Back home in Edinburgh, after finishing my
Caird Short-term Research Fellowship at the
National Maritime Museum, I thought that I would say some more about Qalasirssuaq, the male Inuit from Cape York, Greenland, whose intriguing portrait -
Qalasirssuaq (Erasmus Augustine Kallihirua), 1851 - I told you about in my first
blog entry in
August.
Connected to this
portrait is another painting from the NMM's collections: Thomas Sewell Robins's
HMS 'Assistance' in the Ice (1853), which shows men at work on the ice in front of a ship.
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HMS 'Assistance' in the Ice by Thomas Sewell Robins, 1853.
The inscription on the painting's gilded frame reads: 'H.M.S Assistance. 1850. Brought Kallihura to England'. This inscription refers to Qalasirssuaq, whose first experience of British society was on board the HMS
Assistance - commanded by Erasmus Ommanney - in search of John Franklin's lost expedition. In the summer of 1850 HMS
Assistance anchored at Cape York, where Qalasirssuaq joined the expedition as guide, but how did Qalasirssuaq experience the micro-, all-male version of British society on board Ommanney's ship?
The
Caird Library holds a copy of P. O'Brien's
Arctic Miscellanies (London: Colburn & Co., 1852, 2nd ed.), which is a collection of articles from the
Aurora Borealis, a newspaper written by the men on the expedition. This newspaper features a letter to the editor from Qalasirssuaq. Although the truthfulness of this correspondence needs further investigation - at the very least Qalasirssuaq must have had an interpreter as ghost-writer - the letter might still offer some insights into the young Greenland Inuit's thoughts. Qalasirssuaq questioned the nature and purpose of Britain's exploration of the Arctic - just as I do in my research today. In some respects, Qalasirssuaq seemed to be asking: if England is so great, why did you leave?
'You speak of a country, which you always call "our beautiful England;" you say it abounds in pussis [seals], narwhals, and tuktuk [deer] and in everything a man wants; notwithstanding its beauty and abundance, you leave that country for these bleak, and, as you are pleased to term them, desolate regions [...] you have come to save a great chief [Franklin], who, with his companions, has been wandering about these terrific seas for the last six winters [...] what could have induced them to come to our land of snows and everlasting ice?' (O'Brien 1852: 90)
I would like to thank all the wonderful people at the National Maritime Museum for their assistance and for the great time that I had in Greenwich during my
Caird Short-term Research Fellowship.