Victoria Island is slightly bigger than Great Britain but home to 2,168 people
Straddling Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, Canada's second-largest island covers about 219,191 square kilometres, a touch more than Great Britain. Yet the 2021 census found only 2,168 residents, split between Cambridge Bay and Ulukhaktok. Victoria Island also holds a record for nesting: no island sitting inside an island inside another island is larger.
People were here long before the name. The Thule culture left five sleds on the Wollaston Peninsula dated between 1250 and 1573 AD, and in Inuinnaqtun the island is Kitlineq, home of the Copper Inuit. European mapping came in fragments. John Richardson glimpsed the south-west coast in 1826 and called it Wollaston Land; Peter Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson traced the south-east in 1839 and named it Victoria Land, after the queen who reigned from 1837 to 1901. A map from 1846 still left a blank between the two, until John Rae charted the whole south coast in 1851 and joined them up. Other stretches waited until 1905 and the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1916 and 1917.
The coastline is so ragged that the island is really a cluster of peninsulas, and the writer Andrew Hund thought its outline looked like a stylised maple leaf. The high point in the Shaler Mountains reaches just 655 metres, and the biggest lake, Tahiryuaq, spreads over 562 square kilometres. Crossing it on foot is no small thing: Clark Carter and Chris Bray failed on their first 1,000 km attempt in 2005 and finished the last 660 km in 2008, becoming the first recorded people to walk across.
No month averages 10 °C, and winter lasts around nine months. At Cambridge Bay the sun stays below the horizon from about November 30 to January 11 and never sets from May 19 to July 22. Each winter the island's Dolphin-Union caribou walk across sea ice to the mainland, unusual behaviour among North American caribou.
A 2018–2019 survey near Cambridge Bay recorded 237 lichen species, 35 of them new to the Canadian Arctic islands. Lichens are key winter food for muskox and caribou, and because much of the land has been free of ice for only about 5,000 years, few species are unique to it.
Source: Victoria Island
