I just purchased a copy of The Wide World,
1918, Vol.2. Just at the beginning I came across this interesting true story. A
little research has inclined me to reproduce it in this blog. John Shiwag is
also described in Wikipedia.
The author is named William Lacey Amy, and may
also be known as Luke Allan—he may be Canadian. He is not included in Wiki—I
will do more research./drf
The Empire’s Only Eskimo Soldier.
By Lacey Amy.
ILLUSTRATED BY
ERNEST PRATER, AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS.
From The Wide World magazine, July 1918.
Digitized by Doug Frizzle, April, 2014.
Many strange races are to be found fighting
under the Union Jack to-day, but the British, Army possesses, or rather it did
possess until the other month, only a single Eskimo fighting man, John Shiwak.
In the following narrative the writer tells how he met John whilst travelling
to Labrador. For an Eskimo he proved to be a
man of remarkable character and of some scholastic attainments, for he kept
diaries, wrote poetry and books, and was a clever artist, photographer, and
musician. When war broke out John heard the call, became a soldier of the King,
and died fighting for the flag in France. His life-story forms a
remarkable human document.
IT was in the
summer of 1911 that I first met John Shiwak. But to have met him once was to
remember him always. Seeking new out-of-the-world places in and around Canada, I had picked on the bleak coast of Labrador. At St John’s, the quaint capital of
Newfoundland, I boarded a little mail steamer that ran twice a month—seldom
more than five times a year—“down” the semi-settled coast of Newfoundland for
five hundred miles, and then another five hundred far off to the North, into
the birthplace of the iceberg, along the uncharted, barren, rugged shores of a
country God never intended man to live in—Labrador.
Yet it was a
pleasant trip, one to look back upon with no shuddering memories, but with a
dreamy halo of unreality dimming its thousand unwonted sights and events, a
composite picture that frays off round the edges, and centres about one lone
figure—John Shiwak, the Eskimo.
We were a
motley crowd on board. The transient passenger-list consisted of the
Woman-who-worries and myself, three professional world-vagrants who travelled
as most people work, a mysterious newly-married couple whom none knew better at
the end than at the beginning. And below decks bunked a score of Newfoundland fishermen and fish merchants on their way to
the great cod grounds along the Labrador.
And there was
John.
I was aware of
him first as he sat at the Newfoundlanders’ table in the dining saloon, never
uttering a word, watching with both eyes every movement at the table of the “foreigners.”
He was the nattiest man on board. Evidently he had invested in a new wardrobe
in St. John’s,
and his muscular, short, straight-standing figure did each garment fullest
justice. Twice a day he appeared in different array—in the mornings usually in
knickers and sealskin moccasins.
Not a word did
I ever hear him speak to another. He would appear on deck for half an hour
twice a day, lean over the railing where he could hear us talk on the
after-deck, and disappear as silently as he came. I set myself the task of
intruding on his reticence, of breaking his silence. In truth it was a task!
Observing him one day watching the unloading of salt into the small boats that
play the part of wharves on the Labrador
coast, I leaned on the railing beside him and made some trivial inquiry about
the scene of the bustle. His reply was three words, and then silence. To my
second inquiry after several minutes the reply was two words. And then he
turned away. I was almost discouraged.
Then one night
we stopped in the sudden darkness that falls in that quarter long after ten of
an August evening to pick up a missionary and his family and household goods.
Suddenly there broke from the outer darkness the shuddering howl of a wolf,
followed by a chorus of howls. I raised myself to listen, peering into the
darkness of the sea where were only scores of tiny islands, and, beyond, scores
of towering icebergs.
“The Labrador
Band,” explained a quiet voice beside me, modest to the verge of self-depreciation
but with a twinkle in it somewhere.
It was John Shiwak.
And the ice was broken. “The Labrador Band” is the term applied to the howling
huskies, most of whom are set down on islands during their summer months of
uselessness, where they can do no harm and are out of the way.
Far into the
morning John and I sat then in the dirty, deserted bow, as the ship felt its
way through the islands on its northward crawl. By the pitch of the boat we
knew when the islands ceased to screen us from the swell outside. Now and then
an icy breath registered an iceberg somewhere about; and once a disturbing
crackling far outside, and a great plunge, told of a Greenland
monster that had yielded at last to the wear of sun and wave. Not a sound of
life broke the northern silence save the quiet voice of the captain on the
bridge above, and the weird howls of hungry or disturbed huskies, only one
stage removed from their wolf-life of past generations. And in those hours I
learned much of John Shiwak’s immediate history.
He was a
hunter in the far interior by winter, a handy-man in his district by summer.
The past winter had been a good one for him—a silver fox-skin, for instance, which
he had disposed of to the Hudson’s Bay Company for four hundred and sixty-nine
dollars, or just over ninety pounds sterling. And on the strength of such
unusual profits he had gone down to St. John’s, Newfoundland, whence all good
and bad things come to Labrador—and whither all good and bad things from
Labrador go—and had plunged himself into the one great time of his life. His
memory of that two weeks of civilization had congealed into a determination to
repeat the visit each summer. And I knew that the dissipations of a great and
strange city had had nothing to do with its attractions.
In his
conversation there was the solemnity of a man who does much thinking in vast
silences. Everything was presented to me in the vivid succinctness, that delights
the heart of an editor. John’s life had been filled with the essentials. So was
his comment on life. When we parted for our berths I was conscious of a series
of pictures that lacked no necessary touch of a master hand, but repetition in
the stilted language and phrasing of civilization was impossible. The wonderful
gift of nature was John’s, and the marvel of it grew on me through the night
hours.
Next morning I
smiled at him from our table, and when we few wanderers collected as usual on
the after-deck, there was John a few yards away leaning on the rail. I went to
him, taking the Woman-who-worries, but after a few monosyllabic words he took
advantage of our interest in some scene on shore to glide away. But an hour
later he was there again, and thereafter he adopted us as his friends. For the
next two days we separated only for meals and sleep. And on the night of the
second day as we swung a little into the open to make the Hamilton
Inlet, a storm arose. And through the storm a tiny row-boat bobbed
up to us in the moonlight, poised for minutes in the flush of a great danger as
it struggled to reach us without crushing against our sides, and then quietly
dropped aboard us two Moravian missionaries. And it was John who seemed to know
just what to do to make the boarding possible. The missionaries recognized him
and rewarded him with a smile and thanks, but John appeared unmoved. A moment
later he was standing beside me in silence, held by the same strange affinity
that had been working on me.
Early the next
morning we cast anchor far within the inlet before Rigolet. And as we glided
into position John and I were talking. In his manner was a greater solemnity
than ever. I believe now it was the knowledge that in an hour or so his new
friend would pass from his life.
“Can you read?”
he inquired. And the unusual embarrassment of his manner impressed me. Then,
“Can you write?” And when I modestly admitted both accomplishments, he
hesitated. I did not try to draw him out. In a moment he explained. “I can,
too.” There was pride in his tone. I recognized it quickly enough to introduce
my commendations with the proper spirit. “And I write much,” he went on. “I
write books.”
Having
received my cue, I succeeded in finding out that his “books” were diaries
filled through the winter months of his long season in the interior.
“Will you read
my books?” he asked me, anxiously.
We climbed
over the side together and sat in the little row-boat that was to take us to
the Hudson Bay quay. As soon as we landed,
John led me off, past the white buildings of the Company, past several
ramshackle huts that looked as if a mild wind would make loose lumber of them,
and stopped before one, a shack more solid-looking than the others. He paused
before entering. It was but one of his expressive movements that meant more
than words. I was not to follow farther; he did not wish me to see within. I
read into it that it was not shame, but a fear that I might not understand his
methods of life. Inside, a few half-hearty words were uttered, and John’s voice
replied quietly; and presently he appeared with two common exercise books in
his hand. These he handed to me and together we repaired to an ancient Eskimo
burying-ground where we need fear no interruption. It would be a couple of
hours before the boat would leave.
But someone
shouted. The missionary who had boarded our boat two days before wanted help to
unload his household goods, and John, the always ready, supplied the want. And
that was the last word I had with John Shiwak.
I seated
myself on the steps to the factor’s house and opened one of the books. The
first thing I saw was a crude but marvellously lively drawing of a deer. With
only a few uncommon lines he had set down a deer in full flight. Therein were
none of the rules of drawing, but in his untrained way John had accomplished
what better-known artists miss. “This is a deer,” underneath, was but the
expression of first principles. And on the second page was a stanza of poetry.
Unfortunately, it is not at hand, but this dusky son of Nature had caught from
his mother what he had never read in books. There were rhythm and metre and
rhyme, and there was unconscious submission to something working within. I
began to read.
It was all
about his past winter back there in a frozen world alone. I read on, until I
heard shouts from the direction of the pier. There are more attractive dangers
than being marooned on the coast of Labrador,
so with the diaries I started for the steamer, thinking to meet John there. But
on the way we passed his row-boat returning to the shore with its last load. I
could only shout that I had his books; and his reply was a slow nodding of the
head; and then a shipping of his oars for a brief moment as he turned and
watched us drift apart.
I never saw
him again. During the six years that followed I received from him a half-dozen
letters a year or less, all there was time for in the short two months of
navigation along the Labrador. I wrote him
regularly, sending him such luxuries as I thought would please him—a camera and
supplies, heavy sweater-coats and other comforts, books, writing paper,
pencils, and a dictionary. From him there came mementoes of his life—a
beautiful fox-skin for a rug, with head and claws complete; a pair of wooden
dolls made entirely by the Eskimo and dressed in exact replica of the seal-skin
suits of the farthest North; a pair of elk-skin moccasins; a pair of seal
gloves. It was significant of John’s gallantry that most of these gifts were specifically
for the Woman-who-worries. For me he was ever on the look-out for a Polar
bear-skin, and had planned a trip farther North to get one, when other events
intervened.
But, best of
all, each summer there came out to me his diaries. Diaries have small prospect
of breaking through my prejudices, but John’s invariably inaugurated a period
of seclusion and idleness until I had read to the last word. They were
wonderful examples of unstilted, inspired writing. They started with his
hunting expedition in the late fall (September, in Labrador) into the interior
by the still open waterways; and through all the succeeding eight months, until
the threat of breaking ice drove him back to civilization with his fur-laden
sleigh, they recorded his daily life, not as a barren round of uneventfulness,
but as a teeming time of throbbing experience. He felt everything, from the leap of a running deer to a sunset, from
a week’s crippling storm to the capture of the much-prized silver fox, from the
destruction of his tent by fire to the misfortune of pilfering mice. And he had
the faculty of making his reader feel with him. In a thumbnail dash he could
take one straight into the clutches of the silent Arctic.
Now and then he broke into verse, although in his later diaries this
disappeared, perhaps under the goad of more careful register. Breathlessly I
would read of the terrible Arctic storms that fell on him all alone, hundreds
of miles from the nearest human being. And the joys and disappointments of his
traps bore almost equally for the moment on the one to whom he was telling his
story.
And John had
taught himself to read and write from the scraps of paper that reach the coast
of Labrador.
From his
diaries I gathered bits of his life. He had left home when only ten years of
age to carve his own fortune, but his father and beloved little sisters were
still to him his home, although he never saw them now. He was everyone’s
friend, grateful for their kindnesses, always ready to help, contemptuous of
the lazy Indian, whom he hated. In the summer he fished, or worked for a
Grenfell doctor—all a mere fill-up until the hunting season returned. But
always there was a note or incomplete existence in his writings, of falling
short of his ambitions, of something bigger within the range of his vision.
Even before I waved farewell to him that day, I had him in my mind as the
subject for a sketch, “John, the Dissatisfied.”
Throughout his
diaries were many gratifying references to the place I had strangely attained
in his affections—communings with himself in the silent nights of the far
North. And each summer his letters almost plaintively inquired when I was coming to Labrador that he might
take me up the Hamilton River to the Grand Falls
where Hubbard lost his life. Even in his last letter, written from a far
distant field, he reintroduced our ancient plans. Once he informed me in the
simplest language that he had in mind a liveyere,
or native girl for his future home, and asked me to send her a white silk
handkerchief with “F” in the corner. John was growing up. During his last
summer in Labrador he was much absorbed in an ambition, to set up as a Labrador merchant, but he had not the money.
During the
first three years of our friendship he embarrassed me much by proposing each
summer to come out to visit me; and in one letter he had almost made up his
mind to come to me in Canada
and throw himself into competition for the future with the white man. I funked
the issue each time. I had no fear of his ability to hold his own in work of
brain or hand, but the Eskimo in civilization seemed too large a responsibility
for one man to assume. At every landing-place in Labrador
was, at the time of my visit, a notice threatening with a fine of a hundred
pounds anyone inducing an Eskimo to leave the country. It was a result of the
dire consequences of the Eskimo encampment at the Chicago World's Fair, in
1893. And I could not rid myself of the solemn warning of an Indian chief
friend of mine against the risk.
Once a letter
arrived from John in midwinter.
The familiar
handwriting on the outside was weirdly unnatural at that season of the year,
for I knew the Labrador was frozen in
impenetrable ice. Inside I learned that a courier was coming out on snowshoes
overland, through those hundreds of miles of untracked snow wastes of Quebec. I replied
immediately. And his diary the next summer told of his joy at the receipt in
midwinter of a letter from his friend. A pair of hunters, on their way in to
their grounds somewhere beyond John, had carried his letter from the little
village on the river and left it in one of his huts.
During the
fall of 1914 my letters to him were going astray. His arrived regularly, always
bemoaning my negligence. A dozen times I wrote on alternate days. The summer of
1915 opened with his diaries and more letters of lonesome plaint. Through June
and July they continued. Not a letter of mine was he receiving, although his
reached me as usual. Then one day came his despairing effort. On the outside he
had written in his most careful hand: “If anyone gets this and knows where Mr.
Amy is, please send it to him.” Thereupon I wrote to friends in St. John’s to get in
touch with John at any cost.
In a couple of
his letters he had mentioned his desire to be a soldier, but I had dismissed it
as one of his ambitions blocked by his race. In the one my acquaintances were
to forward to me he announced that he had enlisted and was going to England to
train.
I ask you to
consider that. An Eskimo, a thousand miles from the nearest newspaper—no
outside life but the Newfoundland fisherman and for only seven or eight weeks
of the year, no industry but hunting and fishing, eight months in the snowbound
silences of the most desolate country on earth! And John Shiwak, the swarthy
little Eskimo, was going to fight for his country whose tangible benefits could
mean nothing to him! Young men in the heart of things cannot read this without
blushing—surely! Within the little Eskimo was burning that which puts
conscription, and strikes, and shirking beyond the pale.
In the early
spring of 1915 I came to England.
Within a week I had found where the Newfoundland Regiment was in training.
John’s reply to my letter is too sacred to publish. There was joy in every line
of it. “I have nothing to write about,” he said, in his simple way. And then he
proceeded to impress me with a mission in life I had scarcely appreciated. But
he was in Scotland, and I
was in London.
And travel in England
was discouraged. Within a very few weeks he was on his way to France, full of
ardour. And just before he went he sent me a picture of himself in khaki, on
the back the message, “This is for you.”
Almost every
week, and sometimes twice a week, I heard from him. He was not liking the life.
There was something about it he did not understand—this killing of men week
after week—and his modesty and reticence, I fear, made him a prey to more
assertive fellow-soldiers. He wrote me that his comforts were stolen when he
was in the line, not complainingly but sadly. I sent him duplicates which never
reached him. I wrote to him to appeal to his commanding officer. And
thereafter, for months, for some strange reason, no letter of mine was received
by him. His petitions for news of me drove me to measures that put me once more
in touch with him. Once he was sick in hospital "with his neck", but
apart from that he was in the lines every time his battalion was on duty. And
after eleven months without leave he suddenly reached Blighty.
It was
characteristic of our merely spiritual propinquity that I had left for Devon on
a holiday trip only two days before his joyful announcement arrived, and when
his wire reached me on a Friday night there was no train to bring him to me and
return him before Monday night ; and he was due in Scotland on Monday. I hastened back
from Devon to catch him on his way through to France, but the letter he sent me
from somewhere in London neglected to include his address, and I could not find
him before his leave was up that night.
His letter of
regret, written from Folkestone, as he waited for the boat to France, is by
me. “I hope we will meet again somewhere,” he said, and I imagined a tone of
hopelessness rang in it.
Upon his
return to France
sorrow came to him. He had induced two other Eskimos to join up with him, but
they had not been able to stand the life, and were sent home. But his real
grief was the death in action of his hunting mate who had often shared his
winters in Labrador, a white man. “I am the
only one left from Labrador,” he moaned. And
the longing to get back to his old life peeped out from every line. But to my
sympathy and an effort to brighten him, he replied: “ I am hanging on all right. The only thing to do is to
stick it till it’s over.”
It is through
misty eyes I read his letters of those last three months. The duration of the
war was wearing on him. He had no close friends, none to keep warm the link
with his distant home. In September he lamented: “ I have had no letters from
home since July. There will be no more now till the ice breaks.” And in his
last he longed again for the old hunting days. Labrador,
that had never satisfied his ambitions, looked warm and attractive to him now.
He wondered what the fur would be for the coming winter, what his old friends
and his people were doing, how the Grenfell doctor had managed without him.
I had been
sending him books and writing paper, small luxuries in food and soldiers comforts.
“It is good to know I have two friends,” he thanked me. (The other was a woman
near his training camp in Scotland.)
“I don’t think
a man could be better off.”
Simple,
grateful John! He complained of the cold; and I dispatched a warm sweater-coat
and a pair of wool gloves.
That was in
mid-November. A month later an official envelope came to me. Inside was my last
letter. On its face was the soulless stamp, “Deceased.” More sympathetic hands
had added: “Dead,” “Killed,” “Verified.”
It was a
damp-eyed sergeant who told me of his end, this native of Labrador,
the only Eskimo to lay down his life for the Empire.
“He was a
white man.” he whispered. Would that John could have heard it! It happened in
the Cambrai tank drive. The tanks were held up by the canal before Masnieres,
and John's company was ordered to rush a narrow bridge that had unaccountably
been left standing. John, chief sniper for the battalion, lately promoted to
lance-corporal, the muscular man of the wilds, outpaced his comrades. The
battalion still argue which was the first to reach the bridge, John or another.
But John reached the height of the little arch and turned to wave his companions
on.
It was a
deadly corner of the battle front. The Germans, granted a breathing space by
the obstacle of the canal, were rallying. Big shells were dropping everywhere,
scores of machine-guns were barking across the narrow line of protecting water.
And just beyond the bridge-head, in among the trees, the enemy had erected
platforms in tiers, bearing machine-guns. As John stood, his helmet awry, his
mouth open in shouts of encouragement unheard amid the din, the deadly group of
guns broke loose. That was why the bridge had been left.
The Eskimo
swayed, bent a little, then slowly sank. But even as he lay they saw his hand
point ahead. And then he lay still. And they .passed him on the bridge, lying
straight and peaceful, gone to a better hunting-ground than he had ever
anticipated.
And my
thoughts of John Shiwak, the Eskimo, are that he must be satisfied at last.
Picture
captions:
A reproduction of a portion of John
Shiwak’s letter from the Front to the Author. Although only an Eskimo. John was
a writer of poetry, an artist, and a photographer—probably the most educated of
all Eskimos.
The battalion
still argue which wag the first to reach the bridge, John or another. But John
reached the height of the little arch and turned to wave his companions on.
