THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 431 



vantage of being freer from rocks and shoals and therefore better 

 adapted to big ships. If the Northwest Passage is made by this 

 route, a ship coming from the east through Baffin Bay and Lan- 

 caster Sound has the option when it gets to Cape Providence on the 

 south coast of Melville Island of crossing thence to Cape McClure 

 and passing around the west side of Banks Island by the route fol- 

 lowed by the Investigator in 1851, or of coming across from Cape 

 Providence directly into the mouth of Prince of Wales Straits and 

 passing south there and thence through the whaling waters past 

 Cape Bathurst and Herschel Island. 



The support party brought me a letter from Storkerson saying 

 that he expected to devote twelve days to survey work east of 

 Hornby Point, returning then to headquarters. This would make 

 him due home about November 22nd. November 4th Emiu returned 

 with the bear meat from Illun's camp. He reported that the ice 

 conditions were by now such that lUun had decided to move his 

 camp south to Ramsay Island which, according to local Eskimo 

 report, would be a good place for hunting bears and seals all winter. 



Emiu brought another story that disturbed me not a little. 

 Before Gonzales started I cautioned him to treat well our two Es- 

 kimo guests. But Gonzales had the theory not uncommon among 

 whalers that "a native is a native" and that the best way to treat 

 them is to make them understand from the beginning that they are 

 your inferiors. The view is about the same as that commonly held in 

 the southern United States with regard to the treatment of negroes. 

 I know from old stories I picked up in Alaska that this method 

 worked very badly when the whalers first came in to Herschel 

 Island (1889). But there were as many as five hundred white men, 

 South Sea Islanders, negroes, etc., in the fleet that wintered at 

 Herschel Island, and as they stuck together and all treated the 

 natives alike, they had the combined strength which forced their 

 view upon the Eskimos, who gradually began to realize, much to 

 their surprise, that instead of being superior to white men they 

 were really inferior to them. My own feelings are such that I have 

 never been able to treat the Eskimos otherwise than as equals. 

 They treated me hospitably and well when first I came to them and 

 had no resources of my own, and in the main they have continued 

 to do so since although I have found exceptions among them as 

 among other people. My experience has been that the less sophis- 

 ticated the native the better he is to deal with. This is usually the 

 experience of all travelers who deal with primitive people, except 

 missionaries. For some reason missionaries generally bring back 



