came from a drawer in the HMS Erebus. If we manage to get a match, Marc the geologist will take samples and bring them aboard for further analysis. If they are, in fact, a match, it will provide more information about where the men of the Erebus were.

It looks like another full day and I think it’s time to call it quits on this one and get some sleep.