How did Inuit knowledge decide who could travel the polar north?

Some of the polar travellers who did best in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the ones who learned from the people who had lived in the Arctic all along. Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit means, literally, "that which has long been known by Inuit": a body of knowledge about nature, animals and people, passed from Elders to youth and learned by taking part.

John Rae learned to live off the land as local people did and, with local craftsmen, designed his own snowshoes. That let him travel great distances with little equipment and few followers, unlike many Victorian explorers. Inuit also told him where to go: in 1846 they pointed him to salt water northwest of Repulse Bay, and told him that the Gulf of Boothia was a bay he would have to cross on land.

Roald Amundsen took the lesson further. During his Northwest Passage voyage he and his crew learned from the Netsilik Inuit to use sled dogs for transport and to wear animal skins instead of heavy woollen parkas, which could not keep out the cold when wet. When he went south he rejected the heavy wool of earlier Antarctic attempts and adopted Inuit-style furred skins. Robert Peary studied Inuit survival techniques too, building igloos, wearing furs and relying on Inuit as hunters and dog-drivers.

Inuit knowledge was also a source of evidence, and it was not always trusted. In 1854 Rae passed on what Inuit had told him about Franklin's men, including cannibalism, and Charles Dickens derided their accounts as "the wild tales of a herd of savages". Twentieth-century archaeology confirmed that some of the crews had indeed resorted to cannibalism.