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.
Kunuk and Nuka, meanwhile, opened a tiny échoppe on Rue Saint-James: Chez les Eskimoz . They sold smoked eel (which they called “river seal”), pickled lingonberries imported from Sweden at great expense, and a fermented tea made from local heather that tasted, as one critic wrote, “like a peat fire wrestling a flower.” It became fashionable. The poet Francis Jammes wrote an ode to Nuka’s savon au phoque —seal fat soap—though no seal was ever harmed in Bordeaux for its making. eskimoz bordeaux
The story that emerged was stranger than fiction. In the winter of 1912, a rogue ice
Today, Chez les Eskimoz is a natural wine bar. The name is gone, replaced by something trendy in sans-serif type. But if you know where to look—down a narrow alley off Rue Sainte-Catherine, behind a dumpster and a wilting plane tree—you can still see the faded outline of a polar bear painted on the brick. And on certain winter nights, when the mist from the river rolls in thick enough to taste like salt, older Bordelais swear you can hear the faint sound of a sealskin drum, beating slow and steady, just beneath the hum of the trams. By the time they sighted land, they were
In the heart of southwestern France, where the Garonne River curls like a dark ribbon under limestone skies, the word Eskimoz meant nothing. Or it meant everything, depending on whom you asked.
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.