SHAKING HANDS WITH SIBERIA
The ship's prow was turned northward after work on the whale had been
finished. I expected we would soon run into the ice again. We sailed
on and on, but not a block of ice big enough to make a highball did we
sight. The white floes and drifts and the frozen continent floating
southward, along the coasts of which we had cruised for whales and which
had surrounded us and held us captive for three weeks, had disappeared
entirely. The warm water from the south, the southern winds, and the
spring sunshine had melted the ice. Its utter disappearance savored of
magic.
A long hilly coast rose ahead of us covered with grass, barren of trees or
shrubs, dotted with blackened skeletons of old ice--an utterly desolate
land. It was Siberia. We put into a bight called St. Lawrence Bay.
There was an Eskimo village on the shore. The huts were made of whale
ribs covered with hides of walrus and reindeer. In the warm weather,
some of the hides had been removed and we saw the white gleaming bones
of the frame work. We could see the dogs with tails curling over their
backs frisking about and could hear their clamor as they bayed the great
white-winged thing that had come up from over the sea's verge.
In this first part of July it was continuous day. The sun set at eleven
o'clock at night in the northwest. Its disc remained barely below the
horizon--we could almost see its flaming rim. A molten glow of color made
the sky resplendent just above it as it passed across the north pole. It
rose at 1:30 in the morning high in the northeast. All the time it was
down a brilliant twilight prevailed--a twilight like that which in our
temperate zone immediately follows the sinking of the sun behind a hill.
We could see to read without difficulty.
Soon boats and kyacks were putting off from the village. When we were
still a mile or two out, strange craft came alongside and Eskimo men,
women, and children swarmed aboard. Very picturesque they looked in
clothes made of the skins of reindeer, hair seals, dogs, and squirrels,
oddly trimmed and decorated with fur mosaics in queer designs. Some of
the women wore over their furs a yellow water-proof cloak made of the
intestines of fish, ornamented with needle-work figures and quite neat
looking.
The men and the older women had animal faces of low intelligence. The
young girls were extremely pretty, with glossy, coal-black hair, bright
black eyes, red cheeks, lips like ripe cherries, and gleaming white teeth
forever showing in the laughter of irresponsibility and perfect health.
The captain ordered a bucket of hardtack brought out in honor of our
guests. The biscuit were dumped in a pile on the main deck. The Eskimos
gathered around in a solemn and dignified circle. The old men divided the
bread, giving an equal number of hardtack to each.
This ceremony of welcome over, the Eskimos were given the freedom of the
ship, or at least, took it. We kept a careful watch upon them, however,
to see that they took nothing else. Several of the Eskimo men had a
sufficient smattering of English to make themselves understood. They had
picked up their small vocabulary among the whalers which every spring
put in at the little ports along the Siberian and Alaskan coasts. One
of them had been whaling to the Arctic Ocean aboard a whale ship which
some accident had left short handed. He spoke better English than any
of the others and was evidently regarded by his fellow townsmen as a
wonderfully intellectual person. He became quite friendly with me, showing
his friendship by begging me to give him almost everything I had, from
tobacco to clothes. He constantly used an Eskimo word the meaning of which
all whalers have learned and it assisted him materially in telling his
stories--he was a great story teller. This word was "_pau_,"--it means
"nothing." I never knew before how important nothing could be in human
language. Here is a sample of his use of "nothing:"
[Illustration: Callers from Asia]
"Winter," he said, "sun pau; daylight pau. All dark. Water pau; all ice.
Land pau, all snow. Eskimo igloo, plenty fire. Moss in blubber oil all
time blaze up. Cold pau. Plenty hot. Eskimo, he sweat. Clothes pau. Good
time. Hot time. Eat plenty. Sleep."
This seemed to me a good, vivid description. The picture was there,
painted chiefly with "nothing."
Of course he had the English words "yes" and "no" in his assortment, but
his way of using them was pure Eskimo. For instance: "You wear no clothes
in winter?" I asked him. "No," he replied. "No?" I echoed in surprise.
"Yes," he said. His "yes" merely affirmed his "no." It sometimes required
a devious mental process to follow him.
A pretty girl came up to me with a smile and an ingratiating air.
"Tobac," she said holding out her hand.
I handed her my smoking plug. She took half of it at one cavernous bite
and gave the remainder back to me, which I thought considerate. She
enjoyed the tobacco. She chewed upon it hard, working her jaws as if she
were masticating a dainty tidbit. Did she expectorate? Not a drop. She
evidently did not propose to waste any of the flavor of that good weed.
Neither did she get sick--that pretty Eskimo girl. At last when she had
chewed for twenty minutes or so, she removed her quid and stuck it behind
her right ear. She chewed it at intervals later on, always between times
wearing it conspicuously behind her ear.
I rather expected our guests would depart after a call of an hour or so.
Not so. They had come to stay indefinitely. When they became tired they
lay on deck--it didn't make any particular difference where--and went
quietly to sleep. They seemed to have no regular time for sleeping. I
found Eskimos asleep and awake during all my deck watches. As it was day
all the twenty-four hours, I wondered if these people without chronometers
did not sometimes get their hours mixed up.
New parties of Eskimos kept coming to see us. One of these had killed a
walrus and the skin and the raw meat, butchered into portable cuts, lay in
the bottom of their big family canoe of hide. The boat was tied alongside
and the Eskimos came aboard. If any of them became hungry, they climbed
down into the canoe and ate the raw walrus meat, smacking their lips over
it. When the sailors would lean over the rail to watch this strange feat
of gastronomy, the Eskimos would smile up at them with mouths smeared with
blood and hold out a red chunk in invitation. It was their joke.
We loafed in St. Lawrence Bay for more than a week. We could not have
sailed away if we had wanted to, for all the time there was a windless
calm and the sea heaved and fell, unruffled by a ripple, like a vast sheet
of moving mercury.
It was weather characteristic of the Arctic summer--a beautiful dream
season of halcyon, silver seas, opalescent haze, and tempered golden
sunlight. To the men in skin clothes, it was warm weather, but one had
only to step from sunshine to shadow to pass from summer to winter. One
perspired in the sunlight; in the shadow there was frost, and if the spot
were damp, a coating of ice.
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."
[Illustration: Peter's Sweetheart]
Without ado Gabriel called aft the watch, manned a boat, and set out in
pursuit. The Eskimo canoe was quickly overhauled and Peter was captured
and brought back aboard.
"You ben bigges' fool for sech a li'l' boy I ever have see," said Gabriel
severely. "You don't know you freeze to deaf up here in winter time, no?"
Peter had nothing to say. He was ashamed, but he was mad, too. He was not
punished. When Captain Shorey learned of the escapade, he merely laughed.
Peter took the matter quite to heart and pouted for days. To the end of
the voyage, he still dreamed of his Eskimo sweetheart and of the happiness
that might have been his. Every time he spoke of her his eyes grew bright.
"She was fine gal," he used to say.