There's a stretch of the Boothia Peninsula in the heart of the Canadian Arctic that Inuit still call Kablunaaqhiuvik, "the place for meeting white people." And a few miles away is Killanaaqtuuk, "having desirable things." In 1999 I interviewed Bibian Neeveeovak, one of the oldest of all Inuit elders at the time, who told me, "I'm grateful that qallunaat-the white man-ventured up here, because their wreck made the Netsilik people survive." The wreck she referred to was the Victory, a British vessel under command of John Ross, a Royal Navy captain on a private venture in search of the Northwest Passage. The search for the Passage-a waterway from the Atlantic to the Pacific-was Britain's motivation for its great nineteenth-century push into the Arctic Archipelago.
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