THE MOST GLORIFIED STRIP OF BUNTING
John McGill
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The United States North Polar expedition of 1871-73 was a disaster-strewn adventure that counts amongst the most bizarre and exciting in the annals of Arctic exploration. Commanded by Charles Francis Hall, a romantic idealist with an obsessive interest in the frozen north, the converted river tug Polaris carries a multinational crew of scientists and sailors, assisted by two Inuit families, along the so-called American Way to the North Pole - the icy channels between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. For Hall, the planting of the Stars and Stripes on the top of the world is a sacred and patriotic duty, but his enthusiasm is shared by few of his companions, and the expedition, under the strain of conditions in the high Arctic, quickly disintegrates into warring factions. With their ship embedded in the ice, the explorers plunge into a maelstrom of anarchy and paranoia fuelled by the clash of two civilisations – Inuit and European – and the mutual misunderstanding and hostility that arise from it.
John McGill’s novel chronicles the events leading up to the strange and suspicious death of the commander, and in a parallel narrative, tells the astonishing tale of the nineteen crew members separated in a storm and cast adrift on an ice floe. Their story is one of the truly great Arctic adventures, a six-month drama of narrow escapes coloured by the ever-present threats of rape, murder and cannibalism, and acted out on a shrinking platform of ice exposed to all the horrors of the most inhospitable climate on earth.
Praise for The Most Glorified Strip of Bunting
‘A murder mystery and a moral fable, the book is superbly structured in a ping pong of chapters that exploit chronology and revel in the present tense. A page turner with the obligatory saucy bits. McGill’s book may also be read as a critiique of US foreign policy, then and now - but will be more properly admired as a darn good yarn.’ The Herald
'In this fictionalised account, McGill’s colourful prose will hold you in thrall. As well as the ship becoming icebound, the crew cast adrift on an ice flow, several narrow escapes and a leader intent on planting the Stars & Stripes at the North Pole come what may, there are also continual cultural clashes between the apparently civilised Caucasians and the two Inuit families accompanying them. Like the bold brushstrokes of an oil painting, we follow the events leading up to the suspicious death of their commander. With wild imagination the author draws us into the moment as he sees it, crafting the characters by putting words into their mouths and feeling into their souls. There is feuding talk, bullying, banter. Inuit lore is explored, enabling the reader to have a view from the other side – and to be grateful not to experience the privations of living in an igloo! This marvellously wrought novel is surely based on painstaking research. The curious sequence of chapters, alternating between ‘Questing’ and ‘Drifting’, with Board of Enquiry testimonies interceding, rather interrupted the flow for me, though that doesn’t mean other readers won’t like it. In fact, this is a rambunctious tale that will not disappoint.' Polar Worlds (www/polarworlds.info)
About John McGill
John McGill was born in Glasgow and now lives in Orkney. He has taught English all over the place and has published a collection of short stories, That Rubens Guy, and a novel, Giraffes. His stories have featured in a number of anthologies and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Scotland.
An extract from The Most Glorified Strip of Bunting
Joe sits. Cassiopeia wheels. In the thin moonlight, in the sharp silence, the harpoon is better than the Springfield rifle. Six hours he sits, though he does not count hours or particularly mark Cassiopeia’s quarter-circling of the Star.
He has sat, this Joe, on gilt-surrounded plush, sipped tea with the Empress of India, sucked partridge bones with the Prince Consort. Now he perches on his ice-stool and time is not circling stars but the chants he composes to the rhythm of his own slow heartbeat. Under him he feels walrus and narwhal and the variegated seal tribes – the Greenland, the ringed, the thunder-headed oogjook – and he selects one, a small shiny spotted Greenlander, and enters him and bloodtalks to him. He sees the heart which he will remove and eat the instant the seal is on its back by the hole, as his payment for the frozen hours. He chews a piece of flipper, spit-softened by Hannah, and his chewing too finds the rhythm of his silent chant as his heartbeat tunes to the seal’s pulsing blood:
Come to the breathing hole, little brother,
Come to the breathing hole, little friend,
My harpoon-head is worried.
Let me see your head here, above the ice,
Little bowl of blood-soup, little blubber-feast, little shitbag,
I’ll chew your heart, Tookolito will lick your liver,
Puney will suck your warm eyes. Yes – the breathing hole, little friend,
Show your nose to the moon, little brother.
There is no wind, no grinding of the ice. But there is movement up high, a dance of moonlit clouds and a noise of starsong that slips under his chant. He sleeps with eyes and ears open, focused on the two-inch hole. Eyes, nose, ears, fingertips – they work unbidden, like his singing blood, and his mind is free for pictures, memories, anticipations.
Hannah’s wise feet, famous for having massaged Captain Hall’s frozen ones and thereby saving his toes. At lectures in five states she bowed to the applause while Hall introduced her and her feet, pronouncing her real name with romantic slow emphasis: Ladies and gentlemen – Tookolito.
These feet are cleverer than the ladies and gentlemen or Hall or Budington or Tyson or the scientists can ever know. Joe makes pictures: in the sweet blubbery warmth under the bearskin her toes coax and tease his oosook (which even now in his half-starved state rises to the memory, salutes their cunning) while his fingers and hers meet between her thighs in the warmest haven in the igloo. Beside them, Puney grunts her irritation and hunger and Captain Tyson knows nothing.
Tyson has told him the temperature is minus fourteen, forty-four degrees of frost, too cold for the hunt. But he has gone because the wind has died and because Puney has sobbed, and because there is a clear sky and moonlight too bright to be wasted. The moonlight is sharper, reveals more than the hour and a half of noon twilight. Within an hour his heart and fingertips are synchronised to the ghostly frolickings under the ice while his head roams free. There is a parade of feasts in his skull – deep red oogjook soup, delicate sweet walrus liver, a comically small chewy oosook from Nanuk the ice-bear, blankets of maktak fresh from the whale, warming the gums and the throat. Then satiation, and Hannah laughing under the skins as she steers his oosook from her ribs to friendlier shores.
