Blacklead Island
| Blacklead Island (Uummannarjuaq) | ||
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| Waters | Cumberland Sound , Labrador Sea | |
| Geographical location | 64 ° 58 '55 " N , 66 ° 12' 50" W | |
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| length | 2.9 km | |
| width | 1 km | |
| surface | 2 km² | |
| Highest elevation | 143 m | |
| Residents | uninhabited | |
Blacklead Island ( Inuktitut Uummannarjuaq , "like the heart of a large marine mammal") is an uninhabited island in the Qikiqtaaluk region of Nunavut , Canada . Your former whaling station has been a National Historic Site of Canada since 1985 .
geography
The island is off the coast of Baffin Island in Cumberland Sound . It is 2.9 kilometers long, up to one kilometer wide and 143 m high.
history
Inuit have long been visiting the island to go whaling here in the spring. In 1840 the young Inuk Eenoolooapik (approx. 1820–1847) brought the Scottish whaler William Penny here. Blacklead Island became one of the two centers of whaling in Cumberland Sound - the other was Kekerten Island - and a place where the Inuit met with European and American whalers. In the 1850s and 1860s, more than 30 ships entered the Cumberland Sound annually. Some of the men spent the winter in wooden houses on Blacklead Island, so that a permanent whaling station was built around 1860. Soon, however, the work of whaling was left to the Inuit and the hunted animals were collected in summer. The island was now permanently inhabited, but the bowhead whale population collapsed in the 1870s . In 1894 Edmund James Peck (1850–1924) established an Anglican mission on the island. He also taught the Inuit the syllabic system ("syllabic system") for Inuktitut. The system spread from here all over the Canadian northeast. Around 1900 there was a renewed boom in whaling and an increase in population. The German Arctic explorer Bernhard Hantzsch found 168 Inuit living on the island in 1909. In 1921 the last bowhead whale was shot. In the same year the Hudson's Bay Company established a trading post in Pangnirtung with an outpost on Blacklead Island.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kenn Harper: Eenoolooapik . In: Mark Nuttall (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Arctic . tape 1 . Routledge, New York and London 2003, ISBN 1-57958-436-5 , pp. 543-544 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
Web links
- Uummannarjuaq (Blacklead Island) in The Canadian Encyclopedia (English)
- Black Lead Iceland Whaling Station National Historic Site of Canada (English)
- Blacklead Island in the Atlas of Canada - Toporama