Read Ebook: The North Pole: Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club by Peary Robert E Robert Edwin Grosvenor Gilbert Hovey Author Of Introduction Etc Roosevelt Theodore Author Of Introduction Etc

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AN ARCTIC OASIS

In a little arctic oasis lives the meager and scattered handful of the Eskimo population--a little oasis along the frowning western coast of Northern Greenland between Melville Bay and Kane Basin. This region is three thousand miles north of New York City, as a steamer goes; it lies about half way between the Arctic Circle and the Pole, within the confines of the great night. Here, taking the mean latitude, for one hundred and ten days in summer the sun never sets; for one hundred and ten days in winter the sun never rises, and no ray of light save from the icy stars and the dead moon falls on the frozen landscape.

There is a savage grandeur in this coast, carved by eternal conflict with storms and glaciers, bergs and grinding ice-fields; but behind the frowning outer mask nestle in summer many grass-carpeted, flower-sprinkled, sun-kissed nooks. Millions of little auks breed along this shore. Between the towering cliffs are glaciers which launch at intervals their fleets of bergs upon the sea; before these cliffs lies the blue water dotted with masses of glistening ice of all shapes and sizes; behind the cliffs is the great Greenland ice cap, silent, eternal, immeasurable--the abode, say the Eskimos, of evil spirits and the souls of the unhappy dead.

In some places on this coast in summer, the grass is as thick and long as on a New England farm. Here bloom poppies, with dandelions, buttercups, and saxifrage, though to the best of my knowledge the flowers are all devoid of perfume. I have seen bumblebees even north of Whale Sound; there are flies and mosquitoes, and even a few spiders. Among the fauna of this country are the reindeer , the fox--both blue and white--the arctic hare, the Polar bear, and perhaps once in a generation a stray wolf.

But in the long sunless winter this whole region--cliffs, ocean, glaciers--is covered with a pall of snow that shows a ghastly gray in the wan starlight. When the stars are hidden, all is black, void, and soundless. When the wind is blowing, if a man ventures out he seems to be pushed backward by the hands of an invisible enemy, while a vague, unnamable menace lurks before and behind him. It is small wonder the Eskimos believe that evil spirits walk upon the wind.

During the winter these patient and cheerful children of the North live in igloos, or huts, built of stones and earth. It is only when they are traveling, as sometimes during the moonlit period of the month, that they live in the snow igloos, which three good Eskimos can build in an hour or two, and which we built at the end of every day's march on our sledge journey to the Pole. In summer they live in the tupiks, or skin tents. The stone houses are permanent, and a good one will last perhaps a hundred years, with a little repairing of the roof in summer. Igloos are found in groups, or villages, at intervals along the coast from Cape York Bay to Anoratok. As the people are nomadic, these permanent dwellings belong to the tribe, and not to individuals, constituting thus a crude sort of arctic socialism. One year all the houses in a settlement may be occupied; the next year none, or only one or two.

These houses are about six feet high by eight to ten feet wide by ten to twelve feet long, and one may be constructed in a month. An excavation is made in the earth, which forms the floor of the house; then the walls are built up solidly with stones chinked with moss; long, flat stones are laid across the top of the walls; this roof is covered with earth, and the whole house is banked in with snow. The construction of the arched roof is on the plan which engineers know as the cantilever, and not that of the Roman arch. The long, flat stones which form the roof are weighted and counter-weighted at the outer ends, and in all my arctic experience I have never known the stone roof of an igloo to fall upon the inmates. There are never any complaints made to the Building Department. There is no door in the side, but a hole in the floor at the entrance leads to a tunnel, sometimes ten, sometimes fifteen, or even twenty-five, feet in length, through which the tenants crawl into their home. There is always a small window in the front of the igloo. The window space is not glazed, of course, but is covered with the thin, intestinal membrane of seals, skilfully seamed together. To a traveler across the dark and snowy winter waste, the yellow light from the interior lamp is visible, sometimes, a long distance away.

At the farther end of the igloo is the bed platform, raised about a foot and a half above the earthen floor. Usually this platform is not built, but is the natural level of the earth, the standing space being dug before it. In some houses, however, the bed platform is made of long, flat stones raised upon stone supports. When the Eskimos are ready to move into the stone houses in the fall, they cover the bed platform first with grass, which they bring in by the sledge-load; the grass is then covered with sealskins; above these are spread deerskins, or musk-ox skins,--which form the mattress. Deerskins are used for blankets. Pajamas are not in fashion with the Eskimos. They simply remove all their clothes and crawl in between the deerskins.

The lamp, which stands on a large stone at the front of the bed platform on one side, is kept burning all the time, whether the family is asleep or awake. An imaginative person might liken this lamp to an ever-burning sacred flame upon the stone altar of the Eskimo home. It serves also as a stove for heating and cooking, and makes the igloo so warm that the inhabitants wear little clothing when indoors. They sleep with their heads toward the lamp, so the woman may reach out and tend it.

On the other side of the house food is generally stored. When two families occupy one igloo, there may be a second lamp on the other side; and in that case the food must be stored under the bed. The temperature of these houses varies from eighty or ninety degrees Fahrenheit, on the bed platform and near the roof, to something below freezing point at the floor level. There is a little air-hole in the center of the roof, but in the happy home of an Eskimo family, in winter, the atmosphere could almost be handled with a shovel.

Often, in winter traveling, I have been obliged to sleep in one of these hospitable igloos. On such occasions I have made the best of things, as a man would if compelled to sleep in a tenth-rate railroad hotel or a slum lodging-house, but I have tried to forget the experience as soon as possible. It is not well for an arctic explorer to be too fastidious. A night in one of these igloos, with the family at home, is an offense to every civilized sense, especially that of smell; but there are times when a man, after a long sledge journey in the terrible cold and wind, hungry and footsore, will welcome the dim light shining through the translucent window of an igloo as one welcomes the light of home. It means warmth and comfort, supper, and blessed sleep.

There is no blinking the fact that my Eskimo friends are very dirty. When I have them on the ship with me they make heroic efforts to wash themselves occasionally; but in their own homes they practically never do, and in winter they have no water except from melted snow. On rare occasions, when the dirt gets too thick for comfort, they may remove the outer layer with a little oil. I shall never forget the amazement with which they made acquaintance with the white man's use of the tooth-brush.

With the coming of the summer, the stone and earth houses become damp, dark holes, and the roofs are taken off to dry and ventilate the interior. The family then moves outside and sets up the tupik, or skin tent, which is their home from about the first of June till some time in September. The tupik is made of sealskins, with the hair on the inside. Ten or twelve skins, sewed together in one large piece, make a tent. It is stretched on poles, high in front and sloping toward the back, thus offering the least possible resistance to the wind, the edges held down with stones. The earth floor of these tents is six or eight feet wide and eight or ten feet long, according to the size of the family.

In recent years my Eskimos have adopted an improvement upon the building customs of the west coast natives, and many of them have an entrance extension to their tents made of transparent tanned sealskins, thick enough to keep out the rain but not the light. This adds to the roominess and comfort of their summer dwellings. A usual practice among the better class of Eskimos is to use the old tupik of the previous summer for a rain or weather-guard to the new tent. In heavy winds or heavy summer rains, the old tupik is simply spread over the new one, thus giving a double thickness and protection to the owners.

The bed platform in the tupik is now generally made of lumber, which I have furnished, raised on stones, and in pleasant weather the cooking is done outside. Oil is the only fuel for heat, light, and cooking. The Eskimo women trim the lamps so well that there is no smoke from them, unless there is a draft in the tent or igloo. They cut small pieces of blubber, which they lay on moss and ignite, and the heat from the moss dries out the oil, making a surprisingly hot flame. Until I gave them matches, they had only the primitive means of ignition by flint and steel, which they obtained from a vein of pyrites. When I first went up there, all their lamps and rectangular pots were made of soapstone, two or three veins of which are found in that country. Their ability to utilize the soapstone and pyrites is an illustration of their intelligence and ingenuity.

As a rule little clothing is worn in the tupiks in warm weather, as the normal summer temperature is around fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and in the strong sunlight may go as high as eighty-five or even ninety-five.

The trial marriage is an ineradicable custom among the Eskimos. If a young man and woman are not suited with each other, they try again, and sometimes several times; but when they find mates to whom they are adapted, the arrangement is generally permanent. If two men want to marry the same woman, they settle the question by a trial of strength, and the better man has his way. These struggles are not fights, as the disputants are amiable; they are simply tests of wrestling, or sometimes of pounding each other on the arm to see which man can stand the pounding the longer.

Their fundamental acceptance of the proposition that might is right in such matters sometimes extends to a man saying to the husband of a woman: "I am the better man." In such case the husband has either to prove his superiority in strength, or yield the woman to the other. If a man grows tired of his wife, he simply tells her there is not room for her in his igloo. She may return to her parents, if they are living; she may go to a brother or a sister; or she may send word to some man in the tribe that she is now at liberty and is willing to start life again. In these cases of primitive divorce, the husband keeps one or all of the children if he wants them; if not, the woman takes them with her.

The Eskimos do not have many children, two or three being the usual number. The woman does not take her husband's name in any case. Akatingwah, for instance, will remain Akatingwah, whether she has had one husband or several. Children do not address their parents as father and mother, but call them by their names, though sometimes very small children use a diminutive which corresponds to our "mamma."

Among the Eskimos the woman is as much a part of the man's property as his dog or sledge--except in some rare cases. The cause of the suffragettes has as yet made little headway in this region. I remember one instance in which an Eskimo woman had a difference of opinion with her husband, and proved her right to independence by blackening the old man's eye; but I am afraid that the more conservative members of the tribe attributed this unfeminine behavior to the corrupting influence of contact with civilization.

As there are more men than women among the Eskimos, the girls marry very young, often about the age of twelve. In many cases the marriages are arranged between the parents when the children are quite young; but the boy and girl are not bound, and when they are old enough they are permitted to decide for themselves. In fact, they can make several such decisions without losing caste. On the last expedition, as on those of former years, I found that a number of matrimonial changes had taken place among my Northern friends since I was last among them.

It would be worse than useless to attempt to engraft our marriage customs upon these naive children of Nature. Should an arctic explorer consider it his duty to tell a young Eskimo that it was not right for him to exchange wives with his friend, it would be well for the explorer to have his supporting argument well prepared beforehand, for the censured one would probably open wide his eyes and inquire, "Why not?"

These people of the ice-land, like all intelligent savages, are remarkably curious. If confronted, say, with a package containing various supplies unknown to them, they will not rest until they have examined every article of the lot, touched it, turned it over, and even tasted it, chattering all the while like a flock of blackbirds. They exhibit, too, in marked degree, all the Oriental capacity for imitation. Out of walrus ivory, in some respects their substitute for steel,--and a surprisingly good substitute it is,--they will construct amazingly good models or copies of various objects, while it does not take them long to master the use of such tools of civilization as may be put into their hands. It will easily be seen how valuable and useful a quality this has proved for the purposes of the arctic explorer. If he could not rely on the Eskimo to do the white man's work with the white man's tools, the labors of the arctic traveler would be tremendously increased and the size of his expedition would have to be enlarged to limits that might be found unwieldy in the extreme.

My own observations of this interesting people have taught me to repose no confidence whatever in the tales of barbaric craft and cruelty which I have heard of them. On the contrary, taking into consideration their uncivilized state, they must be ranked as a humane people. Moreover, they have always been quick to grasp the purposes that I have had in view and to bend their energies toward achieving the ends for which my expeditions have been striving.

Their humanity, as has been indicated, takes a form that would delight a socialist. They are generous and hospitable in a crude way, almost without exception. As a general rule, good and bad fortune are shared. The tribe shares in the proceeds of good luck on the part of the hunters and, as their existence depends on hunting, this accounts in large measure for the preservation of the tribe.

ODD CUSTOMS OF AN ODD PEOPLE

Hard as is the life of the Eskimo, his end is usually as rigorous. All his life he is engaged in constant warfare with the inhospitable elements of his country, and Death, when it arrives, usually comes in some violent form. Old age has few terrors for the Eskimo, for he seldom lives to reach it. He dies, as a rule, in harness, drowned by the capsizing of his skin canoe, caught by the overturning of an iceberg, or crushed by a snow-slide or a rock-slide. It is seldom that an Eskimo lives to be more than sixty years of age.

Strictly speaking, the Eskimos have no religion, in the sense in which we use the word. But they believe in the survival of the person after death, and they believe in spirits--especially evil spirits. It may be that their lack of any idea of a beneficent God, and their intense consciousness of evil influences, result from the terrible hardships of their lives. Having no special blessings for which to be grateful to a kind Creator, they have not evolved a conception of Him, while the constantly recurring menaces of the dark, the bitter cold, the savage wind and gnawing hunger, have led them to people the air with invisible enemies. The beneficent spirits are those of their ancestors , while they have a whole legion of malevolent spirits, led by Tornarsuk, the great devil himself.

When the ice presses hard against the ship, an Eskimo will call on his dead father to push it away; when the wind blows with special violence, ancestors are again appealed to. Passing along a cliff, on a sledge journey, a man will sometimes stop and listen and then say: "Did you hear what the devil said just then?" I have asked the Eskimo to repeat to me the words of Tornarsuk, up there on the cliff, and I would not dream of laughing at my faithful friends at such a time; the messages of Tornarsuk I receive with a respectful gravity.

There are no chiefs among these people, no men in authority; but there are medicine men who have some influence. The angakok is generally not loved--he knows too many unpleasant things that are going to happen, so he says. The business of the angakok is mainly singing incantations and going into trances, for he has no medicines. If a person is sick, he may prescribe abstinence from certain foods for a certain number of moons; for instance, the patient must not eat seal meat, or deer meat, but only the flesh of the walrus. Monotonous incantations take the place of the white man's drugs. The performance of a self-confident angakok is quite impressive--if one has not witnessed it too many times before. The chanting, or howling, is accompanied by contortions of the body and by sounds from a rude tambourine, made from the throat membrane of a walrus stretched on a bow of ivory or bone. The tapping of the rim with another piece of ivory or bone marks the time. This is the Eskimo's only attempt at music. Some women are supposed to possess the power of the angakok--a combination of the gifts of the fortune teller, the mental healer, and the psalmodist, one might say.

Once, years ago, my little brown people got tired of an angakok, one Kyoahpahdo, who had predicted too many deaths; and they lured him out on a hunting expedition from which he never returned. But these executions for the peace of the community are rare.

Their burial customs are rather interesting. When an Eskimo dies, there is no delay about removing the body. Just as soon as possible it is wrapped, fully clothed, in the skins which formed the bed, and some extra garments are added to insure the comfort of the spirit. Then a strong line is tied round the body, and it is removed, always head first, from the tent or igloo, and dragged head first over the snow or ground to the nearest place where there are enough loose stones to cover it. The Eskimos do not like to touch a dead body, and it is therefore dragged as a sledge would be. Arrived at the place selected for the grave, they cover the corpse with loose stones, to protect it from the dogs, foxes, and ravens, and the burial is complete.

According to Eskimo ideas, the after-world is a distinctly material place. If the deceased is a hunter, his sledge and kayak, with his weapons and implements, are placed close by, and his favorite dogs, harnessed and attached to the sledge, are strangled so that they may accompany him on his journey into the unseen. If the deceased is a woman, her lamp and the little wooden frame on which she has dried the family boots and mittens are placed beside the grave. A little blubber is placed there, too, and a few matches, if they are available, so that the woman may light the lamp and do some cooking in transit; a cup or bowl is also provided, in which she may melt snow for water. Her needle, thimble, and other sewing things are placed with her in the grave.

In former years, if the woman had a small baby in the hood it was strangled to keep her company; but I have, of course, discouraged this practice, and during the last two expeditions I have not heard of any strangled babies. Among the members of my own party I have simply forbidden the practice, and have promised the relatives sufficient condensed milk and other foods to keep the infant alive. If they have reverted to the old custom during my absence, they have not mentioned the fact to me, knowing of my disapproval.

If a death occurs in a tent, the poles are removed, and the tent is left on the ground to rot or blow away. It is never used again. If the death occurs in an igloo, the structure is vacated and not used again for a long time. The relatives of the dead observe certain formalities in regard to food and clothing, and the name of the lost one is never mentioned. If any other members of the tribe have the same name, they must take another until an infant is born to which the proscribed name can be given. This appears to remove the ban.

Eskimos are children in their grief, as in their pleasure; they weep for a dead friend a few days, then they forget. Even a mother who has been inconsolable at the death of her baby soon laughs again and thinks of other things.

In a country where the stars are visible for so many weeks at a time it is not strange perhaps that they receive much attention from the natives. The Eskimos are, within barbaric limits, astronomers. The principal constellations visible in northern latitudes are well known to them and they have given them their own names and descriptions. In the Great Dipper they see a herd of celestial reindeer. The Pleiades are to the Eskimos a team of dogs pursuing a solitary polar bear. Gemini they describe as two stones in the entrance of an igloo. The moon and the sun represent to the Eskimo, as to some of our North American Indian tribes, a fleeing maiden and her pursuing admirer.

Time is, of course, of small value to the Eskimo, so far as he is himself personally concerned, yet after the Eskimo has been trained to the ways of the white man he seems to absorb an excellent notion of the value of punctuality and will carry out orders with a surprising degree of promptness and despatch.

The strength and capacity for enduring hardships exhibited by this people is extraordinary and is not, I believe, exceeded by that shown by any other aboriginal race now in existence. It is true that the average size of the Eskimo is, judged by our own standards, small; but I could give the names of several of them who stand five feet ten inches and weigh 185 pounds. The popular idea that they are clumsily fashioned is not correct. That notion is merely another case of judging a man by the clothes he wears, and an Eskimo's garments are not precisely what we should call of fashionable cut.

To my mind, the skin canoe of these Northern aborigines is, with its hunting implements, one of the most complete and ingenious manifestations of intelligence to be found in any aboriginal tribe. Over a light framework, an almost infinite number of small pieces of wood deftly lashed together with sealskin thongs, is stretched the tanned skin of seals, the seams being neatly sewed by the women, and then rendered water-tight by an application of seal oil and soot from the native lamps. The result is a craft of great buoyancy, some grace, and especial fitness and effectiveness for the purposes for which it is intended, that is, to enable the hunter to creep softly and noiselessly upon seal, walrus, or white whale. This canoe, while varying somewhat with the size of the owner and maker, will average between twenty and twenty-four inches in width by sixteen or eighteen feet in length. It carries one man only. I may have helped the Eskimos a little in perfecting it, by giving them more suitable material for the framework, but the canoe is original with them.

It will scarcely be considered strange that I have grown to love this childlike, simple people, as well as to value their many admirable and useful qualities. For it must be borne in mind that for nearly a quarter of a century they have been more thoroughly known to me than any other group of human beings in the world. The present generation of able-bodied Eskimos has practically grown up under my personal observation. Every individual member of the tribe--man, woman, and child--is known to me by name and sight as thoroughly as the patients of an old-fashioned family physician are known to him, and perhaps the feeling existing between us is not so very different. And the knowledge of individuals gained in this intimate way has been priceless in the work of reaching the Pole.

Take, for example, the quartet of young Eskimos who formed a portion of the sledge party that finally reached the long-courted "ninety North." The oldest of the four, Ootah, is about 34 years of age. This young man is one of the sturdiest of the tribe. He stands about 5 feet 8 inches and is a fine hunter. When I first saw him he was a young boy. Egingwah, another of the group, is about 26 years old, a big chap weighing about 175 pounds. Seegloo and Ooqueah are about 24 and 20 respectively. All four of them have been brought up to regard me as the patron, protector, and guide of their people. Their capacities, peculiarities, and individual characteristics were perfectly known to me, and they were chosen out of the whole tribe for the final great effort because I knew them to be most perfectly adapted to the work in hand.

Before taking up the story of our advance from Cape York, a word ought to be said about those remarkable creatures, the Eskimo dogs, for without their help success could never have crowned the efforts of the expedition. They are sturdy, magnificent animals. There may be larger dogs than these, there may be handsomer dogs; but I doubt it. Other dogs may work as well or travel as fast and far when fully fed; but there is no dog in the world that can work so long in the lowest temperatures on practically nothing to eat. The male dogs average in weight from eighty to one hundred pounds, though I had one which weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds. The females are somewhat smaller. Their special physical characteristics are a pointed muzzle, great breadth between the eyes, sharp-pointed ears, very heavy coat underlaid with a thick, soft fur, powerful, heavy-muscled legs, and a bushy tail or brush similar to that of the fox. There is only one breed of Eskimo dogs, but they are variously marked and of different colors, black, white, gray, yellow, brown, and mottled. Some scientists believe that they are the direct descendants of the Arctic wolf, yet, as a rule, they are as affectionate and obedient to their masters as our own dogs at home. Their food is meat, and meat only. That they cannot live on any other food I know, for I have made the experiment. For water they eat snow.

The dogs are not housed at any season of the year; but summer and winter they are tied somewhere near the tent or igloo. They are never allowed to roam at large, lest they be lost. Sometimes a special pet, or a female that has young puppies, will be taken into the igloo for a time; but Eskimo puppies only a month old are so hardy that they can stand the severe winter weather.

Enough has been said to give the reader a general idea of these strange people, that have been so valuable to me in my arctic work. But I want to say again, at the risk of being misunderstood, that I hope no efforts will ever be made to civilize them. Such efforts, if successful, would destroy their primitive communism, which is necessary to preserve their existence. Once give them an idea of real-estate interest and personal-property rights in houses and food, and they might become as selfish as civilized beings; whereas now any game larger than a seal is the common property of the tribe and no man starves while his neighbors are gorging themselves. If a man has two sets of hunting implements, he gives one of them to the man who has none. It is this feeling of good-fellowship which alone preserves the race. I have taught them some of the fundamental principles of sanitation and the care of themselves, the treatment of simple diseases, of wounds, and other accidents; but there I think their civilization should stop. This opinion is not based on theory or prejudice, but on eighteen years of intimate study and experience.

GETTING RECRUITS

Sailing by these cliffs, which extend for thirty or forty miles, my thoughts were busy with the work before us. First and most necessary of all was the task of gathering our arctic personnel of Eskimos and dogs, already begun before we left Cape York.

Imagine this man-and-dog-bestrewn ship, on a pleasant, windless summer day in Whale Sound. The listless sea and the overarching sky are a vivid blue in the sunlight--more like a scene in the Bay of Naples than one in the Arctic. There is a crystalline clearness in the pure atmosphere that gives to all colors a brilliancy seen nowhere else--the glittering white of the icebergs with the blue veins running through them; the deep reds, warm grays, and rich browns of the cliffs, streaked here and there with the yellows of the sandstone; a little farther away sometimes the soft green grass of this little arctic oasis; and on the distant horizon the steel-blue of the great inland ice. When the little auks fly high against the sunlit sky, they appear like the leaves of a forest when the early frost has touched them and the first gale of autumn carries them away, circling, drifting, eddying through the air. The desert of northern Africa may be as beautiful as Hichens tells us; the jungles of Asia may wear as vivid coloring; but to my eyes there is nothing so beautiful as the glittering Arctic on a sunlit summer day.

A WALRUS HUNT

The walrus are among the most picturesque and powerful fauna of the far North. More than that, their pursuit and capture, a process by no means devoid of peril, is an important part of every serious arctic expedition, for on every expedition of mine these huge creatures, weighing as they do all the way from 1,200 to 3,000 pounds, are hunted for the purpose of obtaining the maximum of meat for dog food in a minimum of time.

Wolstenholm and Whale Sounds, which are passed before reaching Etah, are favorite haunts of the walrus. The hunting of these monsters is the most exciting and dangerous sport in the arctic regions. The polar bear has been called the tiger of the North; but a contest between one or two, or even three, of these animals and a man armed with a Winchester repeating rifle is an entirely one-sided affair. On the contrary, a contest with a herd of walrus,--the lions of the North,--in a small whale-boat, will give more thrills to the minute than anything else I know of within the Arctic Circle.

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