You are here: Home » Ipiirvik and Taqulittuq
Ipiirvik and Taqulittuq
also known to Qallunaat as Esquimau Joe, Ebierbing, Epiopee, etc. and as Tookoolito, Hannah, Tackritow, etc.
Ipiirvik and Taqulittuq, a couple from South Baffin Island, made several long voyages with Qallunaat whalers and explorers from the 1850s to the 1870s. Taqulittuq was born around 1838 at Cape Searle north of Cumberland Sound. She was younger than her husband, Ipiirvik. His father was Oo-yung, and his mother was Noo-ker-pier-ung from Newton's Fiord in Frobisher Bay.
Ipiirvik and Taqulittuq's first recorded meeting with Qallunaat whalers was in the fall of 1851 on Qimmiqsut (Nimigen Island) in Cumberland Sound. In 1853, they travelled to England on the schooner Bee and met Queen Victoria. When they returned home two years later, Taqulittuq attracted attention for drinking tea, knitting, sewing fur clothing in Qallunaat styles and speaking English well. She often worked as an interpreter.
In 1860, the American explorer Charles Francis Hall met Ipiirvik and Taqulittuq in Cyrus Field Bay. He was greatly impressed by Joe's hunting and navigational skills and by Taqulittuq's generosity, gracefulness, modesty and calm intellectual power. The couple was invaluable to him on his expedition. When Hall returned to the United States in 1862, Taqulittuq and Ipiirvik accompanied him. They also brought their baby son, Tarralikitaq. The family appeared at many of Hall's fundraising lectures, but all three Inuit soon became ill. Tarralikitaq died of pneumonia in February 1863 in New York City. Taqulittuq mourned her son for years afterwards in letters to her American friend Sarah Buddington.
In 1864, the couple returned to the Arctic with Hall, this time to the Naujaat area and the Melville and Boothia Peninsulas. The expedition lasted five years. Ipiirvik and Taqulittuq lost another baby and then adopted a young girl whom they called simply Panik, meaning daughter. In 1869, they returned with Panik to the United States, where Hall soon hired them again as part of his American expedition to the North Pole.
The expedition never got near the North Pole. Instead, Hall died, the ship began to leak and 19 expedition members including Ipiirvik, Taqulittuq and Panik ended up marooned on an ice floe for over six months. They were eventually picked up by a sealing ship off the coast of Labrador nearly 3,000 kilometres from their starting point. Everyone survived, thanks largely to the hunting skills of Ipiirvik and Hans Hendrik, another Inuit man on the floe. The Inuit could have abandoned the Qallunaat crew, who frequently treated them unfairly. Ipiirvik said that he stayed because he did not want the crew to die, and he had promised Hall that he would hunt for the expedition.
In 1873, Taqulittuq and Ipiirvik settled once again in the United States, where they struggled to learn Qallunaat customs and to fit into the new country. Taqulittuq attended church, learned to read books, attended religious services and enjoyed eating gingerbread. The couple took their daughter to the circus, and they enrolled her in the local school and insisted she attend every day. Ipiirvik learned to skate. Taqulittuq obtained a sewing machine, which she used to make and sell clothing. Ipiirvik ran errands, did carpentry and worked as a farmhand.
Taqulittuq and Ipiirvik did not abandon their Inuit culture. One American neighbour remembered that Taqulittuq made seal fur clothing for white children she befriended. Ipiirvik would carve them toys, including small ivory animals. Ipiirvik often talked about Arctic houses, and one winter day he made an igloo outside their American house with a piece of pond ice for a window. The family slept in it that night. Ipiirvik lamented that he could not fully put his Inuit skills to use. He wrote that he wanted to return to the Arctic because in the United States there was nothing to do. I want something to do, he wrote. [In] my country I hunt all the time. Don't like to be lazy.
In 1875, Panik became sick and died in the United States. The following year, Ipiirvik joined an English expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. Taqulittuq died of tuberculosis while her husband was away. When Ipiirvik came back and found his wife had died, he left the United States and never returned to it. His sense of home there had been contingent on his family's presence. He remarried but died in 1881 in Hudson's Bay.
NOTES :
Hall, Arctic Researches, 158-159.
Joe Ebierbing to Henry L. Brevoort, Esq., June 20, 1870. Charles Francis Hall Collection, Smithsonian National Museum of American History Archives.