Nunaga: my land, my country

‘Single, ambitious, self-reliant young man required,’ read a Hudson’s Bay Company advertisement in the Glasgow Sunday Post one day in 1955; ‘must be prepared to live in isolation.’ Duncan Pryde, an eighteen-year-old orphan, ex-merchant seaman and disgruntled factory-worker, decided to try his hand at fur trading and emigrated to Canada.

In Nunaga, Duncan Pryde tells of his discovery of a remote and primitive way of life to which, astonishingly, he found that he easily adapted.

One of his first posts was isolated Perry Island then a refuge of fugitives from the law, where most of the male Eskimos were caught up in blood feuds. Pryde describes how, after a night-long fight, almost to the death, with the community bully, he won the respect and affection of these tough people, and came to share their life completely – all their concerns, joys and tribulations. He earned a degree of acceptance by the Eskimos that is granted to few whitemen; he witnessed the most sacred of Eskimo shaman ceremonies; he was paid the ultimate compliment – the invitation to share a friend’s wife.

His story abounds in high adventure – incredible, near-fatal sled and canoe journeys; seal, polar bear and caribou hunts; breathtaking encounters with the beauty of Arctic flora and fauna.

Pryde speaks with authority of norther native life–the Eskimos’ birth, death and marriage rites, their extraordinary tolerant sexual customs, their age-old and amazingly effective hunting skills, their uncertain future in a fast-changing North. His account becomes all the more valuable as traditional Eskimo society vanishes into history, and the Eskimo follows western civilization out of the tundra into town.

Duncan Pryde’s experience is of a kind shared only by a handful of truly original adventurers, those who have ventured into the life of a remote people and for a chosen time taken to themselves, with awe-inspiring totality, the manner and the soul of that people.

(jacket flap)