Tookoolito

Tookoolito was born in the Cumberland Sound area of Baffin Island. As a young woman she spent time in England with her husband Ebierbing, whom Europeans called Joe, an experience that left her fluent in English and gave her an unusual understanding of how outsiders thought, alongside her own deep knowledge of Arctic travel and survival.

That combination made her indispensable to the American explorer Charles Francis Hall, who hired the couple in 1860 for the first of several expeditions searching Baffin Island for relics and survivors of the lost Franklin expedition. Tookoolito worked as interpreter, seamstress and diplomat between Hall's party and local Inuit communities, whose cooperation and knowledge the expeditions depended on completely, whatever credit the published accounts gave to Hall himself.

In 1871 the couple joined Hall's Polaris expedition toward the North Pole. After Hall died in suspicious circumstances and the ship was later crushed and abandoned in the ice, Tookoolito was among nineteen people, including several children, left stranded on a large ice floe as it drifted for six months down the coast of Labrador through the winter of 1872 to 1873. Her sewing kept the group in usable skin clothing, her hunting and food-handling knowledge stretched meagre supplies, and her calm authority held the group together until a sealing ship finally spotted them.

She and Ebierbing settled for a time in Groton, Connecticut, where their young daughter died of tuberculosis, a loss from which Tookoolito never fully recovered. She died in 1876, remembered by the explorers she had saved rather more than by the wider public whose expeditions she made possible.