THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 591 



noxious to me. I thought it an interesting peculiarity and assumed 

 that everyone else would think so, and there were few things I 

 told about so often as the fact that I was peculiar in that I could 

 not eat fish. I think I might have lost the notion sooner if it had 

 not formed such an excellent topic of conversation. And so I im- 

 agine it is with many who have similar beliefs about food. 



The peculiarity about Peter Lopez was that he could not eat 

 fat. He had a story to explain this. The explanation ran that 

 when he was a small boy in the Cape Verde Islands fat was ex- 

 pensive and he was forbidden to eat more than the share that came 

 to him as one of several children. But one day when nobody was 

 looking he made away with the allowance intended for the whole 

 family. His mother to punish him melted up some lard and com- 

 pelled him to drink it. This overdose caused nausea and from 

 that time on he had an unconquerable repugnance against fat in all 

 forms. This he had kept through all the vicissitudes of his career 

 as a whaler in the Arctic and as a trapper married to an Eskimo 

 wife and living among Eskimos. 



Now came the time when he learned that I intended to abandon 

 the Star temporarily and take him with the rest of our crew to 

 Melville Island where they would all have to live on meat. He 

 approached me on the subject of whether he might take an extra 

 allowance of sugar for himself to Melville Island since he could not 

 eat fat, and I vetoed it on the ground that where everybody is 

 more or less fond of sugar it would not be practicable to allow one 

 man to have more than the rest. Neither did I have much sym- 

 pathy with his prejudice, thinking that he would get over it as I had 

 got over mine. But he was certain that he could never learn to 

 like fat. 



When the party reached Melville Island they had some sugar. 

 After it was finished Lopez began to feel increasingly uncomfortable 

 living on meat from which he carefully trimmed off all the fat. 

 His wife kept urging him to try a little tallow or a little boiled 

 suet or some marrow, either raw or cooked, but he refused. It 

 presently became evident that he was losing flesh rapidly and even- 

 tually he became actually ill. 



And then one day his wife caught him surreptitiously eating a 

 piece of fat. At first he became angry at her spying on him, and 

 he forbade her to tell. But the joke was too good to keep and 

 she told everybody, whereupon Lopez owned up and began to eat 

 fat openly. He recovered his health, flesh and spirits in a few 

 days and by the time I arrived in the fall he prided himself on being 



