Gísli Pálsson,
"Hot Bodies in Cold Zones: Arctic Exploration"
(page 2 of 7)
Herschel Island
The early zoning of the earth into regions or culture-areas
underlined Western ideas about borders, cultural differences, and the
exotic. The "Arctic", however, neither had clear boundaries nor a firm
definition. For some, it represented anything beyond latitude 66°33'
north, for others it began with the tree line, and for still others it
was identified by average temperature. For most Western whalers, early
explorers, and anthropologists, the Arctic was a radical other. This was
underlined by frequent references in Western discourse on the Arctic to
"going in" and "coming out", indicating that civilization ended where
the Arctic began. Despite their othering of the people of the Arctic,
European travelers often formed intimate relations with their indigenous
collaborators, relations without which they would not have survived. The
loosely defined Arctic Circle continues to be deeply enmeshed in the
geopolitics of northern states and international bodies focusing on
development, resources, and climate.
One of the key sites in the exploration and colonization of the
Canadian Arctic was Herschel Island, located a few miles from the arctic
coast close to the Mackenzie Delta (see Map 1). The number of guests who
wintered there, mostly in relation to whaling, peaked soon after 1890,
with approximately 1500 people. The Inuit living on or near the island
provided European whalers with food and clothing in return for southern
goods, including tea and sugar. Many accounts of local life dwell on
stories of drinking and fighting. The main reasons for the expansion of
the settlement at Herschel Island had to do with changes in fashion and
morals in Europe. Among women of the aristocratic classes, wide and
flexible dresses had increasingly been replaced by more firm and
restricting clothes. Sometimes they were carefully tightened around the
waist to underline the Victorian forces applied to women's minds and
bodies. Corsets, especially when strengthened by whalebone, baleen, were
seen to be useful for this purpose. The French elite spoke of "Corps
Baleine". The growing market for corsets invigorated the whaling
industry at Herschel Island. The price of whalebone increased and the
operation of whaling boats became a lucrative business, even under the
difficult conditions of the Arctic. Ironically, Victorian ideas about
the clothing and constitution of women's bodies were the driving force
behind the development of the whaling community on Herschel Island, a
community that apparently posed a fundamental contradiction to the
virtues that the corset symbolized in Europe.
Map 1 Stefansson's field. (Drawn by Lovísa
Ásbjörnsdóttir).
Over the years the whalers on Herschel Island—a mixed group of
Whites, Afro-Americans, Siberians, Inupiat, and Cape Verdeans
("Portuguees")—established a colorful, multicultural colony on
Herschel Island. Hundreds of whalers arrived from the south, with their
goods, languages, desires, beliefs, and diseases (notably measles,
tuberculosis, and syphilis). There was racial tension between
southerners as well as between guests and natives. In 1884, a few wives
of whaling masters wintered on Herschel Island, along with their
children. While this had a noticeable impact on social life, normally
the whalers arrived without their families. Inuit males often worked as
hunters or mates and Inuit women as seamstresses, either "on deck" or
"below deck", as "seasonal wives". Suddenly, when the whaling stocks had
nearly collapsed and hunting was no longer economical, they were all
gone. In the process, however, Canada had expanded its empire. And for
the Inuit life would never be the same. For almost twenty years, roughly
from 1890 to 1908, Herschel Island was a frontier boom-town, known as
"The Sodom of the Arctic". Many of the European explorers and travelers
who passed through here and elsewhere in the Arctic had native wives or
concubines, including Peter Freuchen, Knud Rasmussen, and Vilhjalmur
Stefansson.
One of the characteristics of the colonial era in the early stages
was the relative absence of women in the colonies. This invited complex
problems both at home and abroad. What rules should be applied to the
intimate and the "private"? Often, the dark sides of colonialism—the
tension between races, the problems of orphanage, and illegitimacy—were
barely noticed. The mixed-blood children of colonial servants and
native women posed a particular classification problem, a problem that
usually was simply ignored. Stoler describes the silencing of emotions
and passions and their consequences as "stubborn colonial aphasia"
(2002: 14). Nevertheless, these were important issues in the biographies
and histories of the colonial world. In some of the colonies, including
the Dutch ones, European children were strictly forbidden to play with
the children of servants of another race. Their moral strength, it was
assumed, would be eroded if they began to babble in the native language.
In the long run, this would lead to racial mixture that, in turn, would
lead to the degeneration of the white race. Stoler's work seeks to
outline the "microphysics of colonial rule" (p. 7) through a colonial
reading of Foucault, exploring "what cultural distinctions went into the
making of class in the colonies, what class distinctions went into the
making of race, and how the management of sex shaped the making of both"
(p. 16).
Much of what Stoler has to say about empires, gender, race, and
intimacy applies to the society of Herschel Island at the beginning of
the last century. In particular, European women were rarely part of the
teams of whalers and explorers. The likelihood of women visiting the
Arctic in the early stage of colonizing was minimal, much less than in
the case of the Tropics. The fiancées, wives, and children of European
travelers invariably stayed behind, usually on the grounds that the
environment and the tasks ahead were too tough for them. Native
seamstresses on the other hand had an important role to play in
exploration parties. Beside sewing warm clothes, preparing food, and
taking care of camps, they provided company and sexual pleasures. Often
guests and natives formed intimate relations and occasionally the guests
married and decided to stay for good.
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