One of the Newfoundland fishermen left an Eskimo in charge of his supplies for the winter. Of these provisions he had set aside plenty for the Eskimo—for he knew how much a "husky" can eat. The Eskimo seems to have a "bread-basket" quite as extensible as any dog he drives.
Then all the other Eskimo came swarming: and he fed them all, so that in two days the whole crowd were starving together.
Grenfell found that the white man, green to the business of dog-driving or whale-hunting, had to win the respect of the Eskimo.
The Eskimo knows that most of his paleface brethren from the south are wholly unable to paddle their own canoes.
The white man, as a rule, cannot slay the seal, nor catch the cod, nor catch anything else except a cold.
He cannot stand up to a polar bear with a knife in fair fight.
He cannot sit out on a rock in a rain-storm all day without an umbrella and seem to enjoy it.
He cannot stand hunger, thirst and frost, and he chokes when the fumes and the black smoke of oil lamps get into his throat.
Then he is so funny about food! He doesn't care for stinking fish: he doesn't like his meat crawling with maggots after it has been buried in the ground; he doesn't know how much better molasses tastes when mice have fallen into it and expired.
The white man washes. How silly! He takes a brush made of little white bristles and rubs his teeth with it. Well, if the white man's mouth, which is full of water, isn't clean, then what part of him can be clean? And why does he turn up his nose at the Eskimo for being dirty?