Pond Inlet

         Pond Inlet

                        "Men of the High North you who have known it, 
                        You in whose hearts it's splendors have abobe,
                        Can you renounce it, can you disown it?
                        Can you forget it, it's glory and it's goad?
                        Where is the hardship, where is the pain of it?
                        Lost in the limbo of things you've forgot,
                        Only remain the guerdon and pain of it,
                        Zest of the foray and God, how you fought!"

                                                                      R. W. Service.

It is Canada's birthday, 1967; celebrating 100 years of confederation. We had transferred from Liscombe Light and Fog Alarm Station to a position as oiler on the heavy icebreaker John A. MaDonald, my wife and young family moving to Drum Head to take up residence in the Lloyd Flick house which we had purchased from Archie Manthorne.
Immediately upon moving in I drove to Halifax to join the ship and on Dominion Day we sailed, after bunkering at Irving Oil in Woodside. We proceeded to Montreal to load a conglomeration of cargo for the northern communities, about 6000 tons, as I recall.
Montreal; always a good port for shoregoing, was especially so that year with Expo 67 in town. We'd head over there evevy time we were off watch and took in the most of it during the five days it took to load the ship.When sailing time came we were all happy to leave Montreal and it's oppressive July heat. We made an overnight stop in Quebec City( where no one was allowed ashore) Quebec is the clothing depot for the Coastguards Eastern Region and we made the stop to pick up uniforms et cetra.
Pond Inlet was our third stop. The first two were Cape Dyer And Broughton Island, where we landed supplies for the innuit. This was in a time when the northern supply system wasn't as well established as it is today and government ships were hauling a lot of freight. Today the freighting is mainly in private hands, with the aboriginal people owning NTCL, headquartered in Hay River, they own a fleet of tugs and barges and do a lot of supply work in the central and western arctic, they also have some chartered vessels, while Groupe DesGagne of Quebec is one of the main suppliers to the eastern arctic.With the amount of goods and services to be moved in the short navigation season the supply operation entails a lot of high calibre logistics.
We reached Pond Inlet in mid-July and off-loaded the cargo consigned to the village, which was named for John Pond, royal astronomer, by John Ross, in 1888. The R.C.M.P. and the Hudsons Bay Company both set up posts at Pond in 1921. On the hillside that sits between the village and the airstrip, the Mounties have made and keep maintained a larger than life replica of the forces insignia, bison head and all, sided by on the left, Pond, and on the right of the insignia,Inlet. .All done with small white painted rocks. In the crystaline Arctic air it can be seen some distance off shore.
The ship was in over the week end, and both the catholic and protestant clergy sent out invitations to the evening services.We filled the tiny churches full to over flowing, having 96 crew, plus eight passengers on board.
I was one of the crowd who attended th Anglican church, and among our group was one Arthur Durnford (pronounced Dunford) from a small outport on the south coast of NL., name of Francois. (Pronounce that Fransways) Art was a real good singer, and an Anglican, so even though the service was in Inuktitut, Art sang right along in his south shore dialect, which, as we told him as indecipherable to us as was the Inuktitut version.
After church Don MacLeod of Yarmouth, my room mate, and I went up over the hill for a walk toward the airstrip. Anyone who has never experienced an Arctic summer cannot envision the proliferation of wildflowers that bloom in many areas of that harsh and unforgiving landscape. Tiny flowers of many colors, covering the morain so thickly that one can literally leave their tracks in them. Fleeting; in the short duration of their season, they are unimaginably frail. I tried to press some for Carolyn, but they disintegrated to dust, when I opened the book I had pressed them in.
The water front of Pond Inlet was then and probably still is unbelieveably squalid........carcasses of seals, whales, dogs and what-have- you lay, around the waters edge in abundance. I often recalled this scene in later years when I had the opportunity to visit many ports in Greenland, which are kept in pristine condition, and the innu of Greenland always appeared to me to be more upwardly mobile than do their Canadian counterparts across Davis Strait. Perhaps the Danes have been better mentors than the bureaucrats in our Dept. of Northern affairs.
North from Pond Inlet is Bylot Island which is flanked by Eclipse Sound and Navy Board Inlet. This island is a rookery for many species of birds and it's cliff's are home in summer to tens of thousands of mating pairs. Bylot Island played an important part in the hey day of Arctic whaling, the Northern Right whale being found off it s shore's in abundance in the 1800's as were many other species. Many are the song and story of the hardships endured by the whalemen of that era, when whale oil held such an important place in the world' s economy.  Seen in the above are left to right, the author, Boatswain Clayton Foote, Quartermaster Charlie Smith and O/S Milford Roy. This was taken on the landing barge on the beach at Pond Inlet. Note the emblem on the hillside described in the text.
Our Arctic is an awe inspiring place of beauty where I was fortunate to spend three summers, covering an area from Jones Sound to the Bering Strait and from Tanquary Fiord to Hudson Strait and most of the ports on the west coast of Green Land from Thule in the north to Juliannahab in the south. Three summers that will live in my memory forever.

Seanachie