That was not the end of it, however. For the skullcap, soon to be celebrated as “The Jock Roberts Yarmulke”, was not the only Hebraic artifact to be found in the Arctic. Another was discovered by Waldo Logan of Boston, captain of the whaling barque Determination, who landed at Pelly Bay in 1869. Logan was met by a friendly band of Netsilik Eskimos. One of them, In-nook-poo-zhee-jook by name, claimed to have found a second lifeboat on King William Island with a large number of skeletons strewn about. Some of the bones had been severed with a saw and many of the skulls had been punctured the easier to suck out the brains. He had taken a book back with him from the site for his children to play with and it was the remnants of this book, later established to be a siddur or Hebrew prayer book, that Logan would bring out of the Arctic.
Logan, an observant man, noted that the parkas worn by this band of Netsiliks differed in one significant detail from the usual. Four fringes hung from the outermost skin of each one, the fringes made up of twelve silken strands. One of their number, Ugjuugalaaq, told him, “We were on King William Island to hunt seals when we met a small party of whites pulling a boat on a sledge. They all looked starved and cold. Except for the young man called Tulugaq, and his older friend, Doktuk, none of them wore furs.”
Here, in Life With The Esquimaux, A Narrative of an Arctic Quest in Search of Survivors of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition, Logan noted in parenthesis that tulugaq meant raven in Inuktituk.
“We camped together for four days and shared a seal with the whites. Tulugaq was short and strongly built with a black beard and was most concerned about Doktuk who seemed very sick.”
Ugjuugalaaq was careful not to say anything about Tulugaq’s struggle to the death with the officer who dressed like a woman or about the miracles wrought by him. Neither did he mention the death of Doktuk, who was buried beneath a wooden head-board that read:
Sacred
to the memory of
Isaac Grant, MD
assistant-surgeon
HMS Erebus
Died Nov. 12, 1847
My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me? why art thou so
far from helping me, and from the
words of my roaring?
Psalm 22
A hundred years later academics were still squabbling over the enigma of the Hebraic artifacts, ventilating their theories in learned essays that appeared in The Beaver, Canadian Heritage, and The Journal of Arctic Studies.
Professor Knowlton Hardy, president of the Arctic Society, put forward his hypothesis at the meeting in the spring of 1969 that led to Moses’s expulsion. The so-called Jock Roberts Yarmulke, he said, was not a bona fide Franklin clue but a red herring. Or, he added, looking directly at Moses, more properly, perhaps, a schmaltz herring. It was inconceivable that it had ever belonged to any member of the Franklin expedition or even a native. Most likely it had been the property of a Jew on board an American whaler.
“Possibly,” Moses said, “the keeper of the ship’s ledgers.” Then, improvising on a bellyful of Scotch, he advanced a proposition of his own. One or more members of the Franklin expedition had been of Jewish extraction and the artifacts had been among their personal possessions.
“Fiddlesticks!” Hardy said.
Moses, acknowledging Hardy with a lopsided smile, pointed out that more bizarre objects than a yarmulke, or a siddur, had belonged to certain of the officers or crew. This was proven by understandably unpublished but meticulously itemized accounts (available to serious scholars at Admiralty House) of articles found in searches of Beechey and King William Islands. They included a filigreed black suspender belt, several pairs of frothy garters, some silk panties, three corsets, two female wigs, and four diaphanous petticoats.
“I don’t have to sit here and listen to this drivel,” Hardy shouted, slamming his fist against the table. The latter items, he protested, catalogued with such a typical drunken smirk by Berger—casting doubts on the sexual proclivities of brave officers and men—impugning the honour of the dead—were in fact absolutely innocent. They would have been the property of either Lieutenant Philip Norton or Purser John Hoare. Both of them had been to the Arctic with Parry, on the HMS Hecla, and had distinguished themselves on the boards of the Royal Arctic Theatre that had been set up in Winter Harbour in 1819. Norton had played a saucy young lady in a number of farces and harlequinades and Hoare’s interpretation of Viola had earned him five curtain calls as well as the sobriquet Dolly. “As for Jews having signed on with Franklin,” Hardy charged, “nonsense!”
“And why not?” Moses asked.
“Let me be direct with you, Berger. It is a well-known fact that Jews who immigrated to this great country in the nineteenth century did not risk the Arctic Circle, but tended to settle in cities where there was the most opportunity for trade and advancement.”
Rising uncertainly to his feet, Moses drifted over to Hardy’s place at the U-shaped table, picked up a jug of water, and attempted to empty it over his head. Hardy, leaping free, knocked it out of his hand.
IN THE SUMMER of 1969 a scientific expedition was flown out to the Isaac Grant gravesite on King William Island. The expedition, led by Professor Hardy, included a forensic scientist and an anthropologist, as well as a support group of technicians armed with the latest in mobile X-ray equipment. They lifted the body of Isaac Grant, undisturbed for more than a century, out of its resting place and defrosted it. Grant had been buried in a narrow plank coffin. But his body, unlike the other three previously exhumed, was wrapped in a curious shroud. The anthropologist pronounced the shroud disconcertingly similar to the sort of shawl that had once been the everyday outer garment of ancient nomads and farmers in the Near East. The shroud or shawl was made of fine woven wool with occasional black bands, its corners pierced and reinforced to take knotted tassels or fringes. When photographs of the shawl, taken from every possible angle, were later distributed among Arctic buffs, Moses Berger pounced. He wrote to the Arctic Society, identifying the garment as a talith, the traditional prayer shawl common to the Ashkenazi Jews of Northern Europe.
Professor Hardy was outraged. Moses’s letter seemed to confirm his outlandish theory that one or maybe even more members of the Franklin expedition had been Jewish. However, an examination of the startling documents buried with Grant belied that notion. There was, for instance, a letter from a vicar, addressed to the Reverend Isaac Grant, praising him for his diligent work on behalf of a mission to the savages of the Gold Coast, and beseeching other Christians to heed his plea for charitable contributions. Other documents and letters, tied with ribbon, were even more impressive. There was a letter, uncharacteristically effusive, commending Grant for his medical acumen, signed by Mr. Gladstone. Another letter, this one from Sir Charles Napier, celebrated his unequalled skills as a bone-setter, and thanked him for mending a leg that had been broken by a French musket ball. Other letters, signed by still more dignitaries, recommended Grant as a devout Christian and a surgeon blessed with unsurpassed talents. Confirming these panegyrics, Grant’s medical degree, also buried with him, showed that he had graduated from the College of Surgeons in Edinburgh summa cum laude in 1838. Folded between two of the letters was an old theatre bill from Manchester, announcing: