Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
Death is a lonely business, but often graveyards are crowded places. This week, we’re remembering some of the loneliest graves in the universe—places of particular isolation, melancholy, and beauty. Previously: the most isolated war grave of the British Commonwealth, a Mormon pioneer’s grave, and cremated remains on their way out of the solar system.
Herschel Island, also known as Qikiqtaryuk, is fragile and losing ground. The whalers are long gone, and the Inuvialuit who once called it home now only pass through every once in a while, as a seasonal place to camp, or as a stopover while they’re out hunting. This 45-square-mile island in the Beaufort Sea, north of the Arctic Circle, is largely abandoned, and threatened by erosion and rapidly vanishing permafrost.
That could be a death knell for the island’s graveyards.
The island can be a tough place to live. On one hand, it’s beautiful—treeless but strewn with wildflowers and roaming caribou. On the other, it spends nearly half the year stuck in ice and near-darkness, occasionally broken by a few hours of twilight. It’s also a vexing place to bury the dead.
In the 19th century, the demand for whale oil and baleen led whalers to meet the challenges of Arctic life, and the island’s population swelled to 1,500. Whalers often spent the winter hunkering down aboard their ships, but they sometimes died there, too. Digging…
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