A Year with a Whaler

by Walter Noble Burns

I went duck hunting with a boat's crew one day. Mr. Winchester, who headed the boat, was a good hand with a shotgun and brought back a fine bag. One of the ducks, knocked over on the wing, dropped within a few feet of shore. When we rowed to pick it up, I touched Siberia with an oar. I felt that it was a sort of handshake with the Asiatic continent. I never landed and never got any nearer.

In a little while, most of us had traded for a number of nicely tanned hair-seal skins and had set the Eskimo women and girls to work tailoring trousers and vests and coats. It was marvelous how dexterous they were at cutting and sewing. They took no measurements and yet their garments fitted rather snugly. Before they began sewing they softened the edges of the skins by chewing them. They wore their thimble on their index finger and drove the needle into one side of the skins and jerked it through from the other side with such amazing rapidity that the two movements seemed one. A good seamstress—and all seemed remarkably expert—could cut and sew a pair of trousers in an hour, a bit of work it would have taken a sailor a day or two to accomplish. We could hire a seamstress for an entire morning or afternoon for five hardtack. A bowl of soup with a piece of salt horse was sufficient pay for a day's labor.

My old skin clothes, which I had obtained from the slop-chest were greasy, dirty, and worn and I had an Eskimo woman make me a complete new outfit from hair-seal skins I purchased from her husband. She cut out a coat, vest, and trousers, spreading the skins on deck and using a knife in cutting. She sat cross-legged on deck most of the day sewing on the garments and I carefully superintended the job. She ornamented the coat with a black dogskin collar and edged it down the breast and around the bottom with the same material, which set off the glistening seal skin attractively. I also bought a new squirrel skin shirt with a hood attached. When I appeared on deck in my new toggery, I felt quite presentable.

However, I was not alone in gorgeous regalia. Most of my shipmates were soon looking like animate statues of silver in their shining seal skins. Our turns up and down deck became fashion parades. We strutted like peacocks, it must be admitted, and displayed our fine clothes to best advantage under the eyes of the Eskimo beauties.

It remained for Peter, our rolypoly little Swede, to make the only real, simon-pure conquest. In his new clothes, which sparkled like a silver dollar fresh from the mint, and with his fresh boyish face, he cut quite a handsome figure and one little Eskimo maid fell a victim to his fatal fascinations. "'E's killed her dead," said English Bill White. She was perhaps fifteen years old, roguish eyed, rosy cheeked, and with coal-black hair parted in the middle and falling in two braids at the sides of her head. Plump and full of life and high spirits, the gay little creature was as pretty as any girl I saw among the Eskimos.

Peter was all devotion. He gave his sweetheart the lion's share of all his meals, feasting her on salt horse, hardtack, soup, and gingerbread which to her primitive palate that never had risen to greater gastronomic heights than blubber and raw meat must have seemed epicurean delicacies. The sailors called the girl "Mamie," which was very different from the Eskimo name her mother spluttered at her. If Peter was missed at any time, it was only necessary to locate the charming Miss Mamie, and there by her side Peter would be found, speaking only with his eyes and making distinct progress.

Sometimes Peter, finding optical language not entirely satisfactory, pressed into his service the intellectual Eskimo as interpreter. These three-cornered efforts at love making were amusing to all who chanced to overhear them;—the dashing young Romeo could scarcely talk English himself, the interpreter could talk even less and the object of Peter's adoration could not speak a word.

As the upshot of this interesting affair, the little lady and Peter plotted between them that Peter should run away from the ship and live among her people. This plan appealed to Peter who was a cold weather product himself and almost as primitive as his inamorata. But Peter made one mistake;—he took old Nels Nelson, his countryman and side-partner, into his confidence. Nelson loved the boy like a father and did his best to persuade him to give up the idea, but Peter was determined.

One twilight midnight with the sun just skimming below the horizon, Peter wrapped from head to foot in an Eskimo woman's mackintosh of fish intestine, with the hood over his head and half hiding his chubby face, climbed over the rail into an Eskimo boat with a number of natives, his sweetheart among them, and set out for shore. Nelson and several sailors watched the boat paddle away, but no one but Nelson knew that the person bundled up in the native raincoat was Peter. The boat got half a mile from the brig. Then Nelson could stand it no longer. The strain was too much. He rushed back to the quarter-deck where old Gabriel was walking up and down.

"Peter's run away," Nelson blurted out. "There he goes in that boat. That's him dressed up like a woman in fish-gut oil-skins."