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McLellan
The McLellan was an American whaling ship based out of New London, Connecticut. She made six Arctic voyages between 1846 and 1852. Twelve of her crew members were the first qallunaat to deliberately spend a winter in Cumberland Sound.
In 1851, the crew of the McLellan failed to catch any bowhead whales in Cumberland Sound. An Inuk told them that they had arrived too late; bowheads were most numerous when the ice was still too thick for qallunaat ships to enter. The McLellan's captain, William Quayle, asked for volunteers to overwinter in the Sound. They would hunt whales the following spring, and he would return in the McLellan and pick up the men that summer. Twelve crew members, including a Portuguese whaleman and the ship's African-American cook, offered to stay behind on Qimmiqsut (Nimigen Island), an island on Cumberland Sound's west shore.
The men built a house on Qimmiqsut, mostly out of local rocks. They stuffed the gaps in the walls with earth and moss and erected a roof made of sealskins with a skylight made of intestines. This roof was presumably sewn by Inuit women from skins that Inuit had hunted and scraped. The men of the McClellan lived well that winter. They were not very good seal hunters, but they traded with local people for country food. When their trade goods ran out, Inuit continued to feed them. To heat their house, they burned whale skeletons, which Inuit helped them bring to the hut on dog sleds. When spring came, the crew caught 17 bowhead whales, an extremely impressive number considering most summer voyages hoped to return with two or three. The unprocessed products of these whales would, at a conservative estimate, have fetched approximately $72,000 in 1852 US currency at a time when $250 per year was sufficient for a single man to live in New York City.
The McLellan never came back for the twelve men at Qimmiqsut. It was wrecked among ice floes in Davis Strait. On September 4, 1852, with summer drawing to a close, the twelve men loaded themselves and their whales onto a departing Scottish ship, which took them to Hull. These men had proved that qallunaat could live enjoyably and comfortably in this part of the Arctic. At least three of the volunteers George Tyson, Sidney Budington and William Sterry would choose to spend several more winters in Cumberland Sound. In 1860, Sterry declared that he had never enjoyed himself better than when he was living among the Inuit and that he would like a piece of raw seal meat right now. The news travelled quickly among whalers that, if they overwintered in Cumberland Sound, they could count on the help of local people and on an excellent profit. Based on the success of the McLellan's crew, other American and Scottish captains began deliberately freezing their ships into the ice, thereby intensifying their interactions with and dependence on Inuit.
NOTE : Sidney Budington in Colby, For Oil and Buggy Whips, 96.
NOTE : William Sterry in Hall, Journal, Feb 1860-Mar 1860. Charles Francis Hall Collection, Smithsonian National Museum of American History Archives.