LIFE AND HISTORY OF THE ESKIMOS 



all essentials untouched. Guns were hardly known, the chief 

 weapons on land being the bow, and on sea the harpoon. Long 

 before Peary finished his last expedition all the hunters 

 possessed the most modern of the breech-loading guns of our 

 time. The old knives, which consisted of little splinters of 

 meteoric stone, laboriously hafted in bits of reindeer skin or 

 narwhal tusk, were replaced by the finest steel ; and their 

 sledges, which once were pieces of whalebone cunningly tied 

 together to form runners, were now of the best ash or oak. 



Long before Peary appeared a lively bartering with the 

 Scotch whalers certainly took place ; but a thing like a gun was 

 a great rarity. Commercial intercourse with the whalers seems 

 on the whole to have been very casual, and one may therefore 

 say that it is Peary who has given the tribe its present effective 

 equipment for winning a livelihood. Previous to the intro- 

 duction of modern weapons it was obvious that the Polar 

 Eskimos were subjected to the moods of the varying years. 

 Their own simple and primitive weapons were beautiful and 

 serviceable inventions ; but the handling of them was an art, 

 and when the condition of weather and ice, or even the move- 

 ments of the animals, were unfavourable, it happened not 

 rarely that they had to face bad winters through which they 

 could only manage to exist with great difficulty. So far as 

 their livelihood was concerned, Peary developed in them the 

 white man's brain, which of course signified great progress in 

 their material existence. 



But the Eskimos did not forget to repay Peary what they 

 thought they owed him ; on his last two voyages to the North 

 Pole about seventy to eighty Eskimos — men, women, and 

 children — with several hundreds of dogs, accompanied him on 

 the Roosevelt to the northern point of Grant Land. In 

 other words, this included all the best young men in the tribe. 

 And can anyone think of a more serious and extensive contribu- 

 tion to scientific exploration than this wholesale sacrifice of the 

 supremest ? 



But Peary himself possessed qualities which made it possible 

 for him to come to such an arrangement with his helpers. His 



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