Scots of the Arctic

IT BEGAN, as all good things do, in the pages of The Scotsman. For decades a small advert would appear seeking young men with a spirit of adventure. The destination was the wilds of the Canadian Arctic and the employer was the Hudson’s Bay Company. For a generation of Scots, the small advert, with its poetic prose, became a passport to a life far beyond the family farm or upstairs close, one of brilliant white vistas, freezing cold nights and the warmth of an Inuit welcome.

The stories of the group of young men who set off to make their fortunes in a distant icy world is the subject of a new BBC documentary, The Hudson’s Bay Boys, to be broadcast next week, but yesterday the five men featured in the programme were at The Scotsman Hotel in Edinburgh, having decided to use the programme as justification for a return visit to their homeland and a fundraiser for a noble, if sad, cause, of which more later.

The lure of the Arctic tundra caught Jim Deyell young. He was just 17 and a strong, strapping lad with striking red hair when he left the Shetland Islands in the summer of 1965. His arrival at the Hudson’s Bay Company coincided with a seismic shift among the Inuit people, with many finally abandoning the nomadic existence practised for 1,000 years to form permanent settlements beside the Hudson Bay stores which traded food, coffee, bullets and equipment for seal skins. After two years learning the ropes, Deyell was posted to the remote island community of Sanikiluaq where he ran the general store and took on the de facto role of doctor and dentist. “When I first saw him, he was huge, with muscles and red hair,” said Dora Emikortailak Fraser, who worked as a cashier. “I thought he was a monster.”

With the assistance of a basic medical manual and the advice of doctors available via shortwave radio, he pulled teeth, gave rabies shots and delivered four babies. If the patient’s condition worsened he would call the air ambulance, but there were days when the weather meant it couldn’t land. The worst moment came when a girl came down with meningitis and he was unable to save her.

“It was totally out of control,” Deyell recalled. “No book told me anything about this. I was told later that the only thing I could do was drill a hole in her head and relieve the pressure from the meningitis membrane from the brain that was swollen but I had no means to drill a hole in anyone’s head and I didn’t think even then I would have attempted something like that. I didn’t know what to do, I had never seen a death like that, a person losing control of one bodily function after another and in fairly rapid succession. I could see people looking at me and thinking, ‘what are you going to do?’ But there was nothing I could do.”

Yet he loved the cold, harsh, hostile environment and the people who made him part of their community. As a Bay Boy, Deyell lived in a house, while the Inuit lived in tents, in what he described as “third world conditions”, but despite their meagre resources, they held out the hand of friendship. “At night I would sometimes sit at home and look out at the stars, play my accordion and think of Shetland.” At the time any stress, he felt, was absorbed by his young heart and mind – it was only after he left the community that it kicked in: “When I left I was smoking 60 cigarettes a day, so it was evidence that it was weighing on me, but it was only when I left that I felt the loss.”

While the others worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company for short periods, Deyell, now 63, is a Bay Boy lifer and after 14 years managing stores he moved into management, before retiring to Ottawa with his wife, Jeanette, a nurse who was also born in Scotland. “I found making the documentary very emotional,” he explained. “My eyes have been filled with tears on many occasions. I think you only appreciate what you love as you grow older.”

Brigitte Bardot is not popular with the Hudson’s Bay Boys. When the French actress visited Canada in 1977 and posed with a seal pup to highlight the cull, it triggered the beginning of the end for a way of life that stretched back centuries. By the early 1980s, when Donald Mearns was running the general store at Pangnirtung on Baffin Island, the campaign against seal fur resulted in a catastrophic collapse in the prices paid to hunters who used the funds to purchase ammunition, supplies and equipment. One of the last of the Scottish Bay Boys, he left Aberdeenshire in 1981, and at Pangnirtung he fell in love with a local girl, Meeka, and they now have three children and four grandchildren. “I can still remember getting a call from the head office. At the time we paid $80 for a harp seal fur and $20 for a ring seal. Overnight they dropped to $20 and $8 and we had guys who had worked all summer and hoped to buy supplies for the year.”

Within 12 months, Inuit hunters who had been self-sufficient were reduced to living on welfare. The title of a book on their plight said it all: Lords of the Arctic, Wards of the State. Unable to afford the ammunition to hunt, and with no demand for their kills, many Inuit men sought solace at the bottom of a bottle and rates of alcoholism among the communities spiked rapidly. “It was a tragedy,” explained Mearns, who is now Director of Education in Nunavut and a Justice of the Peace.

“This is my first time in Edinburgh since my job interview 35 years ago,” laughed John Graham, who left the family farm in Selkirk for the frozen shores of Forbisher Bay on Baffin Island in 1976, where he was trained to grade furs along with bookkeeping. The collapse in the seal trade was catastrophic to watch: “The Inuit lost their way. It was a tragedy from which many did not recover.”

After four years with the company, he went into airport management and as the managing director of Iqaluit Airport, helped develop the site into a popular testing ground for aircraft manufacturers anxious to pit their products against the chill of the Arctic. He has also worked closely with the local youth and became the first recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Forces for his services to the nation’s air cadets.

John Todd spent the shortest time as a Hudson’s Bay Boy, just eight months, but it was long enough for him to fall in love with the environment and way of life. Born in St Andrews, he said: “I didn’t see any future for myself. I wanted to be something different.” In 1966, at the age of 17, he signed up with HBC and arrived in Cambridge Bay, where the temperature was minus 40, in his good suit and polished dress shoes. “For me there were three things: the first was to be a minority in a majority, the second was the language – that was tough – and the third was the smell of Mistovale in a honey bucket [toilet]. That was bad and I can still smell it today.”

He quickly learned that he was not going to secure his fortune from behind a store counter and instead used the contacts he had developed to set up an array of successful businesses in joint ventures with the Inuit and, in the process, made himself a millionaire. When in 1999 the Nunavut – the parliament that allowed the Inuit to take control of their own affairs – was set up he became Finance Minister.

He insists that the future prosperity of the region is linked to mining. The biggest undeveloped gold mine was discovered a few miles from his home in the Rankin Inlet and it now provides jobs for local people who previously struggled to survive on state welfare. “I get so frustrated when some middle-class yobbo comes in from Ontario and pontificates about the terrible things about mining and then returns to his $500,000 home and his $120,000 lifestyle and drives a Range Rover,” he said.

“Well, the guys I grew up with are still trying to find a job for their kids and they can’t feed them. Poverty sucks. I really believe this. Northerners are not going to let that happen. I don’t want to sound like I’m all in favour of raping and pillaging the landscape, but there are enough checks and balances in the system now. Without this we are destined to be poverty stricken. We will be a Third World country.”

Last night, at The Scotsman hotel, the group held a fundraising ceilidh in aid of the family of Mearns’ brother-in-law, Noah Metuqu. For the documentary the producer, Gilly Mathieson – who has been nurturing the programme for almost a decade – united the five men on a seal hunting expedition led by Donald and Noah. Later, on 1 August, while on a family hunting trip, Noah fell overboard in strong winds and heavy seas. It was difficult to recover him and he died in hospital. “He was a tremendous guy,” said Mearns. “When you see him in the movie, he loved the land so much and he knew it so well, he was just so able out there. It has been a real hole in our lives.”

Although Mearns has enjoyed his visit back to the land of his birth, he is “anxious to get home”.

• The Hudson’s Bay Boys is on BBC 2 at 9pm on Wednesday, 30 November