URINE USED IN THE MANUFACTURE OF SALT.
Gómara explains that, mixed with palm-scrapings, human urine served as salt to the Indians of Bogota,—“Hacen sal de raspaduras de palma y orinas de hombre.”—(“Hist. de las Indias,” p. 202.)
Salt is made by the Latookas of the White Nile from the ashes of goat’s dung.—(See “The Albert Nyanza,” Sir Samuel Baker, Philadelphia, 1869, p. 224.)
Pallas states that the Buriats of Siberia, in collecting salts from the shores of certain lakes in their country, are careful as to the taste of the same: “Ils n’emploient que ceux qui ont un goût d’Urine et d’alkali.” (“Voyages,” Paris, 1793, vol. iv. p. 246.) This shows that they must once have used urine for salt, as so many other tribes have done.
The Siberians gave human urine to their reindeer: “Nothing is so acceptable to a reindeer as human urine, and I have even seen them run to get it as occasion offered.”—(John Dundas Cochrane, “Pedestrian Journey Through Siberian Tartary,” 1820-23, Philadelphia, 1824, p. 235.)
Melville also relates that he saw the drivers urinate into the mouths of their reindeer in the Lena Delta.—(Personal letter to Captain Bourke.)
Here the intent was evident; the animals needed salt, and no other method of obtaining it was feasible during the winter months. Cochrane is speaking of the Tchuktchi; but he was also among Yakuts and other tribes. He walked from St. Petersburg to Kamtschatka and from point to point in Siberia for a total distance of over six thousand miles. His pages are dark with censure of the filthy and disgusting habits of the savage nomads, as, of the Yakuts, “Their stench and filth are inconceivable.... The large tents (of the Tchuktchi) were disgustingly dirty and offensive, exhibiting every species of grossness and indelicacy.” Inside the tents men, women, and girls were absolutely naked. “They drink only snow-water during the winter, to melt which, when no wood can be had, very disgusting and dirty means are resorted to,” etc. But nowhere does he speak of the drinking of human urine, which, as has been learned from other sources, does obtain among them.
(Tchuktchees of Siberia.) “It would be impossible, with decency, to describe their habits, or explain how their very efforts towards cleanliness make them all the more disgusting.... It requires considerable habitude or terrible experience in the open air to find any degree of comfort in such abodes. The Augean stables or the stump-tail cow-sheds appear like Paradise in comparison.”—(“Ice-Pack and Tundra,” Gilder, New York, 1883, p. 105.)