Eenoolooapik. Unknown artist. J. Henderson (lithographer). c. 1839–40. Lithograph in Alexander M’Donald, Some Passages in the History of Eenoolooapik, A Young Esquimaux, Who Was Brought to Britain in 1839, frontispiece (Edinburgh: Fraser & Co. and J. Hogg, 1841)

Inuluapik was born in about 1820 in Qimmiqsut, an island on the southern coast of Kangiqtualuk in Nunavut. When a boy, he and his family moved close to Aggiijat, then a well-used watering place for whaling ships.  There he came to the attention of Scottish whaling captain William Penny who was taken with Inuluapik’s knowledge of an ‘inland sea’ said to be teeming with whales – his childhood home, Kangiqtualuk. Although Inuluapik had not been there since boyhood, his command of traditional ways of observing the environment enabled him to draw a detailed map of the area from memory. In the autumn of 1839, Penny brought Inuluapik to Aberdeen to learn from him, and to plan a voyage with him to explore the seas and inlets he had mapped.   

“Eenoo” or “Bobbie”, as Inuluapik was called in Aberdeen, was a popular social triumph during his stay.  Any attempts to make a mere exhibition of him as a racial curiosity he met with humour and dignity: the Aberdeen Herald of 16 November 1839 delighted in his ability to turn the ethnographic gaze back onto the white man:  

One of the men at the Boiling House…(Fittie) drew the outline caricature of a Broad Face, and said, “That is an Esquimaux”. Bobbie immediately borrowed the pencil, and drawing a very long face with a long nose, said “That is an Englishman”.  

The only portrait we have of Inuluapik was produced while he was staying in Aberdeen in 1839–40. This lithograph, produced by J. Henderson of Aberdeen, served as the frontispiece of a book written about Inuluapik by ship’s doctor Alexander M’Donald, who had voyaged with him. 

While most Victorian images of Inuit presented them in their native dress, as they would have appeared in exhibitions of ‘exotic’ peoples, this is more an image of an individual rather than an ethnological spectacle. The portrait is of a well-dressed and well-disposed gentleman, and it may have been meant as evidence of a successful “civilizing mission”. However, the representation may be rather Inuluapik’s choice: he agreed to appear in his native dress just once in Aberdeen, but only on the condition that he not be asked to do so again during his visit. Not only was the clothing too hot for the Scottish springtime, but it seems he strongly resisted being made a spectacle of.  

Upon his return home to Nunavut in the Spring of 1840,  Inuluapik became a successful trader, was married and had children. Sadly, about ten years after his visit, the Aberdeen newspapers reported his death from tuberculosis.  His lungs had never recovered from the life-threatening infection which had marred an otherwise triumphant first voyage away from his home, to Scotland. 

Essay by Sophie Gilmartin