From Paris to New York by Land

by Harry De Windt

My friend is probably the only white man who has ever assisted at a whale dance, which took place in a hut, dimly lit by seal oil lamps and crowded with both sexes in a state of nature, with the exception of their sealskin boots. The performance commenced with music in the shape of singing accompanied by walrus-hide drums, after which a long plank was brought in and suspended on the shoulders of four men. Upon this three women were hoisted astride, and commenced a series of wild contortions, back and forth and from side to side, not unlike the "Dance du ventre." Relays of girls continued this exercise for two or three hours, until all were exhausted, and then flesh of the whale, caught the preceding summer, was handed round by children, and washed down by floods of raw whisky, which brought the entertainment to a close for that night. The following day athletic sports were indulged in by those sufficiently sober, the owner of one hut furnishing the prizes and refreshments. This giver of the feast and his family were distinguished by faces plastered with the red paint already mentioned as being obtained from the mountains of the interior. Wrestling and racing were the chief pastimes, the prizes consisting of a cartridge, a piece of calico, or perhaps a fox skin. The women did not join in these contests, but with them a form of "tossing in a blanket" was gone through. A walrus skin perforated around with holes to give a firmer grip was held by seven or eight stalwart men, and at a given signal a girl lying in the centre was sent flying into the air, she who reached the greatest height receiving the appropriate prize of a needle or thimble. At night the dance was continued, and on this occasion a fire was kindled around which the medicine men seated themselves, mumbling incantations and casting small pieces of deer or walrus meat into the flames as a sacrifice to the evil spirits. The whale entertainment lasted for three nights, but the incidents which occurred upon the last evening are not fit for reproduction here. The whaleman, being more or less of a celebrity, had attracted the bright glances of several Tchuktchi maidens. But even when he found his affinity poor Billy's courtship was of short duration, for his ladylove, when embraced for the first time upon the lips, indignantly thrust him away and screamed for help. According to Tchuktchi customs, she had suffered an irreparable insult, the only recognised mode of kissing here being to rub noses while murmuring "Oo" for an indefinite period. This was Billy's first and last experience of love-making here, although Teneskin would gladly have welcomed a white man as a son-in-law, and without the tiresome preliminaries which generally precede a Tchuktchi marriage. For, on ordinary occasions, a man must first obtain the consent of his fiancée, then that of her parents, and when these points are settled he must reside for several months as an inmate of the girl's hut before he becomes her husband. A Tchuktchi may put a wife away on the slightest pretext, but no crime on his part entitles his wife to a divorce. A curious custom here is that of exchanging wives with a friend or acquaintance, who thereupon becomes a brother, even legally, and so far as the disposal of property is concerned.

A Tchuktchi may have as many wives as he pleases or can afford, but married life here is usually a happy one, which is probably due to the fact that a wife is never idle. Not only must she attend to the wants of the household, needlework, cooking, washing, and in winter clearing the roof of the yarat of snow, but there are hides to be tanned and deerskins to be dressed and sewn into clothing. A married woman must also pass cold and weary hours in winter watching for seal and walrus, and in summer probe the depths of boredom by fishing with a line for "Tom cod." And from a feminine point of view, there is no reward for her labours, no balls or parties, nor smart hats or gowns to excite the envy of her neighbours; all the Tchuktchi spouse can hope for being a "quid" of tobacco, so rare a luxury that it only reaches her lips when her husband has extracted most of its flavour. While smoking, the Tchuktchis, like the Yakutes, use tiny pipes; the smoke is not ejected or inhaled, but swallowed, and the rankest tobacco is so precious here that it is usually eked out with seal-hairs.

Tchuktchi-land teems with legends and superstitions of which Whalen had its full share. A rock off the coast hard by was said to sing and talk whenever a chief of the village was about to die, and the following curious legend was gravely related to me by Yemanko. Many years ago there lived at Whalen a chief with a wife so pretty that even fish were attracted to the land by her charms. Amongst the dwellers of the sea was a whale, with whom, unknown to her husband, she contracted a union. Eventually a young whale was born to the amazement of the settlement, which, regarding it as a mysterious gift from the spirits, paid the new arrival great homage. A huge tank was dug and contained the monster until it had attained its full growth, when it was marked and turned loose in the sea to decoy other whales. But the natives of Inchaun, an adjoining village, caught and killed the marked whale, which was scaring away all their fish. The Inchaun people were thereupon attacked by the Whalen men, who slaughtered every soul in their village. There is no doubt that this tribal conflict did take place some time during the eighteenth century, but I cannot say whether the murder of the marked whale was the real cause of the battle.

The Tchuktchis appeared to have no religion, and I never saw any ceremony performed suggestive of a belief in a Supreme Being, although good and evil spirits are believed to exist, and when I was at Oumwaidjik, sacrifices of seal and walrus meat were often thrown into the sea by the medicine men to abate its fury. Three men who died at Whalen during our visit were clad after death in their best deerskins and carried some distance away from the settlement, where I believe they were eventually devoured by the dogs. Several natives told me that a man who dies a violent death ensures eternal happiness, but that an easy dissolution generally means torment in the next world, which shows that the Tchuktchi has some belief in a future state. The theory that a painful death meets with spiritual compensation probably accounts for the fact that loss of life is generally regarded here with utter indifference. A ghastly ceremony I once witnessed at Oumwaidjik is a proof of this. It was called the Kamitok, in other words the sacrifice, with the full consent, of the aged and useless members of the community. When a man's powers have decreased to a depreciable extent from age, accident, or disease, a family council is held and a day and hour is fixed for the victim's departure for another world. The most curious feature of the affair is the indifference shown by the doomed one, who takes a lively interest in the preliminaries of his own execution. The latter is generally preceded by a feast where seal and walrus meat are greedily devoured and whisky is consumed until all are intoxicated. After a while the executioner, usually a near relative of the victim, steps forward, and placing his right foot against the back of the condemned, quickly strangles him with a walrus thong. Or perhaps he is shot with a Winchester rifle, this being the usual mode of despatching a friend who has asked another to put him out of the world on account, perhaps, of some trifling but troublesome ailment such as earache or neuralgia, which the sufferer imagines to be incurable.[64] And a request of this kind must be obeyed, or if not lifelong misfortune will attend the man who has refused to fire the fatal shot. Women, however, are never put to death, nor, so far as I could glean, do they ever want to be. The origin of this custom is probably due to the barren nature of this land where every mouthful of food is precious, and where a man must literally work to live.

[64] Mr. Waldemar Bogoras, the Russian naturalist, writes as follows in Harper's Magazine of April 1903: "One of the attendants I had with me for two years while in the Kolyma country belonged to a family with a tradition of this kind. He was a man of fifty, and the father and elder brothers had already followed in the way of their ancestors [by the Kamitok]. One time, while stricken with a violent fever, instead of taking the medicine that I gave him, he inquired anxiously if I were sure that he would recover at all, otherwise he felt bound to send for his son and ask for the last stroke."—"A Strange People of the North," by Waldemar Bogoras, Harper's Magazine, April 1903.

That the Kamitok also exists amongst the Eskimo of Alaska is shown by the following anecdote. Captain Healy, of the Revenue cutter Thetis, told me that he once inquired of a native near Point Barrow whether one Charlie he had known the previous year was still alive and in good health.

"Oh no," was the reply, "Charlie dead, I shot him."

"Shot him?" said Healy, taken aback. "What did you do that for?"

"Oh, poor Charlie sick, pains all over, he asked me shoot him, so I shot him with his own gun and kept it afterwards!"

The Tchuktchis are by no means an idle race, and whenever I entered a hut I invariably found even the youngest inmates usefully employed; the women busily engaged cooking and sewing, or cleaning and polishing firearms, while the men were away duck-shooting or hunting the seal or walrus. Sometimes we went seal-hunting with our friends, but this is poor sport, especially in damp, chilly weather. The outfit is very simple, consisting of a rifle, snowshoes and spear. A start is made at daylight until a likely-looking hole in the ice is reached, and here you sit down and wait patiently, perhaps for hours, until a seal's head appears above water, which it frequently fails to do. In warm weather this might be an agreeable occupation, but on cold days it seldom induced me to leave even the comfortless shelter of our hut. Most of the seals caught here are hair seals, which must not be confounded with the valuable fur seal, which is used in Europe for wearing apparel, and is seldom found north of the Privilov Islands in Bering Sea. The latter animal is too well known to need description, but the skin of the hair seal is a kind of dirty grey, flecked with dark spots, and is short and bristly. But it is warm and durable and therefore used by the Tchuktchis for breeches and foot wear. Recently, too, it has been introduced into Europe for the use of chauffeurs of automobiles, but ten years ago it was practically worthless; although the flesh is preferable as food to that of the more costly species.