Taissumani, Jan. 13, 2011
Boats without Masts
A group of children played on the beach in northern Greenland in the land of the Inughuit. It was late summer, over a hundred years ago, and the sun circled low on the horizon. The timeless days of a far northern summer were drawing shorter.
Suddenly one of the children looked out to sea, then shouted out — qaqaitsorssuakkut! This cryptic cry meant, in this context, “The men with boats without masts!”
All the children then echoed the cry before racing up into the hills and hiding amongst the rocks.
What did it all mean, wondered a stranger. That was a leading question, and was all that a garrulous old elder needed to begin a story.
“Do you see that low, black iceberg yonder?” he asked. “That is what the children are running away from. In olden days, at the approach of the first dark evenings, there was always a good look-out kept on the sea, for it sometimes happened that ships came into sight — ships without masts. They were the ships of the nakasungnaitsut, the short-legged men.”
This strange word needs some explanation. “Nakasuk” is the Inuktitut word for “bladder,” but “nakasungnaq” means “calf of a person’s leg,” probably because the shape of a muscular calf resembles the shape of a bladder.
With the addition of a suffix of deprivation (“-it”) and a plural noun ending, the word comes to mean “those with no leg calves,” and therefore “short-legged men.”
The elder continued, “They were also called qavdlunaatsiat, a race of white men who were very warlike. They used to come up here with great boats, the sterns of which were higher than the bows, so the old people tell us.”
The story-teller then linked this strange tale with the well-known legend, common in much of the Inuit world, about the origin of white people.
“These white men came originally from these parts,” he said, adding that tradition related this in the legend of the girl who married a dog.
“These qavdlunaatsiat were amongst her children. When they grew up, she made a boat out of a sole of a leather boot and started them out to sea, so that they might sail to the country where the white men lived.
“You shall be fighting men,” she told them. “These are the words of the legend.”
From that day on, the Inuit of the far north were frightened of any ships that ventured to their homeland, for the men of those ships picked quarrels and killed people.
The elder continued, “But often a dark iceberg was mistaken for them, and roused false terror in a village. And that is what has now grown into a game among the children.”
That was the background to what the stranger had witnessed.
Such a legend leaves questions. How had such a story really begun? Was this a vestigial memory of predatory visits centuries before by Norsemen who lived in settlements near the southern tip of the great island? Were the vessels ships whose sails had been taken down, to be powered by oar through the treacherous waters of ice-infested bays and fjords?
But the questions went unasked for the visitor knew that the old man had no answers. The story he had related explained what had happened to the old man’s own satisfaction. There was no need for further explanation.
Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
