The Long Exile (3 page)

After returning to Toronto to report his findings, Flaherty almost immediately found an excuse to go back up north. This time his aim was the Belcher Islands, an obscure cluster of rocks off the coast of Cape Dufferin, just south of the Nastapokas. The cape occupied an area the size of England and had a population of two hundred Inuit, some of whom hunted walrus out on the Belchers. On the Nastapoka trip he had been told of the existence of a large island in the Belcher group whose tall blue cliffs bled when scraped and this suggested to Flaherty the presence of high-grade iron ore there. The island did not appear on any of the maps and there was no mention of it in any navigation charts, but Flaherty had witnessed the precision with which the Barrenlanders memorised their landscape and were able to recall its contours. He decided not to believe the maps but to put his trust in the Inuit instead.

The following year, he set out in the sixty-three-foot sloop,
Nastapoka
, but was forced back to Kuujjuarapik by bad weather. Running low on supplies, he sailed south to Fort George to restock and when the sea froze over some months later he took off once again, this time by dog sled, intending to cross the Ungava Peninsula to Cape Dufferin, then complete the remainder of the journey to the Belchers on the sea ice. That far north, he figured, the ice would be stable. He was wrong. The ice proved so turbulent that year that Flaherty had to abandon his original plan. Instead, he decided to cross the Ungava Peninsula and try to reach Fort Chimo, or Kuujuak, on the eastern side. It was a crazy plan. Ungava was an unmapped, treeless tundra the size of Norway. No white man had yet crossed it from one side to the other, partly because travelling in the interior was exceedingly dangerous. Away from the coast, the only available food, aside from the odd Arctic hare, lemming or fox, was caribou and the caribou populations had been radically reduced since the introduction of rifles to the region. The adventurer Albert Peter Low had recently been forced to turn back from the Ungava interior to the coast on the point of starvation and Flaherty had none of Low's experience.

Undaunted, Flaherty hired three Inuit guides, “Little” Tommy, Tookalok and Wetallok, and the four men took off on three dog sleds. For several days they followed Wetallok until the guide finally admitted that he had no idea where they were but had been too proud to say. Poor weather set in and the men, weary and hollow with hunger, had no choice but to stop and dig in. Over the next few days, frostbite got to them, snow blindness followed close behind, but they could do nothing except sit inside their snowhouse waiting for the storms to clear, making mental lists of the dogs they would eat and in what order. Flaherty wrote in his diary that the temperature fell so low the dogs vomited from the cold. The four men survived, but did not reach the Belchers.

Flaherty set out again to go north the following year, 1913. In St. lohn's, Newfoundland, he bought a seventy-five-foot topsail sloop,
Laddie
, and had her rerigged and belted with greenheart to withstand
ice. He loaded up his rock hammers, his acids, litmus and sampling bottles and this time he took along a Bell and Howell movie camera, portable lights, film stock and a developer and printer. His photographs had generated some interest in the south and he wanted to capitalise on that. By now, Flaherty was a good deal less interested in iron ore than he was in the ordinary life of the Barrenlanders. Wherever he went, he sensed that Inuit culture had already been compromised by contact with whaling crews and white explorers and he was desperate to film a way of life whose existence was fragile. He begged to be taken along on
kayak
trips and to be taught how to flense seals and sew clothes from caribou skins. At every opportunity he got out his camera and filmed. On one of his filming expeditions to the interior of Baffin, Flaherty's
komatik
, dog sled, broke through some rotten ice and his film fell into the water and was ruined but with his characteristic aplomb Flaherty took this setback in his stride. When Christmas came that year, he threw a party and Inuit sledged in from camps two days away at Fair Ness and the Isle of God's Mercy and Markham Bay to see what the
qalu-naat
had to offer. Flaherty treated them all to “varicoloured paper hats” and to tinned sardines. He was delighted by his new friends and, by and large, they returned the compliment.

On 14 August the following year,
Laddie
sailed into Hudson Bay on a course for the Belchers. A week later the islands hoved into view, exactly as the Inuit had described them: a hand of long, icy fingers the chief of which bore blue spiny cliffs. The
Laddie
moved towards this largest island but as she did so, a terrific gust of wind roared out of nowhere, blew her on to a reef and tore a hole in her hull. The crew piled into the whaleboat and made for the shore. Flaherty decided there was nothing to be done but to get on with what he had come here to do. Once the prospecting was finished, they would have to rely on the little whaleboat to get them across the notorious waters of Hudson Bay back to the safety of Moose Factory. Over the weeks that followed, Flaherty collected samples, labelled and weighed, took pictures and sketched plans of the location
and distribution of the iron ore. Then he and his men clambered into the whaleboat, said a quick prayer, and turned south.

Late August/early September is storm season in the eastern Arctic and the little whaleboat was buffeted around like a twig in a stream. It took them ten days to travel the eight hundred miles south. Several times they considered themselves as near to dead as made no difference. Eventually, the outline of the Moose Factory post came into view and they raced towards it, feeling they were finally safe. When they got close they noticed that the post flag was at half-mast and assumed some dreadful calamity had befallen the post. They disembarked with caution and were greeted by Monsieur Duval, the post factor, dressed in linens and a straw hat, who explained that he had set the flag at half-mast because he missed his beloved Normandy and longed for a little Camembert and a glass of apple brandy and sensed that France and all her loveliness was for ever lost to him.

Before leaving on the Belcher expedition, Flaherty had used his time in the south to court Frances Hubbard, the daughter of eminent geologist Lucius L. Hubbard. Now he returned to her and, despite rumours that Flaherty's affections were not confined to Frances alone, the couple were married in New York City on 12 November 1914, with Frances buying the ring. A friend of theirs later noted that Robert “was like a light and [Frances] was like a sensitive photographic plate.” The couple passed their first winter together editing what remained of Flaherty's film of Inuit life and the following spring they showed a rough cut at the Convocation Hall in the University of Toronto, where the picture was met with a wall of polite incomprehension.

By the autumn of 1915, Robert and Frances were apart once more. Robert spent that Christmas back at the Belchers, feasting on pea soup and currant buns and whiling away the time it took for the sea ice to freeze solid teaching the Inuit how to sing “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” Between times he set his camera rolling. The following
September he headed south, with thirty thousand feet of exposed film.

The Flahertys worked through the early winter of 1916 and by Christmas they had a rough cut of the new film prepared and printed. This they sent off to Harvard in the hope that the university might screen it and Robert set himself to the business of refining the edit. As he was sitting over the negative one day, concentrating on the frames, a cigarette dropped from his fingers on to the film can, and the film flared, and burst into twists of flame before finally slumping to the floor in a heap of blackened celluloid. It was a bad film, Flaherty said later. He would just have to go back out to the Arctic and make a better one.

But not on Sir William Mackenzie's time. Flaherty's old benefactor had long since turned his real attentions away from Arctic ore to the war in Europe. There was no money to be had for Flaherty's adventures from that quarter and Flaherty had none himself. For a while, he ploughed his energies into the lecture circuit and making babies. Frances gave birth to three girls in close succession: Barbara, Frances and Monica. The new family moved to Houghton, Michigan, to stay with Frances' parents, then found a house of their own in New Canaan, Connecticut. But the empty spaces of the Arctic tapped on Flaherty's heart and he longed to return.

In the early spring of 1920, he saw his chance. At a particularly dreary cocktail party in New York he was introduced to Captain Thierry Mallet of the Rvillon Frres trading company. Flaherty was a warm, convivial man, and he was used to people gravitating towards him, rewarding them for their attention with his rough-tough tales of the kind of pioneer life which already seemed to belong to another, more fascinating, age. Thierry Mallet was no exception. Mallet knew the settings of Flaherty's tales. Rvillon Frres had recently opened posts in the Ungava Peninsula to capitalise on the Arctic fox populations there. The fur trade was picking up after a long wartime stagnation. As Mallet told Flaherty, a good
white Arctic fox pelt was now selling at the wholesale fur market in Montreal for C$25 and Mallet's company was feeling buoyant. Its great rivals still needled it, though. The Hudson Bay Company was celebrating its 350th anniversary that year and Rvillon Frres was hoping to outdo its rivals when it came to celebrating its own 200th anniversary in three years' time. Did Flaherty have any good ideas, Captain Mallet wondered.

As it happened, Flaherty did. His idea, he told Mallet, was to make an adventure film about an astonishing group of people living in a world of unimaginable harshness, a world in which Rvillon Frres also operated. It would be the first film of its kind, a genuine trailblazer and he, Flaherty, would be willing to sell Rvillon Frres the rights to it. Flaherty saw Mallet's eyes take on a new intensity. He was in.

A few weeks later, the venerable Rvillon Frres company signed a contract promising Flaherty C$11,000 in exchange for the rights to his as yet unmade Arctic adventure film and on 18 lune 1920 Flaherty found himself at the railhead in northern Ontario with some new camping equipment, a canoe, a Haulberg electric-light plant and projector and two movie cameras. lust about two months after that, on board the schooner
Annie
, Flaherty “let go anchor at the mouth of the Innuksuak River and the five gaunt and melancholy-looking buildings” of the post “stood out on a boulder-ridden slope less than half a mile away,” as he wrote in his diaries.

By the time he reached Inukjuak in 1920, Robert Flaherty had a good sense of what he needed to do and how to do it. Before he left New York he had paid a visit to the Craftsman Laboratories to get advice from Terry Ramsaye and Martin lohnson, who were trying to put together an adventure film from lohnson's various travels in the tropics. Film-making was new and, in spite of his experience filming on Baffin Island, Flaherty was unsure about the grammar of film sequences and shots. He had also updated his equipment. The Ake-leys he had bought to replace the earlier Bell and Howell used
graphite for lubrication rather than oil so they were less likely to freeze. They were also the first cameras to be fitted with gyroscopic tripod heads allowing the camera to be tilted and panned by a single movement without too much jerking. Eastman Kodak had provided an old English Williamson printing machine, which Flaherty screwed to the wall of his cabin beside his Frans Hals print. He had also brought developing fluid and a small battery of lightweight lights and a Graflex stills camera, and soon after his arrival in Inukjuak he fixed up a rudimentary darkroom with a drying annex, heated by a coal-burning stove, in which to dry the developed film.

So Flaherty finds himself in this tiny, remote settlement, with nothing but his equipment, a few pictures, his gramophone and a tremendous sense of his own destiny. He is keen to begin filming before the weather closes in and ice creeps across the sea so he takes Alakariallak, Maggie and Cunayou out along the coast and he films his first sequence, of hunter, wives, children and dogs all emerging, one by one, and as if by magic, from the one-man
kayak
seat. It's a bit of a joke, a moment of comedy in what will, he hopes, be a tense and dramatic tale of survival against the odds. He films Maggie pulling the baby from her
amiut
and setting him down among the husky pups. He watches her smile through the Akeley. He says, “Smile!”

A few days later, Flaherty sets up the projector in his cabin and invites his cast in for a viewing. He offers round hot tea and sea biscuits and quickly discovers that Maggie, Alakariallak and the rest have no idea what a film is or, for that matter, what the images represent. When he shows them stills of themselves, they hold them upside down and he has to take them to a mirror before they are able to understand what it is they are looking at. Finally, when everyone is crammed in and settled and seems to have at least some idea of why they are there, he runs the rushes, noting with satisfaction, later in his diary, the gasps and giggles of his cast as they recognise themselves in black and white and two dimensions.

Summer is short in the Arctic and this one is quickly done. By mid-September the summer birds are gone and the long winter is once more closing in like a fist around Inukjuak and the business of making a movie suddenly becomes a good deal more complicated. Inukjuak lies south of the Arctic Circle but by October the light is already limited to six hours a day and by November there is only sufficient daylight for three hours' filming. The water for washing the film begins to ice up and, as winter grips, Flaherty's helpers are forced to cut a hole through six feet of ice, pull water up in buckets, pour it into barrels and load it on to a fourteen-foot-long sled hauled by a ten-dog sled team to the little cabin. A constant wind sends smoking whorls of dry snow blasting into the camera lens, blizzards break open and in a matter of minutes the cast are unable to see as far as their own hands. As temperatures drop, film shatters inside the cameras from the cold and the men are forced to stash the retorts and sometimes even the cameras inside their parkas to keep them warm enough to work. The moment the cameras are brought into the relative warmth of the cabin, they frost up and have to be taken apart and dried piece by piece. One time the Graflex is so badly affected by condensation that Flaherty has to dismantle it completely only to discover that he cannot recall how to put it back again and one of his Inuk helpers has to sit down at his table and gradually, by candlelight, put it back together.