THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 355 



cold, will doubtless explain in that way this peculiar food habit 

 of the polar bear. Here naturally arises a subject on which I want 

 to have my say — the great need for fat in an arctic diet. 



I am not sure whether I learned this from my parents or from the 

 school geographies. At any rate, I knew it up to the time I was 

 twenty-seven when I first went north to the Eskimos. I had read 

 much about their fondness for blubber and I expected to marvel at 

 seeing them eating with a spoon some palatable food such as butter, 

 or to be horrified at seeing them drinking train oil. I did see them 

 eat butter with a spoon. They seemed to look upon a piece of 

 it as a sort of dessert as we do upon suet pudding. We never eat 

 butter with a spoon unless after mixing it with sugar and changing 

 the name into "hard sauce." But in my whole polar experience I 

 have only on two occasions seen an Eskimo drink seal oil. One was 

 the time we were starving on Horton River in 1909 and had nothing 

 but seal oil for food. There were seven or eight of us and the rest 

 used to soak the oil up in something to make a kind of salad, but 

 one old man used to take his oil "straight." He used to drink half 

 a teacupful in the morning and half a teacupful at night, and the 

 rest of the Eskimos marveled how he could do it. 



The only other place known to me where seal oil is drunk is on 

 the "Sandspit" at Nome, Alaska, when the tourists come to town. 

 It is an ordinary tourist stunt to walk out to the Sandspit and say 

 to the first Eskimo, "Here, Johnny, I'll give you a dollar if you'll 

 let me see you drink some oil." The victim I saw took a small 

 sip and tried hard not to make a face and my tourist friends thought 

 they had seen one of the wonders of the North. 



My experience with diet in the North is that you get hungry 

 sooner if you are cold but it makes little difference just what food 

 you eat to satisfy the hunger. On ships and at whaling stations 

 or at the barracks of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police at 

 Herschel Island there is no greater percentage of fat in the diet than 

 where similar groups are gathered in another climate. If men are 

 badly dressed or if their houses are cold they may eat with rather 

 better appetites than would be the case farther south, but what they 

 eat is a matter of choice or individual preference. The Police eat a 

 great deal of bacon and so do the Hudson's Bay men, but that is 

 largely because it is considered a standard ration and is regularly 

 furnished from outside. 



There was a time when fat was a much more important element 

 than it is now in the diet of Europeans. This was before the time 

 of sugar. Four hundred years ago ordinary sugar was unknown in 



