Between Two Worlds (29 page)

This novel is loosely based on the life of an Inuit (Polar Eskimo) girl known to the explorer Robert E. Peary and his family as Eklayashoo (or Eqariusaq, as the Polar Eskimos might say it today).
¹
More frequently, the Pearys referred to her by the nicknames Miss Bill or Billy Bah. While I was writing my nonfiction book
The Snow Baby: The Arctic Childhood of Admiral Robert E. Peary’s Daring Daughter
, which includes an account of Marie Ahnighito Peary’s true-life adventures on the ice-locked
Windward
in 1900 and 1901, I often wondered how events would have appeared from the Inuit point of view. In this reimagining from Billy Bah’s perspective, I’ve taken the few facts that are known about the historical figure and woven them into a fictional story.

The real Billy Bah was revered by Robert E. Peary as his most accomplished and valued seamstress. She helped outfit his men on numerous expeditions in the late 1890s to 1909, the year Peary reached the Pole. During this famed expedition, Billy Bah sewed explorer Matthew Henson’s
kapatak
(or
kapetah
), the hooded fur garment he wore in the celebrated photo that appears in every one of his biographies.

In Josephine Peary’s writings, Billy Bah is first mentioned in relation to Marie Peary’s birth in September 1893 in the Arctic of Northwest Greenland. About eight or nine years old at the time, Billy Bah brought gifts to baby Marie and eventually taught her words of the Polar Eskimo language. Peary’s expedition members called the young girl Miss Bill. Baby Marie could not pronounce either “Eklayashoo” (Eqariusaq) or “Miss Bill.” The words “Billy Bah” came out, and the nickname stuck.
²
Meanwhile, according to the same account, the Greenland natives sometimes called Marie by her middle name, Ahnighito. Marie surmised from stories she remembered as a child that the woman who made her baby clothes was her namesake. However, such a person is not mentioned in the writings of either Josephine or Robert E. Peary. Nor is Ahnighito a name that is recognized by the Polar Eskimos of today.
³

In several published works, Josephine Peary describes the year from 1894 to 1895, when Billy Bah lived with her and toddler Marie in Washington, DC. Why this nine- or ten-year-old girl became the first of her people to leave the Arctic is unclear. Perhaps Mrs. Peary, who returned to America without her husband, brought the Inuit girl along as a helper or nursemaid. It is not known if the Peary family offered Billy Bah’s parents material rewards for her. In any case, it seems that Billy Bah’s parents trusted Josephine Peary and encouraged their daughter to make the journey.

Mrs. Peary and her mother and sister, with whom she lived, treated Billy Bah kindly, especially considering the standards of the day, when children often labored on farms or in factories. At the same time, the year represented a dramatic, perhaps harrowing, adjustment for the bewildered Inuit girl. After the stark wilderness of the Arctic, urban Washington, DC, with its sweltering heat, wagons, deafening trains, tall green trees, and enormous buildings came as a shock. Josephine Peary dressed Billy Bah in clothing the girl was completely unaccustomed to: a woolen dress, a pinafore, and shoes and stockings. Everything about the girl’s life changed, as Mrs. Peary describes in her children’s book
The Snow Baby
:

The “Noah’s Ark” where Billy Bah collected her treasures served as inspiration for the wooden chest in my novel.

Billy Bah is briefly mentioned in the Peary family writings when Marie visits the Arctic in the summer of 1897. This was the trip in which Robert E. Peary took a giant thirty-four-ton meteorite from the Cape York area of North Greenland. By then Billy Bah, around age fourteen, was married to a man named Ahngoodloo (perhaps the
Pearys’ version for the Inuit name Angulluk). Many years later, Marie recalled the time in her memoir:

That summer when Robert, Josephine, and Marie Peary returned to America on the ship the
Hope
, with the meteorite, the ship also brought a group of five Inuit from Itta. The group included Billy Bah’s parents, Nuktaq and Atangana, who worked for Peary on several of his expeditions. An adopted daughter, Aviaq, a girl of about twelve, accompanied them. Another of Peary’s hunters, Qisuk, came on board, along with Qisuk’s son, Minik, who was about seven years old. Uisaakassak, a native man from southern Greenland, joined the party en route. Anthropologist Franz Boas, of the American Museum of Natural History, had asked Peary to bring back one Inuk for him to study. More than one native volunteered to come aboard the ship. Or, as some accounts suggest, Peary coerced them.

Perhaps Billy Bah’s stories of the white man’s land enticed her parents to make a trip of their own? Sadly, their experience ended in tragedy. The winter and spring after the Inuit group arrived in New York, all but two died of influenza, pneumonia, and perhaps other illnesses to which they had little resistance. Many historians have written about this unfortunate event, and the orphaned Inuit boy Minik, who saw his people, their skeletons layered in wax, on display at the American Museum of Natural History. Peary, who was living in Washington, DC, during the time the Inuit group died in New York, had nothing to do with this gruesome exhibit. But he neither visited nor offered to help the native people once he’d left them at the museum. Perhaps he feared that further involvement in their affairs would damage his reputation in
the press—which might prevent him from raising funds for his expensive polar expeditions.

Not surprisingly, only brief mentions of this incident exist in any of the writings of Robert E. Peary. Neither Josephine nor Marie wrote of it at all—the family clearly wished to put this ugly incident behind them. It’s possible that Minik, who returned to the Arctic for several years beginning in 1910, could have told Billy Bah about the events at the museum. But by this time, Minik no longer had a firm grasp of his native language. Whatever Billy Bah was told of the museum or of her parents’ deaths, and how she felt about the situation, is left to the imagination.

What is known is that Robert E. Peary never again took another native person away from Greenland. And despite the tragedy, Billy Bah’s relationship with the Peary family continued.

Three years after the Greenland trip involving the meteorite, seven-year-old Marie and Billy Bah, who was about sixteen, happily reunited. This is the period in which the novel is set, from 1900 to 1901, when Marie and Mrs. Peary came to the Arctic for what they anticipated would be a summer voyage on the
Windward
. The official purpose of the trip was to drop off supplies for Peary. Josephine Peary, who heard of her husband’s injured feet due to frostbite, probably came along to persuade her husband to return to America.

The novel takes place during a low point in Peary’s career, between two failed attempts to reach the North Pole. During this time, Josephine and Robert E. Peary’s marriage, which was long, for the most part happy, and extraordinarily enduring, also hit rock bottom. On board the ice-locked ship, Josephine experienced the shock of meeting up with Peary’s Inuit lover, Allakasingwah (Aleqasina), called Ally, and her baby, Anaukaq, called Sammy. Though it’s a true-life incident, I filled in known facts with fictional dialogue. Again, and not surprisingly, the Peary family makes little mention of these personal and painful events, even in their private journals and letters. And in her childhood diaries, Marie fondly talks about playing with Sammy when Ally came to the
Windward
to sew Marie’s hooded fur coat, but she probably did not know at the time that Sammy was her half brother.
⁶

Though a number of the Inuit characters in the book are historically based, others are fictionalized; the historical record includes very few Inuit names in this place and time, so I created a few characters to round out village life. In real life, the names of Billy Bah’s brother and sister were not recorded. Nuljalik’s children are fictional. Marie’s friend Akitsinnguaq (Tooth Girl) is based on a real person, though Magtaaq, Mikihoq, and Navarana are made up. The real Navarana, wife of Peter Freuchen, lived in Northwest Greenland several decades later.

Akitsinnguaq, in real life, was probably one of the Itta group who traveled to Ellesmere Island with the Peary
family on the
Windward
, and the “village” described at Payer Harbor would have been more of a camp that was occasionally occupied by native hunters from the Greenland shore. American explorer Adolphus Greely was the first to establish a base on Ellesmere Island, in 1881; Robert E. Peary was only the second to chart the region, beginning in 1898. Whalers from Canada, and perhaps from the Scandinavian countries, ventured as far north as Smith Sound in the 1800s and 1900s, but not frequently. The area was (and is) often ice-locked, and the larger whale species prefer warmer waters.

In creating Billy Bah’s spiritual life, including the naming of her parents, I’ve drawn upon many general sources about Inuit peoples in Greenland and Canada. Beliefs among Inuit people vary greatly over time and according to region. Marriage customs, including divorce and wife trading, also vary. Little can be known specifically about Billy Bah’s people’s customs and beliefs. In his writings, Robert E. Peary’s cultural references are sketchy. Though he dabbled in anthropology (including the measuring and photographing of naked people), his main focus was geographical exploration.

Also, it should be noted how very difficult it is for an English speaker to learn Inuktun, which, like Chinese, contains many guttural sounds unknown in our own language. The fact that Peary never mastered Inuktun isn’t surprising. And because the vast majority of people in Greenland, then as now, live along the ice-free west
coast, far south of Itta and where Kalaallisut (Western Greenlandic), a different dialect of Greenlandic, is spoken, Peary could not have brought a translator with him on his voyages. He was virtually the first and only explorer of his time to live among this community, which was isolated both by geography and by language. It follows that his cultural understanding of the Polar Eskimos would be somewhat limited.

Perhaps the part of the novel where I’ve taken the most artistic license is with regard to Duncan. There was a crewmember on the
Windward
named Duncan, but he probably had nothing to do with Billy Bah. Likewise, though Peary’s crews sometimes included artists and taxidermists, Officer Sutter is fictitious.

In real life, it is known only that Billy Bah married and divorced a number of times. Explorer Matthew Henson, in writing of the famous Peary expedition of 1909, makes a very brief but intriguing mention of Billy Bah as he describes life on the
Roosevelt
: