Sometimes the Arctic simply refuses to reveal itself. We arrived at Dundas Harbour on the southern coast of Devon Island to almost perfectly calm conditions. There was hardly a breath of wind and the sea was wonderfully still. Under different circumstances it would have been ideal weather for getting ashore, launching the Zodiacs and exploring one of the most fascinating historic sites in the Canadian High Arctic.
When Arctic Fog Changes Everything
There was, however, one rather significant problem. Fog.
Thick Arctic fog had wrapped itself around Dundas Harbour, reducing visibility to almost nothing. Somewhere beyond it were mountains, tundra, the remains of an old Royal Canadian Mounted Police post, Inuit archaeological sites and a coastline where polar bears regularly wander. We knew they were there. We simply couldn’t see them. And in polar bear country, if you can’t see, you can’t land.
Before any landing in the Canadian Arctic, the shoreline and surrounding ground need to be carefully checked for bears. In clear conditions that means scanning beaches, slopes, rocky outcrops and buildings before anyone goes ashore. In thick fog there is simply no way of knowing whether a polar bear is fifty metres away on the beach.
So our landing was cancelled. Unfortunately the visibility was sufficiently poor that even a Zodiac cruise wasn’t practical. Instead, Dundas Harbour became one of those peculiarly Arctic experiences where you know you are surrounded by an extraordinary landscape while seeing remarkably little of it.
Every so often the fog shifted tantalisingly. For a few minutes a section of coastline appeared and, through the mist, we caught sight of the old RCMP buildings standing beside the shore. Then the fog rolled back across them and they disappeared again.
Devon Island: The World’s Largest Uninhabited Island
Dundas Harbour is an abandoned place, and seeing its old buildings briefly materialise through the fog made them look like ghosts from another age. The harbour lies on the southeastern coast of Devon Island, overlooking Lancaster Sound and the eastern approaches to the Northwest Passage. Devon Island itself is enormous, covering around 55,000 square kilometres, yet today it has no permanent population. It is generally described as the largest uninhabited island in the world.
Inuit History and Life in the High Arctic
Calling it “uninhabited”, however, risks giving entirely the wrong impression. People have travelled, hunted and lived around this coastline for centuries. Archaeological evidence at Dundas Harbour shows that Inuit used the area long before Europeans arrived. The old Inuit name for this part of Devon Island is Talluruti, referring to the appearance of traditional tattoo lines on a woman’s chin and apparently inspired by the streaks and crevasses visible across the island’s landscape. Among the archaeological remains are the ruins of a cold-weather house used by Thule Inuit, the direct ancestors of today’s Inuit, sometime after AD 1200. Its roof was once supported by whalebone, while the remains of walrus, whale and seal around the site provide clues to the animals upon which people depended.
That relationship with the sea is fundamental to understanding human life throughout the Canadian Arctic. Seals, walrus, whales, fish and seabirds weren’t simply wildlife to be observed; they provided food, clothing, fuel and materials for tools and shelter. In a landscape where trees were largely absent, bones could even become structural materials.
The geography of the Arctic also changed dramatically with the seasons. Open water provided summer routes for boats and qajaqs, while frozen sea ice created winter highways connecting islands and hunting grounds that appear isolated from one another on a modern map. It is an important thing to remember when travelling through Nunavut. What can initially look like empty wilderness to an outsider is actually a cultural landscape containing generations of place names, stories, travel routes and accumulated knowledge. Dundas Harbour later acquired another role because of its position beside Lancaster Sound.
Dundas Harbour and the Northwest Passage
For European explorers, Lancaster Sound was effectively the front door to the Northwest Passage. For centuries they searched for a navigable route through the Canadian Arctic that might connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and avoid the enormous voyage around Cape Horn. The problem, of course, was ice. Expedition after expedition sailed into Lancaster Sound only to become trapped, forced to overwinter or eventually retreat. Most famously, Sir John Franklin sailed into these waters in 1845 aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror with 129 officers and men. Neither ship returned. Their disappearance triggered one of the greatest searches in the history of exploration. For decades British, American and other expeditions travelled through this enormous maze of islands and channels looking for Franklin and his men.
Dundas Harbour wasn’t a central location in the Franklin story, but it sits within exactly the same geographical theatre. From here Lancaster Sound leads west towards Beechey Island, where Franklin’s expedition spent the winter of 1845–46 and where three of his men died.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Arrive in 1924
By the early twentieth century, however, the Canadian government’s concerns about these remote islands were less about finding a Northwest Passage and increasingly about demonstrating sovereignty over the High Arctic. One way of doing that was to put people here. In August 1924, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police established a detachment at Dundas Harbour. Three constables – E. Anstead, G.T. Makinson and V. Maisonneuve – were delivered with fuel and provisions by the Canadian Government Ship Arctic. Their stores were deliberately placed about a quarter of a mile from their living quarters, apparently as a precaution against polar bears. For their first three years at Dundas Harbour the men didn’t even have radio contact with southern Canada. News arrived with the annual government ship. During their first winter they saw virtually nobody and very little wildlife, while the difficult terrain of Devon Island and rough sea ice severely restricted travel.
Tragedy, Isolation and Abandonment
Eventually they began making remarkable journeys. In 1926 the Mounties pioneered an overland route across Devon Island, allowing patrols to travel between Dundas Harbour and Craig Harbour on Ellesmere Island. Later, with the assistance of Inuit hunters recorded by the RCMP as “Keepomee and Komonee”, Mounties undertook dog-team patrols covering thousands of miles through the High Arctic between 1929 and 1932. There was tragedy here too. Constable Victor Maisonneuve died in June 1926, while Constable William Robert Stephens died the following summer after accidentally shooting himself while hunting walrus. Both are buried in the small graveyard above the detachment. A young daughter of one of the Inuit families who worked alongside the police is also buried there.
Those graves must be one of the most poignant sights at Dundas Harbour. We weren’t able to reach them because of the fog, but simply knowing they were somewhere above the buildings added another dimension to those brief glimpses of the settlement through the mist. The RCMP temporarily withdrew from Dundas Harbour in 1933, but that wasn’t the end of attempts to establish a community here.
From Abandoned Outpost to Arctic Settlement
The Hudson’s Bay Company subsequently leased the empty RCMP buildings. In 1934 its ship Nascopie brought Inuit families from Cape Dorset, Pangnirtung and Pond Inlet to Dundas Harbour, attracted by the prospect of hunting and fox trapping. It was a short-lived experiment. Ice and weather made resupply difficult and in August 1936 the Hudson’s Bay Company abandoned the post. Some families returned home while others moved on to Arctic Bay and eventually farther west. Then, in September 1945, the RCMP returned. Two officers, H.H. MacLeod and J.H. Biensch, reopened the detachment, accompanied by two Inuit special constables and their families from Pond Inlet. For the following five years Dundas Harbour was the most northerly police post in the Arctic. The RCMP finally closed it in August 1951 and transferred operations north to Craig Harbour, where dog-team travel was considered easier and safer. Remarkably, the RCMP has continued to visit Dundas Harbour to maintain the graveyard. The surviving buildings and graves remain physical reminders of Canada’s early attempts to establish a permanent presence in this enormous northern territory.
Devon Island: The Closest Place on Earth to Mars?
There is another extraordinary aspect to Devon Island that makes this already unusual landscape even more interesting. Parts of the island are about as close to Mars as it is possible to get without leaving Earth. The combination of extreme cold, very low precipitation, permafrost and largely barren terrain has made Devon Island an important analogue for Martian environments. Scientists have studied the huge Haughton impact structure and used the surrounding landscape to investigate how life might survive in similarly hostile environments elsewhere in the Solar System. Equipment and techniques intended for planetary exploration have also been tested here.
So within one island you can move from ancient Inuit hunting sites to nineteenth-century exploration routes, abandoned twentieth-century police posts and twenty-first-century research into how humans might eventually explore Mars.
Wildlife, Whalebones and the Arctic’s Final Word
Back at the harbour, however, our wildlife watching was rather more restricted. We saw hooded seals, black-legged kittiwakes, northern fulmars and little auks, but the fog concealed most of the landscape and whatever else might have been travelling through it. Normally the surrounding waters of Lancaster Sound can support an extraordinary range of Arctic wildlife. Narwhal, beluga and bowhead whales occur in the wider region, along with ringed and bearded seals and walrus. Polar bears travel the coast and sea ice, while muskoxen can be found on Devon Island’s tundra. The presence of bears was precisely why we were still sitting offshore rather than wandering among the historic buildings.
For a sea kayaker it was slightly frustrating. Dundas Harbour would be a wonderful place to explore quietly by kayak, and paddling here would have an additional significance because the kayak itself is an Inuit invention. The Inuktitut word qajaq describes a craft developed and refined over generations specifically for travelling and hunting in Arctic waters. Modern expedition sea kayaks may use very different materials, but their ancestry lies here in the Arctic. This was one of those days when Arctic guiding means accepting that the environment makes the decisions.
During one brief improvement in visibility we could see the RCMP huts again and, along the shoreline, whale bones. They were another reminder of how closely human survival here has always been connected to marine mammals.
Beluga hunting remains part of Inuit subsistence culture in parts of the Canadian Arctic. One traditional communal method involves setting nets offshore along known beluga travel routes. Animals entering the net can then be brought towards shore, where the whale provides a substantial quantity of food and other resources for the community. The bones scattered along Arctic shorelines can therefore represent generations of hunting rather than simply the remains of animals that happened to die there.
When the Fog Closes In Again
Then the fog closed again. The shoreline disappeared. The old RCMP buildings faded back into the grey. It wasn’t the Dundas Harbour visit I had imagined. We didn’t walk amongst the abandoned buildings. Nor did we stand beside the graves. We didn’t explore the archaeological remains or paddle beneath the mountains. We didn’t even manage a Zodiac cruise. But perhaps that made the experience more memorable.
The Arctic is often presented through photographs of endless blue skies, enormous icebergs and perfectly reflected mountains. The reality can be very different. Fog, wind, ice and wildlife determine what is possible, and sometimes a place remains tantalisingly beyond reach. For a few minutes Dundas Harbour allowed us a glimpse. A handful of wooden buildings appeared through the mist on one of the largest uninhabited islands on Earth. Around them lay evidence of Inuit hunters who had lived here centuries earlier, the remains of animals upon which generations depended and the graves of people sent north as part of Canada’s attempt to establish sovereignty over the Arctic. Then everything disappeared again.
Why not take the opportunity to read our other blogs about Nunavut and the Canadian arctic;
- Beechey Island: Polar Bears, Franklin and Three Graves Beside the Sea
- Kayaking with Arctic Wildlife: Staying Safe Around Polar Bears, Walrus and Whales
- Croker Bay: Paddling Beneath the Glaciers of Devon Island
- Duart Bay: Sea Kayaking into a Scottish Corner of Baffin Island
- Isabella Bay: In the Realm of the Bowhead Whale
- Qikiqtarjuaq: Gateway to the Wild Mountains of Baffin Island
- Port Leopold: Paddling Through the Search for Franklin
- Prince Leopold Island: Paddling Beneath a City of Seabirds
- Radstock Bay: Paddling Through a Thousand Years of Arctic History