ESKIMO ENGINEER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 October 1938, Page 7

ESKIMO ENGINEER

EFFICIENCY WITH SMALL EQUIPMENT. MOTORS AND CHRONOMETERS REPAIRED. There are no garages or repair shops on Canada’s Arctic islands, but when anything from a watch to a ship’s engine needs repairing it is usually referred to John Ell of Southampton Island, one of Canada’s wealthiest Eskimos (says the “Christian Science Monitor”). Not long ago an English university exploring party reached Canadian waters with expensive and intricate engines for two boats which they had built to order at Churchill, on Hudson Bay. They headed for Southampton Island at the top of the bay. Long before they reached it their engines failed to work. Not one of that party .of natural scientists brqught up in the motor age could make sufficient repairs to keep the engines running. The fur trader at Southampton told them to see John Ell. John had never seen such engines, but for many years he had run his own petrol engines on his schooners. And though these English engines were more complicated. John’explained later, he found a pin broken in each, and without replacement parts, he sat down to file from scrap metal at the fur post, pins to fit those engines. When he was finished they worked like new. CHRONOMETER REPAIRED. Another party of explorers remarked they had a chronometer with them which would not function. Again the storekeeper called in John Ell. He had seen watches, but nothing as fascinating as the works of a chronometer. Sure he would fix it. With only an ordinary manicure file and a piece of scrap copper he made new parts for the chronometer. When the makers in London saw it they were amazed that a man with such meagre equipment could do so perfect a job. John Ell is outstanding among Canada’s northern citizens, even so much that he was one of the honoured ones to receive a medal on the occasion of King George’s silver jubilee. He is so anxious to adapt himself to the white man’s way insofar as it is possible that he sent his eldest son to boarding school near Toronto a few years ago. He meets Canada’s annual government inspection ship dressed in a blue serge suit and wearing a captain’s peaked cap. He pilots the annual supply ship each year through the maze of channels to the harbour at Southampton Island trading post?, though he has never studied a chart of the harbour approaches.