AMONG UNKNOWN ESKIMO
A Woman of the Fox Channel Tribe.
With jacket splendidly worked in beadwork. Her husband has obtained the beads by barter from whaling ships.
AMONG
UNKNOWN ESKIMO
AN ACCOUNT OF TWELVE YEARS INTIMATE RELATIONS
WITH THE PRIMITIVE ESKIMO OF ICE-BOUND
BAFFIN LAND, WITH A DESCRIPTION OF
THEIR WAYS OF LIVING, HUNTING
CUSTOMS & BELIEFS
BY
JULIAN W. BILBY
Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society
Member of the Folk Lore Society
WITH THIRTY-THREE ILLUSTRATIONS & A MAP
PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
LONDON: SEELEY, SERVICE & CO., Ltd.
1923
Printed in Great Britain. [[11]]
PREFACE
In offering the present book on the Eskimo tribes of the Arctics to the reading British public, I must discharge the grateful and pleasing duty of acknowledging my indebtedness for much courtesy and documentary assistance to the Canadian Government, in the person of F. C. C. Lynch, Esq., Superintendent of the “National Resources Branch of the Department of the Interior.” He has been zealously instrumental in enabling me to consult sources of classic recent information of which otherwise I should not have had the confirmation and the benefit, and also has placed at my publishers’ disposal the section of the official map which represents the most up-to-date geographical information about Baffin Land.
There is a considerable literature about the Eskimo (as distinct from a quite formidable list of works dealing with travel and voyages in the Arctics) which should be consulted by students of ethnography.
The classical authorities in this department are Dr Franz Boas and Dr Rink, a study of whose researches should underlie all the more recent first-hand contributions to what must remain for a long time to come a new subject. [[12]]
For the photographs I am greatly indebted to the Rev. A. L. Fleming, L.T.H., who spent several years among the Eskimo of South Baffin Land. His photos were taken during many intrepid journeys in those wilds, and he knew exactly the scenes it was desired to record by photography in this work. I am also indebted to Miss A. B. Teetgen for her assistance in the literary construction of the book.
Finally, I wish to record my admiration and respect for the genial and brave Eskimos of those barren lands, and for the way they face and overcome the difficulties of the Arctic wilds. [[13]]
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I
[The Voyage to the Arctics] 17
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
[The Eskimo] 56
CHAPTER V
[The Building of the Village] 72
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
[Eskimo Dogs] 119
CHAPTER X
[Tribal Life] 136
CHAPTER XI
[Tribal Life]—continued 154
CHAPTER XII
[The Eskimo Language] 171 [[14]]
CHAPTER XIII
[Legends] 184
CHAPTER XIV
[The Conjurors] 196
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
[The Creatures of the Wild] 252
[Appendix] 265
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
ERRATA.
The legends to illustrations facing pages 40 and 88 have been transposed.
In this edition, this is corrected by also transposing the illustrations. [[17]]
The Eskimo of Baffin Land
CHAPTER I
The Voyage to the Arctics
A voyage to the Arctics has always been a dangerous and exciting adventure, whether entered upon by whalers and hunters, intrepid men lured by the hardy business of the frozen North, or by the no less intrepid pioneers of exploration and of science. For the moment, we are not concerned with the latter, but rather with some aspects of life in the barren lands and icy seas north of “the Circle,” and with the adventures and experiences of the few ships’ crews who have been making yearly voyages in those regions for trading purposes ever since the efforts of the sixteenth century navigators to discover the famous North West Passage began to chart out these hitherto unnavigated seas.
The search, indeed, for this passage, a sea route of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (or, in other words, a short way to the East Indies without doubling the Cape of Good Hope)—was incidentally the means of opening up the whole of the north polar regions to exploration and discovery. As early as the year 1527, the idea of such a [[18]]passage was suggested to Henry VIII by a merchant of Bristol; but it was not until the beginning of the following century that a first expedition was fitted out at the expense of some London merchants and despatched to the arctic seas.
Centuries before this, however, the Arctic Ocean was entered by a Norwegian adventurer about the time of King Alfred; and the west coast of Greenland was colonised from Iceland early in the eleventh century. But no further progress was made in arctic discovery until the sixteenth century, when various seas and points of land were mapped out, mainly in the eastern hemisphere. The navigator Henry Hudson discovered the Straits and Bay named after him in the great North American archipelago, in 1610. Frobisher, Drake, and Hall, made voyages to the west coasts of Greenland and to the opposite coasts; but the entrance to the arctic regions west of that continent was discovered by John Davis in 1585. In 1616, Baffin and Bylot passed through this passage and sailed up Smith Sound, but nothing further was learned of these parts for another two hundred years.
The Eskimo preserve to this day the story of Frobisher. It was, indeed, narrated to the writer with a wealth of authentic detail by a native, to whom it had been handed down amid other oral traditions of his tribe and locality.
“Now it is said that Frobisher, coming to Nauyatlik for the first time, not knowing the place or where there was a safe anchorage, crept along the [[19]]side (of the land) in his small ship, and was wrecked. For it was shallow water there, and getting aground, he ordered the fuel (coal) to be taken out and carried ashore to a place called Akkelasak. For the ship was no longer habitable. The crew found refuge on a small, flat island, and pitched tents there of the vessel’s sails, and began to fashion a graving dock by digging out the soft ground. When it was finished, they towed the wreck to the spot and docked her. All this happened a long time ago, but traces of their work are still visible. The shipwrecked sailors overhauled the hull. When at length their repairs and rebuilding were complete, they towed out the ship and moored her alongside a cliff, at the top of which they fixed their tackle, unstepped and restepped the mast, their task being completed. At last, and having buried those of their shipmates who had died during this weary time, they abandoned the remainder of their fuel and set sail for home. This is the narrative of one who had it from her mother, who in turn had received it from her dead father, who had it from his forbears; for thus they were accustomed to narrate it.”
The above translation, of course, is very free. It would interest the philologist to have it in the original, or even in a literal version; but possibly the foregoing will convey to the general reader that graphic grasp of the story which renders all Eskimo history so reliable and enduring.
The attempt to find a north west passage by sea, [[20]]from the Atlantic Ocean to Behring Strait, where farthest east meets farthest west, was abandoned until Commander John Ross, in modern times (1818), was sent out to prosecute further exploration in the Arctic. Throughout the nineteenth century, many intrepid voyages were made, with which the names of such men as Parry, Ross, Richardson, Rae and Franklin are associated. Prior to this wonderful epoch of dauntless adventure, all within the Arctic Circle upon the map was a blank. The entire geography of the Canadian arctic archipelago has been worked out, defined, charted, and named, since that time. Voyages of discovery were made in rapid succession, after Sir John Ross’s expedition in 1818, many of the leaders working in conjunction with the officials of the Hudson Bay Fur Trading Company, who were anxious to determine the extent and limits of the immense continent they controlled, now known as the North West Territories. Every name upon the arctic map, whether of sea, sound, inlet, strait, island, peninsula or cape, is a historical association with the personnel or the patrons of these numerous expeditions.
All the islands of the Arctic Archipelago lying to the northward of the mainland of the continent, and the whole of Baffin Land, form part of the British possessions in North America by right of discovery. They were formally transferred to the Dominion of Canada by Order in Council of the Imperial Government on September 1st, 1880. [[21]]
An immense amount of scientific information was derived from all this hardship, endurance and enterprise. The story of Sir John Franklin alone is a deathless epic in the annals of this seafaring nation. And the whole field was opened up for the whalers, sealers, hunters and fishers, whose business it soon became to demonstrate that arctic exploration had a bearing on commerce and the hardier industries of maritime mankind.
The whaling trade originated as early as the discoveries of Barentz and Hudson, but Sir John Ross opened up the northernmost waters of Baffin’s Bay to it, in recent times. The search for the North West Passage, indeed, proved abortive for many years, owing to the fact that the season in which it was possible to navigate in very high latitudes only lasted about seven weeks. The most experienced men, though, never gave up the theory of the probability of its existence. Half a century went by before the route was found at last. Captain McClure, in the search for the long-lost Franklin, achieved the discovery of two routes to the Behring Straits and the Pacific Ocean, in the autumn of the year 1850. Useless and futile as the discovery proved to be, who can sufficiently estimate and appraise all that has gone, of human worth and high resolve, of suffering and of life itself, to the making of it?
Of the whalers and traders who followed in the wake of the explorers, the Scottish seamen have been the most persistent. Scotch vessels continue, to-day, [[22]]to visit the Arctic every year. They sail from home in early summer, cross the North Atlantic, work their way up Davis’ Strait, and, (unless they winter on the coast of Baffin Land or Greenland), return to Scotland late in “the fall.” Sometimes the practice was to make the passage, generally through open water, from Dundee to St. John’s, spend some weeks upon the sealing grounds, then return to refit at the Newfoundland port for a whaling cruise farther north in Lancaster Sound. Having secured their cargo of seal skins and oil, they return home. The vessels of the Dundee whaling fleet are designed and built for navigation in northern seas. The hull is of wood, on account of its resisting power where pressed by ice, and the hardwood (“greenheart”) sheathing minimises the abrasions caused by conflict with the jagged edges of the floes. The ship is immensely braced by stout cross beams inside. The cutwater is protected by iron bands or plates, to enable her to withstand the heavy strain of the ice. She is barque rigged (i.e., a square rigged vessel, having yards on the foremast and mainmast, but not on the mizzen mast), and fitted with steam, to enable her to proceed during a calm, to shear her way through ice, or to enter and leave harbour independently of wind or tide. On all other occasions she depends upon her sails. A whaler fitted after this fashion is called an “auxiliary steam vessel.” She sails, however, much faster than she can steam. She carries about 500 tons of coal. [[23]]
Many of these tried and tested Scottish whaling ships have been bought up by the leaders of Arctic and Antarctic exploring expeditions, and remodelled and refitted for the scientific uses to which they would be put, and have done yeoman service in the assault on the Poles.
Of late years the Hudson Bay Company (of historic and ubiquitous enterprise in Canada), have established posts on the southern shores of Baffin Land, (opposite to that northernmost region of the bleak Labrador known as Ungava), so that their ships, which sail from Montreal as annual supply ships for all the Company’s “Forts” and “Factories” along the Canadian coasts, have points of call along Hudson Strait en route for Hudson Bay itself and the fur ports of that vast inland sea.
The Scotch whaling industry has various agents posted in many a bleak, un-heard of spot along the icebound littoral of the Eskimo countries, whose duty it is to collect and store the pelts brought in by the natives—employed by the agent—and ship them away annually or bi-annually, as the case may be.
A whaling voyage was filled, especially in the earlier days, with as much danger as adventure. The ships were manned by sailors who had taken to the life as lads, or, held by the fascination of the North, returned thither year after year, seldom caring to make voyages elsewhere. They lived amid the ice. True northman and fine seaman, many a whaler’s master is proud of the fact that he began his career [[24]]as a cabin boy and worked his way aft. He is a fighter, every inch of him, such as only “the wild” can breed. He has an iron code of honour, and a strain of true Norse hardness in him for his enemy. But he has also the manly virtues of his type—fidelity to his fellows, and generosity to lesser men than himself.
Previous to an Arctic voyage, months were spent in the commissioning of these vessels. Every rope and block was overhauled. The ships’ boats were rigorously tested and each carefully fitted out. Food and stores of all kinds were taken aboard wholesale, against every contingency experience and foresight could suggest, especially that of a forced wintering in the north. An armoury of weapons was carried: harpoons and harpoon guns for the boats, lances for killing whales, huge knives for cutting up the carcases, bombs, hatchets, rifles and ammunition. No less exhaustive was the inventory of the “trade”—articles for the Eskimo trade and barter—such as needles, soaps (scented and otherwise), pipes, matches, calico, beads, and, above all, tobacco! Every boy’s book of adventure will suggest the scope of the slop chest, the incredible handiness and nattiness of the galley, the reek of the fo’c’sle, the snug dignity of the Captain’s cabin, and the compressed completeness of an equipment designed to last a ships’ entire crew (let us say her tonnage is about 129, and her company number twenty-nine) over many months of toil, emergency, and utter isolation. [[25]]She carried no doctor. The first mate presided over the medicine chest, and had resort to some small book of directions as to what to give and what to do in case of illness or accident. In the early days adventurers to the Arctic were sorely stricken with scurvy, for want of vegetable food and a knowledge of how to provide against this deficiency. We have often heard of desperate feats of amateur surgery carried out on board ship. It has been that the mate of a whaling vessel often acted, not at all unsuccessfully, as surgeon.
Doctor William S. Bruce, indeed, tells us in his “Polar Exploration” that, generally speaking, germ diseases are unknown in the Arctic, the intense cold making everywhere—in the air, on the sea and on the land—for a high degree of bacterial sterility. “Under ordinary conditions it is not possible to ‘catch cold’ in the polar regions .… infectious fevers are practically unknown, unless contracted in a dirty ship or filthily kept house.” Hence the feasibility of a practical asepsis in accident or operation. Bishop Bompass once amputated a man’s leg above the knee, and the operation was completely successful. The Bishop had no medical knowledge beyond having attended some lectures at an opthalmic hospital, in order to learn how to treat his Indians for snow-blindness.
The whaling voyage itself might be uneventful enough until a high latitude was reached; but after that, the greatest possible skill was required to navigate [[26]]the ship safely through the “pack” ice coming down from the Pole through Davis Straits and Fox Channel, on its way to the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland, to be finally melted and dispersed in the Gulf Stream.
Arctic navigators and oceanographers enumerate many varieties and vagaries of the polar ice. Suffice it here to note that “pack ice” is the jammed and frozen conglomeration of masses of ice from broken floes and vast disintegrating “fields” of ice. In Straits, this pack is always heaviest in the centre but less compact along the shores, so that a vessel can sometimes be worked along the coast when navigation in the middle would be impossible. This “middle pack” is rightly dreaded by Arctic seamen. A change of wind might drift it in upon the shore, when the ship’s destruction would be inevitable. The great danger in meeting the ice pack out at sea consists in the fact that the larger part of the floe is almost submerged and little of it is to be seen. Again, it bristles with spurs and points which stick up and out like spears and rams, any one of which might rip up a hull sailing at any speed.
The rapidity with which the ice pack moves is something wonderful. Miles upon miles of sea will be free from ice, with the exception of small masses from the floes, and the ship ploughs a steady course to the north. Suddenly the wind changes. Ice swiftly makes its appearance on every quarter, and—with incredible rapidity—the vessel is surrounded. But [[27]]warning has been given from the “crow’s nest” (the look-out aloft, a barrel at masthead), and the Master works a cautious way through the “leads” in the shifting ice. Should the pack be exceptionally heavy, threatening to pen in the ship completely, measures for her safety are immediately taken. Orders ring out sharply. The crew, with ice saws or blasting powder, quickly make a space in the ice, like a temporary dock, large enough to warp her into, where she can lie snug while the savage floes grind and crash against each other without. Woe to the ship caught between them ere such a refuge can be made! No vessel that ever adventured in the polar seas could stand the awful grip. There would be a rending of the stoutest timbers, groans of a ship in agony, a lift and a quiver, and as the floes swung apart on the black swell below, the brave creature, mangled, rent, and stove in, would plunge to her bitter grave. As for her crew, their only chance would be to lower the boats, and, either marooned on the ice, drift south on the prevailing current until perchance sighted by a ship; or, if afloat, work their perilous way to the Greenland coast, and take refuge at one of the Danish settlements sparsely scattered on its southern extremity.
Icebergs—those rightly dreaded wanderers of the northern seas—afford a glorious vision in bright, calm weather, as they wend their majestic course to the south, tinted by the setting sun or by the indescribable loveliness of the northern sunrise. Sometimes [[28]]a large portion having been melted, breaks from the berg, when the vast mass slowly careens over, plunges with a thunderous crash, and reasserts itself upon a new floating base, peerless and beautiful as ever. The ship is fortunate who finds herself standing well away at such a moment.
In spite, however, of their bad reputation, the bergs have their uses for those hardy wayfarers of the sea who know them. The ancient Arctic mariner will tell you that an iceberg can sail against the wind as well as with it! Gripped for two-thirds of its bulk by a strong under-current, it can crash its way and forge ahead against the wildest adverse gale. An old whaler told of an experience he had when his ship was beset by the loose floe, and like to be crushed to matchwood. The men were striving all they knew to get her into safety, when a vast berg drove slowly down beside her through the ice, shouldering it aside as a giant liner drives through a heavy sea. With the inspiration of sheer desperation, the Captain saw his chance! The vessel was cautiously worked still nearer the berg and then kedged on to it. Towed thus, with resistless might, she too forged safely through the chafing floe to clear water and deliverance.
Again, a ship—no matter of what class or tonnage—can only carry a certain quantity of water. So, too, with a whaler; she is limited in her supply. It sometimes happens that, cruising about week after week, she runs short of water. On sighting an iceberg, [[29]]she sends off her boats loaded with casks, and the crews refill them either with water from the pools at the foot of the berg, or with the ice itself, which being fresh water ice, melts down, of course, into splendid drinking water after the brine and salt coating from the sea has first been scraped off. For, be it remembered, an iceberg is a portion—the seaward end—of one of the polar glaciers. As the immense ice river reaches the coast it is pushed out over the cliffs, and vast masses break off with terrific detonation, plunge into the sea, and the newly born icebergs go floating far and wide. A large number of these bergs are formed in Eternity Fiord on the Greenland coast, and the crash and roar of them can be heard for miles.
As the season wears on and the whaler’s hold slowly fills with the cargo of the Arctic hunt, from time to time she puts into the sparse harbours of the northern coasts, to refit, or to meet the tribes of Eskimo gathered there to do “trade” with her. The Hudson Bay Company have lately introduced a form of coinage for this purpose, anything of the sort being previously quite unknown among the natives. Pieces of metal in various shapes represent the values of a currency and are used as money. But the prehistoric marketing of barter still holds good throughout the greater part of the Arctic regions.
Sometimes a shipmate has to be left, perforce of accident or illness, to sleep the long sleep that knows no earthly waking, in this drear and far-off land. [[30]]
So much then for the voyage and the voyagers to the Arctic. Now for that frozen world itself, and for those strange people whose lot, compared with that of all the rest of the more genially situated sons of men, would seem to have fallen in the bleakest, harshest and most forbidding places, where human life might scarcely exist.
When the first ship seen by an Eskimo tribe touched on the coast, what did they think of it; what was the bewildering impression they got? An old hunter, recounting the story of his tribe and its adventures, gave the writer a graphic account of just such an event. An enormous boat, he said, appeared, filled with Kabloonâtyet (strangers), speaking an unknown tongue and having hairy faces! The tall masts were hung with the clouds (sails), and there was a door in the roof (the companion leading from the deck), instead of in the side of the house. At first the tribesmen hovered round this amazing thing in their canoes, afraid to approach too near. Presents were thrown out to them of which they could make nothing. They just smelt at the tobacco, biscuit and sweets, and cast them aside. There were knives, but they cut themselves with these, not knowing how to handle steel ones. It was almost as if some unimaginable craft from another sphere were to visit the Earth and make incomprehensible overtures to us by means of objects which conveyed nothing to our intelligence—something after the style of Mr. Wells’s Martians. At last, however, looking glasses resolved the situation. [[31]]These the Eskimo received with huge delight and amazement. Eventually they were induced to board the strange boat and open up some sort of initial overtures with her alarming crew. His fore-fathers, said the old hunter, had seen these things and carefully handed them down. [[32]]
CHAPTER II
Baffin Land
A landfall in the Arctics is forbidding enough. Little is to be seen save bare rocks broken by ravines, filled with snow even so late as far into July and August—bare rocks, rising into gaunt hills from 500 to 1,500 feet high. The coastline is broken by bays and fiords, running deep inland. These inlets with their irregular outlines have a singular if rather drear beauty of their own, especially in the summer-time, when what little vegetation there may be—a spare, coarse grass and a red and white variety of heather—adds a grateful note of relief to the severe scene. There are miles and miles of rocky coast in places, where not so much as a handful of soil to support the hardiest little living thing could be found.
Baffin Land, or Baffin Island—the country with which this book has to do—is an immense portion of the Canadian Arctic archipelago lying between latitude 62° and 72° N. By far the greater part of it extends north of the Arctic Circle, while its southern-most cape touches the latitude of the Faroe Islands, ’twixt the Shetlands and Iceland, in our own more [[33]]familiar waters. The whole country lies far beyond the northernmost limit of trees, although it is not without an Arctic flora of its own. Baffin Sea, or Baffin Bay (that stretch of the North Atlantic Ocean which, beyond Davis Strait, divides the west coast of Greenland from North America), was discovered by the navigator William Baffin in 1615. Hence the name of the country. Discredit was thrown throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on Baffin’s work in the north; and, after him, Arctic exploration ceased for about two centuries. Then Sir John Ross verified Baffin’s observations in 1818, and many of them became the bases of later expeditionary enterprise.
A glance at the map shows how the country lies. To the north of it, beyond the whaling grounds of Lancaster Sound, Devon Island is the next stretch of the poleward tapering continent. The Gulf of Bothnia and Fox Channel divide it on the west from the enormously broken coasts of the North West Territories. “The territory now known as Baffin Land was, until about 1875, supposed to consist of different islands, known as Cockburn Island, Cumberland Island, Baffin’s Land, Sussex Island, Fox Land, etc. It seems to be now established that these are all connected and that there is but one great island, comprising them all, to which the name of Baffin Land has been given. It forms the northern side of Hudson Strait.… It has a length of about 1,005 English statute miles, with an average breadth of 305 [[34]]miles, its greatest width being 500 and its least 150 miles. Its area approximates 300,000 square miles, and it therefore comprises about one tenth of the whole Dominion. It is the third largest island in the world, being exceeded only by Australia and Greenland” (Annual Report of Geolog. Survey of Canada, 1898.)
It is an entirely Arctic country, immediately north of which runs the polar limit of human habitation.
Up to the actual time of writing, Baffin Land has been held to be incapable of inland commercial development, but a Royal Commission of the Government of the Dominion have recently examined the possibility of establishing there a reindeer and muskox ranching industry. Their report has not yet been published, but already some steps are being taken to realise such a project. If this should have results, a new means of livelihood would be opened up to the Eskimo, at present employed exclusively by the whaling agents on the coast. But the natives are not herders, and in all probability Lapps would be brought over from northern Europe to initiate the industry. From this would ensue doubtless some racial modifications—probably quite inappreciable to any but those observers, like the present writer, used to the pure and unmixed Eskimo stock. In the present book, little account will be taken of those tribes which have been in contact with other races, like those of Alaska and Labrador, whence results hybridization or degeneration. The writer proposes to confine his attention [[35]]entirely to the people of ancient, unmixed blood, and to depict their life and customs as uninfluenced by the forces of trade and civilisation, which are already threatening to usher in a new era and extinguish the last representatives of the “reindeer age.”
From another point of view, however, Baffin Land should not pass without remark. It has certain undetermined mineral resources. At Cape Durban, on the 67th parallel, coal is known to exist, and graphite (plumbago) has been found abundant and pure in several islands. Again, pyrites and mica are all to be found in its rocks.
The geology of the Arctic regions is, of course, a study in itself beyond the scope of this book. It may be of interest, however, to note that the two great distinctive bodies of rock to be observed in a country like Baffin Land are the granite and the finer grained, darker, basic rock. The ironstone from there is very similar to that brought from India to be smelted in England. The graphite might be mistaken for coal, but for its formation under geological conditions which could not have given rise to the latter. The two pyrites occur in the rocks of all ages; the one is a brassy yellow, very hard mineral, and the other a brilliant black stone (magnetic pyrites) looking much like a mass of loosely formed crystals. Garnets are also formed in several kinds of rock, but are chiefly to be found in the schist. As a rule, these little gems are far too much broken and split by the [[36]]intense frost to be worth collecting. In the winter, the hardest rock is so split by the cold that every peculiarity of its composition can be clearly seen. The graphite can be chipped out with an axe and utilised very conveniently for writing.
The scenery everywhere is typical of the “Barrens,” the “Bad Lands of the North.” In winter, a featureless waste of snow, where in that dark season “come those wonderful nights of glittering stars and northern lights playing far and wide upon the icy deserts; or where the moon, here most melancholy, wanders on her silent way through scenes of desolation and death. In these regions the heavens count for more than elsewhere; they give colour and character, while the landscape, simple and unvarying, has no power to draw the eye.” (Nansen.) In summer, when the iron grip of ice is relaxed around the frozen coast, snow may disappear from the interminable wastes of rounded granite hills which are a feature of the interior. The effect of this endless succession of low bare elevations is one of “appalling desolation.” The long, high-pitched howl of the wolf, the ultimate note of the wilderness, falls occasionally upon the ear of the twilight camper. This, and the cry of the loon from the lakes, with the crowing bleat of the ptarmigan in the low scrub, are the chance evening sounds (of spring and summer) in the Barrens.
The country generally is mountainous and of a hilly and barren aspect. In some districts comparatively [[37]]level Laurentian areas occur, where immense herds of reindeer roam in the summer. At this season the ranges have a dark or nearly black appearance, owing to the growth of lichens upon them, but this sombre character is often relieved in valleys and on hill-sides by strips and patches of green, due to grasses and sedges in the lower bottoms, and a variety of flowering plants on sheltered slopes exposed to the sun.
The high interior of Baffin Land, lying just north of Cumberland Sound, is apparently all covered with ice, like the interior of Greenland. Around the margins of this ice cap the general elevation above the sea is about 5,000 feet, and it rises to about 8,000 feet in the central parts. Large portions of the northern interior are over 1,000 feet above the sea, so that vast regions of the country may be said to be truly mountainous.
There are no trees or shrubs of any kind in Baffin Land. Of Arctic flowers, a small yellow poppy seems to be the hardiest and most widespread. Even in those parts where desolation seems to reign supreme, this poppy (Papaver radicatum), and a tiny purple saxifrage (Saxifraga appositifolia) can generally be discerned. There are coarse grasses growing in scant patches, and immense tracts of reindeer moss, upon which the cariboo entirely subsist.
Unlike the sterile Antarctic, however, it is well known that the flora of Arctic lands is a feature of such importance that it has been the subject of an immense amount of expert investigation carried out [[38]]by very many eminent botanists from every country. Professor Bruce says it is quite impossible to enter into detail regarding arctic botany, largely on account of its sheer profusion. “No matter how far the explorer goes, no matter how desolate a region he visits, he is sure to come across one or more species of flowering plants.… Every arctic traveller is thoroughly familiar with scurvy grass, the sulphur coloured buttercup, the little bladder campion, several potentillas, the blaeberry, many saxifrages, the rock rose, the cotton grass and the arctic willow.” In Grinnell Land (far north of Baffin Land) the British Arctic Expedition of 1875 met with “luxuriant vegetation.” The presence or absence of the Arctic current along the shores of these countries seems to have much to do with the problems of vegetation. Baffin Land, bathed in its icy waters, is far more barren than Greenland, where it does not touch. Possibly Grinnell Land is immune from its influence. It is, nevertheless, quite possible for a dense plant life to flourish—under certain conditions of climate, altitude and situation—deep within the Arctic Circle, where even the tundra, a wilderness of snow in the winter, becomes an impassable fever-haunted, mosquito ridden, torrid, flower decked swamp in the summer.
But there is more than this in the botany of Baffin Land! The natural or geological history of the Arctic regions generally is that of the earth’s crust itself, and from this point of view the study of these [[39]]northern blossoms is more wonderful than that of its rocks.
The fossil plants of these ice-bound countries belong to the Miocene period, an epoch warmer than the present, which preceded the glacial age now triumphant there. The latitudes of Baffin Land were once covered by extensive forests representing fifty or sixty different species of arborescent trees, most of them with deciduous leaves, some three or four inches in diameter, the elm, pine, oak, maple, plane, and even some evergreens, showing an entirely different condition of seasons to that which now holds sway in the far, far north. The modern botany of the Arctics, comprising some 300 kinds of flowering plants, besides mosses, algae, lichens, fungi, is characteristic of the Scandinavian peninsula. Now, the Scandinavian flora is one of the oldest on the globe. It represents unique problems in distribution, from which the most tremendous scientific deductions have been drawn, such as those concerning a former disposition of terrestrial continents and oceans, and some concerning changes in the direction of the earth’s axis itself! All this is very far beyond the scope of any such account of Baffin Land as the present. Suffice it, nevertheless, to indicate the deep vistas of interest that lie behind the “appalling desolation” of its appearance to-day, and the limitations of its hyperborean native folk.
The reindeer moss is a very important asset of the country. It is a delicate grey-green in colour and [[40]]beautiful in form as well. It grows luxuriantly to about the height of six inches. When dry, it is brittle, and may be crumbled to powder in the hands; but when wet it is very much of the consistency of jelly, and very slippery. The reindeer live entirely upon it all the year round. In the winter, when it lies under a deep blanket of snow, to get at it the deer have to scrape their way down with their great splay hoofs. It sometimes happens that a season comes when a thaw may be followed by a sharp frost. In this case the surface of the snow is first melted and then quickly frozen, making a coating of ice over all the surface of the ground. To scrape this would cut the deers’ legs, so there is an exodus of the herd to other feeding places, and hunger even to famine and starvation may reign in the district they have deserted. Generally speaking, the herds keep to the high grounds and hills in the winter, because there the moss is more exposed and easier to come at. They move down to the coast at intervals, to lick the salt which comes up through the “sigjak,” i.e., ground ice, along the shore, when the tides rises and the water leaves pools behind it.
An Ancient Aboriginal Encampment.
A group of Eskimo on the site of an ancient encampment of the Tooneet, or aborigines of that country. Tooneet used to build their houses of large stones filled in with moss. They were small but very strong, and are now, as far as can be known, extinct.
The deer feed in a peculiar manner. Once a pit has been sunk in the snow and the moss at the bottom is browsed down, the creatures do not attempt to enlarge the place, but scramble out again, only to dig a fresh hole and sink shoulder high in it at a little distance, and begin feeding afresh. The herd is always dogged by a pack of watchful wolves, ever on the qui [[41]]vive to attack; but the leaders’ vigilance never slackens, and battle breaks out in the wild at the first movement of aggression.
There are one or two particularly interesting facts, astronomical and otherwise, which account for the extraordinary physical phenomena and conditions of life in the polar regions. To begin with the seasons. The “Arctic” properly so called is geographically defined by that circle of latitude where the sun on midwinter day does not rise, and where on midsummer day it does not set. In Arctic countries the sun is never more than 23½ degrees above the horizon, and their intense cold is due, in summer, to the sharp obliquity of his rays, and in winter, to his entire absence. In the latitude of Blacklead Island, on December 25th, the whole orb of the sun is not visible, only the upper section shows above the horizon (unless mist or snow overcast the heavens) for a brief ten minutes at midday. On May 18th, conversely, the sun has been noted as shining for eighteen hours, the remaining six out of the twenty-four being a bright twilight, scarcely distinguishable from day.
The whole year round there is little to be seen but rocks and snow. No tilling, sowing, harvesting, mark the progress of the seasons or call man to the pursuits which have brought all civilisation in their train in milder climes. These seasons (which depend, of course, upon the position of the earth in its orbit round the sun, and upon the inclination of the polar [[42]]axis to the plane of the ecliptic giving a six month’s day and six month’s night at the poles), are markedly defined in Baffin Land. But far more distinctly so on shore than at sea, where unbroken ice may reign supreme throughout the greater part of the twelve-month. Winter sets in on the southern coast about the end of September; farther north a week or two earlier. By this date the hills are getting their snow caps, which extend downwards every day, and a thin sheet of ice appears upon the sea at night. A rim of ice along the shore marks the rise and fall of the tide. Frequent snowstorms now set in, and the ice at sea thickens and strengthens, until by November it extends as far as the eye can rove. This ice, however, is not stout or welded enough to bear sleds, except in the fiords and smaller bays, until nearly Christmas time. The sea freezes when the temperature of the air falls to about 15° F., and the whole surface of the water becomes covered with a mass of ice spicules known to polar sailors as Bay Ice, from its forming first in the bays of the coast. Presently this solidifies and thickens, growing ever whiter and more translucent in the process, and is broken, even in calm weather, by the action of gentle swell or the currents beneath into thousands of discs, large and small, like pans of ice. Sea ice is formed at a temperature of 3° F. below the freezing point of fresh water. There are many remarkable and interesting physical distinctions between ice formed on land and ice formed at sea. The latter when melted is quite drinkable, [[43]]being not nearly so salt as salt water. The intense cold, though, of drinking water so obtained tends to inflame the mucous membrane of the mouth and throat, and its slight salinity still further augments thirst; so it is never resorted to except of necessity. These pans eventually freeze together into one great solid floor of “pancake ice,” and the Eskimo, away hunting in the winter for seal, may camp and live for weeks, miles out from land on the frozen sea.
The days grow ever shorter and shorter until, in midwinter, there may be only a few hours or even minutes of daylight left. The long Arctic night lasts from September to March.
By the end of March, however, the sun is once more high in the heavens; the sudden spring has begun, and the sound is everywhere heard of water trickling under the snow. Readers of Alaskan romance will recall many a fine passage about the ice “going out” on the Yukon, and realise the terrific transformation undergone by the whole still, silent, rigid, frozen landscape when the iron bonds of winter at length give way. Springtime in the Arctics is a wonderful time. The thaw comes from below. The rocks take the heat, and the snow sinks down, baring more and more of them every day. It grows quite warm; bird sounds (ptarmigan and snow bunting) enliven all the day; ducks quack at the floe edge. Sunrise beams upon the Arctic hills until they lie smiling in the full beauty of sunshine on their mantles of untrodden snow. [[44]]
At the end of June, summer is come; the sun is really hot, and the long-covered earth, bared at last to its benign influence, puts forth heather and grass and flowers. For six months there is no more night. Its place is taken by the pale light that offers so strange a phenomenon to the dweller from the south. If the sky be unclouded, shadows will be seen pointing to the south. If clouds cover the heavens, the landscape stands out without shadow at all, clear and sharp under this strange illumination. There is no one point from which the light can come; it comes from everywhere. Owing to the length of this Arctic “day,” the ground has no time to radiate away the welcome warmth, hence the rapid growth of what vegetation the region may show. Again, as Nansen says so poetically: “In these regions the heavens count for more than elsewhere: they give colour and character … to the landscape … it is flooded with that melancholy light which soothes the soul so fondly and is so characteristic of the northern night.”
The stars are an open book to the Eskimo. They know all the principal groups, and use them for the directing of their journeys. They can make a very creditable chart of the northern heavens. They recognise the Plough, and the Bear (which is indeed called “Nanook”—the Bear), and they recognise the constellation of three stars in a straight line and at equal distances from each other, which they call the “Runners,” and describe as the spirits of three [[45]]brothers in pursuit. The arctic hunters are marvellous students of nature generally. They have the lore of the wild at their finger tips, and all the wisdom of the seasons. It is probable that this primitive people have preserved nearly all the original instincts—as to the presence of danger, right direction, etc., etc.—of primaeval man, which are all but extinct in the over-civilisation of the modern European.
In August autumn begins. Last year’s ice has been broken up and carried far out to sea. There are frequent showers of rain, and the nights begin again to encroach more and more on the day. It is about this time that the trading ships generally arrive and put in at various points along the coast to do business and refit. They pick up the annual intelligence of the whaling stations, and leave for home as soon as the new ice begins to form.
Then winter comes down upon the land once more. The sky, like velvet, is bespangled with stars of incomparable brilliance, burning like opals. The Northern Lights, like lambent curtains of amazing illumination, swing weirdly through the sky; the blanched hills and the frozen fiords stand out in ghostly black and white under the startling moonlight. There is no sound save the sharp cracking of rock or ice under the strain of the intense frost, the uneasy growl of dogs, the distant howl of a wolf.
Suddenly, however, there may be a chorus of barking in the night, as a strange team of dogs sweeps into view up the fiord, or the harbour, and visitors [[46]]descend upon the camp. Except for the noise, one could imagine the newcomers to be the ghosts of ancient hunters haunting their old grounds. But cheery cries, the crack of whips and the howls of the dogs, dispel any such idea as the group comes up. They are stalwart and sturdy individuals enough, clad from head to foot in deerskin, and covered with rime and frost. They are seeking hospitality here, and at once friendly doors are open to them, invitations are readily extended and accepted, and soon everyone of the strangers is comfortably bestowed (after Eskimo notions of comfort) in one or another of the various dwellings, the dogs are unharnessed and fed, and peace resumes her tranquil sway.
The natives thus name the four seasons: Opingrak, spring; Auyak, summer; Okeoksak, autumn (i.e., material for winter), and Okeok, winter. The months are named by the sequence of events—the coming of the ducks, the birth of the reindeer fawns, the coming of the fish (sea trout), etc., as “the duck month,” “the fawn month,” “the fish month,” etc. And the days are distinguished as “oblo,” to-day; “koukpât,” to-morrow; “ikpuksâk,” yesterday; “ikpuksâne,” the day before yesterday, and so forth. “Akkâgo” means next year, and “akkâne” is last year. [[47]]
CHAPTER III
Arctic Flora and Fauna
Another striking feature of the Arctics is the effect upon the appearance and character of those shores touched by the Gulf Stream, as compared with those where its waters never pass. Thus the coast of Greenland is comparatively luxuriant in vegetation and its seas teem with fish, while Baffin Land, opposite, washed by arctic currents, is desolate and barren, with no fishing off its shores. The same contrast holds good with respect to the north and south coasts of Hudson Strait. There are no cod off Baffin Land, but the Labrador fishermen ply their trade right into Hudson Bay.
Baffin “Island” is a trackless, mysterious continent where, high up on the summits of some of the mountains, there are vast lakes fed from hidden springs—or from streams from still higher ranges—wherein salmon trout abound! At least, these fish are exactly like the sea trout which come up the rivers every year to spawn, save that the hue of the belly is bright red. The Eskimo point to this as proof that they never go down to the sea, and call them the “dirty fish,” since they never quit the lakes. How they ever [[48]]got into them is a mystery the arctic zoölogist must be left to solve, since neither hunter nor fisherman can offer a suggestion. The trout could not have attained any such level upstream. It would almost appear—if one might hazard a guess—that at some remote geologic epoch this part of the N. American continent was submerged, for the Eskimo of Baffin Land speak of an inland sea, now dry, where fossil remains are to be found of large creatures such as the whale and walrus. They come across fossil fish, indeed, in their more extended wanderings, also shells, and bring them back to camp as curiosities.
The Eskimo are properly a seaboard people and seldom penetrate farther inland than thirty miles from the coast, unless during the annual deer hunt, when they may be away for a couple of months, according to the distance the quest may take them.
Possibly these unaccountable trout are the descendants of fish cut off from access to the sea, when the gradual rise of the continental level left lakes of originally salt water among the ranges. Where they are not without marine life (excepting those wonderful seaweeds which are found at the tropics as well as in the arctic), the waters round these shores contain many species of fish commonly known elsewhere, only in a much less developed state. Such creatures as sea anemones, shrimps, sea snails, small squid, and salt water centipedes, are to be found on the arctic beach. Naturalists enumerate a formidable list of the sort, bristling with scientific nomenclature. Then [[49]]there are the mosquitoes, of which more anon, and small yellow, white and brown butterflies. It is indeed due to the comparatively rich fauna and flora of the arctic regions, both east and west, that arctic exploration has been carried out so frequently. The utter absence of plant or animal or human life in the dead antarctic has greatly militated against the success of southbound expeditions.
To deal with the mosquitoes! These insects abound in the summer-time, and are a terrible pest. It is a puzzle how they survive the winter, when everything is frozen solid, and the very spots which thaw under the sudden warmth of an arctic spring and allow them to swarm out in their malignant millions are iron-bound as the rocks themselves for the greater part of the year. So formidable are these insects that man himself has sometimes fallen a victim to their onslaught. On one occasion, a polar bear was crossing a swamp on the prowl, when he was attacked by mosquitoes. They stung his eyes, the inside of his ears, penetrated his nostrils and stung them. As the nasal passages became inflamed and swollen, the bear was forced to open his mouth to breathe, when his enemies swarmed in, fastened on to tongue, palate and throat, causing them also to swell, until the tormented brute succumbed to suffocation. His howls attracted the attention of some Eskimo hunters, who afterwards told the tale.
Another time, some women in a summer camp noticed a kyak (skin canoe) drifting about at sea in [[50]]a curious way, and a man went off to investigate. On arriving within hail he found a body in the canoe, leaning back stone dead; done to death in precisely the same way by mosquitoes.
Arctic birds are numerous. Most of them are migratory, but an eagle, a hawk, some owls and a raven, remain the year round. The most typical of all Arctic birds, the Snow Bunting (Plectrophenax nivalis), is the first to arrive and bring news of the spring. He comes about the same time as the Ptarmigan. Lastly comes the bird that always seems to greet the explorer on landing, the Purple Sandpiper (Tringa striata). He comes soon after the ducks—the Eider, the King Eider, the Pintail and the Harlequin. Between the two, there is a rapid vernal succession of birds, including sea pigeons and geese.
Eskimo hunters speak of the wild swan, on the south coast and in the vicinity of Frobisher Bay. The raven is the only arctic bird which does not change its plumage to match the surroundings. He is always aggressively, blatantly black. Possibly, being so able a match for any ordinary foe, this bird has no need to adopt the “protective resemblance” of white. The writer has watched a raven alight to secure some tit-bit of offal, and keep even the wolfish Eskimo dog at a respectful distance, with its huge beak. The bird is cunning to a degree. It will follow a trapper, note the position of his traps, and return to visit and despoil them of their bait as soon as the coast is clear. Then it takes up its stand on some convenient rock [[51]]just out of gunshot range, and watches the trapper on his return, just for all the world as if it relished his comments!
So much for the land birds. At sea there are petrels, gulls, and skuas. The natives do not recognise pictures of puffins or penguins, as these birds are not known on their coasts.
Again, the animals of the frozen north form quite a formidable list. There are three large lakes in Baffin Land (shown on the map at the end), linked together by rivers and making connection with the sea by river.
The southern lake is called “Angmakjuak” (“the great one”). The length of this sea may indeed exceed 120 miles by 40 in breadth in its central part. The central lake, “Tesseyuakjuak,” is possibly 140 miles long by 60 broad, and the northern lake “Netselik” (the place of seals) is at least 15 miles across. The difference in level between these great sheets of water is so inconsiderable that the natives can paddle with ease either up or down the waterways connecting them; perhaps none of them lie much higher than 300 feet above the sea. They teem with seal coming up from the coasts, and on the shores of Netselik old hunters will tell you they have seen the Red Fox, as well as white and smoky. This may well be so, as the fox is a denizen of Labrador, and might easily cross Hudson Strait on the ice during a hard winter. The seal of these lakes and of the coast (much hunted for food and for their skins by the [[52]]natives), are the grey haired seals of wide-spread commerce, but not the fine, fur-bearing animals whose pelts are of the first beauty and value. This latter is a different species and is protected by Government, only a certain number being allowed to be killed each year.
Bears, of course, abound. The female is the only arctic land creature which hibernates. Then there is the wolf, the white and blue fox,[1] the ermine, the arctic hare, a tailless snow mouse, or lemming, the musk ox, and—the most widely distributed of all—the cariboo or reindeer (Rangifer tarandus). It would be impossible to over-estimate the value of the last named beautiful creature, alive or dead, to all the peoples of the arctic countries, east or west. It would be superfluous here to remark much about it, except to note one interesting peculiarity. The reindeer differs from all other deer in that both sexes bear antlers.
The wolves, of course, are the inveterate enemies of the deer. In the winter, when the latter herds leave the lowlands and go up to pasture among the hills, where the snow lies less deep and can be more easily scratched away, they are dogged by the wolves. These hungry and voracious creatures know well enough that the deer are sentinelled while feeding by their fighting males, and make no movement of aggression until one of them chances to stray from [[53]]the herd. When this happens, the luckless animal is immediately headed off towards the shore and hunted down. The wolfish pack concentrates behind it and draws in on either side, so as to leave but one avenue of apparent escape. The quarry dashes down and away, out on towards the ice; but its weight is so great and its hoofs so sharp that the frozen crust of snow gives way beneath it and sorely cuts it about the legs. The deer loses blood and slackens in speed, so that the wolves, skimming easily over the treacherous surface, close in and soon drag it down.
It is a fact well known to the Eskimo hunter that the actual chase is put up by the female wolf, the male only coming in at the last, for the kill. The former do the hustling and placing of the victim, as it were, and the latter do the fighting and killing at the end.
The Lemming (Cuniculus torquatus) is a queer typical little arctic animal. It has a chubby build, a rudimentary tail, and no external ears. The first toe of the forepaw is almost nil, but the third and fourth have very strong claws, which grow longer and still more powerful in winter. It is grey in summer and white for the rest of the year. It lives upon the grubs to be found amid the moss under the snow, and burrows its way along as it searches for food. It is quite a familiar sound to hear the scratch, scratch, scratch of a lemming’s claws beneath, as one lies on the snow sleeping bench of an Eskimo’s igloo. The creature’s skin when dried is used by the natives for sticking over cuts or boils. It is hunted in the spring by the [[54]]women and children, who are guided by the sound of its burrowings. They arm themselves with a stick having a long barbed wire attached, and spear the animal with this through the snow.
Around the coasts there are various species of whales. The Grampus (Orca gladiator) or killer, as it is called by the whalers, is a fierce member of the dolphin group, sometimes attaining a length of thirty feet, with large powerful teeth, from ten to thirteen in number, on each side of the jaw. It has a high, upstanding fin on the back, like a shark. It is very swift in the water and can easily overtake and kill one of these latter creature. It is shunned and feared by all the denizens of the arctic seas except the Walrus and the great Sperm Whale. The Grampus is incredibly voracious, and has been known to devour thirteen porpoises and fourteen seals at one meal.
All the smaller animals take refuge in shallow water inshore at the approach of a Killer, only to fall a prey there to the native. The Killers hunt the whalebone whale, which, fast though it is, cannot make good its escape. The pursuers will leap right out of the water and crash down upon the head of their victim; or rush upon it and ram it, until terrified, stunned and exhausted, the whale drops its jaw, when the Killers tear out huge pieces of the tongue. (The tongue of a whale is a vast mass of fat, weighing in a full sized animal as much as a ton.) Finally, the unwieldly carcase is also despatched, and the Grampuses take themselves off, replete. The male Walrus [[55]]is too active and fierce to be beset in this manner, but a female encumbered with a calf will often be pursued by the Killer. She takes the young one under her flipper and tries to escape; but the aggressor rushes in and butts at her. Sometimes he succeeds in claiming this tender mouthful; sometimes he is killed by the infuriated mother.
The Sea Unicorn or Narwhal (Monodon monoceros), is a purely arctic animal. The curious “horn” is really the left tooth grown to the length of six or seven feet. It is only hollow for a certain distance. Exteriorly this horn is spirally grooved, to allow presumably for quick thrust and withdrawal. The Narwhal often engage in a mock combat among themselves with these horns, but use them with fierce and deadly precision when engaged in actual warfare.
It were too long to linger here with the creatures of the North, since we shall meet them all, and many more, in dealing with the human inhabitants of the country. Arctic animals have a fascination all their own, and of late years a wonderfully sympathetic and intuitive literature has grown up having them almost exclusively for its protagonists. Jack London has endeared the powerful, savage, husky dog to us for all time, in his “White Fang.” [[56]]
[1] Occasionally the black fox is taken, and the fortunate hunter may receive as much as the equivalent of $100 to $500 for a pair of fine skins, from the Agent. [↑]
CHAPTER IV
The Eskimo
The inhabitants of the Arctic are the Eskimo, also written Esquimaux, Usquemows, called by themselves Innuit (Innuk s. Innooeet p.) or the “people.” The word Usquemow is Indian, meaning raw flesh eaters. The English and Scotch anglicised it to Eskimo. The name “Husky” as applied to the native is merely slang, a corruption of Eskimo perpetrated by men whose ears and tongues were untrained to the language—whalers who sometimes employed the tribesmen in their hunting, and dubbed them with the first jargon name that came handy. It is still used in this sense in localities where Europeans are numerous, such as Alaska, and Hudson Bay.
Part of an Eskimo Tribe of Women and Children.
With their outside jackets off, the inner jackets showing the ornamentations of beadwork.
Pure blood Indians do not penetrate so far north as the Eskimo territories, being denizens of the forest but not of the barrens. The Eskimo are a kindly, intelligent people, hardy to a degree. They follow the manner of life and the pursuits of primitive man; but when brought into contact with the whites and with civilisation, show themselves by no means incapable of assimilating a good deal of instruction. They have qualities of amiability, hospitality, ingenuity and [[57]]endurance, which all travellers have agreed in extolling; although here and there in the records of the voyages of exploration in the nineteenth century we also find unfavourable comments passed upon them. They exist in small, scattered tribes along the sea coasts, whence they derive the bulk of their subsistence. Owing to the establishment of whaling and other stations, the geographical areas of the tribes are now more circumscribed and confined than they used to be, as each station is a centre of trade where most of the necessaries of life can be obtained.
The origin of the Eskimo is a matter of ethnographical conjecture. They themselves had no written language until comparatively few years ago, and depended upon oral tradition for their history. And even to-day it is only the few who have been taught to read and write, so that legend still holds sway throughout the greater part of Baffin Land, Cockburn Land, and the rest. Their past is lost in obscurity. In the obscurity perhaps of that neolithic or “reindeer age” of which their life, even now, has so often been cited as a close replica.
That immense span of time in the history of the human race known as the Stone Age, falls into five divisions. There is the Palaeolithic period (Early, Middle and Late), and the Neolithic period (Transitional and Typical). During the last throes of the glacial epoch in Europe, the type of human being was that represented by the relic which has come down to us known as the Neanderthal skull. But the later [[58]]Pleistocene period saw a greater diversity in the matter of types, and one race in particular is represented by a fair number of specimens. They denote a good-looking, purely human being. Another race of the same period is represented by a single specimen only. It is known as the Chancelade Race, and “the skeleton, of comparatively low stature, is deemed to show close affinities to the type of the modern Eskimo.” (Dr. Marett.) This is exceedingly interesting as giving us some idea of the antiquity of the stock, and as showing how glacial conditions in prehistoric times in Europe produced a type which lingers on amid the races of the modern world in the still existing glacial epoch of the Arctic.
The “Reindeer men” of prehistoric times lived lives no harder in the bleak climate and unprogressive conditions of glaciated Europe than those of the Eskimo in glaciated America to-day. “The races of Reindeer men were in undisturbed possession of western Europe for a period of at least ten times as long as the interval between ourselves and the beginning of the Christian era.” (H. G. Wells.) If we add these periods of time together we may form some estimate of the age of a civilisation such as the climatic conditions have produced and proscribed in the modern Arctics.
Perhaps it may be said that in one sense the Eskimo have no history. They are living the same life, under the same rigorous conditions, in the same way now, as their forefathers lived it before them, [[59]]and as far back as human life could be traced in the Arctic earth. It is wonderful how faithfully this oral tradition of theirs has been handed down through the generations, for the same adventures and incidents and stories will be told with little or no alteration by various people of widely different tribes, and events that took place centuries ago will still be invariably related with circumstantial precision.
The writer well remembers an account given to him one winter’s night by an aged hunter, of some stores left by a party of the early explorers. It was during a journey along the south coast of Baffin Land, and shelter had been sought in the snow house of an ancient Eskimo couple. The old man was grandfather of the tribe, and had been a noted hunter in his day, and had fought many a battle with the savage elements and more savage beasts of the wild. It was after the evening meal. The old fellow and his equally old wife had been warmed with some steaming coffee liberally sweetened with molasses, and regaled with ship’s biscuit. The pipes of both had been filled, and were drawing well. Their bronzed, lined faces, lined like the shell of a walnut, shone with contentment, they huddled on their sleeping bench and smoked and dreamed of the strenuous past. A question or two soon elicited a flood of guttural reminiscences. The old hunter pictured himself as a youth again, and went over the exploits of his prime, prompted now and again by the crone at his side, in a shrewd expectation of further acceptable items. Among other [[60]]things, he told of the various “dumps” or “caches” of stores made by the white men who came long ago, remembering exactly the localities and the contents of every one. Some had been broken into long since by wandering Eskimo; some had been destroyed by bears; some remained intact. His memory was as exact and reliable as if he had seen the things but a week—instead of a lifetime—before. Perhaps it was an echo, all that time afterwards, of the Franklin tragedy.
These primitive Eskimo inhabit the great archipelago which stretches polewards from the northern shores of the Canadian continent, from Greenland on the east to Alaska and the Aleutian islands on the extreme west. There is, too, a settlement of Eskimo beyond Behring Strait. Some ethnographers hold them to be of purely American origin with no affinities in Asia, however Mongolian they may be in appearance. Dr. Rink believes in an Alaskan origin for the Eskimo, as opposed to an Asian, but another authority, Dr. Boas, thinks the solution of this racial problem might be obtained by means of an archæological research on the coast of the Behring Sea.
The original Eskimo stock is now probably extinct. In language and physique, many of the present day tribes exhibit traits of racial admixture with the Red Indians. This has occurred in such junction areas as Labrador and Alaska, and has given rise to the probably quite fallacious idea of an Indian origin for the Arctic race. This error could not be made in [[61]]Eskimo lands proper. Those who have lived for long years with both Indian and Eskimo, and are intimately acquainted with the language, legends, and characteristics of both peoples, hold strongly to the opinion that they are entirely distinct. Personally, the writer would incline to the belief that the Innooeet are of Mongolian stock. He has heard on good authority of a pure Eskimo sailor being addressed by a Chinaman in Chinese, under the impression that he was speaking to a fellow-countryman. It is conjectured that in the remote past some Mongols may have reached the sea coast in the extreme east, and have crossed by boat from island to island, and so to the Arctics of North America. Increasing there in numbers, they presently dispossessed the aboriginals—the “Tooneet”—and drove them to the “back of the Arctic beyond.” But of this more when we come to Eskimo legends.
Undoubtedly the Eskimo are linked, if not by blood certainly by custom, to the Arctic peoples of Siberia, to the Lapps and Finns of northern Europe. In historic times they mixed with the Danes and Norsemen. They are not numerically very strong. Forty thousand may possibly total the nation, and of those 12,000 are in Greenland, and rather more in Alaska, leaving some 13,000 souls scattered along the shores of Baffin Land, Melville Peninsula, Boothia, Victoria Island, Banks Island and the rest of the bleak, fragmented continent. It is in Baffin Land, in Boothia, and Victoria that the pure Eskimo race is found. [[62]]Elsewhere the type is extremely mixed. It is to be deplored, too, that where the people have been in contact with vicious and unscrupulous whites, traders, sailors, and the rest, the introduction not only of alien blood but of the diseases of “civilisation” have here and there threatened extinction to whole tribes.
The “Central” tribes of Eskimo (i.e., those tribes exclusive of the Greenlanders, the Alaskans, and all the Labradorians save those on the northern shore of Hudson’s Strait) number about thirty-two. They have been carefully classified, enumerated, and geographically located, by the ethnologist, Dr. Boas. Three communities are found along the northern shore of Hudson’s Strait (the southern shore of Baffin Land), the Sikkoswelangmeoot at King Cape, the Akuliangmeoot at North Bluff, and the Quamanangmeoot in the Middle Savage Islands. All along the coast of Davis’ Strait are scattered another nine tribes, the chief of which are the Nuvungmeoot, in the neighbourhood of Frobisher Bay, and the Oqomiut (divided into four territorial groups) all about Cumberland Sound. The Lake Netselings Eskimo are a branch of these, called the Talikpingmeoot. In the extreme north of Baffin Land the Tunungmeoot are found at Eclipse Sound, and the Tununirusirmeoot about Admiralty Inlet.
There is constant intercourse and intermarriage among these scattered groups (none of which is numerically large), wherever the tracts of land in between them are not wholly impassable. Other groups [[63]]are more or less isolated by long stretches of territory, unnegotiable by any means of Eskimo travel. These folk are not only migratory in their habits, but great travellers for the sake of travelling, as well. They often engage on journeys which occupy months or even years, although there is a strong tendency among the old people to return to their native spot before the end, and so territorial distinctions are maintained.
Even before the advent of Europeans and the trade they brought with them, there was a certain amount of barter going on among the Arctic folk themselves, occasioning not a little movement. More driftwood being found in some localities than in others (chiefly at a place called Tudjadjuak), the tribes came from everywhere to barter for it with those on the spot. Again, the soapstone or “potstone,” of which their lamps and cooking utensils were made, is found in a few places only, such as at Kautag, Kikkerton and Quarmaqdjuin; so that the natives came long distances to dig or trade for that, too. Pyrites for striking fire was also a valuable if local production, and flint for arrow head making. On the whole the relationships of the various tribes were very friendly, and open hospitality was everywhere observed throughout all the regions where communication was fairly open and established. Some feuds or tribal reserves obtained where the peoples were strange to each other, and hence arose some extraordinary customs as to greetings, which looked very much like [[64]]challenges to single combat by the chosen representatives of either group.
There seems to be some evidence that the present day Eskimo were not the original inhabitants of these regions at all. There are definite traces still remaining of an earlier folk called the Tooneet. Eskimo tradition speaks repeatedly of these Tooneet as having been conquered by the ancestors of the present race and pushed farther and farther north, until they were lost sight of altogether. Some of their words have been preserved by the Medicine Men (Angakooeet, the conjurors), and the remains of their dwellings and graves were to be seen up to a few years ago, the latter still containing skeletons and weapons.
An Iglovegak or Eskimo Dwelling.
The house is built entirely of snow and takes about a day to build and finish, the window seen in front is a slab of fresh water ice.
The Tooneet were short, between four and five feet in stature, and very broadly built. (On this subject the reader should consult Dr. Rink, “Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo.”) The skull was oval, unlike the present race, who are round-headed. Their weapons were fashioned of stone, but of a different shape to those of to-day. Their skin canoes were short and broad instead of the long, narrow kyak in use now. Of these aboriginals little further trace or memory remains. The writer met a very ancient Eskimo on the south coast of Baffin Land, who related that his grandfather had seen two Tooneet on the shores of an inland lake. They were getting into their canoes, and would not allow the other to come near. They appeared to understand nothing of the shouted greeting, but hastily paddled off. The Tooneets [[65]]were also found on the coast of Labrador. The present tribes of the region were originally enslaved to them. At Nakrak, their remains are to be seen.
The unmixed Eskimo type of to-day closely resembles the Chinese, with an average stature of five feet, lank black hair and small peaked eyes. Nansen gives us a very life-like picture of them: “Their faces are as a rule round, with broad, outstanding jaws, and are, in the case of the women particularly, very fat, the cheeks being especially full. The eyes are dark and often set a little obliquely, while the nose is flat, narrow above and broad below. The whole face often looks as if it had been compressed from the front and forced to make its growth from the sides. Among the women, and more especially the children, the face is so flat that one could almost lay a ruler across from cheek to cheek without touching the nose; indeed, now and again one will see a child whose nose really forms a depression in the face rather than the reverse. It will be understood from this that many of the people show no signs of approaching the European standard of good looks, but it is not exactly in this direction that the Eskimo attractions usually lie. At the same time there is something kindly, genial and complacent in his stubby, dumpy … features which is quite irresistible. Their hands and feet alike are generally small and well shaped.” Elsewhere he adds: “One cannot help being comfortable in these people’s society. Their innocent, careless ways, their humble contentment [[66]]with life as it is, and their kindness, are very catching, and must clear one’s mind of all dissatisfaction and restlessness.” The length of the excerpt will be forgiven, since it gives more than a delightful pen picture—an inimitable bit of human psychology, that touch of insight which makes the whole world kin.
The Eskimo on the southern coasts of Baffin Land are taller than their fellows, sometimes attaining a stature of six feet and breadth in proportion. The majority of the men are beardless. Their hair, black and coarse, is worn either long or short, but is cut square across the forehead. It covers the ears, to prevent frostbite, and a band is tied round the head to prevent it blowing about too freely in the wind. We shall deal with the ladies’ coiffure at greater length in another connection.
Each band of Eskimo inhabits some particular spot or tract of the coast, and takes its name after the country, or some peculiarity it exhibits. For instance, the land at the point of Fox Channel and Hudson Strait is called Sikkoswelak, a term which describes the fact that the ice just there is seldom stable, owing to the swift local tides. Thus the tribe is known to the rest as the Sikkoswelangmeoot or “The-People-of-the-Place-which-never-Freezes.” Again, there are the Puisortak or the “People-who-live-where-Something-Shoots-up” (a blow-hole in a glacier). The tribe is not a very big unit. It consists of about ten to twenty families (generally less, and, be it noted, the people are polygamists), but the birth-rate is a low [[67]]one. The deaths fairly balance the births, so that their numbers remain more or less stable. Were not this the case, the regions they inhabit could never support them, for the Eskimo are voracious eaters (naturally, considering the climate!) and so far as land animals are concerned, the hunting is very scanty for many months of the year.
Apropos of this peace-loving, non-belligerent quality in the Eskimo character, some word should be offered in explanation of the fact that these people have occasionally shown themselves dangerous to the white men, and have murdered a few whalers and traders.
As far as any historical records of them exist at all, it would seem that on one occasion only did the Eskimo ever go to war, or make an active and successful stand against their enemies. This was many centuries ago. The handful of Norsemen from Iceland who originally colonised some spots along the coast of southern Greenland, lived peaceably enough with the natives they discovered there. At last, however, a quarrel broke out, blood was spilt, and the Eskimo, plucking up a courage and spirit never since repeated, fought and killed off the foreigners. But in America, whenever the Innuit came into contact with the Red Indians they simply fled before them ever farther and farther into the icy fastnesses of the north. The red men seem to have been always particularly savage and inimical to the others. And when in the course of time they became possessed of firearms, they [[68]]pressed this overwhelming advantage against the spear and bow-and-arrow people more ruthlessly than ever.
The Eskimo believed that it was the white fur trader who had armed the Adlât with these “fire-tubes” against him, hence the original hostility of these people towards all other white folk. As a matter of fact, the servants of the Hudson Bay Company did all they could, in those early days, to protect the Eskimo against the Indian, and to bring about an understanding between the native races of the great territory they exploited. It was, however, this original fear and prejudice which must be held accountable for any barbarity white men have met with since at the hands of the Eskimo (unless indeed the instance has been one of recently and immediately provoked reprisals). For the most part, it certainly holds good that the inhabitants of the Arctic north have been the least dangerous “savages” explorers have ever met. There are some conflicting accounts on this subject in the annals of arctic voyagers; but as a very general rule the Eskimo have been found to be a kindly and harmless folk. Seldom as they wage war against others, seldom as they can be provoked or even terrified into self-defence (except by flight), they never fight, in a collective sense, among themselves. This is not due to effeminacy or cowardice, for no one could connect any such suspicion with the hardy intrepid natives of the most pitiless regions of the earth. It is simply that the [[69]]Eskimo are not made in the mould too common to all the other races of mankind—they are not fighters. Most people, it has been said, regard war as a reversion to primitive instincts. But some historians hold that war—organised war, as we understand the term to-day—was not primaeval in its origin. It was unknown to early man, and it is unknown to early man’s last representatives, such as the Black Fellows of Australia and the Eskimo of the Arctics, at the present time. The Eskimo can be doughty enough in single combat when necessity or custom require it of him; but generally speaking he is the most pacific being on earth.
Where these people come within the sphere of practical British influence, they are treated somewhat on the same lines as the North American Indians, but without being gathered into Reservations. There is a Government Agent in charge of the tribe, and its material needs are provided for by the annual supply ship sent along the coast. It is generally the Agent, trading or Departmental, who extends the first handclasp of welcome to medical man or evangelist who betakes himself to the peoples of the Arctic.
There have been, however, few travellers in Baffin Land, excepting, of course, the seamen who use its coast. Much of the country is unexplored. Probably the only whites who have penetrated it at all have been missionaries and explorers.
Thus the very modern and limited story of Baffin Land trade, etc., is the only civilised history it has. [[70]]As for its native history, we might refer almost without qualification to any archæological account of the fur-clad men of the stone age. The similarity of the Eskimo’s implements, their ways of life, their primitive pursuits, their domestic and tribal management, to those of the neolithic age, has often been pointed out. The only other notices of the Baffin Islanders to be found are those which occur in the journals of explorers’ voyages, such as Captain Parry’s second expedition of 1821, in which we get a lively account of the junketings on the ice between the “savages” and the crews of the “Fury” and the “Hecla.”
It was during this voyage that the leader fell in with an Eskimo girl whose name should be rescued from oblivion. Igloolik added to many native graces and accomplishments a bright intelligence and so good an idea of hydrography and of the seacoasts in the neighbourhood of the “Fury’s” moorings, that the Captain utilised the charts and drawings she made for him in the further prosecution of his expedition, finding them always reliable and mainly correct. He afterwards called an island by her name.
Ten years later, Captain John Ross received the same sort of assistance during his second Arctic voyage, from another Eskimo woman named Teriksin. She revised and corrected for him the sketches of the surrounding coasts furnished by some of the men of the tribe.
The chart which illustrates Chapter XII is just such another as Igloolik and Teriksin might have drawn. [[71]]It was furnished from memory by a man called Pitsoolak, and is very fairly correct. The hunters and fishers of the Arctic are taught as children to memorise the contours of the coast, all landmarks, and every “blaze” of any sort a trail might afford. They have no unit of measurement, except the “sleep,” i.e., the length of a day’s march and its interval of rest. [[72]]
CHAPTER V
The Building of the Village
The Eskimo are a wandering folk, thus their dwellings must of necessity be capable of quick erection, demolition and easy transport. The tribe lives in tents in the summer, moving from one camp to another as the hunters decide; but winter quarters are more permanent, and the snow built house—the igloo—takes the place of the sealskin tupik on a more lasting foundation. The Eskimo tent is a wholly different affair from the Indian wigwam or lodge. It consists of a penthouse shaped framework of poles, semi-circular at the back, with overlapping strips or curtains of dressed skin for the entrance in front. The whole thing carries a covering of skins, firmly and beautifully stitched together. The back part of the tent, used as the family sleeping place, is covered with skins of the large ground seal—ogjuk—or of the ordinary grey seal, with the hair left on in order to ensure some darkness during the long, unbroken day of the arctic summer. The heavy hair also serves to throw off the rain in wet weather. But the front portion of the dwelling has a roofing of the inner membranes of the sealskins, pared from the entire pelt when fresh and [[73]]moist. These membranes are first stretched upon frames and dried, prior to being sewn together, when they become almost transparent, so that there is plenty of light in the rest of the tent. They are so beautifully and so neatly stitched as to be practically waterproof, like the fine fishing jackets made of dried and split seal gut for the kyakers. The finish of Eskimo clothing, fur “blankets” and tent coverings, is always neat and workmanlike and gives no ragged, tatterdemalion impression of nomad savagery such as might be derived from some Indian’s belongings.
An Eskimo Tupik.
A summer tent of sealskins stretched over a framework of poles made from driftwood and held down with boulders. The shaded parts show skins with hair for the purpose of excluding light and to throw off rain. The front part is made of membrane to give light. These tents, or tupiks, are used in summer camps, lighter ones being used for travelling.
[[74]]
Towards the back of the tent, inside, a board is fixed from side to side, and the whole space between this and the walls is filled with a deep bed of heather, spread on top with deerskins. This is the sleeping place of the family, in the dark half of the dwelling. Additional deerskins serve as blankets, and lie about the bed, rolled up, during the day. The rest of the furnishing is very simple.
Inside the entrance hang the bags of seal oil used for lighting or cooking purposes. Then there are the cooking pots (“kettles,” as they are called), deep, oblong boxes of soapstone without a lid. And the lamps, also of soapstone, and in shape not unlike a crumb tray, with a raised lip and a little shelf at the back for refuse bits of wick. These “lamps” are fed with seal oil. The wick consists of dried moss and gossypium. This is moulded into pellets; a row of wick balls is set on the rim of the lamp and then kneaded down into a line upon it and kept carefully trimmed, so that the edge of flame remains clear and bright. All the cooking is done over a “lamp” of this description, unless over a fire of heather and driftwood out in the open. The Eskimo housewife uses a blubber hammer (a stone, or mallet of ivory tusk set in a wooden handle), to beat down the seal or whale fat into oil for her lamps. Her furs, and her cooking pots, together with her needles, and knives and implements for dressing skins, constitute the Eskimo woman’s domestic outfit; a training in the clever use of them is the Eskimo girl’s education, and [[75]]the dowry of the Eskimo bride. The tent and these impedimenta are portable enough for the wanderings of the arctic summer, and it is remarkable what an amazing host and medley of belongings can be stowed in the family travelling boat, and unloaded from it—a veritable Pandora’s box—at the next bit of summer beach.
The winter locale and the winter dwelling is altogether another story. The tribe having chosen the site of a village in some sheltered bay, near a frozen lake or stream (or, at any rate, where ice or water can be obtained), will return to it year after year, and remain there throughout the long dark season, until the time comes round again for the summer-exodus. An occasional excursion is undertaken by both men and women in search of supplies, but the old folk are left on guard.
The building of this village is quite a work of art, and is begun as soon as the snow lies deep enough. Before this happens, the tents have been getting very cold to live in, despite the stitching on of several layers of dried heather to break the force of the wind and keep all snug inside. At last a day comes when by common consent the hunters all remain in camp, and join forces with the old men and the boys to build the winter dwellings.
Each man plans and builds his own house according to the size of his family; but only in his turn, and assisted by the rest of the community, to whom he has already given, or is prepared to give, his services. [[76]]The first houses to be erected are those of the Angakooeet, the Medicine Men; the chief hunters are the next to be considered, and everyone else comes in the order of his estimation in the tribe.
The main considerations the Eskimo has to bear in mind in building his snow house are that it will have to be kept in repair, and that it must be adequately lighted and warmed. This means labour and oil, so for his own sake the dwelling is planned on as small a scale as possible. It varies in nothing but in this point of size from all the rest of the village.
An Eskimo Snowhouse.
Ground plan and elevation of a snowhouse large enough for one family. (Central Eskimos.) These very complete houses are built in the winter encampments and last through the winter, those built in temporary camps are less elaborate. The one shown in the sketch would occupy half to the whole of one day to build.
The hunter having chosen his site, next takes a [[77]]sealing spear, a long twelve-inch knife and a saw, and begins piercing the snow in every direction, his object being to find a spot where it is deep, and so closely packed and hardened by the wind that it can be cut out into great blocks for building. Otherwise his “bricks” would be too brittle or too friable for the purpose. Should no such patch lie near at hand, the builder calls all hands, and together they start trampling and packing down the snow with their feet, while the old men, the women and boys constantly bring up fresh supplies and throw it in to be stamped firm. Having thus prepared what he considers sufficient material for his purpose, the good man commences to saw out huge rectangular blocks of this solidified snow mass, each one of which taxes his utmost strength to lift. He begins his house by building a ring of them, a larger or smaller ring as the case may be, fitted and jointed together with the utmost nicety by means of his knife. A second tier is added to this ring, the builder working from the inside and the blocks being brought up by his assistants. As soon as this is “well and truly laid,” he trims the upper surface to a slope, and continues building, but in a spiral now and slightly sloping inwards, until he has reached the top of what has grown to be a dome roof. A key block is deftly fitted in to complete and close it, and the shell of the dwelling is complete.
A semicircular opening in the side is next cut out for the doorway, and then the builder turns his attention [[78]]to the sleeping bench—the principal feature of the Eskimo igloo. He builds a line of blocks from side to side, facing the opening, up to the height of a man’s legs. The space between this and the walls is filled with broken snow like rubble, which is trampled down until brought to the necessary level, so as to form a solid bench of snow right across the building.
Then side pieces are built out, to form solid shelves for the lamps and family utensils and to serve generally as a larder and storage place for oil and blubber; so that, by the time all is done there is little of the original floor space left.
The next step is the porch or sukso, another little domed erection much like the main igloo, built in front of the entrance and intended, first to break the force of the wind and to keep the larger place warm, and secondly as a store house for surplus meat and blubber, for the dogs’ harness, whips, sealing lines, and anything the latter and the wolves might find eatable. (Eskimo dogs, be it remarked, find nothing uneatable save sticks and stones). As an entrance or exit for the sukso, a further passage is built, like a little tunnel; again as protection from the arctic wind.
The finishing touch is the window. Light is a necessity, but the Eskimo is scarcely particular about ventilation. The less he gets of that the more successful his architecture seems to be. A square opening is cut high up in the dome of the igloo, facing the [[79]]sleeping bench. It is then glazed after the fashion of the Arctics. The builder sets off for the nearest sheet of fresh water ice, and with the butt end of his sealing spear shivers out a good thick pane of it. This he places over the hole in the roof, packing its edges round with half melted snow, and pouring water over the packing. In two minutes, everything is frozen airtight and solid, and a window of flawless ice lets the illumination of the northern night into the pure and icy chamber of the newly made house. Failing a window of ice, one is made of strips of dried seal intestine (a thin, translucent material, not unlike oiled silk), stitched together with fine deer sinew. The seams are parallel, and as neatly executed as if by machine working on the smallest stitch. The fabric is stretched over the opening and pegged down at the corners, and congealed into its place by half melted snow. A small hole is cut in the dome for ventilation, and a snow block provided to stop it up again when necessary.
Finally, the interior has to be glazed. While the householder himself has been busy more or less within the building, on the outside the old men and the children and the women have been set the task of packing every joint and crevice in the snow masonry with loose snow, so as to make it absolutely wind tight. Now comes the moment when the doorways, too, are closed and every entrance blocked. Two lamps, well trimmed and well supplied with oil, have been carefully lit and left burning inside, much as [[80]]we in this country leave a sulphur candle in a room to be fumigated after infectious illness, and seal up the door. As the lamps burn slowly away, the temperature rises and all the surface of the snow is slightly melted. As the lamps die out the temperature falls again, and the surface freezes to glass-like smoothness. Every asperity of the sawn blocks of snow is annealed, and the dwelling is as proof against draught as the inside of a bottle. Water, too, is thrown on the floor, to make it smooth as marble and as durable as cement.
The writer has dwelt thus at length upon the building of the Eskimo’s winter quarters, since there is something almost like a fairy tale in this fantastic yet ingenious and practical use of snow and ice. If masters of taste have always insisted upon the principles in architecture that design should be in keeping with site and surroundings, and material should be indigenous to the locality, surely the houses that these hardy children of the frozen North build for themselves are by no means wanting in true artistry.
An Eskimo Home.
Here is a little collection of igloos joining each other, with one common entrance. It is really a collection of relations living together, each one having their own igloo with doorways opening into the principal families’ igloo.
These snow houses do not take very long to construct. An Eskimo can build an igloo large enough to house about six people in a few hours, given some assistance. It would be imagined that no great degree of comfort could be expected within a dwelling where a thaw of the roof and walls begins as soon as the temperature rises above freezing point. But warmth is a matter of degree in the Arctic, and shelter from [[81]]the bitterness of the wind alone is almost warmth. The stillness of the air inside, the greatly lessened intensity of cold, and the local if foul warmth over the lamps and cooking pots, all make for comfort as the native understands it.
In some parts of the country the natives line the dome and walls of their houses with cleverly stretched skins, and between them and the snow walls the intervening space acts as a regulator against the interior warmth, so that excessive thaw is checked, or its effects are prevented from damping the family circle below.
Lest the foregoing account of the white and frozen village should convey too dazzling an idea of such a settlement, it should be remembered that the snow all round and about is trampled up, and incredibly defiled by all the refuse of a community who have no ideas at all about sanitation and seemly surroundings. Hence there is an appearance of dirt and squalor wherever the Eskimo encamp, and these little congeries of human beings contrive quite effectually to blot and mar the pure immensity of the snow-white northern landscape.
The Igloovegak once finished, it remains to do the furnishing. This is essentially the women’s work. Heather is lavishly spread over the sleeping bench, and covered again with the heavy winter skins of deer. The rolled-up fur rugs (or “blankets”) of the family are ranged round the walls. Two of the soapstone lamps are placed on stands at each end of the sleeping [[82]]bench, and a rough framework of wood and deer thongs arranged above them by way of a rack for drying clothes. Stone cooking pots may be suspended over the lamps when required, and a store of blubber and meat is kept handy on the snow benches behind the lamps.
The rest of the family belongings are stowed away in the porch, and the house is ready for occupation.
There is another description of snow dwelling used by the Eskimo called a Sinniktâkvik, an acquired sleeping place. This is merely a temporary affair, a hastily built igloo sufficient to house a travelling party for the space of a “sleep,” having no porch or window, and only intended to be abandoned next day.
It is interesting to note that the remains of the dwellings of the Tooneet can be distinguished by the fact of their circular floors having been laid down with rough stones, unlike the modern igloo, which leaves little or nothing to mark its site by the time it has all melted away in summer. The sleeping bench in the Tooneet house was narrower than the present day Eskimo’s, showing that the earlier people were of shorter stature.
The family continue to inhabit the winter igloo until the spring thaw comes, and the roof falls in. Then, for a week or two, skins are stretched over the hole to keep the storms from beating in; but this is only a temporary measure. By the time the milder weather really sets in, and the trickle of water can be [[83]]heard everywhere, and the tunnelling, too, of the lemming under the sleeping bench, the tupik has to be in readiness. It has been stored away under a heap of stones during the winter, but with the advent of the ducks it is brought forth and erected once more.
These Eskimo settlements are not built according to plan. Each man chooses a site for his own igloo, generally in the shelter of some rock, or where there is a good supply of hard packed snow. The dwellings are not very scattered, however, but grouped fairly closely together, for the double purpose of sociability and common defence against attack by dogs, wolves, or bears. The true Eskimo village boasts of no common room or general meeting house such as may be in use among some of the tribes in Alaska and elsewhere, where few native customs survive unchanged. Nor is the log or sod hut ever seen in the regions where Eskimo life is still lived as it used to be before Europeans set foot in the polar wilds.
It is noteworthy that, when an Eskimo tribe moves to another locality, the old igloos are never destroyed. In the barrens, the law of hospitality is universally observed, and such of these buildings as may survive the springtime thaw, might serve for shelter at any time to travellers on journey. Those that are fairly intact when the tribe moves away are merely blocked up; but those which have become unsafe have the roof knocked in. The writer has frequently come across these deserted villages in the course of his journeys, [[84]]and had occasion to avail himself of the shelter thus offered. It is a weird and desolate sight—a collection of derelict igloos—some gaping open, others closed; but no smoke or steam escaping from their little domes. And, over all, the pall of the frozen silence of the Arctic. [[85]]
CHAPTER VI
The Sealing Grounds
The day’s work in an Eskimo village (i.e., permanent winter quarters), is full and varied, and quite regular. It is a busy life they lead, both men and women, marked by all sorts of skilled activities; by intervals of neighbourly recreation and gossip; by the excitement and stir of the hunters’ return from sealing or bear hunting; and by wonderfully cheery, cosy, hospitable orgies of eating in the evening, when everyone is getting dry and warm and replete for the night.
The hunters start out early in the morning, after a hasty meal of raw flesh and a drink of water, accompanied by their sons and the dogs, four or five in number, harnessed to a light sled loaded with lines and harpoons, or whatever implements may be needed for the proposed chase. The team starts out in a fine tear, urged by shouting and the cracking of whips, and off they all race, men and dogs together, to the sealing grounds out on the frozen sea, or inland for deer. The stars serve as a compass, or in thick weather the wind will be sufficient guide.
No food is borne on the sled, for the hunter depends [[86]]upon himself for his dinner. The duty of the boys is to watch the sled, to mind the dogs, and see they do not fight or stampede, to study the conditions of the ice, the signs of the weather, the habits of animals, to note their calls and movements and how to imitate them, to take careful notice of the topography of the country and make mental drawings of it to serve as charts and maps, to read the stars, and, generally to endeavour to become skilled and successful hunters themselves.
They arrive at the sealing ground as the winter day breaks, and immediately start the search for a seal hole; for upon the finding of this depends the comfort and sustenance of the whole family for days to come, and the succour of the families of anybody else who may not be in luck, but who may return home, cheery as ever, but empty handed.
All around as far as the eye can see is a vast, white expanse, utterly featureless and monotonous save for an occasional iceberg or a ridge of hummocky ice. Behind is the white line of the broken coast; ahead is a dark mist, marking the floe edge and the open sea; and above all, the twilight sky, darker than the drear white world, of the Arctic winter. To a European, the effect of such a scene is crushing in its melancholic immensity, its frozen immobility and silence. Not so to the native. He remains irrepressibly cheerful, his whole soul preoccupied with the necessities of his larder, buoyed up with the hope and the tireless patience of the sealer. He goes searching [[87]]for his blow hole. The slight indication for which his practised eye is scanning every foot of the ice is a faintly rounded bump with a small opening in it no bigger than a shilling. As soon as he catches sight of one of these he is reassured, and prepares to wait—quite indefinitely, and perfectly still—for what must presently happen.
The seal is a warm-blooded creature, whose need of air to breathe is urgent and frequent. As soon as the sea begins to freeze, the animal takes precautions against being imprisoned and drowned under the ice. It makes a series of breathing holes over the whole area of its feeding ground below. If one or another of these freezes over again, there are the rest; or if an enemy is encountered at one hole, it can have recourse to another. The seal comes methodically after feeding to each blow hole in turn, and keeps it open by scratching away any newly formed ice threatening to close it up. It puts its nose to the opening and breathes long, deeply, and luxuriously, before diving once more.
The hunter knows every move in the game.
Having discovered a seal hole, he provides himself with a block of snow to sit upon, and prepares for a lengthy wait. He takes up his patient station facing the wind (for the seal has the keenest scent, and the Eskimo is, to say the least of it, somewhat smelly), thrusts his feet and legs into a deerskin bag, tucks his hands into the sleeves of his jacket, lays his spear across his knees, and watches—it may be for hours—[[88]]motionless as a rock, for sound travels under the ice and the prey must not be warned. A sealer will wait all day and all night, if need be, at the blow hole. If he should fall asleep, he runs the risk of being maimed for life with frostbite.
The Return of the Successful Seal Hunter in Springtime.
His wife and friends dragging the seal to his tupik, where it will be cut up and all will be invited to the evening meal.
Presently he hears the expected scratching, and the scraping of the paws of a seal coming up to breathe. Silently he prepares for action. Now is the critical time. First, there comes the expulsion of the foul air long pent in the animal’s lungs; but not yet dare the watcher make the slightest sign. The seal withdraws its head and listens intently for a possible foe. Reassured after a few moments, it again approaches the hole with the little dome of snow and, putting its head well up, takes a long, reviving breath. This is the hunter’s moment. His hand slips to his spear (his fur garments making no sound), grips it, and poises it with unerring aim. With one swift downward thrust, the weapon is through the blow hole and its barb buried deep in the neck of the seal. When the eye is true and quick the stroke is seldom missed. The animal immediately dives, taking out the barb and line. The Eskimo seal spear has a movable head or barb, which is attached to the shaft in such a way that it becomes detached from it the moment an animal is struck, and remains firmly embedded in the flesh with the long line of white whale hide attached, while the spear itself floats on the water or falls on the ice as the case may be. The hunter instantly recovers this shaft, and now the butt comes into play. [[89]]The hole is quickly enlarged and the prey hauled up and killed, there on the ice, with one quick stroke.
It is but the work of a few minutes for the dog team (which had been driven away back from the hole as soon as it was discovered), to come racing up. A shout summons every other hunter within sight, and quicker than it takes to tell, there is a concourse of fur-clad figures, the seal is cut open, and a rib, dripping with the fresh, hot blood, is presented to each by way of an invigorating snack. The carcase is soon skewered together again by means of the long ivory pins carried by the hunter, and loaded on to the sled, when the successful “outfit,” bidding a cheery adieu to the others, strikes off then and there for home, rejoicing in the thought of fresh supplies of meat and blubber, and another skin added to the family stores.
When the sealing season fully sets in, sealing camps are formed far out on the ice at sea, over the sealing grounds, and thither the younger half of the entire Eskimo community resorts for a month or more. A new, roughly fashioned, temporary village quickly springs up, and all the usual household goods are installed in readiness for the season’s work on the spot. The camp igloos are much smaller and less ambitious dwellings than those on shore, their sole object being to provide a few weeks’ shelter. There is none of the home life of the permanent village. The men and boys are away all day long, and the women spend all their time preparing and drying the [[90]]skins and keeping the cooking pot going. Water is obtained either from the snow lying deep on the surface of the ice, or from ice from the nearest berg. From early morning till late at night the camp resounds with the crack of whips, the shouts of the dog-team drivers, the gruff voices of men and the shrill voices of boys, as they drive hither and thither, quartering the expanse of the sealing grounds in search of the blow holes. Every foot of the way is closely scanned. Suddenly a deep “Ugh!” from the hunter announces the saucer-like depression in the snow which tells him that a seal cavern is beneath.
Here and there a solitary sportsman with but one dog on a long line sets out on his own, over the sealing ground. He trudges observantly along, urging the dog to ferret about and pick up the scent of the quarry beneath the snow. “White Fang,” nothing loth, sets all his sharp, trained wits to work, and presently starts snuffling and scratching, like any terrier at a rat hole, and the hunter knows he has come upon his prey.
To understand the activities of the sealing camp it is necessary to know something of the habits of the seal in the breeding season. For some time before the baby creature is born, for instance, the mother has been preparing a house for it. She does not give birth in the water nor on the surface of the snow, for the obvious reasons of the cold and of the possible presence of enemies. She makes a hole in the sea ice big enough for her to get through, and proceeds to [[91]]scrabble out an airy cavern in the deep layer of snow above, leaving a sort of shelf or flooring of clear ice upon which she can lie in safety and bring her young to birth. This place is—comparatively—warm, dry, and even cosy. It is within immediate reach of the hole through which she can dive back into the water at a moment’s alarm, and it is almost completely hidden from above. The baby is left in this cavern while the mother seeks food, and it lives there until, after a series of short educational excursions in the water, it has learnt to hunt for itself, and its lungs have accustomed themselves to the conditions of the adult seal’s existence.
Frequently indeed the baby gets drowned! The mother may have heard some noise above which has alarmed her. Fearing danger, she has thrust her head up through the diving hole, caught hold of the young one, and hastily retreated with it to a depth unsuitable for its tender lungs, with a sad and fatal result.
The Eskimo sealer knows all this natural history as he knows that of every other denizen of the Arctic, and founds upon it his methods in hunting.
Directly he has detected the locality of a seal’s nursing cavern under his feet, either by the presence of a slight depression in the snow, or by the pointing of the dog, he arms himself with a nixie, or hook on the end of a long shaft, and gathering himself together makes a tremendous jump into the air, coming down with all his weight and force upon the spot. He [[92]]jumps again and again, until at last the snow caves in and blocks the hole below, cutting off the baby seal’s retreat into the sea beneath. Then he prods and probes among the débris of the cavern for the imprisoned creature, locates it, hooks it out, and kills it with one blow on the head. After that, there is the mother to be caught. She is probably lurking under the ice nearby. So, before he kills the little one, the hunter ties his sealing line to one of its flippers and pushes it through the diving hole into the water. The mother at once tries to come to its rescue, only to encounter her own devoted death. She, too, is hooked, dragged out, and despatched.
Young Seal Hunting in May.
An Eskimo hunter breaking through into a young seal’s dwelling. This is done by jumping upon the top of the dwelling and breaking in the roof which, falling down, fills up the hole in the ice and prevents the mother from rescuing the young one. The hunter then inserts his hook and secures the young seal.
The seal has other enemies to contend with besides man. The bear has a keen scent, a heavy paw, a huge [[93]]appetite, and a peculiar relish for her young. He, too, wanders out on the sealing grounds at the proper season, and having found a cavern, sets his two huge forepaws on the snow and, with one mighty push, breaks it all in. He easily hooks the helpless little creature beneath, and devours it with ursine relish.
Or it may be that an arctic fox decides to spend a day seal hunting. He glides over the snow, an almost invisible shape, like nothing so much as a white wraith of the desolation around. His scent having guided him to a likely spot, and being unable, like the bear, to do his housebreaking by mere brute force, he adopts a peculiarly wicked plan of his own. Planting all four feet together pivot-fashion, he spins himself round and round, his claws boring a way through the snow, until he corkscrews his unwelcome presence into the seal’s retreat. The baby, again, falls a helpless victim.
This seal hunting of the tribesmen, far out at sea in the camp on the ice, is not without its dangers, as the following tale will show.
For several weeks all had gone prosperously with the sealers. The weather had been good, and the young seals plentiful. Loaded sleds had been continually going to and fro between the winter village on shore and the village on the ice, bearing meat and skins to the old folk at home. Contentment and jollity reigned, for had not the Conjurors guaranteed prosperity and good luck, and were their prophecies not amply fulfilled? [[94]]
But, one day, the sky became overcast. Hour after hour it grew more heavily banked with forbidding cloud, whilst from seaward came a low roar, the presage of an arctic storm. The sealers hastily retreated to their dwellings, and blocked up their doors, and prepared to wait. Evening drew nigh, and the tempest rose. An occasional quiver of the icy floor told of the pounding of heavy breakers at the floe edge, and a portentous shiver now and again spoke of masses of it being broken away.
With the indifference which comes of familiarity with danger, these hardy northern folk stayed out there in camp, on the very edge as it were of death; and as the night drew on, merely rolled themselves in their fur blankets and went to sleep, confident that the morning would see an abatement in the storm. Nevertheless, it went on increasing and grew more and more violent. The shivering dogs scratched holes for themselves in the snow on the lee side of the igloos, and buried themselves as deeply as they could. At length the Eskimo instinct of peril was aroused, and an intuitive sense of the full extent of the catastrophe at hand (a sense not developed to any marked degree among civilised peoples), roused the entire camp.
It began when a woman and her husband waked suddenly, feeling that all was not well. They looked round the igloo, yet could detect nothing amiss. Its other occupants slept soundly. There was the thud and the roar of the wild hurricane without, but all seemed snug within. [[95]]
And yet—what was that? Even as the goodwife watched and waited, there came another of those strange quiverings in the ice, and the cooking pot suspended over the lamp began to swing. The awful thing told its own tale! The ice on which the camp was built was breaking up beneath it, and every soul was faced with imminent and deadly peril. The sea was fathoms deep below; the land a long distance away! Darkness and the savage uproar without made chaos of the arctic night.
Then indeed the ice gave way, and in a moment became nothing but a pounding, grinding mass of detatched fragments, on which the wrecked camp tossed. The sealers, roughly awakened, smashed down their doors, or with knife and spear cut a way out of their igloos as best they might, and got clear of them, followed by the women and children. With the strange but unerring instinct of primitive man, they headed, even in that tumult and pitchy darkness, for the unseen land; and then began a perilous race with death and the spirits of the storm.
They had to spring from floe to floe, following each other, encouraging and helping the women, finding a way where from moment to moment there might be none, risking everything at every leap.
Among those in the crowd was Kownak, a young hunter, and his new made wife. The girl was only then recovering from a recent sickness, and her strength completely failed her. The two started, indeed, on their ghastly journey like the rest; but before [[96]]half the distance to safety was accomplished the young wife—wet, terrified, and weak—sank down exhausted and beaten on the bitter ice with a cry of despair. Kownak lifted her up and bore her on in his arms. But the rocking of the ice flung them both into the sea time and again, despite his utmost endeavour. Once he managed to grip the edge of the floe, whilst the girl scrambled back on to it again over his shoulders. He stripped off his coat to wrap it round her in the frantic effort to keep her from freezing, and tried again to lift and carry her. But it was an impossible feat on the tossing, glassy ice. She struggled to rise and stagger on, but could endure no more and sank down again, unconscious, to be frozen to death within another minute.
Kownak could not tear himself from the body until it had become nothing but an indistinguishable mass, one with the ice. Only then did he remember his own desperate plight, and make a final effort to save himself. After incredible exertions and hairbreadth escapes, at last he reached the shore, black with frostbite, and joined the surviving remnant of the sealing camp. The merest handful of the people had outlived that terrible night.
Two Women in Summer Dress.
They are wearing their inner jackets only. The row of beads on the front of one of the dresses is made by the woman herself. She makes a rough mould in a piece of ivory or bone and drops lead into it. They are very proud of their beads, for this purpose they will take lead as part payment for work done.
[[97]]
CHAPTER VII
Womanhood in the Arctics.
In the meantime, the women, left in the village on shore, have been far from idle. As soon as the husband has gone off for the day the wife sets about her domestic affairs. First, she rolls up the bedding and tidies the sleeping bench. The next job is to sweep the hoar-frost from the window and the cupola, to prevent the dripping of any moisture, and then to sweep up the floor—littered, likely enough, with the remains of a good feed overnight. These duties are performed with a brush made of the outspread wings of a duck or raven; it might almost be called a double-bladed brush. The backs are sewn together and the upper bones form the handle. Such a contrivance is a very handy affair altogether, and will last quite a long time.
The next task is to prepare a quantity of blubber for oil. This is pulped with a bone hammer or koutak, and the fuel so obtained is suspended over the shallow lamps in such a way as to dip into them and keep them supplied. New wick is fashioned from dried moss and cotton plant trimmed upon the lamps. Next comes the stew for supper. The Eskimos have only one way of cooking meat, and that is stewing it in the [[98]]stone “kettles” already described. These are partly filled with sea water for the sake of the salt, a quantity of seal’s blood is added, and then comes the meat. The whole thing hangs simmering over the lamps all day, and by the time the men come back at night a reeking hot meal is ready, rich, nourishing, and as tender as a sharp-set hunter could desire.
Water is the next consideration. The Eskimo housewife hauls it in skin buckets from the nearest stream, bailing it up through a hole in the ice; or, failing that, she brings in the ice itself, or snow, and sets it to melt over a spare lamp. These people are thirsty souls, and water is hard to come by in the winter. Every drop that can be obtained is used for drinking or cooking, so that washing (except the hands and face), is dispensed with perforce of arctic circumstance. Fresh water ice melts more quickly than beaten snow, and it is an interesting fact that an iron or tin pot used for melting the former will last much longer than for melting snow. The latter process causes it to become quickly pitted with spots of rust and perforated. Aluminium vessels last the longest. In the old days—i.e., prior to the establishments of trading posts—the Eskimos had no utensils of any sort except those of native manufacture from bone, or stone, or ivory. Nowadays they have steel-tipped spears, iron nails, and tinware for cooking purposes.
Perhaps the next most important employment of the feminine portion of the community is the preparation [[99]]of skins, the softening of leather, and the finer animal tissues, the washing, drying, and stretching of gut, and the manufacture of the marvellously fine sinew used for sewing and stitchery. All this includes the making of tents and clothing. The old women help the housewives as far as they are able, and the girls watch and learn, with a view to rendering themselves eligible in the eyes of the young men as accomplished brides-to-be. The women are perpetually employed chewing the edges of skins and leathers to make them pliable and soft for sewing. This process tends to wear down the teeth to very unsightly stumps.
The heavy work is done by the hale and hearty, who leave only the lighter tasks, such as the tending of the lamps and the minding of the house, to the older folk. Womanlike all the world over, the crones love to get together and indulge in unlimited gossip. All the women, indeed, pay a constant round of visits, and gathering, now here, now there, sit about smiling and gossiping, as is their wont from the tropics to the pole.
The Eskimo are a genial, jovial, peaceable people, among whom quarrelling is a crime, and he or she who disturbs the general peace is a villain of the deepest dye. So, whatever else comes of all the gossip, it is not—in an Eskimo village—malevolence, backbiting and spite. They talk—these fur-clad, hard-working women—of their last year’s journeyings, who and what they saw and heard, of their trials and vexations, of their children and relations and [[100]]husbands—each one’s contribution to the conversation being punctuated by a chorus of “Ah, Ah’s,” “Elarle! Elarle!” (Indeed! Yes!) from the rest.
Suddenly, however, just when their enjoyment may be at its height, the children’s cry of “Kumokse! Kumokse! Netsérkpok!”—(A sled, a sled! He’s got a seal!) breaks up the gathering in excited confusion. There is a rush, each wife to her own home. Cries of joy and anticipation fill the air, and the whole village is stirred with cheerful and prosperous bustle. The hunters are returning, and fresh supplies are at hand. Very soon the cracking of the dog whips is heard, shouts of command, barks and howls; and the teams appear, scrambling over the sigjak (the broken ice along the shore), with their welcome loads. Quickly the harness is thrown off and safely bestowed, the lines and everything eatable being carried into the sukso; the dogs are fed and quieted, and curl round and go to sleep in the snow.
Then comes the evening meal. The stewpot is taken from the slings and set in front of the mistress of the igloo. The sturdy men and children crowd round her and each one is served with a generous piece of sealmeat. They hold it in their hands to eat. Each bronzed or wind-blackened face glows with enjoyment and contentment in the homely lamplight, and an atmosphere of unfeigned goodwill and cheer dominates the little group. The hungry folk whose husbands and fathers have not been successful all day simply distribute themselves through the [[101]]village, and share the food of the lucky. The captor of to-day may return empty handed to-morrow, when he may look for hospitality to his guests of to-night.
As soon as the meal in the pot is finished, the soup is poured out into a drinking bowl and handed round, each one taking a good pull in turn. The air soon reeks—the tight-packed assemblage of unwashed humanity, the stench of seal oil and blubber, the strong odours from the pot and the exhalations of garments spread out on the racks to dry, all contribute to the malodorous atmosphere. But what of that to those accustomed to nothing else, to whom the whole means warmth and plenty and the nearness of his own, in the frozen immensity of the awful arctic world without?
As soon as the meal is done the day’s catch of seals is cut up. Each animal is placed on its back on the floor, opened and dismembered, and pieces of the meat and blubber are given to the needy. Open hospitality is the law of the land in the Arctics. Travellers, whether native or European, are always sure of welcome and shelter on reaching an Eskimo village. On these occasions the stranger is always the first to be served from the generous family stew.
This sanguinary and odoriferous business being despatched, and the neighbours having taken themselves off, the door is fixed for the night—the door being a slab of snow cut to fit the main entrance to the igloo, and set on one side during the day. The lamps are trimmed to a low flame, wet clothes are [[102]]spread on the drying frames above them, and each member of the family rolls up in a fur blanket on the sleeping bench and so goes to bed. Occasionally the mother wakes up, to trim the lamps and turn the clothes during the night. She will be the first to wake and rise in the morning, since it is part of the woman’s work “which is never done,” to rub and soften the leathern clothing of her good man and the boys, which had hardened in drying while they slept.
Before the advent of the white man and his methods, the Eskimo used to start a fire by means of “firesticks.” The writer has seen this done repeatedly at the present day. An oblong piece of wood with a depression made in it to hold the tinder (a mixture of dried moss and cotton plant), receives the spindle. Another small piece of wood, placed on top of the latter, is held in position by the teeth and pressed down firmly upon it. The spindle is made to rotate rapidly by means of a rough bow until a spark, caused by the friction, starts up in the tinder. This is gently blown to a flame, and the fire is kindled. Nowadays, steel, or pieces of iron, are used in place of the driftwood board and spindle, especially on hunting expeditions; for although matches have found their way into the Eskimo igloo, they are costly, and apt to get damp.
There seems to be a happy sort of sex equality among these people, or perhaps it should rather be said that a mutually agreeable division of equally essential labours cause the men and women to live [[103]]more on a common footing than they seem to do among many other uncivilised folk. Old women, widows, and orphan girls, never want for protection and sustenance, so long as the rest can shelter and support them. The Eskimo are a very improvident people, never taking thought for the hungry morrow when they can feast to-day; but so long as the good things last, so long as they are to be had, the old and helpless of both sexes are never neglected. If a time should come when there arises a question of superfluous mouths to fill, the old people go into a sort of voluntary retreat in their own houses, and willingly die the death of starvation. More will be said on this subject elsewhere.
On one dreadful occasion an Eskimo woman was betrayed by force of circumstances into an act of cannibalism. This woman was a tall, commanding figure from the south coast, with a grave, intelligent face. She was an excellent huntress, equally at home with gun or spear. She could wield her needle, too, and together with her husband, was a first-rate worker and much respected by all the tribe.
A party of women, including herself and her baby, were travelling to a trading station. Their sled was well provisioned and their dogs in good condition, and the route lay over mountains and valleys, and across all the intervening fiords and bays. Soon after they started things began to go wrong. The weather changed and a wind got up, bearing snow. Storm after storm swept the country, through which the [[104]]travellers could scarcely force their way. The dogs sank to their shoulders in the deep drift, and at last could make no further progress at all. The little expedition called a halt. They built a sleeping place and prepared to wait till the violence of the weather abated. But, as day after day went howling by, each as impossible as the last, the stock of rations became exhausted, and the whole party reached the verge of starvation.
The Eskimo woman from the south fell ill, in consequence of the hardships and privations, and lost consciousness. While she happened to be in this state, a council was held by the others of the party, who decided to keep life going by killing and eating the child. This was accordingly done, and as soon as she could be partially roused, a portion was given to the famished mother. Not knowing what it was she did, she ate the meat—and survived. Some time afterwards the forlorn band was rescued by some hunters and taken to their camp, and only then the woman learnt the truth about her supposedly dead baby. Years after the horrible thing occurred the writer met her and had the story from her own lips.
A Young Wife with her Baby in her Hood.
The ornamentation on the front of her jacket is strings of various coloured beads, much prized by the women.
Eskimo Family Group.
The Eskimo marry at an early age, generally at about 14 years of age, the marriage being arranged between the parents of the parties.
Women and their adventures figure largely in Eskimo folk tales. One of them might almost point to a feminist movement in the Arctics! Two brides, it is narrated, ran away from their homes before their very first children ever saw the light. After awhile the fathers went in search of their lost daughters. When the girls found they were discovered they wept [[105]]bitterly, and declared themselves most unwilling to return to their husbands. The fathers, however, were quite relieved to find them comfortably off where they were, and having stayed a couple of “sleeps” in their daughters’ house, returned home without the brides. When they got back to the tribe they had this amazing thing to tell—that two women without the company of any men, lived happily all by themselves, and were never in want!
There is a charming little story of a lonely woman who owned a bear cub, and loved it and brought it up like a child and called it her son. The bear repaid her devotion, and supported her by his prowess in hunting so well that the rest of the villagers grew jealous and planned to kill him. So, conscious of their evil designs, he departed, almost as much to the grief of the children of the village as to that of his “mother.” He never ceased, however, to repay her love, and continued out on the ice floes to catch seals for her support.
The gruesome story of the murderess Toodlânak has never hitherto—so far as the writer can ascertain—been included in any ethnologist’s collection of the Eskimo legends.
It is narrated by the Ancient Ones that there lived this Toodlânak, who was an evil spirit in female disguise. She had a large house (igloovegak) built by the side of the route used by hunters going inland after deer. It was far up country, many days’ journey either from the sea or from the pastures of the interior. [[106]]The house was large and comfortable, and Toodlânak had a reputation for hospitality. She loved to entertain any who passed that way and to give them food and shelter for the night. She allotted to them the best rugs and the most comfortable part of the sleeping bench. Presently, however, it began to be noticed that few if any of these hunters returned. At last the brother of one of these inexplicably missing men determined to look into things. He started out with a companion, and in due course both reached the half-way house. Out came Toodlânak, as usual, all smiles and amiability, inviting them to enter and refresh and rest themselves there for the night. They did so, but the suspicious young man kept his wits about him, and never relaxed a sharp look-out on his hostess. He had a notion that she knifed her guests in their slumber.
Unknown to Toodlânak, he secreted a flat stone within the bosom of his tunic (the netseak), and, rolling himself in his blanket, lay flat on his back apparently in deep sleep. His hostess had also retired to rest, and seemed also quite dead to the world. But, about midnight, he saw her rise by the dim light of the lamp, and creep over to his companion where he also lay asleep on the bench. The movement betrayed the fact that the awful creature had a knife-like tail with which she struck her victim through the chest and killed him. She then crept stealthily towards the watcher, and would have served him the same way but that he was ready for her. The vicious tail struck, [[107]]indeed, at his chest, but shivered on the hidden stone, broke off, and left Toodlânak defenceless. The hunter sprang up and killed her on the spot. He searched all over the place, and found the remains of innumerable victims, and their property hoarded away. He broke down the house, buried his luckless companion, and returned home with the news that at last the country was ridded of its pest and might be safely travelled. [[108]]