Where in the world is Fiji Island?

Isn't Fiji Island in the South Pacific Ocean?

Most people would give the above answer, but this is not correct. The island nation of Fiji is indeed in the South Pacific Ocean, but the Fiji archipelago comprises over 300 islands and not one of them is named Fiji Island.

Fiji Island in the Canadian arctic Source: Google

However, thousands of nautical miles north of Fiji, the official maps show Fiji Island above the Arctic Circle and part of the Canadian Northwest Territories. This island is isolated, off the northernmost edge of the Canadian mainland - a tiny, low-lying landform at approximately 70°10′31″ N latitude and 125°03′09″ W longitude. It rises an average of just four metres above the freezing waters off Booth Island in the Beaufort Sea. Fiji Island appeared on older Canadian charts as Little Booth Island before it was renamed at the request of the local Inuvialuit people to honour their friend Jim Fiji. Indeed, a sheltered anchorage in the south of the island used by hunters and trappers was also named Jim Fiji Harbour.

Fiji Jim's journey to his Arctic harbour Source: Facebook

Who was 'Jim Fiji'?

While reports differ in their detail, all agree that Ratu Asesela Robanakadavu probably came to the Arctic by accident. (Ratu is a title given to aristocratic males, like 'the honourable'.) He left his home district in the southern island of Kadavu to find work in Samoa, where he boarded a ship bound for the United States. Legend has it that in 1893 he mistakenly joined a whaling vessel heading north, arriving in the bitter cold of the Arctic. Known to his companions as Jim, the young man who would have been skilled in tropical agriculture worked as a whaler, sailor, trapper and hunter and settled in a brutal environment that could not have been more different from Fiji. In 1910, Jim was recorded as a harpooner on the schooner Rosie H under Captain Fritz Wolki. In 1915, he was still (or perhaps, once more) on the Rosie H.

The Canadian Arctic Expedition 1915-17

In August 1915, Ratu Asesela's survival skills caught the attention of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, leader of the scientific Canadian Arctic Expedition (CAE) which had started work two years earlier. The Fijian was employed in the Northern Party as a sailor, trapper, and expert harpooner, for the substantial wage of $75 per month. For 60 days he earned an extra bonus of $2.50 per day for 'watching a cache', probably a store of caribou meat on the east coast of Banks Island.

Jim Fiji during his CAE service Source: Canadian Museum of Nature

Expedition journals document his high value to the survival of the crew. For example, during a gruelling mapping stint on Banks Island, photographer George Hubert Wilkins took Jim Fiji on hunting teams to gather caribou and seal meat to keep the base camp from starving.

In his personal journals, Stefansson wrote that Jim Fiji was "one of the finest men in the North" and counted him as a close personal friend. Although Stefansson mistakenly at first believed Jim to be Samoan, official CAE accounts accurately state he was a Fijian chief.

Fiji Jim's later life on Fiji Island

In 1925, Jim is recorded as living alone in a shack close by his schooner moored in a sheltered harbour (now Jim Fiji Harbour), engaging in hunting and trapping despite declining vision. Some time later, he disappeared. His Inuvialuit friends reported that he went seal hunting, but they thought his poor vision led him to misjudge the condition of the ice and he must have slipped into the deadly water. He is not believed to have left any descendants.

I can't help wondering why Ratu Asesela Robanakadavu never went home to Fiji's warm waters fringed with coconut palms. Several possible reasons spring to mind, but such idle speculation will not produce the true answer. Perhaps his reasons weren't clear even to Jim Fiji himself.

More Fijians in the Arctic

But Ratu Asesela was not the only Fijian who came to call the Canadian Arctic home. The National Archives of Fiji note a separate mid-19th-century story involving a group of five Fijian sailors who were forcibly recruited onto a foreign whaling ship, eventually landing near Tuktoyaktuk in the Canadian Arctic. Here they stayed, integrated and married into the local Inuit population, a long way west from the Inuvialuit Islands where Jim Fiji would later make his home. I wonder if Jim ever heard of their descendants on his own travels through the region.

A consensus among researchers highlights that the physical traits and oral family histories of several prominent families in Tuktoyaktuk still hint at their Pacific Islander lineage. The Fiji Times in 1967 reported that an author traveling through the Northwest Territories interviewed Inuit individuals who claimed to be descendants of those original 19th-century Fijian sailors. The descendants knew they had Fijian ancestry, although they knew nothing about Fiji at all. This is surely a question that should be settled by more research and DNA analysis.

As the ancestors of Fijians are thought to have voyaged from Taiwan thousands of years ago, perhaps it should not surprise us that 19th century Fijians sailed and settled from one end of the Pacific to another.

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I look forward to hearing from you!

Bernadette

B.M. Allsopp