Niakungitok, George (Inuit, b.?-d.1825)

Niakungitok was baptized George (at the Moravian mission at Hopedale, where he learned to read Inuktitut and speak English, he toured Berlin, Leipzig, and England, between the years 1823 and 1824, as part of an “exhibition” by Captain Samuel Hadlock (1792-1829), a whaling captain from Maine.

In October 1820, Samuel Hadlock Jr. (1792-1829), a whaling captain from Maine, brought onboard his ship Five Brothers an Eskimo man from Greedy (now Grady) Harbor, Southern Labrador (near Cartwright), and then picked up an Eskimo woman and child about 50 miles further down the coast. Hadlock was in Labrador to obtain a cargo of ice for the West Indies trade but arranged with the families of the two young Eskimos to take them with him until the following summer. They were initially exhibited in New London, Connecticut, and by his uncle Epps Hadlock in New York and Philadelphia in early 1821. A recent widower, Samuel Hadlock then left his three children with his sister and in the Fall sailed for Europe, where he exhibited his “Esquimaux Indians” and “Museum” at country fairs throughout England and Ireland, and then in Hamburg, Leipzig, Berlin, Dresden, Potsdam, Prague, Vienna, Munich, Stuttgart, and Strasbourg during the period of 1821-1825. According to a booklet printed to accompany the exhibition, Hadlock’s “Museum” contained 77 items, with about equal proportions of North American Indian and Eskimo clothing and ethnological objects; natural history specimens, especially various animal skins, teeth, bones, and various “oddities”; and New Zealand Maori clothing and objects, including a jade hei tiki and a preserved tattooed head. The Eskimo couple originally consisted of 27 year old Niagungitok, baptized George (at the Moravian mission at Hopedale, where he learned to read Inuktitut and speak English), 25 year old Mary Coonahnik, and an infant who died in New York. Mary died later that year in England, and for exhibition purposes was initially replaced by a Gypsy woman dressed as an Eskimo, and later by another dark-complexioned but more sober and reliable impostor! Niagungitok demonstrated the use of his kayak, a dog pulling a sled, his skill at spearing birds (and coins), and an “Eskimo marriage ceremony”, both before the general paying public and for royalty (after Hadlock’s marriage to the daughter of a worker at the Royal brass works near Berlin). He also sold his pen and pencil drawings, most of the few known examples showing him holding a harpoon, his “wife” holding a fish on a short line, and a dog standing in between. After George died of pneumonia in Strasbourg on November 18, 1825, his “wife” was exhibited in Paris together with George’s stuffed corpse. Hadlock returned to his home on Great Cranberry Island in Maine with his new Prussian wife and their daughter, born in Paris shortly before their return in the late spring of 1826. He died in 1829 on the coast of Greenland when his ship and all hands were lost at sea while on an Arctic voyage in pursuit of seals, which he planned to stuff and sell to European royalty for their collections of curiosities on his expected return to Europe.