The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, is home to thousands of treasures. Many of those treasures were taken from (or “gifted by”) indigenous peoples around the world for study or as status symbols in European museums, universities, and private homes.  Among the artefacts on display in the Museum, is a collection of Inuit hunting and fishing tools. The story of how they came to be in the Museum is one of disappointment, friendship, loss, and adventure.

In 1818, Sir John Ross commanded one of two ships on expedition to seek out the Northwest Passage. The other ship was commanded by Lieutenant William Edward Parry. During the voyage, at Lancaster Sound, Ross saw that his way was blocked by a mountain range that he named the Croker mountains. The expedition returned to Britain, and Ross was promoted. He published his observations and experiences in 1819: A Voyage of Discovery … for the Purpose of Exploring Baffin’s Bay, and Inquiring into the Probability of a North-West Passage. However, the second secretary to the Admiralty, Sir John Barrow, never forgave Ross for failing in his expedition. A tit-for-tat followed, conducted through pamphlets and publications by several figures involved in the expedition.

Ross would not sail for the Arctic again until 1829, when the Victory, funded mostly by “gin magnate” Felix Booth and by Ross himself, would become icebound. Ross and his men survived until 1833, and Ross’s Narrative of a Second Voyage (pp. 201-2) places great emphasis on learning from the Inuit:

“It would be very desirable indeed if the men could acquire the taste for Greenland food; since all experience has shown that the large use of oil and fat meats is the true secret of life in these frozen countries, and that the natives cannot subsist without it; becoming diseased, and dying under a more meagre diet. […] I have little doubt, indeed, that many of the unhappy men who have perished from wintering in these climates, and whose histories are well known, might have been saved if they had been aware of these facts, and had conformed, as is so generally prudent, to the usages and the experience of the natives.”

It was during this period that Ross collected the artefacts that are still on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum: a kayak said to have been the property of Adam Beck, a Greenland Inuit man who acted as interpreter for Ross’s 1851 Arctic expedition; kayak paddles; hunting and fishing implements; caribou-horn implements; a walrus ivory knife; a pair of ambidextrous seal-hide gloves; and a leather sled-belt used by Ross on his trek from Elizabeth Harbour to Fury Beach, Boothia Peninsula, Nunavut, in June 1832.

Ross retained these items until the 1850s – when he experienced another great disappointment. Sir John Franklin’s famously ill-fated expedition had been missing since 1845, with no sign of Admiralty success in locating it. Ross had been insulted in that expedition’s planning stages, when his offer of advice was rejected. So, in 1850, he raised private funds to send out a small vessel, the Felix, but, as Elizabeth Baigent notes, this did not “materially further” the efforts of the British Admiralty ships to solve the Franklin mystery.

It was in the immediate aftermath of this failed project that Ross corresponded closely with the astronomer and antiquary, John Lee. The pair’s correspondence in these years (1850–1856) survives at the Caird Library in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. The men were good friends, with Lee supporting Ross, and Ross confiding in Lee his lack of confidence in the Admiralty’s search for the missing Franklin expeditions.

The letters also indicate when Ross may have given his Inuit artefacts to Lee. In a letter dated 8 Nov. 1855, Ross writes to Lee: “I am glad that the box of miscellaneous articles arrived safe and gave you satisfaction. I am quite sure they could not be better bestowed.”

Lee and Ross crossed paths quite a few times. As it happened, in 1808, they were both in Sweden, but it is not known whether they met there. Later, they were both were active in the Meteorological, Astronomical and Archaeological Societies, and Lee contributed to the private fund established by Ross to aid his Arctic expedition of 1850–1851.

The collection remained at Lee’s home at Hartwell, Bucks., until July 1918, when it was donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum, where it remains today.

Similar objects exist in other major British collections such as the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, indicating the popularity of particular kinds of with collectors – and, in some cases, indicating their ubiquity in the indigenous setting. But Ross’s collection is an early example. Dale Idiens has outlined how, in Britain, most collections of Inuit artefacts date from the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely because the later nineteenth-century maritime expeditions had stored and transported artefacts much more easily than the earlier expeditions.

The sled-belt that Ross gave to Lee is particularly interesting. Inscribed with the story of its multiple appropriations, it communicates impressions of both Inuit life and of the life of the Arctic explorer. Ross’s survival depended on adopting Inuit skills, and the sled-belt symbolised his triumph over Arctic conditions. In the Arctic, this was a practical, everyday object – but inside a glass case in a British museum, it takes on a new life as the residue of failure and disappointment.

Sources:

Baigent, Elizabeth. “Ross, Sir John (1777–1856).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed January 24, 2017, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24126.

Idiens, Dale. “Rae as Collector and Ethnographer.” No Ordinary Journey: John Rae – Arctic Explorer 1813–1893, edited by Ian Bunyan, Jenni Calder, Dale Idiens and Bryce Wilson, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993.

Ross, John. Letters to John Lee. 1850–56. MS. National Maritime Museum, MS HAR/301–343.

Ross, John. Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage, A. W. Webster, 1835.