The Ostiaks and the Samoiedes are great hunters of the white bear. It is the same with the Yakouts, a people dwelling near the Bouriats, and approaching, like them, to the Mongol type. It seems that the object of the chase is not always to kill the animal, but to catch him alive. Madame Felinska relates that she saw one day a considerable troop of bears conducted to Bérézov like a herd of tame cattle, and apparently quite as inoffensive. She neglects to inform us, however, by what means they had been reduced to this state of passive obedience. The Ostiaks and the Yakouts frequently attack the white bears body to body, without any other weapon than a hatchet or a long cutlass. They need to strike the animal with extreme skill and vigour, to slay him at the first blow, or otherwise they incur extreme peril. If he misses his stroke, the hunter’s only resource is to fling himself on the ground and lie motionless, until the bear, while smelling his body and turning him over, incautiously offers himself again to his attack.
The Yakouts are nearly of average height. They are robust and brave, honest and hospitable, but addicted to idolatry and polygamy.
The Kamtschatdales are smaller and shorter than the Yakouts. They have a round flat face, a broad depressed nose, and prominent cheek-bones. They are of a friendly, mild, and peaceable character. They have a strong partiality for the song and the dance, and their amusements frequently degenerate into orgies. Small-pox and excessive brandy-drinking have reduced to a few hundred families a population which numbered, a century ago, fully 15,000 souls.
One sole population inhabits the immense icy plains which extend into America even beyond the Polar circle. I refer to the Eskimos, who are found—encamped in summer under tents made of reindeer or seal-skin, hidden in winter in their snow-huts—from Behring’s Strait even to Cape Farewell. This race has the reddish-brown tint of the North American Indians. In its small stature and physical forms it does not differ from other Hyperboreans; but in physiognomy and the flattened skull it singularly recalls the men of lofty stature who inhabit the other extremity of the American continent, the Patagonians. The physiognomy, the character, and the manners of the Eskimos have been frequently described. The courageous navigators who have explored the Polar Sea in quest of a North-west Passage have held frequent intercourse with these poor people, and all agree in eulogizing their gentleness, their patriarchal life, their eagerness to succour strangers. An American, Captain Hall, the last adventurer who has set himself the task of discovering the wrecks of Franklin’s ill-fated expedition, spent a whole year in the midst of the Eskimos, whose amiability and generosity he praises in no stinted terms. Exclusively hunters and fishers, the Eskimos have no other domestic animal than the dog; they harness it to their sledges, and also train it to chase the seal, the walrus, and the reindeer. It is in the summer only that they hunt the latter animal. In that genial season there is no lack of other game, terrestrial and marine. It is for them a season of abundance, wherein they gorge themselves with flesh, blood, and fat. During the winter they often fast several days at a time, and remain immured in their huts like hybernating animals; but at length, driven by famine and by want of oil, they go forth upon the ice in search of the seals which come up to breathe. When they have been fortunate enough to kill one, they divide it amongst them amicably, and regale themselves upon it until only the bones remain, after which they endure a new period of privation. Thus they live from day to day, in continual alternations of gluttony and abstinence, without injury to their health, and without shortening their lives. And it is worthy of notice that Europeans who once consent to adopt this regime—to drink the warm blood and eat the raw flesh and fat of seals—soon accept of it without the slightest repugnance, and become capable of enduring, like true Hyperboreans, the terrible cold of the long Polar winters.
The inhabitants of Sagalien, one of the northerly Asiatic islands, are a race called the Anios, the same people who form the aboriginal population of Jesso, and some tribes of whom also dwell on the opposite shores of Manchooria. They are uncultured and pagan savages, who dwell in huts built of rough logs, and live upon the proceeds of their fishery and the chase. Their women are ugly and little; the men are tall, lithe, straight, and strong, with flowing hair and unkempt beard and moustaches. Like the Samoiedes they worship the bear; feasting the living animals on the choicest dried fish, and planting young pines round the cages in which they are kept. Their graves they regard with similar feelings of veneration.
The other Hyperborean races do not widely differ in character and physical appearance from those already described.