Whilst he was ambling around the Inuit settlements on the Upper Savage Islands, Captain Parry came across a human skull. This was just one of the six Inuit crania that would reach the Edinburgh Phrenological Society by 1834. Ostensibly, these skulls all came from the same place: at least according to the phrenologists, they were all ‘Esquimaux’, originating from the Arctic region around Davis Strait and Baffin Bay. However, to accept this claim is to privilege a static understanding of locality, one in which the work of transit is absent. In this paper, I uncover how Inuit crania moved along different social and physical routes in their passage from the Arctic towards Europe and the USA. Some of these skulls were collected by Danish colonialists, others by Royal Navy explorers and the rest by commercial whalers. By emphasising different routes, I am able to identify four distinct ways in which transit influenced the phrenologists’ understanding of Inuit skulls.

First, each skull entered the exchange network in a different manner. Some skulls were robbed from Inuit graves, whereas others were traded for. Second, different routes represented different seasons. Prior to the 1850s, whalers rarely overwintered in the Arctic. As such, prolonged contact with the Inuit was uncommon. In contrast, Danish colonialists occupied the west coast of Greenland all year round. These seasonal differences influenced the content of the accounts which accompanied each skull. Third, each skull exited the exchange network in a different way. Some skulls were delivered in boxes alongside other natural history specimens, whereas others were delivered unboxed by hand. Finally, each route brought with it a distinct form of Inuit agency. When Parry collected skulls, the Inuit occasionally helped him. Indeed, as oral histories have revealed, some of the Inuit interpreted Parry’s practice in terms of their own creation story. In other situations, such as in the case of grave robbing, native agency was absent. Ultimately, my paper reveals a broader need to study collecting without privileging static notions of place, particularly those implicit in the terms ‘core’ and the ‘periphery’.