f 



AN OLD WOMAN WITH HER SON. 



ON HERSCHEL AND FLAXMAN ISLANDS 311 



of doing things which are not permitted by our laws, and thus 

 the natives learned to be careful. The ships were fined if 

 they gave out intoxicating drink, and in a very few years the 

 drinking ceased. But not so with the diseases and desires 

 which the white men introduced among these children of 

 nature. Diseases from which we are more or less immune 

 killed the people in 

 hundreds ; typhoid 

 fever, measles, and 

 small-pox, each had 

 a period of deadly 

 sway. Many died, 

 and of those who sur- 

 vived a few emigrated 

 to safer places ; but 

 more stayed, as the 

 inducements were too 

 great ! 



Great numbers of 



half-bred children are seen on the island, but in justification 

 of the whalers I must say that they mostly take care of them 

 as well as they can, and send them down to Unalaska to 

 school. But for all that I have often wondered whether it 

 is really good to send them out of the country to school for 

 a few years. Most of them are bound to come back to their 

 mother-country, and what can they do then ? Can they take 

 up the tight for existence as could their maternal ancestors ? 

 I believe not. They cannot all be missionaries and school 

 teachers ; and then we have a class of people, only one 

 generation removed from the savage, who are too proud to 

 hunt for a living even if they had the ability, and I am inclined 

 to think that it would be better to let them live in the country 

 and be brought up to hunt, to fish, and to trade, with the same 

 schooling as the other Eskimos, and to forget in the course of 

 time that their fathers were white men. 



So much for the boys. The girls are still worse off when 

 they get the rudiments of European education. They desire to 

 be white women, and may acquire some of their accomplish- 

 ments, but for all that they are only half-bred, and when the 

 fathers cease to pay for them they go back to their own 



