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Iain Flett

I’m Iain Flett of the Dundee city archives, of Dundee Scotland. We’re on one of the oldest ports in Scotland. It was a free port going back to about 1200. There was a lot of interest in European trading but the interest in whaling began when the UK government started giving subsidies both for the white fishing and for the whale fishing at the end of the 18th century. From customs records, we can track how important this was. The government didn’t charge tax on the whalers because they were so keen for them to go to the whaling grounds. From the beginning of the 19th century, whale oil was important for lubrication and for light. As they imported this very coarse material, jute, from the Indian subcontinent they found the only way to soften it was to use oil, preferably whale oil. From the middle of the 19th century, whaling and the jute industry went hand in hand.

Of course it is now an ecological disaster because [after] they hunted the whales out of existence in Greenland, they went to the Antarctic and hunted whales out of the Antarctic. Then the whalers came back with seals instead.

By the middle of the 19th century, this was a very industrious and prosperous city. In some ways it was a re-creation. Dundee was the second most prosperous borough in Scotland after Edinburgh before the sack by the Cromwellian troops in 1651. In some ways, it went into decline after 1651 and then it developed trade with Europe again, particularly with India during the jute trade. Through jute, and through the heavy industry associated with that, by the middle of the 19th century it had again developed into a very important east coast harbour.

Shipbuilding was important because very specific strengths were required for the whale ships. The hulls of the whale ships had to be very elastic but hard, so that, when the ice closed in, they would keep on bouncing to the top of the pack ice. They wouldn’t be crushed, as the first expeditions were. They started a very specialized boat building.

A lot of Dundonians now feel that they’ve lost touch with their heritage, in that the Dundee port is now a wharf port along the river. If you walk outside this building you will find the name Shore Terrace, yet you look at the shore and there’s nothing but approach roads for the Tay Road Bridge. If you stand at the approach roads to the Tay Road Bridge, you can see where the whalers would have come in 100 years ago. In some cases, it’s very sad for schoolchildren because they’ve lost that link with the past. They no longer see an active harbour, in the middle of the city which they can connect with that wealth of the past.

I think it [whaling] was almost like going off to war, because they were waving these whaling boats away and they would never know if they would come back safely. Whalers were long shallow boats with harpoons in them. It was extremely dangerous. One flick of the whale’s tail and you’d be killed. If you ended up in the water, you’d last for about two and a half minutes before you froze to death. To them, it was an act of bravery for these young boys especially to go away in the whaling boats. Of course they’d be away for two or three winters before they could get back again. Coming back, if they had caught a whale, while the whales were in abundance, there would be riches. We’ve looked at how the Shetlands called the whalers “da merry boys,” the happy men, because they’d come back from the whaling season very rich indeed. And very smelly.
Dundee wasn’t such a center for processing baleen, but other whaling ports were. The demand for whalebone for stays, as they’re called in Scotland, which are corsets, meant that because of fashion, the whale was doomed as well.
Mostly, crews were recruited locally, in Shetland and in Peterhead, because Shetlanders were brought up with the sea. There is the tradition of being a crofter-fisherman. In Shetland you still have the design of the rowing boats that were the same as the Viking rowing boats that came over in the 12th century. They had a very low prow. Shetlanders have had a long tradition of being very good seafarers. Also, in Orkney, [with] the Hudson's Bay Company, you also have the tradition that Orkadians and Shetlanders were great seafarers. In a rowing boat, in a gale, they could manage to work their way through.

There must be a few Inuit buried here in the local cemetery. The question is how to track them down. Twenty years ago someone did come to the office, trying to find his family. There’s this wonderful tradition of hospitality amongst the Inuit. They would welcome these [Scottish] crews, who were overwintering and stuck in the snow, and give them shelter and hospitality. Children came as a result of this. Then these children and grandchildren would come over here expecting a welcome. Unfortunately, they faced a very frosty reception. There was not the understanding that their ancestors had been looked after over a harsh winter. It’s all that’s wrong with Scottish Presbyterianism. There’s not the idea that their ancestors had been loved and looked after and given shelter in a harsh winter.

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Fiona Riddell

My name is Fiona Riddell. I’m the curatorial assistant at the Arbuthnot Museum in Peterhead. I’ve been here about five years. I’m very interested in the whaling era and in trying to put things together so our heritage isn’t forgotten.

Peterhead was built on whaling. There is a saying that Peterhead was built on whale blubber and guarded by whalebone. It really was a very, very poor community, through the fishing. People were just going out in little boats, unable to make a living. We imported whale oil to start with, and then realized that it was more profitable to go and get it ourselves, so in 1788, a little ship, the Robert, set out from Peterhead to do the whaling.

They didn’t make anything of it for about 12 years. They decided it wasn’t really working. It was crewed by Englishman, so it wasn’t really in their best interests to build up Peterhead. They were going to forget all about it. Then they decided to put some Scottish crews from Peterhead on it, which they did. As a result they came back with a bumper ship.

They never really looked back after that. More and more people got in on the act. The Robert was replaced by the Hope, a very famous ship. It started from there, and [Peterhead] built up to the top premier port for the whaling at that time. Peterhead never looked back after that.

Our height was about the 1850s, and after that, it started to wane. Then the herring came in. After that, they decided it was safer to go out in the little boats, easier not to leave their families and be away for months on end. And really it’s just Dundee. It’s easy to go out from there.

The Robert went up to what we call the high Arctic, to Davis Strait and Baffin Island. They only took on a quarter crew from here, from Peterhead itself. They went up to [Lerwick] and took on another quarter, but most of their crew… She [the Robert] went up to the High Arctic because that’s where they knew the right whales were. Those were the ones they hunted. They were called right whales because they were the right whales to catch. They moved very slowly, and when they were harpooned and eventually died, they floated on the surface. They didn’t sink. So obviously they were easier to put aboard.

There were a few shipbuilders here, building the whalers. The coopering was also attached to it. The coopers went on board the whaling ships as well to make the barrels so that they got the blubber home. Coopering was a very important trade. They made the barrels before they went, stored them all on board, and filled them up as they went along. But they brought cooperers with them so that if anything happened to the barrels they were able to sort them.

The Grays took some Inuit home. They lived with them. They were paraded about the town. Peterhead was so small. People never left Peterhead. They just worked hard and tried to make a living. So these in-comers were quite new to them and were something to see. [In Peterhead there was] no television, no papers really. A lot of them [Peterhead residents] were illiterate. Unfortunately they [the Inuit] died here due to diseases that we had, colds and such that which we managed to fight off. But the Inuit had no resistance to them. They are buried in the Peterhead graveyard. I know some of them went up to Balmoral to meet Queen Victoria. Whether they were the Peterhead ones, I couldn’t really say, but Queen Victoria did meet quite a few of them.

The Active was built here. When the ship owners realized that the English were not really making anything of it [the whaling], they decided to put Alexander Geary (who had been mate on the Robert for a number of years) as captain, and he was very successful.

When the Robert got too small, they built the Hope. She is a very famous whaler. She did very well. That’s when it started. The Hope II came in and the Perseverance, all the way through to the Windward, which was built in 1890. It was our last ship, and it was also sailed by the Grays. The Grays were such a big dynasty here. When the last of the Grays died, the whaling died. The life just went out of Peterhead for that. But then the herring came in.

Dundee bought most of the ships because they were made so strong. We did foray into steel ships. Being in the arctic, they decided that steel was the way forward, steam and steel. There were two [steel] ships built, the Empress of India and the Inuit. They were both steel ships, and both were lost on their maiden voyage because the ice was just too much for them. It squeezed them. Where timber will move, the steel ships didn’t. They just cracked and they were lost. There were only ever two made.

Steam was the way forward for them, to power through the ice. They sent away for the steam engines, and put them in the ships. They tried to refit the ships out of season so that they were ready for the next season. A lot of them went to two seasons. They went to the sealing, between February and May, and then the whaling, from March right through to September-October. They had to be back before the ice froze them in. Unfortunately some of them did get caught in the ice with sometimes disastrous consequences.

There was a lot of that [whalers having sexual relationships with Inuit] about because the men were away from home for so long. The Inuit very kindly lent them their wives. Lots of babies were born, but these children, you knew they weren’t Inuit. You knew they were of mixed blood. A lot of them, they [the Inuit said they] had Peterhead faces because they just knew that they were truly Inuit. But they were accepted into the Inuit families. As far as I’m aware, there was never any kind of “No, you don’t belong to us.” The Inuit just accepted them all. They only saw their fathers when they came back to the fishing.

How many of these men told their wives [about this] when they got back home has never been documented. Personally, I do not think they would. What tha dinna ken das na herm ya. [What you don’t know won’t hurt you.] Certainly, in the arctic, there was no shame to it. They were very good, but you really knew that…

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Discovery: Earl Scott

I am Earl Scott. I am a guide on the Discovery and I am also a guide at Verdant Works. I take people from all over the world to come and see our wonderful ship, a great attraction which Dundee is famous for.

This ship was actually bought in 1905 by the Hudson’s Bay Company of Canada and they used it as a cargo ship. It went from Canada to London sailing their fur and pelts. It was lent to the French government in 1914, during the First World War and it was used way up in Russia. This is built in the style of a whaling ship. The hull had four different layers of wood.

This is winter, this is summer.

They did not know what to expect down at the South Pole. Because Dundee was so well renowned for building famous wooden whaling ships which went up to the Arctic, so they thought: ‘Well, it would be better having the knowledge of the Dundee ship builders and go for their ship rather than get a metal ship which might burst.’

The next expedition was going to the Falkland Islands, all to do with whaling. That came back in 1927. After that it was 1929 to 1931, that was the third expedition, which was going back to Antarctica all to do with checking various things on that continent. It came back in 1931 and then stayed on the Thames embankment, as a training ship for sea scouts and sea cadets.

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Iain Sword
The jute is growing out of the ground so it is thick and quite hard up to the tip where it is thin and much softer. Feel it up there it is a bit hard but when it is all pressed together it is literally that hard. Then with a twist when you put on the tension, the fiber will slide past each other and they will pull on each other and that will give the grip that will allow you to spin it tight.

Dorothy H. Eber
Do you know why the Dundee vessels kept whaling after all other vessels? It was because they needed the whale oil for the jute factories there.

Iain Sword
Dundee was an important port 800 years ago and traded mainly with Europe and the Baltic sea. Probably around the middle of the fifteen hundreds Dundee was easily by far the second city of Scotland. Very rich city.

Interviewer
Was it bigger than now?

Iain Sword
No, not bigger than now but much richer. But a lot of things happened. Both sides of the civil war sacked Dundee, ruined Dundee. Within a few years it was also sacked with the plague and the city was almost wiped out and had to start again and never got back to its former richness although at the height of the textile industry, probably at the time of the American Civil War a few of these textile industry owners were hugely rich.


Dorothy H. Eber
When I went to Scotland, I interviewed the current Mr. Kinnes, that firm is still there. They’re still in business, only now their business is not whaling. They’re supplying the oil rigs with supplies! I met Mr. Kinnes, and he said, “Do you know why the Dundee whalers were so involved in the whale hunt and kept on whaling for so long?”, and I said, “Oh, yes”, and he said, “No, you don’t!”. And then he told me it was because of the Dundee jute industry.

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My name is Fred Calabretta and I’m curator of collections at Mystic Seaport. I’ve been here for many years. One of my great interests and passions has been the study of Eastern Arctic whaling and especially New London’s involvement in the whaling there.

New London had a long tradition of whaling, going back to the colonial period before the revolutionary war. The whaling industry in New London peaked in about 1845. The whaling agents and ship owners there were very prosperous, and they began looking for new whaling grounds. Before the American Revolution, they had visited the Davis Strait grounds, but there had been a 50- or 60 year lapse. A group of owners decided that they would try to visit the Davis Strait and Cumberland Sound area again.

They purchased a ship called the McLellan, fitted her out for arctic whaling, and in 1846 sailed for Davis Strait and Cumberland Sound. That voyage was a very important one. It marked of the renewal of American whaling in the Eastern Arctic and established the dominance of New London in whaling activity and as a foothold for New England whalers in the region once again. It set the stage for extensive relationships between the New London whalers, the arctic explorers, and the Inuit.

Eastern Arctic whaling differed from more traditional whaling. The whalers were now hunting bowhead whales for the first time, where traditionally they had primarily hunted right whales and sperm whales. Their destination was relatively close to home, so less time was required to get to the whaling grounds. Because of the environment, they didn’t have to worry as much about desertion. This was a problem on whaling voyages in other parts of the world, but in the Arctic a sailor was much less likely to jump ship. Very often, he would have nowhere to go, so that wasn’t a risk. They didn’t have to worry about putting copper on the bottoms of ships to prevent ship worms, because the water was cold.


A major milestone occurred on the McLellan’s last voyage.

The McLellan made seven voyages. She was a very important ship, not just because she was the first. She was literally a training ship for important whaling masters who came later on. Sydney Budington, George Tyson and Christopher Chappell all sailed and learned on her decks. The McLellan was like a school ship.

On the McLellan’s 1851 voyage, the captain decided to try something different and left a group of men behind to winter in the Arctic. These were the first American whalers to deliberately winter in the Arctic. The party included Sydney Budington, who became very important later on. They survived the winter, a major reason for which was the assistance and cooperation of the Inuit. From them, they learned arctic survival, what to eat, how to dress, and how to protect themselves from the cold. So, in about 1851, the relationship with the Inuit really began in earnest.

The relationship with the Inuit was important because it influenced both the whalers and the explorers. The men on that voyage, in the group who stayed, learned to live like the Inuit who had transferred that knowledge to them. Explorers like Charles Francis Hall came to New London where he talked to and learned from these men who had overwintered in the Arctic. Thus there is a direct connection to these Inuit survival techniques that date back to the McLellan group.

Initially there was not a formal relationship between the Inuit and the whalers, although there was some informal trade. The Americans would provide manufactured goods and in exchange they would probably get furs and clothing prepared by the Inuit women, but it was a not a major exchange.

Eventually, within about 15 or 20 years, the Americans established whaling stations in the Eastern Arctic, especially in Cumberland Sound and also in Hudson Strait. Once the whaling stations were established, the role of the Inuit became more important. They had working relationships with the stations and were a presence there on a regular basis. That was an important extension of the relationship between the American whalers and the Inuit.

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This interrelationship expanded, and dependence on Inuit cooperation grew. By the time of Captain George Comer, who was the last New England Arctic whaling captain, the relationship was very extensive and very sophisticated. At this point the Inuit generally had more whaling experience than Comer’s own crew and they were manning many of the whale boats. By this time the whaling industry had been in decline for many years and there were fewer and fewer experienced whalers in New England. Now when someone like Captain Comer sailed North with a crew of 14, there may have been only two or three men in the crew, probably the officers, who had ever been on a whaling voyage before.

The dependence on Inuit increased. A large number of the whales taken in those final years, from the 1880s to approximately 1910, were taken by Inuit boats and crews. In exchange they received trade goods or boats. The boat was the ultimate trade good; it was the largest, most expensive and most valuable item. There are photographs of the Era in winter quarters taken in 1903, and in them you can see ten whale boats on the ice. The Era could only carry about five, which means that the other five of those whale boats belonged to the Inuit. The Inuit were beginning to acquire whale boats.

By Comer’s time, not only were the Inuit manning the whale boats, they were also providing services as guides. They drew maps, they assisted with survival, and they provided caribou meat and other food and fish for the American crews, which helped to prevent scurvy and save lives. The other two critical commodities were furs and ivory. The women made caribou suits and sealskin boots for the men. This clothing was warmer than anything they could bring from the States and it was essential for survival.

A very highly developed system of trade had evolved by Comer’s time, and he brought extensive trade goods with him. Inuit received trade goods that were very valuable to them, particularly hunting related items such as rifles, as well as cartridges and ammunition. They also received metal cooking utensils, small telescopes to help them locate game, and many other objects.

By this time, the whale products were less and less valuable. There was money to be made in the baleen trade but whaling in general was not very profitable. They didn’t even bother taking the oil from the whales if it wasn’t convenient. The baleen, which was a plasticlike, flexible substance in the mouth of certain whales, was used because there was a market for it in many products: women’s clothing, buggy whips, springs for carriages, and things like that.

In order to make the voyage pay, Comer and others began to trade much more extensively for furs such as fox, wolverine, wolf skins, whatever they could get. The fur trade became so important that, in the last two years of his career in the North, Comer’s ship was owned by a fur company based in New York City rather than a whaling agent or whaling company. They also collected whatever ivory they could, such as walrus ivory and narwhal tusks. By the end of the whaling era, and by the end of Comer’s career, he was as much a trader as he was a whaler. The relationship with the Inuit reached its maximum point at that time.

Eastern Arctic whaling became extremely important to New London and the entire south-eastern Connecticut region. New London led the way. It had always been important, but Eastern Arctic whaling helped keep it alive. Locally, whaling peaked in 1845, but it continued for about another 50 years because of Eastern Arctic whaling.

The opening of Hudson Bay to whaling in 1860 was a major event. Although there were two New Bedford ships, the captains were both New London whalers. One of them was Christopher Chappell, who had been on the McLellan (a continuation of the link to the McLellan). From 1860 until the end of the whaling era in New London, in the early 1890s, Eastern Arctic whaling accounted for half of the voyages and income. It helped to keep whaling alive locally.

Whaling had a great influence on the local area, including its economy and cultural fabric. The local hospital in New London was built by whale ship owners. Cemeteries and other buildings and civic institutions were developed with money from whaling agents. A great number of people were involved in the whaling industry: not only the whalers themselves, the men who went out on the ships, but also the shipbuilders, the sail makers, the caulkers, the men who made barrels, the shipwrights who made harpoons, the chandlerers and the merchants who provided food and other goods and clothing. Whaling was enormously important in New London and south-eastern Connecticut. That influence came to an end with the last voyage in 1892.

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Captain George Comer was born in 1858 in Quebec. Very little is known of his early years. Apparently his father was a sailor who disappeared at sea shortly after George was born. His mother was originally from England, and for reasons we don’t understand she ended up in the States. She evidently had very difficult times; she appears in different census records and also in the records of almshouses, which are poorhouses. She had a very challenging time making a go of it. She traveled around, bounced from place to place, found employment where she could as a washerwoman, and spent time at these poorhouses, which were very unpleasant places in the early 1860s, all of this with George in tow. He had a very difficult youth.

When George was around eight or nine years old, his mother placed him in an orphanage in Hartford, Connecticut. She was unable to support him. He was there for a few years, and he did receive a little bit of an education but then he was placed with a foster family in East Haddam, Connecticut. East Haddam is located about 35 miles from Mystic, on the Connecticut River. It was a farming town at that time. George Comer then grew up on a farm, doing farm work until he turned 17, in April of 1875. At that time, for reasons that are not clear, he left the farm, walked to New London and shipped out on an arctic whaler. This was the beginning of his whaling career and his career as a sailor, and was also his introduction to the Arctic.

It was a one year voyage. The captain of the ship was Captain John O. Spicer. Spicer was a very important figure in Eastern Arctic whaling, so Comer had connected with a very important mentor and teacher on his very first voyage as a 17 year old.

It is interesting to note that he left arctic whaling for a period of time. He continued to go to sea but he became involved in the sealing industry based in south-eastern Connecticut. It involved the hunting of seal elephants for oil and seals for their furs. Most of the activity was in the southern Indian Ocean and south Atlantic. That was a brutal industry with terrible weather conditions. It was very dangerous and he almost drowned on a couple of occasions. But he did very well and he moved up through the ranks, becoming an officer, first as third mate, then second mate, then first mate. He was thriving as a sailor in difficult conditions. His sealing experience was very good training and it prepared him for what was to come later, in the Arctic.

In 1889, he made the first of three annual voyages to the Arctic with Spicer on a schooner called the Era. Later on in Comer’s life, the Era would become very important. After these three voyages with Spicer he then made another voyage to the Arctic on a ship called the Canton, which is very much like Mystic seaport’s Charles W. Morgan. Finally, New London got out of the whaling industry and sold the Era, which was their last whaler, to a firm in New Bedford.

Comer got his opportunity to sail as captain for the first time in 1895, on the Era, the ship on which he had so much experience. He went to Hudson Bay, and there he specialized. Voyage after voyage, he returned to Hudson Bay.

From very early on, he had a dual interest. He was a sailor, a sealer and a whaleman; that was his life. But along the way he developed a passion for the natural world, for wildlife, animals and plants. He became interested in learning more about them and studying them. This is a very fascinating pursuit for someone with little formal education. As early as the 1880s, he was collecting bird specimens for Yale University. Today, specimens collected by Comer are among the earliest bird specimens in the Peabody Museum at Yale University. He was making his mark in science as early as the 1880s.

He continued those interests as he moved north. He gathered plants in Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait in the early 1890s. He began to focus on what eventually became his life’s work, which was the study and documentation of the Inuit. He started informally by collecting a few things and trading for cultural objects. 1897 was a turning point in Comer’s life. In that year, a man named Franz Boas, who was the founding father of North American anthropology, a huge figure in that field, contacted Captain Spicer, looking for information about the Inuit of the Eastern Arctic. Captain Spicer told Boas he was retired and referred him to Captain Comer.

Boas contacted Comer, asking him if he would collect materials on his next voyage. Boas gave Comer a shopping list of items to collect. Twenty-seven months later, Comer returned with a substantial collection of Inuit objects. He collected them very systematically and they were well documented. He invited Boas to come to his home, where Boas was dazzled by the collection. He wrote a memo to the director of the American Museum of Natural History saying that he had acquired a wonderful collection, many items of which had never before been seen in any museums in North America or anywhere in the world, and all of which were collected by Captain Comer. It was an extraordinary acquisition.

In this way, Comer established his relationship with Boas and the American Museum of Natural History, founding a second career for which he had no formal training. For the next 20 years or so, he had a very strong relationship with the American Museum of Natural History and he continued to collect for them.

For Comer’s next voyage, Boas said, “Take photographs. Make sound recordings. Take plaster life masks of Inuit faces.” In this way, the documentation became comprehensive. Comer kept detailed written notes of Inuit traditions. He collected stories, oral history, information about the Franklin Expedition, drawings, maps, anything it was possible to collect. Most of what he collected went to the American Museum of Natural History. By about 1907 or 1908, they had the largest arctic collection in the world, most of it acquired by Comer and by Robert Peary. This established Comer as an anthropologist. He continued to make profitable voyages as a whaler, but he added this second career.

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This established Comer as an anthropologist. He continued to make profitable voyages as a whaler, but he added this second career.

One key aspect of his voyages, which helped make all this possible, was the long wintering period. Typically, he would go north for 27 months. The whaling activity would stop in September of the first year, and they would begin preparing winter quarters. From September or October until May of the following year, there was very little whaling activity. The ship would be in winter quarters, giving Comer a wonderful opportunity to closely observe and work with and come to know the Inuit as he did. Much of his success was based on the fact that he had a very deep respect for them. It wasn't just a working relationship, the Inuit were not just employees or trading partners, they were people who mattered to him. Because of that, mutual respect developed, and he had tremendous access to them and their lifeways. He was able to observe shamanistic angakkuq ceremonies inside illuit (iglus), and photograph them, which had never been done. He had this access because he was respected and had this wonderful relationship with the Inuit. This relationship continued through his last whaling voyage in 1912.

He continued to go to sea after the whaling had ended. He participated in an expedition to Greenland sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. It was called the Crocker Land Expedition. That party became stranded in Greenland for a couple of years and Comer took that time to do some archaeological work, which he had never done before. He located some early Inuit occupation sites and began collecting archaeological material, without any training. He was just scraping off the surface with the understanding that there were different layers and that the older material would be below. The area he excavated is still referred to as Comer's Midden and it is still considered a very important archaeological site in the North. The findings were published by several people, including Clark Whistler, who was a very important anthropologist. Without extensive training, Comer continued to expand his anthropological work. Today, Comer's Midden

Comer was in his late 50s when he returned from that expedition and he was close to 60 when World War I broke out. He wanted to serve his country, so he joined the navy as an officer. He was not captain of the ship he was assigned to, the U.S.S. Radnor; it was awkward for him because he was used to being the boss, but he did what he could in the navy.

After his naval service, Comer had the opportunity for one last voyage to the North. An ethnologist by the name of Christian Leden was organizing an expedition to Hudson Bay to study the Inuit and to look into the possibility of establishing trading stations. They acquired a vessel called the Finback, a private yacht that they reinforced for arctic travel.

Comer was the captain of the voyage. From the beginning, it was not a happy one. The crew was terribly inexperienced and barely sober, and on one occasion, one of them threatened Comer with a pistol. Comer apparently beat the man substantially. Also, Comer was in poor health and wasn't feeling well. He thought Leden was arrogant, and they didn't get along. Comer wanted to be the supreme authority on the ship, but he had to share authority with Leden, which didn't work out.

However, Comer did get to Cape Fullerton, and he did see his old Inuit friends. Shortly after arriving there, the Finback was wrecked in Fullerton Harbour. Exactly how that happened, I'm not sure, because Comer had been in and out of the harbour more than anyone alive, and he knew those waters very well. It wasn't a crisis, though, because there were steamers in and out of Hudson Bay by then, and the party was rescued. That voyage gave Comer one last opportunity to see his Inuit friends. That was very important to him, and it was his primary reason for going on that voyage.

Comer's work was very comprehensive, and he collected information in many forms. He took photographs, made plaster casts, and wrote detailed information in journals. Because this information was so comprehensive, we are able to put together interesting profiles of specific individuals. That was quite unusual for that time. We can gain a little bit of understanding about certain individuals with whom Comer had close relationships, which is a valuable aspect of his work.

The whalers had, as did American immigration agents at Ellis Island, a habit of simplifying names for their own convenience. They had a very difficult time speaking Inuktitut, although Comer certainly could to some degree. So they gave Inuit the kind of American names they could handle. One of these people was Tasseok, known by the whalers as Harry. Comer knew him for at least 20 years. He was recognized as the leader of the Aivilingmiut, the people most closely associated with Comer throughout his career. Harry was the leader of a boat crew, and was an excellent carver who made many of the ivory carvings and other items collected by Comer. He was a highly-respected individual whom Comer knew for 20 years. Comer truly had not just a working relationship, but a meaningful friendship with Harry.

There was a woman known by the whalers as Shoofly. She was the wife of an Inuk known as Ben, who was also a good friend of Comer's. Shoofly became Comer's companion in the North for many years. There are many photographs of her. She is not referred to very frequently in his journals, and the reason for that may have been that Captain Comer had a family in East Haddam and proper society in New England at that time would have frowned on his relationship with Shoofly. But it was culturally accepted in the North. As long as these things were open, agreeable and acceptable to all parties involved, it was not looked upon in a negative way. Comer did have a relationship with Shoofly.

There were other Inuit with whom Comer had a close relationship. One time, Comer fell through the ice a long distance from the ship. Ben pulled him out, kept him warm and took him back to the ship, essentially saving his life. Comer appreciated these things. When Ben died, Comer mourned.

Melechi was another Inuit whom Comer knew well. He produced many of the carvings and other materials that Comer collected. There was a group of about 30 or 40 Aivilingmiut whom Comer knew very well, and we know a lot about them because of his detailed record-keeping. He took census records, so we know how much they weighed, how tall they were, how old they were, and we know about their family relationships. Comer also made these extraordinary plaster-cast life masks so that we can actually see their faces in 3D. This is a wonderful window to the past and a wonderful connection to these people and is symbolic of Comer's legacy.