64 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



Eskimo companions tried to introduce the fashion of eating them. 

 They found no difficulty in getting children to try them, except that 

 in some cases the mothers were offended by the attempt. The men 

 also were commonly willing to eat them, and I do not recall that even 

 one man refused, but I should say that fully half the women posi- 

 tively refused even to taste the salmon berry during the summer we 

 spent with them. This is really a rather good fruit and I have no 

 doubt that by now most or all of the people are eating it, but our 

 observation that first year seemed to indicate clearly enough the 

 conservatism of the women. We observed it in many other things — 

 for instance, smoking. Although nearly all western Eskimo women 

 use tobacco and although there have been tobacco-using women 

 on our ships when we have come in contact with the eastern Eskimos, 

 we have found the men readier than the women to learn to 

 smoke. 



I have had much experience with the food prejudice of white men 

 in connection with introducing them to a diet of meat only. The laws 

 of that prejudice as deduced from dogs have applied to the men 

 exactly. The older the man the more probable it is that he will 

 object to trying a new kind of food and to abandoning the foods he 

 is used to. A dog brought up on a ship and used to a variety in diet 

 would take readily to a new diet. Similarly, "well brought-up" 

 men, used in their homes to a variety of foods both domestic and 

 imported, take readily to any new thing — such, for instance, as seal 

 meat. But men ''poorly brought-up" and used only to half a dozen 

 or so articles in their regular diet, are generally reluctant to try 

 a new food unless it has been represented to them in advance as a 

 luxury or as especially delicious. Of course the situation here is 

 not so simple as it is with dogs. For one thing, the man of "laborer" 

 type has a feeling of being degraded when he is compelled to eat 

 the food of "savages," while a man of intellectual type is appealed 

 to by a mild flavor of adventure in experimenting with the food 

 of a strange people. 



It was so with my companions now that we were among real 

 Eskimos. They took readily to Eskimo cooking and seemed to con- 

 sider it great sport. Doughnuts fried in seal oil were sampled as 

 an adventure, and their deliciousness surprised them. So with 

 every new thing they had a chance to taste. This is one of the 

 reasons why "well brought-up" young men are the best material for 

 polar explorers, or indeed for any type of "roughing it," except the 

 sort to which the "poorly brought-up" man is native. Generalizing 



