366 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



opportunity of watching a man who had to give up salt and tobacco 

 at the same time. 



No Eskimo I ever saw was as fond of caribou marrow as Thom- 

 sen was. When we killed the three fat bulls just after leav- 

 ing Mercy Bay he ate so much that he was ill and his digestion was 

 out of order for two or three days. At least this was my inter- 

 pretation of it but he maintained that the trouble was the lack 

 of salt. It took us twenty days to cross the island at an average 

 rate of about ten miles per day, and towards the last Thomsen 

 said that he no longer had much hankering for salt but still wanted 

 tobacco badly. When we finally arrived at the base his first thought 

 was to have a smoke, but he took no pains to add salt to his first 

 meal cooked by Levi. When I asked him he replied that the food 

 seemed a little too salty as it was. He had always used salt heav- 

 ily, and under ordinarj^ circumstances would have added a good 

 deal of salt to dishes similarly seasoned. 



At other times I have had experience with men who have said 

 that they found it harder to break the salt habit than the tobacco 

 habit. In general the time of greatest hankering for salt is about 

 two or three weeks after j^ou have ceased to use it. If you con- 

 tinue longing for it six or eight weeks after, you will find on trial 

 that this longing has been artificial (or "psychological") in the 

 sense that the taste of salt will not prove pleasant. I have known 

 no one to welcome the taste of salt after being six months without 

 it. When a white man has been a year without salt it becomes al- 

 most as unpalatable to him as it is to the Eskimos or Indians who 

 have never used it; with this difference, that the white man knows 

 from experience he will come to like it again, but the native has 

 the opinion that he never will. 



In dealing with Eskimos we have found that those who work 

 on ships or who for any reason are compelled to eat salted food, 

 acquire the salt habit about as quickly as they do the habit of 

 tobacco smoking or that of eating some such strange food as bread. 

 Sugar we found in Victoria Island to be peculiarly distasteful to the 

 natives, and even children of no more than four or five objected 

 violently to the taste of candy, sugar, sweet preserves, canned fruit 

 and the like. Eskimo infants too young for formed tastes naturally 

 take to sugar quite as readily as infant children among white people. 



As usual at this season we traveled at night. This had every 

 advantage over day travel except that when we tried to get sextant 



