ALASKA INDUSTRIES. 165 



Gastronomic qualities of walrus meat. — The flavor of the raw, 

 rank mollusca, upon which it feeds, seems to permeate the fiber of the 

 flesh, making it very offensive to the civilized j^alate ; but the Eskimos, 

 who do not have the luxurious spread of sea-lion steak and fur-seal 

 hams, regard it as highly and feed upon it as steadily as we do our 

 own best corn-fed beef. Indeed, the walrus to the Eskimo answers 

 just as the cocoa palm does to the South Sea islander; it feeds him, it 

 clothes him, it heats and illuminates his "igloo," and it arms him for 

 the chase, while he builds his summer shelter and rides upon the sea 

 by virtue of its hide. Naturally, however, it is not much account to 

 the seal hunters on the Pribilof Islands. They still find, by stirring 

 up the sand dunes and digging about them at Northeast Point, all the 

 ivor}^ that they require for their domestic use on the islands, nothing 

 else about the walrus being of the slightest economic value to them. 

 Some authorities have spoken well of walrus meat as an article of diet. 

 Either they had that sauce for it born of inordinate hunger, or else 

 the cooks deceived them. Starving explorers in the Arctic regions 

 could relish it— -they would thankfully and gladly eat anything that 

 was juicy and sustained life witli zest and gastronomic fervor. Tlie 

 Eskimos naturally like it. It is a necessity to their existence, and thus 

 a relish for it is acquired. I can readily understand, by personal 

 experience, how a great many, perhaps a majoritj^ of our own people 

 could speak well, were they north, of seal meat, of whale " rind," and 

 of polar-bear steaks, but I know that a mouthful of fresh or ' ' cured " 

 walrus flesh would make their "gorges rise." The St. Paul natives 

 refuse to touch it as an article of diet in any shape or manner. I saw 

 them removing the enormous testicles of one of the old bull walruses 

 which was shot, for my purposes, on Walrus Island. They told me 

 that they did so in obedience to the wish of the widow doctress of the 

 village, Maria Seedova, who desired a pair for her incantations. 



Curiosity, mingled with a desire to really understand, alone tempted 

 me to taste the walrus meat which was placed before me at Poonook, 

 on St. Lawrence Island, and candor compels me to say that it was worse 

 than the old beaver's tail which I had been victimized with in British 

 Columbia; worse than the tough brown bear steak of Bristol Bay — in 

 fact, it is the worst of all fresh flesh of which I know. It has a strong 

 flavor of an indefinite acrid nature, which turned my palate and my 

 stomach instantaneously and simultaneouslj", while the surprised 

 natives stared in bewildered silence at their astonished and disgusted 

 guest. They, however, greedily put chunks 2 inches square, and even 

 larger, of this fiesh and blubber into their mouths as rapidly as the 

 storage room there would permit — and with what grimy gusto — the 

 corners of their large lips dripping with the fatness of their feeding. 

 How little they thought then that in a few short seasons they would 

 die of starvation sitting in these same "igloos" — their caches empty 

 and nothing but endless fields of barren ice where the lifegiving sea 

 should be. The winter of 1879-80 was one of exceptional rigor in the 

 Arctic, although in the United States it was unusually mild and open. 

 The ice closed in solid around St. Lawrence Island — so firm and 

 unshaken by the giant leverage of wind and tide that the walruses were 

 driven far to the southward and eastward beyond the reach of the 

 unhappy inhabitants of that island, who, thus unexpectedlj^ deprived 

 of their mainstay and support, seem to have miserably starved to 

 death, with tlie exception of one small village on the north shore. 

 The residents of the Poonook, Poogovellyak, and Kagallegak settle- 

 ments perished, to a soul, from hunger — nearly 300 men, women, and 



