24 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



They remember that Jones went crazy and they have not forgotten 

 what Smith told them about his first winter, and they know they 

 are going to be depressed. And they are depressed, to a degree at 

 least. The third group are such men as Hawaii Islanders, Cape 

 Verde Islanders, or southern negroes, whom we frequently have in 

 our northern crews. They have never heard of the depressing ef- 

 fect of winter darkness and are quite as ready to believe the local 

 Eskimos and the captain of the ship who say that the gloom of win- 

 ter is imaginary, as to believe the forecastle men who are in dread of 

 it. I have questioned every one of the men of this type whom I have 

 met and none of them have noticed that they were appreciably 

 depressed by their first "arctic night." 



The winter darkness is to the Eskimo about what the hottest 

 period of summer is to the city dweller. The darkness, as such, 

 may not be agreeable to the Eskimo any more than the heat, as 

 such, is agreeable to the man of the city, but to each of them it 

 means the vacation period. The clerk gets his two weeks in which 

 he can go to the seaside or to the mountains. The Eskimo has 

 found it inconvenient to hunt during the periods of extreme darkness 

 and sees to it that he has laid by a sufficient store of food to take 

 him through for a month or two. Having no real work to do, he 

 makes long journeys to visit his friends and, arrived, spends his 

 time in singing, dancing and revelry. For this reason most Eskimos 

 look forward to the winter darkness more than to any other period. 

 The darkness of Christmas shows itself to be about as depressing 

 on the north coast of Canada as the darkness of midnight on 

 Broadway. 



The soundest reasoning leads to the wrongest conclusions when 

 the premises are false. On the basis of the Arctic as it is supposed 

 to be the Eskimos would be as wretched in the circumstances of 

 their lives as theory makes them. But the fact that they are not 

 wretched has penetrated to most of us through the uniform asser- 

 tions of about ninety per cent, of the northern travelers and ten per 

 cent, of the northern missionaries. Although most explorers have 

 filled their books with accounts of what a happy, carefree life is 

 led by the Eskimos, a few have called them wretched, meaning really 

 thereby that they imagine they themselves would be wretched if 

 they had to live as the Eskimos are living. No one of them can have 

 failed to notice how much leisure the Eskimos have for games, story- 

 telling, singing, dancing and the enjoyment of life in general, and 

 most explorers will agree that an Eskimo laughs as much in a month 

 as the average white man does in a year. One reason why the Es- 



