A Year with a Whaler

by Walter Noble Burns

MOONSHINE AND HYGIENE

We noticed that several of our Eskimo guests appeared at times to be slightly under the influence of liquor and thought perhaps they had obtained gin or rum from some whaling vessel that had touched at the port before we arrived. We asked the intellectual Eskimo where these fellows had got their booze. He pointed to an Eskimo and said, "Him."

"Him" was a lordly person dressed in elaborately trimmed and ornamented skin clothes. From the way he strutted about, we had fancied him a chief. He turned out be a "moonshiner."

This doubtless will surprise those whose ideas of "moonshiners" are associated with southern Appalachian ranges, lonely mountain coves, revenue raids, and romance. But here was an Eskimo "moonshiner" who made unlicensed whiskey under the midnight sun and yet was as genuine a "moonshiner" as any lawless southern mountaineer. The sailors, being thirsty souls, at once opened negotiations with him for liquor. He drew from beneath his deer-skin coat a skin bottle filled with liquor and sold it to us for fifteen hardtack. Wherefore there was, for a time, joy in the forecastle—in limited quantity, for the bottle was small. This product of the ice-bound North was the hottest stuff I ever tasted.

The captain was not long in discovering that the Eskimo had liquor to sell and sent a boat ashore with a demijohn. The jug was brought back filled with Siberian "moonshine," which had been paid for with a sack of flour. The boat's crew found on the beach a little distillery in comparison with which the pot stills of the Kentucky and Tennessee mountains, made of old kitchen kettles would seem elaborate and up-to-date plants. The still itself was an old tin oil can; the worm, a twisted gun barrel; the flake-stand, a small powder keg. The mash used in making the liquor, we learned, was a fermented mixture of flour and molasses obtained in trade from whale ships. It was boiled in the still, a twist of moss blazing in a pan of blubber oil doing duty as a furnace. The vapor from the boiling mash passed through the worm in the flake-stand and was condensed by ice-cold water with which the powder keg was kept constantly filled by hand. The liquor dripped from the worm into a battered old tomato can. It was called "kootch" and was potently intoxicating. An Eskimo drunk on "kootch" was said to be brave enough to tackle a polar bear, single-handed. The little still was operated in full view of the villagers. There was no need of secrecy. Siberia boasted no revenue raiders.

The owner of the plant did an extensive trade up and down the coast and it was said natives from Diomede Islands and Alaska paddled over in their canoes and bidarkas to buy his liquor. They paid for it in walrus tusk ivory, whale bone, and skins and the "moonshiner" was the richest man in all that part of Siberia.

If contact with civilization had taught the Eskimo the art of distillation and drunkenness, it also had improved living conditions among them. Many owned rifles. Their spears and harpoons were steel tipped. They bartered for flour, molasses, sugar, and all kinds of canned goods with the whale ships every summer. They had learned to cook. There was a stove in the village. The intellectual Eskimo boasted of the stove as showing the high degree of civilization achieved by his people. The stove, be it added, was used chiefly for heating purposes in winter and remained idle in summer. The natives regarded the cooked foods of the white man as luxuries to be indulged in only occasionally in a spirit of connoisseurship. They still preferred their immemorial diet of blubber and raw meat.

Aside from these faint touches of civilization, the Eskimos were as primitive in their life and mental processes as people who suddenly had stepped into the present out of the world of ten thousand years ago. I fancy Adam and Eve would have lived after the manner of the Eskimos if the Garden of Eden had been close to the North Pole.

There is apparently no government or law among these Eskimos. They have no chiefs. When it becomes necessary to conduct any business of public importance with outsiders, it is looked after by the old men. The Eskimos are a race, one may say, of individuals. Each one lives his life according to his own ideas; without let or hindrance. Each is a law unto himself. Under these conditions one might expect they would hold to the rule of the strong arm under which might makes right. This is far from true. There is little crime among them. Murder is extremely rare. Though they sometimes steal from white men—the sailors on the brig were warned that they would steal anything not nailed down—they are said never—or hardly ever—to steal from each other. They have a nice respect for the rights of their neighbors. They are not exactly a Golden Rule people, but they mind their own business.