occasionally on fresh trout from a Siberian mountain lake, young wild
ducks as fat as squabs, and reindeer, any of which delicacies could not
be had in the same perfection at Delmonico's or any similar
establishment in New York for love or money. There is scarcely any
better eating in the way of fish than _coregonus_--a new species
discovered at Point Barrow by the _Corwin_--and certainly no more dainty
game exists than the young wild geese and ptarmigan to be found in
countless numbers in Hotham inlet. At the latter place, doubtless the
warmest inside the straits, are found quantities of cranberries about
the size of a pea, which not only make a delicious accessory to roasted
goose, but act as a valuable antiscorbutic. These berries and a kind of
kelp, which I have seen Eskimo eating at Tapkan, Siberia, seem to be the
only vegetable food they have. The large quantities of eggs easily
procurable, but in most cases doubtful, also constitute a standard
article of diet among these people, who have no scruples about eating
them partly hatched. They seemed never to comprehend our fastidiousness
in the matter and why our tastes differed so much from theirs in this
respect. They will break an egg containing an embryonic duck or goose,
extract the bird by one leg and devour it with all the relish of an
epicure. Gull's eggs, however, are in disrepute among them, for the
women--who, by the way, have the same frailties and weaknesses as their
more civilized sisters--believe that eating gull's eggs causes loss of
beauty and brings on early decrepitude. The men, on the other hand, are
fond of seal eyes, a tid-bit which the women believe increases their
amorousness, and feed to their lords after the manner of "Open your
mouth and shut your eyes."
Game is, as a rule, very tame, and during the moulting season, when the
geese are unable to fly, it is quite possible to kill them with a stick.
At one place, Cape Thompson, Eskimo were seen catching birds from a high
cliff with a kind of scoop-net, and I saw birds at Herald island refuse
to move when pelted with stones, so unaccustomed were they to the
presence of man. In addition to being very tame, game is plentiful, and
it is not uncommon, off the Siberian coast, to see flocks of eider ducks
darkening the air and occupying several hours in passing overhead. It
was novel sport to see the natives throw a projectile known as an
"apluketat" into one of these flocks with astonishing range and
accuracy, bringing down the game with the effectiveness of a shotgun.
Game keeps so well in the Arctic that an instance is known of its being
perfectly sweet and sound on an English ship after two years' keeping,
and whalemen kill a number of pigs, which they hang in the rigging and
keep for use during the cruise. It is also noticeable that leather
articles do not mildew as they generally do at sea, some shoes kept in a
locker on board the _Corwin_ having retained their polish during the
entire cruise.
The food of the Eskimo satisfies their instinctive craving for a
hydrocarbon, but they do not allow themselves to be much disturbed or
distracted in its preparation, as most of it is eaten raw. They
occasionally boil their food, however, and some of them have learned the
use of flour and molasses, of which they are very fond.
Their aversion to salt is a very marked peculiarity, and they will not
eat either corned beef or pork on this account. It may be that
physiological reasons exist for this dislike.
SOCIAL AND DOMESTIC RELATIONS.
Omitting other ethnographic facts relative to the Eskimo, which might be
treated in a systematic way except for their triteness, we pass from the
means of the renewal of the animal economy to its reproduction.
Courtship and marriage, which, it is said, are conducted in the most
unsentimental manner possible, are for that reason not to be discussed;
and for obvious reasons many of the prenatal conditions cannot here be
dwelt upon. Having never witnessed the act of parturition in an Eskimo
my knowledge of the subject is merely second-hand, and consequently not
worth detailing. It appears, though, that parturition is a function
easily performed among them, and that it is unattended by the
post-partum accidents common to civilization. As a rule the women are
unprolific, it being uncommon to find a family numbering over three
children, and the mortality among the new-born is excessive, owing to
the ignorance and neglect of the ordinary rules of hygiene. They seem,
however, to be kind to their children, who in respect to crying do not
show the same peevishness as seen in our nurseries; indeed, the social
and demonstrative good nature of the race seems to crop out even in
babyhood, as I have often witnessed under such circumstances as a baby
enveloped in furs in a skin canoe which lay along side the ship during a
snowstorm; its tiny hands protruding held a piece of blubber, which it
sucked with apparent relish, the unique picture of happy contentment. It
was quick to feel itself an object of attraction, and its chubby face
returned any number of smiles of recognition.
The manner of carrying the infant is contrary to that of civilized
custom. It is borne on the back under the clothes of the mother, which
form a pouch, and from which its tiny head is generally visible over one
or the other shoulder, but on being observed by strangers it shrinks
like a snail or a marsupian into its snug retreat. When the mother wants
to remove it she bends forward, at the same time passing her left hand
up the back under her garments, and seizing the child by the feet, pulls
it downward to the left; then, passing the right hand under the front of
the dress, she again seizes the feet and extracts it by a kind of
podalic delivery. Another common way of carrying children is astride the
neck. The subject is one that the Chucki artist often carves in ivory.
The play impulse manifests itself among these people in various ways.
They have such mimetic objects as dolls, miniature boats, etc. I have
seen a group of boys, sailing toy boats in a pond, behave under the
circumstances just as a similar group has been observed to do at
Provincetown, Cape Cod, and the same act, as performed in the Frog Pond
of the Boston Common, may be called only a differentiated form of the
same tendency. Their dolls, of ivory and clothed with fur, seem to
answer the same purpose that they do in civilized communities--namely,
the amusement of little girls--for at one place where we landed a number
of Eskimo girls, stopping play on our approach, sat their dolls up in a
row, evidently with a view to giving the dolls a better look at the
strange visitors. Spinning tops, essentially Eskimo and unique in their
character, are held in the hand while spinning; on the Siberian coast
football is played, and among other questionable things acquired from
contact with the whalemen, a knowledge of card-playing exists. We were
very often asked for cards, and at one place where we stopped and
bartered a number of small articles with the natives they gave evidence
of their aptitude at gaming. The game being started, with the bartered
articles as stakes, one fellow soon scooped in everything, leaving the
others to go off dead-broke, amid the ridicule of some of our crew, and
doubtless feeling worse than dead, for among no people that I have seen,
not even the French, does ridicule so effectually kill.
PERSONAL ORNAMENTATION.
Among the means taken by these people to produce personal ornamentation
that of tattooing the face and wearing a labret is the most noticeable.
The custom of tattooing having existed from the earliest historical
epochs is important, not only from an ethnological but from a medical
and pathological point of view, and even in its relation to medical
jurisprudence in cases of contested personal identity.
Without going into the history of the subject, it may not be irrelevant
to mention that tattooing was condemned by the Fathers of the Church,
Tertullian, among others, who gives the following rather singular reason
for interdicting its use among women: "Certi sumus Spiritum Sanctum
magis masculis tale aliquid subscribere potuisse si feminis
subscripsisset."[2]
In addition to much that has been written by French and German writers,
the matter of tattoo-marks has of late claimed the attention of the law
courts of England, the Chief-Justice, Cockburn, in the Tichbourne case,
having described this species of evidence as of "vital importance," and
in itself final and conclusive. The absence of the tattoo-marks in this
case justified the jury in their finding that the defendant was not and
could not be Roger Tichbourne, whereupon the alleged claimant was proved
to be an impostor, found guilty of perjury, and sentenced to penal
servitude.[3]
[Illustration: Style of personal ornamentation adopted by the women of
Saint Lawrence island.]
Why the ancient habit of tattooing should prevail so extensively among
some of the primitive tribes as it does, for instance, in the Polynesian
islands and some parts of Japan, and we may say as a survival of a
superstitious practice of paganism among sailors and others, is a
psychological problem difficult to solve. Whether it be owing to
perversion of the sexual instinct, which is not unlikely, or to other
cause, it is not proposed to discuss. Be that as it may, the prevalence
of the habit among the Eskimo is confined to the female sex, who are
tattooed on arriving at the age of puberty. The women of Saint Lawrence
island, in addition to lines on the nose, forehead and chin, have
uniformly a figure of strange design on the cheeks, which is suggestive
of cabalistic import. It could not be ascertained, however, whether such
is the case. The lines drawn on the chin were exactly like the ones I
have seen on Moorish women in Morocco. Another outlandish attempt at
adornment was witnessed at Cape Blossom in a woman who wore a bunch of
colored beads suspended from the septum of her nose. These habits,
however, hardly seem so revolting as the use of the labret by the
"Mazinka" men on the American coast, of whom it is related that a sailor
seeing one of them for the first time, and observing the slit in the
lower lip through which the native thrust his tongue, thought he had
discovered a man with two mouths. The use of the labret, like many of
the attempts at primitive ornamentation, is very old, its use having
been traced by Dall along the American coast from the lower part of
Chili to Alaska. Persons fond of tracing, vestiges of savage
ornamentation amid intellectual advancement and aesthetic sensibility far
in advance of the primitive man, may observe in the wearers of bangles
and earrings the same tendency existing in a differentiated form.
DIVERSIONS.
I doubt whether Shakespeare's dictum in regard to music holds good when
applied to the Eskimo, for they have but little music in their souls,
and among no people is there such a noticeable absence of "treason,
stratagem and spoil." A rude drum and a monotonous chant, consisting
only of the fundamental note and minor third, are the only things in the
way of music among the more remote settlements of which I have any
knowledge. Mrs. Micawber's singing has been described as the table-beer
of acoustics. Eskimo singing is something more. The beer has become flat
by the addition of ice. One of our engineers, who is quite a fiddler,
experimented on his instrument with a view to seeing what effect music
would have on the "savage breast," but his best efforts at rendering
"Madame Angot" and the "Grande Duchesse" were wasted before an
unsympathetic audience, who showed as little appreciation of his
performance as some people do when listening to Wagner's "Music of the
Future."
Where they have come in contact with civilization their musical taste is
more developed. At Saint Michael's I was told that some of their songs
are so characteristic that it is much to be regretted that some of them
cannot be bottled up in a phonograph and sent to a musical composer. On
the coast of Siberia I heard an Eskimo boy sing correctly a song he had
learned while on board a whaling vessel, and on several of the Aleutian
islands the natives play the accordeon quite well; have music-boxes, and
even whistle strains from "Pinafore."
From music to dancing the transition is obvious, no matter whether the
latter be regarded in a Darwinian sense as a device to attract the
opposite sex or as the expression of joyous excitement. This
manifestation of feeling in its bodily discharge, which Moses and Miriam
and David indulged in, which is ranked with poetry by Aristotle, and
which old Homer says is the sweetest and most perfect of human
enjoyments, is a pastime much in vogue among the Eskimo, and it required
but little provocation to start a dance at any time on the _Corwin's_
decks when a party happened to be on board. The dancing, however, had
not the cadence of "a wave of the sea," nor was there the harmony of
double rotation circling in a series of graceful curves to strains like
those of Strauss or Gungl. On the contrary, there was something
saltatorial and jerky about all the dancing I saw both among the men and
women. It is the custom at some of their gatherings, after the hunting
season is over, for the men to indulge in a kind of terpsichorean
performance, at the same time relating in Homeric style the heroic deeds
they have done. At other times the women do all the dancing. Being
stripped to the waist they are more _decollete_ than our beauties at the
German, and the men take the part of spectators only in this
choreographical performance.
ART INSTINCT.
The aptitude shown by Eskimo in carving and drawing has been noticed by
all travellers among them. Some I have met with show a degree of
intelligence and appreciation in regard to charts and pictures scarcely
to be expected from such a source. From walrus ivory they sculpture
figures of birds, quadrupeds, marine animals, and even the human form,
which display considerable individuality notwithstanding their crude
delineation and imperfect detail. I have also seen a fair carving of a
whale in plumbago. Evidences of decoration are sometimes seen on their
canoes, on which are found rude pictures of walruses, etc., and they
have a kind of picture-writing, by means of which they commemorate
certain events in their lives, just as Sitting Bull has done in an
autobiography that may be seen at the Army Medical Museum.
When we were searching for the missing whalers off the Siberian coast,
some natives were come across with whom we were unable to communicate
except by signs, and wishing to let them know the object of our visit, a
ship was drawn in a note-book and shown to them, with accompanying
gesticulations, which they quickly comprehended, and one fellow, taking
the pencil and note-book, drew correctly a pair of reindeer horns on the
ship's jib-boom--a fact which identified, beyond doubt, the derelict
vessel they had seen. At Point Hope an Eskimo, who had allowed us to
take sketches of him, desired to sketch one of the party, and taking one
of our note-books and a pencil, neither of which he ever had in his hand
before, produced the accompanying likeness of Professor Muir:
[Illustration]
At Saint Michael's there is an Eskimo boy who draws remarkably well,
having taught himself by copying from the _Illustrated London News_. He
made a correct pen-and-ink drawing of the _Corwin_, and another of the
group of buildings at Saint Michael's, which, though creditable in many
respects, had the defect of many Chinese pictures, being faulty in
perspective. As these drawings equal those in Dr. Rink's book, done by
Greenland artists, I regret my inability to reproduce them here. As
evidences of culture they show more advancement than the carvings of
English rustics that a clergyman has caused to be placed on exhibition
at the Kensington Museum.
Sir John Ross speaks highly of his interpreter as an artist; Beechy says
that the knowledge of the coast obtained by him from Innuit maps was of
the greatest value, while Hall and others show their geographical
knowledge to be as perfect as that possible of attainment by civilized
men unaided by instruments. I had frequent opportunities to observe
these Eskimo ideas of chartography. They not only understood reading a
chart of the coast when showed to them, but would make tracings of the
unexplored part, as I knew a native to do in the case of an Alaskan
river, the mouth only of which was laid down on our chart.
Manifestation of the plastic art, which is found among tribes less
intelligent, is rare among the Eskimo. In fact, the only thing of the
kind seen was some rude pottery at Saint Lawrence island, the design of
which showed but crude development of ornamental ideas. The same state
of advancement was shown in some drinking cups carved from mammoth ivory
and a dipper made from the horn of a mountain sheep.
COMBATIVENESS.
In one of the acts of Shakespeare's "Seven Ages" the Eskimo plays a very
unimportant _role_. Perhaps in no other race is the combative instinct
less predominant; in none is quarrelling, fierceness of disposition, and
jealousy more conspicuously absent, and in none does the desire for the
factitious renown of war exist in a more rudimentary and undeveloped
state. Perhaps the constant fight with cold and hunger is a compensation
which must account for the absence of such unmitigated evils as war,
taxes, complex social organization and hierarchy among the curious
people of the icy north. The pursuits of peace and of simple patriarchal
lives, notwithstanding the fact of much in connection therewith that is
wretched, and forbidding to a civilized man, seem to beget in these
people a degree of domestic tranquility and contentment which, united to
their light-hearted and cheery disposition, is an additional reason for
believing the sum of human happiness to be constant throughout the
world.
MENTAL CHARACTER AND CAPACITY.
The intellectual character of the Eskimo, judging from the information
which various travellers have furnished, as well as my personal
knowledge, produces more than a feeble belief in the possibility of
their being equal to anything they choose to take an interest in
learning. The Eskimo is not "muffled imbecility," as some one has called
him, nor is he dull and slow of understanding, as Vitruvius describes
the northern nation to be "from breathing a thick air"--which, by the
way, is thin, elastic and highly ozonized--nor is he, according to Dr.
Beke, "degenerated almost to the lowest state compatible with the
retention of rational endowments." On the contrary, the old Greenland
missionary, Hans Egede, writes: "I have found some of them witty enough
and of good capacity;" Sir Martin Frobisher says they are "in nature
very subtle and sharp-witted;" Sir Edward Parry, while extolling their
honesty and good nature, adds, "Indeed, it required no long acquaintance
to convince us that art and education might easily have made them equal
or superior to ourselves;" Sauer tells of a woman who learned to speak
Russian fluently in rather less than twelve months, and Beechy and
others have acknowledged the intelligent help they have received from
Eskimo in making their explorations.
Before going further, it may not be amiss to speak in a general way of
the bony covering which protects the organ whose function it is to
generate the vibrations known as thought. Of one hundred crania,
collected principally at Saint Lawrence island, a number were examined
by me at the Army Medical Museum, through the courtesy of Dr.
Huntington, with the result of changing and greatly modifying some of
the previous notions of the conventional Eskimo skull as acquired from
books on craniology. Perhaps after the inspection and examination of a
large collection of crania, it may be safe to pronounce upon their
differential character; but whether the differences in configuration are
constant or only occasional manifestations, admits of as much doubt as
the exceptions in Professor Sophocles's Greek grammar, which are often
coextensive with the rule.[4]
The typical Eskimo skull, according to popular notion, is one exhibiting
a low order of intelligence, and characterized by small brain capacity,
with great prominence of the superciliary ridges, occipital
protuberance and zygomatic arches, the latter projecting beyond the
general contour of the skull like the handles of a jar or a peach
basket; and lines drawn from the most projecting part of the arches and
touching the sides of the frontal bone are supposed to meet over the
forehead, forming a triangle, for which reason the skull is known as
pyramidal.
The first specimen, examined from a vertical view, shows something of
the typical character as figured in A, and when viewed posteriorly there
is noticed a flattening of the parietal walls with an elongated vertex
as shown in D; while a second specimen, represented by B, shows none of
the foregoing characteristics, the form being elongated and the parietal
walls so far overhanging as to conceal the zygomatic arches in the
vertical view, so that if lines be drawn as previously mentioned,
instead of forming a triangle they may, like the asymptotes of a
parabola, be extended to infinity and never meet.
For purposes of comparison a number of orthographic outlines, showing
the contour of civilized crania, from a vertical point of observation,
are herewith annexed. No. 1 is that of an eminent mathematician who
committed suicide; No. 2, a prominent politician during the civil war;
No. 3, a banker; and No. 4, a notorious assassin. Nos. 5 and 6 are negro
skulls. Further comparison may be made with the Jewish skull, as
represented in No. 7, in which the nasal bones project so far beyond the
general contour as to form a bird-like appendage.
[Illustration: A]
[Illustration: B]
[Illustration: C]
[Illustration: D]
A collection of Aleutian heads, as seen from a vertical point of
observation, when I looked down from the gallery of the little Greek
church at Ounalaska, presented at first certain collective characters
by which they approach one another. But anatomists know that a careful
comparison of any collection will show extremely salient differences. In
fact, individual differences, so numerous and so irregular as to prevent
methodical enumeration, constitute the stumbling-block of ethnic
craniology. Take, for instance, a number of the skulls under
consideration: in proportions they will be found to present very
considerable variations among themselves. The skulls figured by A and B
are respectively brachycephalic and dolichocephalic. The former has an
internal capacity of 1,400, the latter 1,214 cubic centimeters; but the
facial angle of each is 80 deg., and in one Eskimo cranium it runs up to
84 deg.. If the facial angle be trustworthy, as a measure of the degree of
intelligence, we have shown here a development far in excess of the
negro, which is placed at 70 deg., or of the Mongolian at 75 deg., and exceeding
that observed by me in many German skulls, which do not, as a rule, come
up to the 90 deg. of Jupiter Tonans or of Cuvier, in spite of the boasted
intelligence of that nationality.
[Illustration: _No. 1._]
[Illustration: _No. 2._]
[Illustration: _No. 3._]
[Illustration: _No. 4._]
[Illustration: _No. 5._]
[Illustration: _No. 6._]
In none of the skulls of the collection is there observable the heavy
superciliary ridges alleged to be common in lower races, but which exist
in many of the best-formed European crania--shall we say as anomalies
or as individual variations? Nor is the convexity of the squamo-parietal
suture such as characterizes the low-typed cranium of the chimpanzee or
the Mound Builder. On the contrary, the orbits are cleanly made and the
suture is well curved. Besides, a low degree of intelligence is not
shown by observing the index of the foramen magnum, which is about the
same as that found in European crania; and the same may be said of the
internal capacity of the cranium. To illustrate the latter remark is
appended a tabular statement made up from Welcker, Broca, Aitken and
Meigs:
Cubic centimeters.
Australian 1,228
Polynesian 1,230
Hottentot 1,230
Mexican 1,296
Malay 1,328
Ancient Peruvian 1,361
French 1,403 to 1,461
German 1,448
English 1,572
An average of the Eskimo skull, some of which measure as much as 1,650
and 1,715 c.c., will show the brain capacity to be the same as that of
the French or of the Germans. None of them, however, approaches the
anomalous capacities of two Indian skulls on exhibition at the Army
Medical Museum, one of which shows 1,785 c.c., and the other the
unprecedented measurement of 1,920 c.c.