Northwest passage 15, Tasiussaq: Saturday September 13, 2025

21:50 Tasiussaq

Peat riding in the bow of the zodiac

[I thought I would include a photo of Peat. He was one of the travelling companions of a British woman a couple of cabins down from us. From the variety of patches on both of her backpacks she was extremely well-travelled and so, I'm guessing, was Peat.  She was deaf and had a special device that presenters wore to help her understand them. She could read lips but I didn't get a chance to talk with her much. I did get the spelling of Peat's name. Later I asked her if Peat was having a good trip and  she assured me he was.]

It was another full day today and kind of a weird one schedule wise. There was a brunch and then we took off in the zodiacs at 10:00. We were first so we had to get ourselves organized right off the bat. The advantage was that we didn’t have to wait for zodiacs to return empty from the shore and it was about a 15 minute transfer.

My legs were tired after yesterday so I was taking it a bit more slowly. The terrain was rocky and hummocky and there were lots of opportunities to catch a toe, which I did a couple of times but didn’t fall.

Terrain at the landing site

One woman did fall on a particularly rocky patch and I think she hit her head. It seemed that, Donatella, the medic was holding compresses to her head. Richard found a way around the rock pile and Marc S. asked him to direct traffic uphill of the rock pile and and I stood a little way down hill and pointed people back onto the path. I don’t know how long we were there but it seemed like quite a while. Chris D the EL came running up and, eventually he and Donatella were able to help the patient up. They supported her on each side and she was able to walk out. That’s about the only way you get out of an area like this. Richard asked both Donatella and Chris how she was doing and Donatella said she was doing pretty well. That’s good to hear. It could have been any one of us.

Lots of walking in this stuff

The attraction of the site was the archeology. It was a Thule and a late Thule site. There were the remains of the Thule houses that used whale bones to support the structure of a skin roof. The whale bones weren’t there but some of the walls were still about a foot above the ground.

Apparently this is one of the best sites for showing the social changes between the late Thule people and the modern Inuit. The modern Inuit built the same kind of houses but they used drift wood instead of the whale bones and there were pieces of wood found at the site with nails in them. I don’t understand exactly how they decide when one people shift and become another people although I think one of the archeologists did explain it. There were several meat caches and there were also graves up on the hill. That part of the site was blocked off to us.

There was a spot where four tall rocks were set up and that was where they built their kayaks. Two of the rocks were set up about eight inches apart and then in a straight line from them was another set of rocks set up in a similar way. Wedging bow of what would become the kayaks frame between one set of rocks and wedging the stern between the other set of rocks gave the builders a way to hold the frame as they built it. They could also skin it, so the rocks served as a kind of workbench.

Kayak workbench*

Someone asked Aleqa about the Inuit beliefs around death. She said she is a Christian and that at first the Inuit had trouble accepting Christianity because Sedna, the goddess of the sea and the creator, lives in the sea where there is bounty. They couldn’t figure out how any god could live in the sky because there is nothing there. She said that after death souls go to an afterlife but there is nothing like the Christian heaven and hell. There are two levels in the afterlife. if you have been a good person you go to the first level. Inuit were buried with all of their tools because they would need them in the afterlife. At the first level there was no hardship. The animals came to the souls as they were needed and the souls killed them and always had enough to eat.

If you weren’t such a good person, your soul went to the second place where there was no suffering and the animals were plentiful and gave themselves over to the souls easily. The difference between the two places lay in the types of animals. In the first place there were only marine animals, whales, seals, walruses, and fish. Those provide everything nutritionally the Inuit need in order to flourish. In the second level all the animals were land based and those are not as desirable as the marine mammals. Aleqa also told us that the Inuit get their vitamin C from muk tuk, the skin of whales, which they eat raw. We had some in Cambridge Bay and they had seasoned it with mustard or soy sauce, I don’t remember which, so I didn’t mind the taste. As Aleqa says, it’s about the texture of a rubber tire. The pieces we got were really small which probably made it more palatable to the settler palate.

Remains of some of the dwellings

The site was gorgeous with the dwellings facing the fjord. There was a fresh water lake inland a bit from there the houses were.

Fresh water lake

That’s where they trained the boys to paddle kayaks before getting them out onto the ocean. Another thing that makes the site unique is that people lived there all year round. Normally they would move depending on the game and the seasons but this site is rich enough that it supported people all year. That’s one of the reasons it’s so important in tracing the transition from the Thule to the modern Inuit.

We walked around the site a bit and then headed back down. I was surprised at how quickly we got down. I guess we spent quite a bit of time directing traffic. I didn’t get many photos today.

I noticed ice on this puddle on the way back

Some days I feel like taking them and I see possibilities everywhere i look. Other days, like today, I don’t seem to have the patience for it.

I never tire of this scenery

When we got back to the ship afternoon tea was being served. Of course, people were hungry having worked up an appetite by being out on the land. Not that any of us would have starved if we hadn’t eaten again until supper time. The line for the food was about 30 people long for about 40 minutes. The other food-related occurrence of note is that there is no milk left onboard. There was a sign on the cappuccino machine saying “out of milk” but I assumed that meant they hadn’t gotten around to refilling it. When Vincent, our waiter, brought my tea at supper he said he’d be back with the milk and then came back to say that they were out.

I think what happened is that people figured out you could get steamed milk out of the cappuccino machine in the library so they were getting double steamed milk and then adding hot chocolate powder to it. I guess the ship hadn’t planned for that. I may have to adjust my tea choices for the next three and a half days as I like black tea with milk and green tea without. Oh well, I can do that.

There were a couple of other things of note today. We signed up for a trip next year on the bigger of the two ships. We weren’t going to and then we got talking about the trip I took last year and how much I enjoyed it. Richard thought he’d like to take it because it goes to some of the places we like best, and I certainly don’t mind doing it again. We were going to go on the smaller ship but then we got looking at it and there was no place in the cabins, even the most expensive ones where the two of us could work separately. Right now Richard has his headset on and is working at the small desk on his composition and I’m sitting on the couch with my feet on my backpack and a large book under my iPad and keyboard. Even when we travel in the van I’ll be in the front and Richard will be on the bed at the back while we work on our own stuff.

Another issue is that in a smaller ship you’ll feel the rolling of the waves more and Richard certainly doesn’t need that. So, after looking at the larger ship, and taking into account the smokin’ onboard discounts, the cost between the ships wasn’t going to be a make or break factor. The most basic cabins on the larger ship are better than most of the cabins on this ship, and they are going to run the trip the same way, same zodiac transfers, same casual attire, but with more creature comforts. We didn’t talk about booze packages or internet and we don’t really care about either of those things. What will be nice is that the bigger ship carries fewer passengers than this one does and we’re already used to the operations on this ship. The small ship takes about 70 people. That would mean faster transfer times but it won’t be substantially different for us from what we already know.

The last thing of interest was the auction. I donated a door harp. I’ve had it for a while and it didn’t make it into the birthday giveaway stuff. They asked me to come up and talk about it, which I did and I put the mic up to it so they could hear the sound it made. It went for $400. The proceeds of the auction all go to the Ayalik fund.

Eric Ayalik Pelly was the adopted son of Laurie and David Pelly. He grew up in Cambridge Bay and his parents gave him as many opportunities to broaden his horizons as they could. He was a good hockey player and had decided that he wanted to do something to help his community when he became an adult. Tragically, he died in his sleep at the age of nineteen. I think it was some kind of heart arythmia. He parents wanted to honour his memory and give other Inuit kids a chance like he had had so they started the foundation. This year they sent 50 kids for outdoor experiences in the south. There are some corporate partners but most of money comes from individual donors. They didn’t tell us how much was raised this year but they did say that we were close to breaking the ship’s record for most raised at an auction. I’m glad my little door harp could go towards helping kids.

It’s now 23:02 and it’s time to head to bed. Tomorrow we are going to a place with a Danish name that I can’t spell on this keyboard. I’ll try to get it as close as I can in English Bjornefaelden. The O has a stroke through it and the a and e are connected. We don’t know what we’ll be doing there yet but there’s a briefing at 8:30. Stay tuned.

Richard found a good rock to nap on

*The red flag in the lower right corner is one that the archeologists place to mark the boundary of where we can and can't go. After we're gone they have to go around and pick up all the flags so they leave the site as they found it and so they can use the flags the next time.