THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 105 



and fifteen thousand words are used in everyday speech, which is 

 a far larger vocabulary than is employed to-day by persons speak- 

 ing any ordinary European language. When you combine the pe- 

 culiar mode of thought with the complexity of inflection and exten- 

 siveness of vocabulary, it is seen to be a task of intense application 

 for many years to get a command of the language.* 



It is not so strange, therefore, as it seems at first sight, that 

 there are white men who have resided for thirty or forty years on 

 the arctic coast, with Eskimo wives and grandchildren, who never- 

 theless have so small a command of the language that when their 

 own wives talk to their own children they have often no idea 

 even of the subject they are talking about. Of those who have been 

 long resident the exceptions known to me are Mr. C. D. Brower 

 of Cape Smythe, and about five or six missionaries who during 

 the last twenty or thirty years have worked in Alaska and north- 

 ern Canada. Of the three expeditions with which I have been 

 connected, Mr. LefRngwell, the commander of the first, and Mr. 

 Jenness, the anthropologist of the present one, are the only men 

 who have even tried to learn anything beyond the jargon. With 

 Mr. Leffingwell, who is a geologist, the language was a pastime, but 

 Mr. Jenness needed it in his studies as an ethnologist and acquired 

 in three years a better command of it than I was able to in my 

 first three. 



Inspector Phillips turned his interest to the customs, beliefs and 

 mode of thought of the Eskimos as he could get them through in- 

 terpreters, and for that purpose he made good use of me while we 

 traveled together towards Macpherson, visiting Eskimos along the 

 road and talking with our own Eskimo companions. Two bits of 

 information that came out on the journey seem interesting enough 

 to relate. 



One evening Inspector Phillips and I were discussing the ques- 

 tion of whether the missionaries as a whole had done a great deal 

 of good in the country. Taliak, an Eskimo I had just hired who 

 had lived for a year or two with one of the Church of England 

 missionaries, listened to the discussion and gathered from it that 

 ;ve were not as favorable in our attitude towards the missionaries 

 IS he thought we ought to be. As with any other Eskimo, the in- 

 ensity and sincerity of his newly-acquired religious opinions are 

 )eyond question. He also wants it distinctly understood that they 

 ire beyond question. Phillips and I had not been paying special 



*See discussion of the principles of the Eskimo language in Chapter 

 vXIV of "My Life With the Eskimo," Macmillan, 1913. 



