The Young Ice Whalers

by Winthrop Packard

The sullen winter set in. The ice closed rigidly about the doomed ships scattered along the coast from Point Belcher to Blossom Shoals, and a wild carnival of loot began for the natives of the north coast. News seems to spread in strange ways in the Arctic. The Eskimo tells much, yet he learns more by the observation of his fellows. Most of all, however, he seems to have an instinct which is more subtle still; and the tribes learned the news in all these ways. To the place of great riches traveled all who had the means of travel. From the bleak coast east to the mouth of the Mackenzie, from the sandy peninsula of Point Hope and from points between, each community saw another pack up and move, and hitched up their dogs and followed, knowing well that the prize for such a journey at such a time of year must be great, else it would not be attempted. By the time the winter sun ceases to rise in the southward, but merely lights the southern sky with a rosy glow at what should be noon, three thousand Eskimos had assembled and begun to build the greatest Eskimo village known to history.

The skin topeks were set up. Caves in the bluff became dwellings. Where the wind had swept the ledges bare, they quarried rough stone and built igloos of these, chinked with reindeer moss and banked with snow for warmth. Many of them, too, began to dismantle the ships and build rude cabins of the wood and sails. Such were the nondescript abodes of the new village, and here they settled down in the darkness and terrible cold of the Arctic midnight, content, for near at hand were provisions and loot such as had never been dreamed of in the wildest flights of Eskimo imagination. The looting went on continuously and peacefully, at first, for there was more than enough for all. The village became crowded with cabin fittings, wrecked deck houses, spars, ropes, sails, and all the metallic paraphernalia of a full-rigged ship. In the holds they broke into the flour barrels and scattered the contents about in willful play, for they knew nothing of the value of flour. Hard bread they prized, but flour was then to them a thing of no meaning, and there are aged Eskimos alive to this day who will tell with sorrow how they wasted the precious stuff, throwing it at one another and setting it adrift down the wind in glee.

The ivory, they prized, the oil, and especially the whalebone, which they eagerly appropriated and took ashore, hiding much of it as well as they could from one another. Later, when all had been taken from the ships and trouble and distrust had come, the villagers began looting from each other.

But at first all went well. With plenty of the prized hard-tack, with meat in barrels, with oil in great profusion, and wood and iron galore, it seemed as if the Eskimo millennium was at hand, and that the tribes might live in peace and plenty here for a long time to come and—who knows?—out of their prosperity found a permanent city and develop a higher scheme of Eskimo civilization than they had hitherto known. Yet it was not to be, and the very plenty that might have been their upbuilding became their undoing. The serpent of envy entered their below-zero Eden, and set tribe against tribe and family against family. Men began to quarrel over articles of loot aboard ship. There was not room to stow their wealth in the igloos, and the women and children fought over what was outside.

The supply of liquor had been in the main destroyed, but on one or two ships this had been overlooked in the haste of leaving, and after a time it was discovered. It was not very much among three thousand Eskimos, but a little liquor goes a long way among these hardy men of the north, and once this began to get in its work among them, no man can describe the extraordinary scenes which ensued. Tribal animosity which had been dulled by plenty and a common object grew keen again, and the men of one village fought with those of another until sometimes a whole tribe was wiped out. As the wild orgy increased and the supply of liquor gave out, they broke into the ships’ medicine chests, and tinctures and solutions of deadly drugs were used with fatal effect.

The horror lasted until the spring sun was well above the southern horizon, and scarcely half the people of the new city were left to see him rise. These were half-clad, and emaciated by the terrible deeds and mishaps of the winter. The dogs, neglected and unfed, had gone “molokully”—crazy—with the cold and hunger, and were roaming the waste of snow, or were mercifully dead. The remnant of the people had no means and were in no condition to travel, yet travel they must. The daze of their orgy was over, and the place was become a place of horrors to them. Dead lay in every igloo, and in Eskimo land an igloo in which some one has died is henceforth a place of evil, and no man must take shelter there.

There were no doubt stores and material enough left in and about the vessels that were unburned to support the people remaining in comfort for a long time to come, and could they have had a chance to recuperate, they still might have made a village unique in size and prosperity, but they would have none of it.

Silently and in terror the remnant of the tribes scattered and hastened to their former homes, but only a part ever reached them. Sick and emaciated, their dogs dead or scattered, the journey was one of hardship long to be remembered, and the miles were marked with the bones of those that fell by the way.

This is the story of “Nunaria,” a place of ghosts and of the dead. To this day no Eskimo will willingly enter its precincts. The ice and gales of winter, the frosts and thaws of spring, the deluges of rain and the grass of summer, work hard to obliterate it, yet still it may be found, and its ruin tells the tale of one brief winter of too much plenty, and the evil effect of a sudden plethora of the good things of civilization and city life on the Innuit. With him, as with the rest of us, self-control is not easily learned where abstemiousness is continually forced. It takes a far greater man to stand sudden great prosperity than it does to survive lean years and narrow opportunities. Harluk expressed this in one brief Eskimo phrase. “Amalucktu amalucktu, peluk,” he said. “Too much plenty is no good.”