Sir Allen William Young (British, 1830–1915)
“The Countries Round the North Pole,” from The Two Voyages of the ‘Pandora’ in 1875 and 1876
Engraving, London: E. Stanford, 1879
General Research Division
The Big Nail
Transcript below
Maggie Mustard: By the end of the 19th century, a commonly held belief in the West was that the Inuit phrase for the North Pole was tigishi or tigi su, “the big nail” in English. However, it’s unlikely that there was any Inuit word for the North Pole before the arrival of Western explorers. Inuit guides who supported these expeditions were often mystified as to why anyone would search so fervently for a place where there was quite literally nothing at all.
The mythic construction of “the big nail” may have come instead from a cross-cultural misunderstanding. Western polar maps shared with Inuit guides would have shown the intended goal as one at the center of increasingly smaller, concentric latitudinal rings. This, in turn, resulted in the coining of the Inuit phrase qalahirriaq, “the big navel,” which may simply have been misheard by Western ears as “the big nail.”
The idea of a nail at the top of the world had much more in common with the double meaning of the English word “pole.” And so the myth of “the big nail” persisted well into the 20th century.
End of Transcript
Maggie Mustard
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