IN 1847, FOUR years after being stood down as lieutenant governor of Tasmania, Sir John Franklin died at the other end of the earth trying to find the Arctic’s fabled North-West Passage. He and his crew were too proud to ask the local Inuit communities for advice. Like the Norse in Greenland some five hundred years earlier, they died partly because they would not accept that an indigenous people held the key to survival in the Arctic.

By the time Franklin had been immortalised for his intrepid but failed expedition, the Inuit had been living in their frozen homeland for millennia. They survived where many others perished because they adapted their diet and customs, their culture and even their language to this frozen and hostile yet resource-rich wilderness.