An unnamed boatswain lost a lottery during the Canadian Arctic winter of 1831-32, which meant his life. The ship, Victory, frozen in ice at Felix Harbour, couldn’t be freed until the spring thaw. Explorer John Ross, the captain, had failed his second attempt to find and explore the Northwest Passage and his men were starving.
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It’s August, 1818, and two British naval ships are dodging icebergs in Baffin Bay on their mission to find the Northwest Passage. John Ross, commanding the HMS
Isabella, and William Parry in the HMS
Alexander are farther north along the western Greenland coast than any previous explorers. They assume this land of glaciers and stark mountains is uninhabited.
But they’re wrong.
They spy several figures running on a hill near shore. Ross assumes they’re shipwrecked sailors in need of rescue, and he steers the
Isabella to get closer. But they turn out to be Native people, a community of Inughuit living farther north than Europeans believed was physically possible.