The Long Exile by Melanie Mcgrath Page B

the Hudson Bay post manager, a Mr. Trafford and his wife; Trafford's rival at the Baffin Trading Company, lames Cantley; his assistant, a Swede by the name of “Slim” Carlson; the missionary, the Reverend White-head; and a Mr. Doubleday who ran the radio station and his wife. They were joined in summer by the odd geologist, naturalist or geographer working for the Canadian Geodetic Service. Living on the opposite bank of the river were the detachment policemen, generally a corporal and a constable, and from 1943 onwards, the chief operator of the new Radiosonde station.
    Before the war, most ordinary Canadians rarely thought about the great lands lying to the north. Robert Flaherty's film had left them with a strong sense of the dignity and courage of the Inuit way of life, but then it had allowed them as quickly to forget it. The Inuit were not much more than colourful characters in the press reports and in the movies, and, as Flaherty had said, “happy-go-lucky.” To all but a few, the 200,000 square miles of its northern territories were not in any real sense Canada.
    The eastern Arctic archipelago and its inhabitants were particularly obscure. The islands had officially become part of Canada after they were transferred by Great Britain in 1870, but for the next seventy or eighty years the question remained as to whether or not Great Britain had the right to title in the first place. In 1904 the Canadian cabinet asked Dr. William King, the Chief Astronomer of Canada, to report on Canada's Arctic possessions on the grounds that “Canada's title to some at least of the North Islands is imperfect.” On maps of the time, Ellesmere Island, the largest in the High Arctic Queen Elizabeth Group, was represented as a U.S. possession or as unclaimed. Three years later, on 20 February 1907, Canadian Senator Pascal Poirier tried to clarify the issue by presenting a motion to the Senate formally claiming all the territory between two lines drawn from the North Pole to Canada. The Russians refused to acknowledge this “sector principle,” as did the Americans. All through the twenties, as losephie Flaherty was learning about ice, the Norwegians and the Danes were making tentative claims to those parts of the archipelago which had first been mapped by Norwegian and Danish explorers. These claims were gradually shrugged off and by the time losephie reached eighteen and the Second World War began, Canada's legal right to the eastern Arctic archipelago was no longer hotly in dispute, though a question mark did still hang over whether the seas around the islands belonged to Canada or were international waters, an issue so complex that it remains a matter of contention today. The issue of sovereignty in the eastern Arctic archipelago did not entirely go away, though. The region was now shown as part of Canada on maps but as part of the war effort, the United States had constructed five airfields in Canada's Arctic zone and even though Canada officially bought these after the war for US$78.8m, they often remained staffed, at least in part, by American personnel, and the American military and some of its various satellite departments often acted as though the territory was still open. In 1946 some U.S. newspapers carried recruiting advertisementsfor young men to work at a series of new weather stations in the Canadian Arctic which Canada knew nothing about. After some frosty enquiries by the Canadian government, Senator Owen Brewster of Maine hastily introduced a bill into the U.S. Senate to establish these proposed stations as joint U.S.-Canadian operations. All through the forties the stations continued to be supplied and serviced by U.S. planes and ships and it was only in 1954 that the Canadian Department of Transport was able to take over sea supply.
    By then, the Arctic had been drawn into the Cold War, and the Americans were announcing plans to build airstrips capable of landing heavy jets and cargo planes at the remote northern