Part 2 (1/2)
On the mess table of the Fur Company's establishment at St. Paul island, seal meat is a daily article of consumption, and from personal experience I can testify as to its palatability, although it reminded one of indifferent beef rather overdone. Hair seal and bear steaks were on different occasions tried at the mess on board the Corwin, but everybody voted eider duck and reindeer the preference. It is not so very long since that whale was a favorite article of diet in England and Holland, and Arctic whalemen still, to my personal knowledge, use the freshly tried oil in cooking; for instance in frying cakes, for which they say it answers the purpose as well as the finest lard, while others breakfast on whale and potatoes prepared after the manner of codfish b.a.l.l.s. The whale I have tasted is rather insipid eating, yet it appears to be highly nutritious, judging from the well-nourished look of natives who have lived on it, and the air of greasy abundance and happy contentment that pervades an Eskimo village just after the capture of a whale. Being ash.o.r.e one day with our pilot, we met a native woman whom he recognized as a former acquaintance, and on remarking to her that she had picked up in flesh since he last saw her, she replied that she had been living on a whale all the Winter, which explained her plumpness.
It must not be supposed, however, that the whale, seal and walrus const.i.tute the entire food supply of the Arctic. There is scarcely any more toothsome delicacy than reindeer, the tongue of which is very dainty and succulent. There is one peculiarity about its flesh--in order to have it in perfection it must be eaten very soon after being killed; the sooner the better, for it deteriorates in flavor the longer it is kept. Indeed, the Eskimo do not wait for the animal heat to leave the carca.s.s, as they eat the brains and paunch hot and smoking.
While our gastronomic enthusiasm did not extend this far, we dined occasionally on fresh trout from a Siberian mountain lake, young wild ducks as fat as squabs, and reindeer, any of which delicacies could not be had in the same perfection at Delmonico's or any similar establishment in New York for love or money. There is scarcely any better eating in the way of fish than _coregonus_--a new species discovered at Point Barrow by the _Corwin_--and certainly no more dainty game exists than the young wild geese and ptarmigan to be found in countless numbers in Hotham inlet. At the latter place, doubtless the warmest inside the straits, are found quant.i.ties of cranberries about the size of a pea, which not only make a delicious accessory to roasted goose, but act as a valuable antis...o...b..tic. These berries and a kind of kelp, which I have seen Eskimo eating at Tapkan, Siberia, seem to be the only vegetable food they have. The large quant.i.ties of eggs easily procurable, but in most cases doubtful, also const.i.tute a standard article of diet among these people, who have no scruples about eating them partly hatched. They seemed never to comprehend our fastidiousness in the matter and why our tastes differed so much from theirs in this respect. They will break an egg containing an embryonic duck or goose, extract the bird by one leg and devour it with all the relish of an epicure. Gull's eggs, however, are in disrepute among them, for the women--who, by the way, have the same frailties and weaknesses as their more civilized sisters--believe that eating gull's eggs causes loss of beauty and brings on early decrepitude. The men, on the other hand, are fond of seal eyes, a tid-bit which the women believe increases their amorousness, and feed to their lords after the manner of ”Open your mouth and shut your eyes.”
Game is, as a rule, very tame, and during the moulting season, when the geese are unable to fly, it is quite possible to kill them with a stick.
At one place, Cape Thompson, Eskimo were seen catching birds from a high cliff with a kind of scoop-net, and I saw birds at Herald island refuse to move when pelted with stones, so unaccustomed were they to the presence of man. In addition to being very tame, game is plentiful, and it is not uncommon, off the Siberian coast, to see flocks of eider ducks darkening the air and occupying several hours in pa.s.sing overhead. It was novel sport to see the natives throw a projectile known as an ”apluketat” into one of these flocks with astonis.h.i.+ng range and accuracy, bringing down the game with the effectiveness of a shotgun.
Game keeps so well in the Arctic that an instance is known of its being perfectly sweet and sound on an English s.h.i.+p after two years' keeping, and whalemen kill a number of pigs, which they hang in the rigging and keep for use during the cruise. It is also noticeable that leather articles do not mildew as they generally do at sea, some shoes kept in a locker on board the _Corwin_ having retained their polish during the entire cruise.
The food of the Eskimo satisfies their instinctive craving for a hydrocarbon, but they do not allow themselves to be much disturbed or distracted in its preparation, as most of it is eaten raw. They occasionally boil their food, however, and some of them have learned the use of flour and mola.s.ses, of which they are very fond.
Their aversion to salt is a very marked peculiarity, and they will not eat either corned beef or pork on this account. It may be that physiological reasons exist for this dislike.
SOCIAL AND DOMESTIC RELATIONS.
Omitting other ethnographic facts relative to the Eskimo, which might be treated in a systematic way except for their triteness, we pa.s.s from the means of the renewal of the animal economy to its reproduction.
Courts.h.i.+p and marriage, which, it is said, are conducted in the most unsentimental manner possible, are for that reason not to be discussed; and for obvious reasons many of the prenatal conditions cannot here be dwelt upon. Having never witnessed the act of parturition in an Eskimo my knowledge of the subject is merely second-hand, and consequently not worth detailing. It appears, though, that parturition is a function easily performed among them, and that it is unattended by the post-partum accidents common to civilization. As a rule the women are unprolific, it being uncommon to find a family numbering over three children, and the mortality among the new-born is excessive, owing to the ignorance and neglect of the ordinary rules of hygiene. They seem, however, to be kind to their children, who in respect to crying do not show the same peevishness as seen in our nurseries; indeed, the social and demonstrative good nature of the race seems to crop out even in babyhood, as I have often witnessed under such circ.u.mstances as a baby enveloped in furs in a skin canoe which lay along side the s.h.i.+p during a snowstorm; its tiny hands protruding held a piece of blubber, which it sucked with apparent relish, the unique picture of happy contentment. It was quick to feel itself an object of attraction, and its chubby face returned any number of smiles of recognition.
The manner of carrying the infant is contrary to that of civilized custom. It is borne on the back under the clothes of the mother, which form a pouch, and from which its tiny head is generally visible over one or the other shoulder, but on being observed by strangers it shrinks like a snail or a marsupian into its snug retreat. When the mother wants to remove it she bends forward, at the same time pa.s.sing her left hand up the back under her garments, and seizing the child by the feet, pulls it downward to the left; then, pa.s.sing the right hand under the front of the dress, she again seizes the feet and extracts it by a kind of podalic delivery. Another common way of carrying children is astride the neck. The subject is one that the Chucki artist often carves in ivory.
The play impulse manifests itself among these people in various ways.
They have such mimetic objects as dolls, miniature boats, etc. I have seen a group of boys, sailing toy boats in a pond, behave under the circ.u.mstances just as a similar group has been observed to do at Provincetown, Cape Cod, and the same act, as performed in the Frog Pond of the Boston Common, may be called only a differentiated form of the same tendency. Their dolls, of ivory and clothed with fur, seem to answer the same purpose that they do in civilized communities--namely, the amus.e.m.e.nt of little girls--for at one place where we landed a number of Eskimo girls, stopping play on our approach, sat their dolls up in a row, evidently with a view to giving the dolls a better look at the strange visitors. Spinning tops, essentially Eskimo and unique in their character, are held in the hand while spinning; on the Siberian coast football is played, and among other questionable things acquired from contact with the whalemen, a knowledge of card-playing exists. We were very often asked for cards, and at one place where we stopped and bartered a number of small articles with the natives they gave evidence of their apt.i.tude at gaming. The game being started, with the bartered articles as stakes, one fellow soon scooped in everything, leaving the others to go off dead-broke, amid the ridicule of some of our crew, and doubtless feeling worse than dead, for among no people that I have seen, not even the French, does ridicule so effectually kill.
PERSONAL ORNAMENTATION.
Among the means taken by these people to produce personal ornamentation that of tattooing the face and wearing a labret is the most noticeable.
The custom of tattooing having existed from the earliest historical epochs is important, not only from an ethnological but from a medical and pathological point of view, and even in its relation to medical jurisprudence in cases of contested personal ident.i.ty.
Without going into the history of the subject, it may not be irrelevant to mention that tattooing was condemned by the Fathers of the Church, Tertullian, among others, who gives the following rather singular reason for interdicting its use among women: ”Certi sumus Spiritum Sanctum magis masculis tale aliquid subscribere potuisse si feminis subscripsisset.”[2]
In addition to much that has been written by French and German writers, the matter of tattoo-marks has of late claimed the attention of the law courts of England, the Chief-Justice, c.o.c.kburn, in the Tichbourne case, having described this species of evidence as of ”vital importance,” and in itself final and conclusive. The absence of the tattoo-marks in this case justified the jury in their finding that the defendant was not and could not be Roger Tichbourne, whereupon the alleged claimant was proved to be an impostor, found guilty of perjury, and sentenced to penal servitude.[3]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Style of personal ornamentation adopted by the women of Saint Lawrence island.]
Why the ancient habit of tattooing should prevail so extensively among some of the primitive tribes as it does, for instance, in the Polynesian islands and some parts of j.a.pan, and we may say as a survival of a superst.i.tious practice of paganism among sailors and others, is a psychological problem difficult to solve. Whether it be owing to perversion of the s.e.xual instinct, which is not unlikely, or to other cause, it is not proposed to discuss. Be that as it may, the prevalence of the habit among the Eskimo is confined to the female s.e.x, who are tattooed on arriving at the age of p.u.b.erty. The women of Saint Lawrence island, in addition to lines on the nose, forehead and chin, have uniformly a figure of strange design on the cheeks, which is suggestive of cabalistic import. It could not be ascertained, however, whether such is the case. The lines drawn on the chin were exactly like the ones I have seen on Moorish women in Morocco. Another outlandish attempt at adornment was witnessed at Cape Blossom in a woman who wore a bunch of colored beads suspended from the septum of her nose. These habits, however, hardly seem so revolting as the use of the labret by the ”Mazinka” men on the American coast, of whom it is related that a sailor seeing one of them for the first time, and observing the slit in the lower lip through which the native thrust his tongue, thought he had discovered a man with two mouths. The use of the labret, like many of the attempts at primitive ornamentation, is very old, its use having been traced by Dall along the American coast from the lower part of Chili to Alaska. Persons fond of tracing, vestiges of savage ornamentation amid intellectual advancement and aesthetic sensibility far in advance of the primitive man, may observe in the wearers of bangles and earrings the same tendency existing in a differentiated form.
DIVERSIONS.
I doubt whether Shakespeare's dictum in regard to music holds good when applied to the Eskimo, for they have but little music in their souls, and among no people is there such a noticeable absence of ”treason, stratagem and spoil.” A rude drum and a monotonous chant, consisting only of the fundamental note and minor third, are the only things in the way of music among the more remote settlements of which I have any knowledge. Mrs. Micawber's singing has been described as the table-beer of acoustics. Eskimo singing is something more. The beer has become flat by the addition of ice. One of our engineers, who is quite a fiddler, experimented on his instrument with a view to seeing what effect music would have on the ”savage breast,” but his best efforts at rendering ”Madame Angot” and the ”Grande d.u.c.h.esse” were wasted before an unsympathetic audience, who showed as little appreciation of his performance as some people do when listening to Wagner's ”Music of the Future.”
Where they have come in contact with civilization their musical taste is more developed. At Saint Michael's I was told that some of their songs are so characteristic that it is much to be regretted that some of them cannot be bottled up in a phonograph and sent to a musical composer. On the coast of Siberia I heard an Eskimo boy sing correctly a song he had learned while on board a whaling vessel, and on several of the Aleutian islands the natives play the accordeon quite well; have music-boxes, and even whistle strains from ”Pinafore.”
From music to dancing the transition is obvious, no matter whether the latter be regarded in a Darwinian sense as a device to attract the opposite s.e.x or as the expression of joyous excitement. This manifestation of feeling in its bodily discharge, which Moses and Miriam and David indulged in, which is ranked with poetry by Aristotle, and which old Homer says is the sweetest and most perfect of human enjoyments, is a pastime much in vogue among the Eskimo, and it required but little provocation to start a dance at any time on the _Corwin's_ decks when a party happened to be on board. The dancing, however, had not the cadence of ”a wave of the sea,” nor was there the harmony of double rotation circling in a series of graceful curves to strains like those of Strauss or Gungl. On the contrary, there was something saltatorial and jerky about all the dancing I saw both among the men and women. It is the custom at some of their gatherings, after the hunting season is over, for the men to indulge in a kind of terpsich.o.r.ean performance, at the same time relating in Homeric style the heroic deeds they have done. At other times the women do all the dancing. Being stripped to the waist they are more _decollete_ than our beauties at the German, and the men take the part of spectators only in this ch.o.r.eographical performance.
ART INSTINCT.