The language of the Eskimos is not difficult to acquire, one season spent among them being sufficient to gain a working knowledge of it. It is necessary for explorers to learn it, as the Eskimos have little or no desire to speak English, and consider it far simpler for the white man to speak their language.
One must make a psychological study of these people properly to manage them. They are people of peculiar temperament, very much like children, and should be handled like children, firmly, but gently. They are as easily discouraged as they are elated. For the most part they are good natured, but occasionally indulge in a fit of sulks. It is no use at all to get vexed at a sulky Eskimo, but one can usually be jollied out of such a mood without difficulty. They greatly appreciate kindness, but are very quick to impose upon a weak or vacillating person. They never forget a broken promise or one that has been kept. In all my dealings with them I have made it a point to mean exactly what I said, and to insist upon things being done according to my instructions. If I promised an Eskimo a certain reward for a task well done, he always got it. If, however, I told him a certain punishment would follow a forbidden course, he knew it would come.
By way of encouraging them to do the things I wanted done and keeping them interested in their work, a record was kept of the game brought in by every Eskimo, and a special prize went to the best hunter. The man who secured the musk-ox with the best set of horns or the deer with the finest antlers got a special reward, as did the man who turned out the best sledge or proved to be the best all-round man on a long sledge-trip. In firmness, tempered with love and gratitude, I have found the best method of dealing with them, and their faithfulness has abundantly attested its efficacy.
Some may get the idea that the Eskimos would serve as faithfully as they did me, almost any one who offered them gifts, but the record of arctic exploration shows that such is not the case. They have not only known me for almost twenty years, but I have saved whole villages from starvation, and the greatest hope and ambition of the children have been to become hunters or seamstresses who would some day be rewarded by “Pearyaksoah.”
As a result of my various sojourns among them, the entire tribe has been raised from the most abject destitution to a condition of relative affluence. Twenty-five years ago they were dependent upon hunting weapons of the most primitive type. There was not a rifle in the whole tribe when I first visited it, and they had only a scant supply of knives, which they had obtained from whalers or exploring ships visiting their shores or caught in the ice near Cape York. In olden times these people improvised knives from the iron of the great Cape York meteorites that I brought home in the summers of 1896 and 1897. Pieces of bone or ivory formed the handles of these knives, and in a groove of the handle small fragments of the meteorite were ingeniously set to form the cutting edge. Very small and crude an instrument it appeared to be, yet it was a great improvement over the bits of flint which in still earlier times had been the only implements the tribe possessed for cutting purposes.
These iron knives had been discarded several generations previous to my first trip north, but in the spring of 1895 I was fortunate enough to run across one of these relics which a woman of the tribe had unearthed in the interior of an old igloo which she was rebuilding for winter use. A few months later a man discovered the handle of another, and an old Eskimo identified them both, the former as a woman’s knife, the latter a man’s. They were the only ones of their kind known to any of the tribe.
Twenty-five years ago there were few kayaks, or skin canoes, among the Eskimos, and the man who owned a spear-shaft or a harpoon-shaft made of a single piece of wood was well off indeed. There were also many women who had no needle, and had to do all their sewing with the aid of a bone awl. They first made a hole in the garment with this, and then drew the thread through. For thread they used the sinews of the reindeer and narwhal.
Conditions are now different among these people. Instead of lacking every accessory and appliance of civilization, every man and boy owns his canoe; there is an ample supply of cutlery, knives, hatchets, saws, cooking-utensils, and needles. All the men have their own repeating-rifles and breech-loading shot-guns and plenty of ammunition, and every hunter has wood for his sledge, his lance, his harpoon, and his seal spear. As a result of owning better weapons, the condition of the whole tribe has improved. The efficiency of the hunters is double what it used to be, thus insuring a more abundant food-supply and better clothing. Warmly clad and well fed, they can meet more easily with hardships which are their daily lot.
DECK SCENE ON THE “ROOSEVELT” (NOT A PINK TEA)