482 THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. [chap. 



any bitter taste. When the inhabitants, in consequence of 

 scarcity of food, removed in the beginning of February from 

 Pitlekaj, they carried with them several sacks of frozen veget- 

 ables, and there were still some left in the cellars to be taken 

 away as required. In the tents at St. Lawrence Bay there lay 

 heaps of leaf-clad willow-twigs and sacks filled with leaves and 

 stalks of Rhodiola. The writers who quote the Chukches as 

 an example of a race living exclusively on substances derived 

 from the animal kingdom thus commit a complete mistake. On 

 the contrary, they appear at certain seasons of the year to be more 

 " graminivorous " than any other people I know, and with respect 

 to this their taste appears to me to give the antln'opologist a hint 

 of certain traits of the mode of life of the people of the Stone Age 

 which have been completely overlooked. To judge from the 

 Chukches our primitive ancestors by no means so much re- 

 sembled beasts of prey as they are commonly imagined to have 

 done, and it may, perhaps, have been the case that " bellum 

 omnium inter omnes " was first brought in with the higher 

 culture of the Bronze or Iron Age. 



The cooking of the Chukches, like that of most wild races, 

 is very simple. After a successful catch all the dwellers in the 

 tent gormandise on the killed animal, and appear to find a 

 special pleasure in making their faces and hands as bloody as 

 ])ossible. Alternately with the raw flesh are eaten pieces of 

 blubber and marrow, and bits of the intestines which have been 

 freed from their contents merely by pressing between the fingers. 

 Fish is eaten not only in a raw state, but also frozen so hard 

 that it can be broken in pieces. When opportunity offers the 

 Chukches do not, however, neglect to boil their food, or to roast 

 pieces of flesh over the train-oil lamp — the word roast ought 

 however in this case to be exchanged iov soot. At a visit which 

 Lieutenant Hovgaard made at Najtskaj, the natives in the tent 

 where he was a guest ate for supper first seal-flesh soup, then 

 boiled fish, and lastly, boiled seal-flesh. They thus observed 

 completely the order of eating approved in Europe. The 

 Chukches are unacquainted with other forks than their fingers, 

 and even the use of the spoon is not common. Many carry 

 about with them a spoon of copper, tinned iron, or bone ffig. 8, 

 p. 486). The soup is often drunk directly out of the cooking 

 vessel, or sucked up through hollow bones (see the figure on 

 p. 476). These are used as drinking cups, and like the spoons 

 are worn in the belt. As examples of Chukch dishes I may 

 further mention, vegetable soup, boiled seal-flesh, boiled fish, 

 blood soup, soup of seal-blood and blubber. To these we may 

 add soup from finely crushed bones, or from seal-flesh, blubber, 

 and bones. For crushing the bones there is in every tent a 

 hammer, consisting of r.n oval stone with a hollow round it for 



