Léo laughed. A typo, surely— Eskimos with a Z, stranded in Bordeaux? But the log wasn't alone. Over the following weeks, he found fragments: a customs officer’s note about “seal-fur mittens traded for a cask of claret,” a wedding certificate from 1914 for a “Kunuk Sivuk” and a fishmonger’s daughter named Céleste, even a faded photograph of a stocky man in a thick parka standing before the Tour Pey-Berland, looking utterly unfazed by the summer heat.
In the winter of 1912, a rogue ice floe had carried a small Inuit hunting party far off the coast of Labrador. Adrift for weeks, they were rescued by a Breton whaling ship low on provisions. The captain, a pragmatic man named Yves Kerdrel, intended to drop them in Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, but storms pushed them south. By the time they sighted land, they were entering the Gironde estuary. The three Inuit—Kunuk, his wife Nuka, and her younger brother Panik—had never seen trees taller than a man. Bordeaux, with its honey-colored stone and endless vineyards, must have felt like a city built on the skin of another world. eskimoz bordeaux
Léo Mazaud, the archivist, eventually published a small monograph: “Les Ours Blancs du Sud: A Forgotten Inuit Presence in Belle Époque Bordeaux.” It sold seventeen copies. One went to a museum in Nunavut. One went to a collector in Paris. And one, mysteriously, was found on the grave of Kunuk Sivuk in the cemetery of Chartreuse, wrapped in oilcloth, with a single spiral drawn on the cover in faded blue ink. Léo laughed