480 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



ishment, somewhat as mediaeval Christians might have expected ill- 

 ness or death to follow the profane use of the sacrament. 



Asked as to the sort of results that would follow, they said that 

 sometimes the man himself would die and sometimes some of his 

 relatives would die within the year, but that usually the result 

 was whitening of the skin — leucodermia, a disease common among 

 Eskimos and also among the negroes of Africa and found, I believe, 

 in all races. I remember particularly an old man three-quarters 

 of whose skin had turned white. I was told by several persons, 

 including his adopted son, that the old man had eaten bear liver 

 when he was young. I asked the old man himself and he denied 

 ever having eaten bear liver knowingly but said that he might 

 have done so inadvertently. 



As soon as I realized that the Eskimo idea of the danger of 

 eating bear liver was of the taboo nature I began to experiment 

 upon every opportunity. I never found an Eskimo who had ever 

 tried the eating of liver, but I did get some stories of liver having 

 been given to dogs which had later become sick, eventually losing 

 their hair. The belief is that the livers of all kinds of bears are 

 equally dangerous. During my second expedition I ate nearly 

 every liver of thirteen grizzly bears I killed myself and of some 

 others. Once I induced an Eskimo, Mamayauk, the wife of Ilavi- 

 nirk, to eat two or three slices of fried liver, but the other Eskimos 

 would not even eat meat that had been cooked in the same vessel. 



On the present expedition my first experiment was near the 

 northwest corner of Banks Island in the spring of 1915 when And- 

 reasen, Crawford, Natkusiak and I were in camp. We had been 

 short of food and had just picked up the depot of caribou fat made 

 by Storkerson, Ole and me the summer of 1914 and buried in a 

 stone-lined pit inland east from Bernard Island at the time when 

 we gave up waiting for the Star and started south, the journey that 

 resulted in the finding of the Sachs. It had been a mild and rainy 

 fall and the caribou fat in the pit became damp and molded before 

 the freeze-up. Certain kinds of molds are said to be poisonous. 

 In our liver-eating experiment we fried the liver in this moldy 

 caribou fat. I pointed cut to the men that if we were to become 

 ill the mold would be quite as reasonable a cause as the bear liver. 

 We all agreed that the bear liver tasted even better than the seal 

 liver, although the latter is considered by white men to be as good 

 as calves' liver and is indeed the one part of the seal that is com- 

 monly eaten by arctic whalers. At this meal we ate a huge quan- 

 tity of fat, so that this alone might have made us ill. 



