The Eskimos were alive to the seriousness of the situation and did their utmost to follow out these hygienic instructions to the last detail. As a result of this first missionary campaign in the cause of health, the Eskimos have begun to keep their igloos clean and to ventilate them in winter. There has grown up among them an unwritten law against indiscriminate expectoration more carefully observed than such ordinances in American cities. The villages have been gradually turned into open-air sanitariums and the death rate from tuberculosis has been materially reduced.
[CHAPTER XV]
NEWS FROM HOME
With the first breeze, we set sail for Port Clarence, Alaska, the northern rendezvous of the Arctic Ocean whaling fleet in early summer. There in the latter part of June or the early part of July, the fleet always met the four-masted schooner Jennie, the tender from San Francisco, by which all firms in the whaling trade sent mail and supplies to their vessels. On our way across from Siberia to Alaska, we passed just south of Behring Straits and had our first distant glimpse of the Arctic Ocean. When we dropped anchor in the windy roadstead of Port Clarence, eighteen whale ships were there ahead of us.
The land about Port Clarence was flat and covered with tall, rank grass—a region of tundra stretching away to distant hills. The Jennie came in direct from San Francisco soon after we arrived. Boats from the whale ships swarmed about her as soon as she dropped anchor, eager for letters and newspapers. Our mate brought back a big bundle of San Francisco newspapers which were sent forward after the cabin had read them. They gave us our first news since leaving Honolulu of how the great world was wagging. Every man in the forecastle who could read read these papers from the first headline to the last advertisement. It seemed good to get into touch once more with the men and events of civilization. Exiles of the sea, the news of our country seemed to have an intimate personal meaning to us which it never could possibly have to stay-at-homes to whom newspapers are every-day, casual budgets of gossip and information. I remember that a telegraphic brevity describing a murder in my native state seemed like a message from home.
Among the Eskimos who came aboard the brig from the large village on shore, was a white man dressed like an Eskimo to the last detail and looking like one except for a heavy beard. He had run away from a whale ship three years before, hoping to make his way to some white settlement to the south and there secure passage on shipboard back to San Francisco. He had escaped, he said, in an Eskimo kyack tied alongside his ship. As soon as he was missed officers and boatsteerers put ashore in a boat and trailed him. He led his pursuers a long chase inland and though he was shot at several times, he managed to elude them and reach the safety of the hills.
After he had seen the whaling fleet sail away, he ventured back to the Eskimo village on shore where he was welcomed by the natives. He soon found that escape by land was practically impossible; the nearest white settlement was hundreds of miles distant and he would have to thread his way through pathless forests and across ranges of mountains covered at all seasons with ice and snow. Moreover, he learned what he should have known before he ran away that no vessels except whaling ships, their tender, and an occasional revenue cutter ever touched at Port Clarence which at that time was far north of the outmost verge of the world's commerce. There was nothing left for him to do but settle among the Eskimos and wait for the arrival of the whaling fleet in the following summer.
During the long Arctic night, with the temperature forty and fifty degrees below zero, he lived in an igloo after the manner of the natives; learned to eat raw meat and blubber—there was nothing else to eat—became fluent in the Eskimo language; and took an Eskimo girl for a wife. He found existence among these human anachronisms left over from the stone age a monotonously dreary and soul-wearying experience, and he waited with nervous impatience for the coming of the fleet with its annual opportunity for getting back to civilization.