Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

Spirabat, cui pelle falum fulcare Britannum

Ludus, et assuto glaucum mare findere lembo.”

These boats were probably covered with either horse’s or bulls’ hides. When used in England they were known as coracles; in Ireland they were styled curachs. Pliny tells us that Cæsar moved his army in Britain over lakes and rivers in such boats. Even the Greeks used them, terming them karabia; and the Russian word of korabl’, or “ship,” is derived from it. King Alfred, in 870-872, tells us that the Finns made sad havoc among many Swedish settlements on the numerous “meres” (lakes) in the moors of that country, by “carrying their ships (baidars) overland to the meres whence they make depredations on the Northmen; their ships are small and very light.”

Until I saw these bidarrahs of the St. Lawrence natives, in 1874, I was more or less inclined to believe that the tough, thick, and spongy hide of a walrus would be too refractory in dressing for use in covering such light frames, especially those of the bidarka; but the manifest excellence and seaworthiness of those Eskimo boats satisfied me that I was mistaken. I saw, however, abundant evidence of a much greater labor required to tan or pare down this thick cuticle to that thin, dense transparency so marked on their bidarrahs; for the pelt of a hair-seal, or sea-lion, does not need any more attention, when applied to this service, than that of simply unhairing it. This is done by first sweating the “loughtak” in piles, then rudely, but rapidly, scraping with blunt knives or stone flensers the hair off in large patches at every stroke; the skin is then air-dried, being stretched on a stout frame, where, in the lapse of a few weeks, it becomes as rigid as a board. Whenever wanted for use thereafter, it is soaked in water until soft or “green” again; then it is sewed with sinews, while in this fresh condition, tightly over the slight wooden skeleton of the bidarka or the heavier frame of a bidarrah. In this manner all boats and lighters at the islands are covered. Then they are air-dried thoroughly before oiling, which is done when the skin has become well indurated, so as to bind the ribs and keel as with an iron plating. The thick, unrefined seal-oil keeps the water out for twelve to twenty hours, according to the character of the hides. When, however, the skin-covering begins to “bag in” between the ribs of its frame, then it is necessary to haul the bidarrah out and air-dry it again, and then re-oil. If attended to thoroughly and constantly, those skin-covered boats are the best species of lighter which can be used in these waters, for they will stand more thumping and pounding on the rocks and alongside ship than all wooden, or even corrugated-iron, lighters could endure and remain seaworthy.

Newack’s Brother, with a Sealskin full of Walrus-oil.

[Mahlemoöt boy—fourteen or fifteen years of age.]

The flesh of the walrus is not, to our palate, at all toothsome; it is positively uninviting. That flavor of the raw, rank mollusca, upon which it feeds, seems to permeate every fibre of its flesh, making it very offensive to the civilized palate; but the Eskimo, who do not have any of our squeamishness, regard it as highly and feed upon it as steadily, as we do on our own best corn-fed beef. Indeed, the walrus to an Eskimo answers just as the cocoa-palm does to a South Sea islander: it feeds him, it clothes him, it heats and illuminates his “igloo,” and it arms him for the chase, while he builds a summer shelter and rides upon the sea by virtue of its hide. The morse, however, is not of much account to the seal-hunters on the Pribylov Islands. They still find, by stirring up the sand-dunes and digging about them at Northeast Point, all the ivory that they require for their domestic use on the islands, nothing else belonging to a walrus being of the slightest economic value to them. Some authorities have spoken well of walrus-meat as an article of diet. Either they had that sauce for it born of inordinate hunger, or else the cooks deceived them. Starving explorers in the arctic regions could relish it—they would thankfully and gladly eat anything that was juicy, and sustained life, with zest and gastronomic fervor. The Eskimo naturally like it; it is a necessity to their existence, and thus a relish for it is acquired. I can readily understand, by personal experience, how a great many, perhaps a majority of our own people, could speak well, were they north, of seal-meat, of whale “rind,” and of polar-bear steaks; but I know that a mouthful of fresh or “cured” walrus-flesh would make their “gorges rise.” The St. Paul natives refuse to touch it as an article of diet in any shape or manner. I saw them removing the enormous testicles of an old morse which was shot, for my purposes, on Walrus Island. They told me they did so in obedience to the wishes of a widow doctress at the village, Maria Seedova, who desired a pair for her incantations.

Curiosity, mingled with a desire to really understand, alone tempted me to taste some walrus-meat which was placed before me at Poonook, on St. Lawrence Island; and candor compels me to say that it was worse than the old beaver’s tail which I had been victimized with in British Columbia, worse than the tough brown-bear steak of Bristol Bay—in fact, it is the worst of all fresh flesh of which I know. It had a strong flavor of an indefinite acrid nature, which turned my palate and my stomach instantaneously and simultaneously, while the surprised natives stared in bewildered silence at their astonished and disgusted guest. They, however, greedily put chunks, two inches square and even larger, of this flesh and blubber into their mouths as rapidly as the storage room there would permit; and with what grimy gusto! as the corners of their large lips dripped with the fatness of their feeding. How little they thought, then, that in a few short seasons they would die of starvation, sitting in these same igloos—their caches empty and nothing but endless fields of barren ice where a life-giving sea should be. The winter of 1879-80 was one of exceptional rigor in the Arctic, although in the United States it was unusually mild and open. The ice closed in solid around St. Lawrence Island—so firm and unshaken by the giant leverage of wind and tide that all walrus were driven far to the southward and eastward beyond the reach of those unhappy inhabitants of that island, who, thus unexpectedly deprived of their mainstay and support, seemed to have miserably starved to death then, with an exception of one small village on the north shore: thus, the residents of Poonook, Poogovellyak, and Kagallegak settlements perished, to a soul, from hunger; nearly three hundred men, women, and children. I recall that visit which I made to these alert Innuits, August, 1874, with sadness, in this unfortunate connection, because they impressed me with their manifest superiority over the savages of our northwest coast. They seemed, then, to be living, during nine months of the year, almost wholly upon the flesh and oil of the morse. Clean-limbed, bright-eyed, and jovial, they profoundly impressed me with their happy reliance and subsistence upon the walrus-herds of Bering Sea. I could not help remarking then, that these people had never been subjected to the temptations and subsequent sorrow of putting their trust in princes; hence their independence and good heart. But now it appears that it will not do to put your trust in Rosmarus either.