It may perhaps be fairly said that it has been my fortune to utilize the Eskimos for the purpose of discovery to a degree equaled by no other explorer, and for that reason it may not seem amiss to suspend the general narrative long enough to give a little information regarding their characteristics, the more so as without some knowledge of these peculiar people it would be impossible for any one really to understand the workings of my expedition to the North Pole. It has been a fundamental principle of all my arctic work to utilize the Eskimos for the rank and file of my sledge parties. Without the skilful handiwork of the women we should lack the warm fur clothing which is absolutely essential to protect us from the winter cold, while the Eskimo dog is the only tractive force suitable for serious arctic sledge work.
The members of this little tribe or family, inhabiting the western coast of Greenland from Cape York to Etah, are in many ways quite different from the Eskimos of Danish Greenland, or those of any other arctic territory. There are now between two hundred and twenty and two hundred and thirty in the tribe. They are savages, but they are not savage; they are without government, but they are not lawless; they are utterly uneducated according to our standard, yet they exhibit a remarkable degree of intelligence. In temperament like children, with all a child's delight in little things, they are nevertheless enduring as the most mature of civilized men and women, and the best of them are faithful unto death. Without religion and having no idea of God, they will share their last meal with any one who is hungry, while the aged and the helpless among them are taken care of as a matter of course. They are healthy and pure-blooded; they have no vices, no intoxicants, and no bad habits—not even gambling. Altogether, they are a people unique upon the face of the earth. A friend of mine well calls them the philosophic anarchists of the North.
I have been studying the Eskimos for eighteen years and no more effective instruments for arctic work could be imagined than these plump, bronze-skinned, keen-eyed and black-maned children of nature. Their very limitations are their most valuable endowments for the purposes of arctic work. I have a sincere interest in these people, aside from their usefulness to me; and my plan from the beginning has been to give them such aid and instruction as would fit them more effectively to cope with their own austere environment, and to refrain from teaching them anything which would tend to weaken their self-confidence or to make them discontented with their lot.
The suggestions of some well-meaning persons that they be transported to a more hospitable region would, if carried out, cause their extermination in two or three generations. Our variable climate they could not endure, as they are keenly susceptible to pulmonary and bronchial affections. Our civilization, too, would only soften and corrupt them, as their racial inheritance is one of physical hardship; while to our complex environment they could not adjust themselves without losing the very childlike qualities which constitute their chief virtues. To Christianize them would be quite impossible; but the cardinal graces of faith, hope, and charity they seem to have already, for without them they could never survive the six-months' night and the many rigors of their home.
Their feeling for me is a blending of gratitude and confidence. To understand what my gifts have meant to them, imagine a philanthropic millionaire descending upon an American country town and offering every man there a brownstone mansion and an unlimited bank account. But even this comparison falls short of the reality, for in the United States even the poorest boy knows that there is a possibility of his attaining for himself those things on which he sets his heart, if he will labor and endure, while to the Eskimos the things which I have given them are absolutely out of their world, as far beyond their own unaided efforts as the moon and Mars are beyond the dwellers on this planet.
My various expeditions into that region have had the effect of raising the Eskimos from the most abject destitution, lacking every appliance and accessory of civilized life, to a position of relative affluence, with the best material for their weapons, their harpoons and lances, the best of wood for their sledges, the best of cutlery, knives, hatchets, and saws for their work, and the cooking utensils of civilization. Formerly they were dependent upon the most primitive hunting weapons; now they have repeating rifles, breech-loading shotguns, and an abundance of ammunition. There was not a rifle in the tribe when I first went there. As they have no vegetables, and live solely on meat, blood, and blubber, the possession of guns and ammunition has increased the food-producing capacity of every hunter, and relieved the whole tribe from the formerly ever-present danger of starvation for a family, or even an entire village.
There is a theory, first advanced by Sir Clements Markham, ex-president of the Royal Geographical Society of London, that the Eskimos are the remnants of an ancient Siberian tribe, the Onkilon; that the last members of this tribe were driven out on the Arctic Ocean by the fierce waves of Tartar invasion in the Middle Ages, and that they found their way to the New Siberian Islands, thence eastward over lands yet undiscovered to Grinnell Land and Greenland. I am inclined to believe in the truth of this theory for the following reasons:
Some of the Eskimos are of a distinctly Mongolian type, and they display many Oriental characteristics, such as mimicry, ingenuity, and patience in mechanical duplication. There is a strong resemblance between their stone houses and the ruins of the houses found in Siberia. The Eskimo girl brought home by Mrs. Peary, in 1894, was mistaken by Chinamen for one of their own people. It has also been suggested that their invocation of the spirits of their dead may be a survival of Asian ancestor worship.
As a general rule the Eskimos are short in stature, as are the Chinese and Japanese, though I could name several men who stand about five feet ten inches. The women are short and plump. They all have powerful torsos, but their legs are rather slender. The muscular development of the men is astonishing, though their fatty roundness hides the differentiation of the muscles.
These people have no written speech, and their language is agglutinative, with complicated prefixes and suffixes, by which they extend a word to a considerable length from the original stem. The language is relatively easy to acquire, and during my first summer in Greenland I gained a fair knowledge of it. In addition to their ordinary speech, they have an esoteric language known only to the adults of the tribe. I cannot say wherein it differs from the other, having made no attempt to learn it, and I doubt if any white man has been fully taught this secret speech, as the knowledge is carefully guarded by its possessors.