THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 389 



fortunes were made in whaling. The largest catch I have heard of 

 was sixty -three whales in two years by a single vessel. Since many 

 other ships also caught large numbers, the market was temporarily 

 glutted and the price dropped to half, but even so the profits were 

 fabulous. But after 1906 a big whale was worth only from $400 

 to $800 and the whaling fleet vanished from the Arctic in a year. 



Arctic whaling is not likely to be resumed except for fertilizer 

 or for food. Let us hope the good sense of the world will soon 

 begin to discountenance whaling for anything but food. There are 

 several countries now where whale-meat is considered good to eat. 

 If we do not care to accustom ourselves to whale-meat, interna- 

 tional arrangement might be made so that the people who already 

 like it can get it, leaving that much more beef and pork for the 

 others. That money can be made through turning whale-steaks into 

 fertilizer should not be argument enough for allowing such waste 

 of food to go on when the world is drifting into an inevitable meat 

 shortage. The chemists have learned to make fertilizer out of thin 

 air, but steaks are as yet beyond their power. 



The large cargo of building material and trade goods shipped 

 to Herschel Island this year on the Ruby was to lay the foundation 

 for a wide expansion of the Hudson's Bay Company's business. 

 It was doubtless the opportunity for pure trading created by the 

 disappearance of the whaling fleet that had induced the "Great 

 Company" to make this new departure, but in part it was our ex- 

 ploratory work of 1908-12. Until that time it had been supposed 

 that between Cape Bathurst and King William Island there were 

 no longer any Eskimos with whom trade could be established, but 

 during those years the work of Dr. Anderson and myself had shown 

 that most of these coasts, both the mainland and Victoria Island, 

 were as thickly populated as Eskimo countries generally are (though 

 that means only two or three persons per mile of coast) , by a people 

 so little reached by modern commerce that their weapons were 

 bows and spears, their cutting and piercing implements copper or 

 stone, and cloth so little known among them that the pieces that 

 had drifted in by intertribal trade were considered to be the skins 

 of peculiar animals. 



This was an opportunity which the Company, in spite of its 

 245 years, had the youth and foresight to grasp. Their way of 

 doing it was to send in the cargo of the Ruby and a small power 

 schooner, the Macpherson. Part of her cargo the Ruby would un- 

 load at Herschel and part at Bathurst, laying the foundations of two 

 stations. Later the chain of trading posts would be lengthened east- 



