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yet the Eskimo straggle over, if they do occupy and fill, vast regions, which, fortunately for them, are never likely to excite the cupidity of the Alexanders, Napoleons, and Frederick Williams, of this civilized and wicked world.

66

From The Quarterly Review. THE ARCTIC REGIONS AND THE ESKIMO.* As is well known, this is a sceptical, fault-finding age, and so our readers must not be surprised if they find old forms and names overthrown in the very heading of our article. Our grandfathers talked of Some years ago our attention was atthe "Esquimaux " and were content; just tracted by the heading of an article in a as our grandmothers when they sucked periodical too much given to supply its eggs extracted the yolk by an old and readers with chaff rather than grain. It time-honored process. So far as regards was entitled, "An Enquiry into the Histhese venerable women, a new generation tory of the Ancient Picts," a most interhas sprung up which will not allow them esting subject, to which we eagerly turned. to pursue such a hand-to-mouth means of What was our surprise, however, to find alimentation, but insists on a more scien- that the whole essay consisted of these tific treatment of barn-door deposits. In words: "Who were the ancient Picts?" the same way we are not suffered to write a literary production which might vie for "Esquimaux" after the good old spelling, brevity with that famous chapter in Ponbut are quite behind the age unless we toppidan's History," "There are no adopt the form "Eskimo." Well, where snakes in Iceland." As with the Picts no principle is involved, we are quite and as with the snakes, so with the Esready to comply with any change which kimo; all that was known of their early will ensure us a quiet life, and so we are history and origin might have been comwilling to follow the learned Dr. Rink in the pressed into the narrow compass of an orthography of the names of the tribes for interrogative sentence. Fifty years ago, which he has done so much, and to call and, indeed, down to a much later period, these interesting members of the great the ethnological inquirer might have human race no longer "Esquimaux," but shouted, "Who are the Eskimo?" till he "Eskimo." If there is any joking on so was hoarse, and yet received no answer. serious a subject as the nomenclature of a The little, in fact, that was known of them family so widely spread over the Arctic was derived from persons either too ignoregions, we may add that the best of the rant or too preoccupied to be able to asjoke is that the Eskimo do not speak of certain the truth. Whaling captains and themselves by the name so commonly Arctic voyagers when they came in congiven them by foreigners, but simply and tact with the Innuit in their snow-houses, proudly as Innuit," that is "the people," cared the one only for blubber, which they as though they were the only people on envied the Eskimo for consuming, the the face of the earth; a confidence all the other only for open water and the Northmore remarkable if we consider that iso-West Passage. "Whales," and "the lated tribes have been met with, number- way to Behring's Strait," were the only ing not a hundred individuals, who were convinced, until discovered by Arctic explorers, that they were the only members of their race that existed; so completely, while they kept the language spoken by the whole race, had the memory and tradition of a common origin with other Eskimo tribes died out among them. And

66

* Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, with a

Sketch of their Habits, Religion, Language, and other
Peculiarities. By DR. HENRY RINK, Director of the
Royal Greenland Board of Trade. Translated from
the Danish by the Author, and edited by Dr. Robert
Brown; with numerous illustrations, drawn and en-
graved by Eskimo. London, 1875.

questions which these simple people were required to answer by their visitors, and if they sometimes afforded the whalers welcome information as to whales, the intelligence they could give to the Arctic explorers as to open water towards the north-west was meagre and unsatisfactory in the extreme. The result of the contact between the civilized and uncivil

ized races was in no wise useful to science. All we knew of the Eskimo from these sources was that they were most accomplished seal and whale hunters; that they delighted in blubber, and that when they

had plenty of it they lay down on their backs to be crammed by their wives with the precious dainty, of which they were capable of devouring twelve or fourteen pounds in a day. It must be owned that the example thus set them by their elders was well followed by the rising generation. An Eskimo boy- we forget whether it is Parry or Richardson who tells the story ate in twenty-four hours eight and a half pounds of seal-meat, half frozen and half cooked, one pound and two ounces of bread, and one pint and a half of thick soup; washing all this down with three wineglasses of Schnapps, a tumbler of grog, and five pints of water. As they seldom or never washed, except when the warm summer sun melted the ice and snow of their huts, they were so dirty that it was hard to tell what the complexion of the race really was under the mask of soot and clotted train-oil which besmeared their faces. It will readily be conceived that a warm bath to such people was more than a luxury. It was, in fact, as dangerous an experiment as a Turkish bath to many Englishmen. In the great interest of tubbing we are happy to say that Parry, who was the first to introduce warm baths among the Eskimo, found that they were attended with the happiest results in the cure of rheumatism and kindred diseases. Besides affording the Eskimo this medical treatment, the various expeditions collected lists of words, but as for these vocabularies of the language, they rivalled that famous one compiled by the veracious Daly in "Gilbert Gurney" at Boulogne, as the dialect of Timbuctoo, in which "Phiz" meant lightning, "Bang," thunder, and, though last not least, "Tooroluro," a wheel-barrow.

weather with a dry philological discussion. We will not drag them from the fresh woods and green fields to ponder over roots and conjugations. All that we shall assume is the right to be rather doctrinaire, and to beg them to believe us when we state results. The Eskimo, then, are the most considerable remnant in northern regions of that nameless pre-historic race of fishers and hunters, who once clung to the coasts and shores of Europe, until they were pushed away into the holes and corners, and to the very verge and edge of the great continents of the earth by the successive bands of the Aryan migrations. They once existed in England, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Spain, in all of which they have left their traces in interments and implements, and laystalls and "kitchenmixens." They were of Turanian race; and even at the present day they exist as Basks in the rugged mountains of Spain. In Sweden we find them as Lapps and Finns; and so on along the Russian coast there is a fringe of them that clings to the edge of the land on the shore of the frozen ocean. How the great division of this pre-historic family found their way to the vast and inhospitable regions in which they are now known to foreigners as Eskimo, is open to doubt. The received theory now is that they were forced thither from the coasts both of Asia and America, across Behring's Strait, by the migrations of Indian and Mongolian tribes; but it is at least as likely that these hardy savages, who are nowhere so happy as in their native tents, if they only have plenty of seal-meat and blubber, have existed from time immemorial in the Arctic regions, and in this sense may claim to be as really autochthon Under these circumstances it is fortu- and indigenous children of the soil, or nate for the Eskimo that they have fallen rather of ice and snow, as any race on the on a far more critical age, which, in spite of surface of the globe. But whether indigall its absurdities about egg-sucking, can enous or not, there they are, a branch of do for them what they would never have the great Turanian family, and carrying been able to do for themselves, that is, tell with them in their speech the best evidence them who they are and whence they came, of their origin, in the affinity which their and, in fact, expand the question, "Who language bears to the Lapp, Bask, Hunwere the Eskimo?" into a very satisfac- garian, and Turkish dialects of their comtory ethnological essay. But let not our mon race. The reader therefore sees at readers be alarmed, we are not going to once that these Eskimo, whose existence break their heads in this fine autumn-huddled up in snow and ice, and con

E

demned for half the year to a perpetual | was more in the Greenland Eskimo than
night (which we may assure them from ex- mere seal-meat and blubber; that they
perience is not nearly so dark as London in had a beautiful language and a rich store
a really good winter fog), and with few or no of traditions and popular tales. These he
wants beyond blubber seems so wretch- set himself diligently to collect, and having
ed and miserable to civilized man, have overcome the natural shyness of all primi-
attained to the dignity of being members of tive people to impart their popular beliefs
the great body politic of nations, and are to strangers, he ended by gathering more
by kinship cousins to some of the proud- than five hundred tales, one hundred and
est and haughtiest peoples in the world. fifty of which are published in the present.
There is a Turkish proverb, we believe, volume. These researches enable him to
which speaks of the pride of the Magyar speak with an authority on all that con-
as exceeding that of the peacock, and no cerns the Eskimo to which no other living
doubt the Magyar repertory of wise saws, man can pretend. In that most useful
which embody the "wisdom of many in and laborious work, Ersch and Grüber's
the wit of one," contains a saying as appo- "Cyclopædia," there is, indeed, a mono-
site to the Turks; but here we find that graph of the Eskimo which summarizes all
the Eskimo are of the same race as both that was known of these tribes up to the
these peacocks, and we dare say have date of its publication; but, then, it was
quite as much right to pride themselves written so far back as the year 1843, in
on their national characteristics.
what may be called the pre-Franklin times.
We are indebted to it for an explanation of
the name "Eskimo," which, it seems, in
the language of the Abenaki, a tribe of
Red Indians in southern Labrador, means
"raw-fish-eaters," and was given by them
to their neighbors in northern Labrador as
a term of reproach and an equivalent for
savages. The manners and customs of
the Abenaki were, no doubt, rude and
wild. They were given to scalp and tor-

one

And now, having thus settled the position of the Eskimo among the races of the world, let us look a little more closely at them by the aid of the light which the researches of Dr. Rink have shed upon them. If, as we think can be shown, Dr. Rink was fortunate in finding so fresh a subject as the Eskimo and their customs, tales, and traditions, the Eskimo in their turn were lucky in having a spokesman so well qualified to become their advocate.ment their enemies, like other Red Indians, The learned doctor has, for the last sixteen winters, either been a resident or a traveller on the shores of Davis Strait, from the southernmost point of Greenland, Cape Farewell, up to the 73rd degree of north latitude. If we reckon his residence by summers, it was still longer, for he was in Greenland for twenty-two summers. He went out to that somewhat unpromising region from Denmark, his native country, in government employ, first as a scientific explorer, until, rising in the service, he became royal inspector or governor of the southern Danish establishment in Greenland. In one respect he set a good exaimple to all governors who have to deal with the natives of a foreign land: he was not above learning the language and acquiring the speech of the people he was to inspect and govern. In this way he came to know and to love the simple race among whom he lived. He soon saw that there

but to fall so low as to eat their fish raw
was an abomination to them, and so when
they came across one of the Innuit
of the people" par excellence, as their
northern neighbors styled themselves
they called him "Eskimo," as much as to
say, "There he goes, the raw-fish-eater!"
For all the rest of the world the term of
reproach applied to one tribe has passed
into the name of a nation, and the mock-
ery of the Abenaki, adopted, we believe,
in the first instance by the French, has
been stereotyped in all books of Arctic
travel as the name of the Innuit. So far
as real knowledge of the Eskimo is con-
cerned, all that has been written of their
habits, manners, and customs before Dr.
Rink took the subject in hand is little
better than so much waste paper. Here
was a very interesting race waiting to be
understood, and biding its time. Dr. Rink
has been the first to do them that good