FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE ESKIMOS 45 



learn from white men, and it was, therefore, only a few 

 years until they changed in many ways. 



When the first ships came, these Eskimos had no white 

 men's food and their trading at Macpherson had been in 

 tobacco, arms and ammunition, knives and other iron 

 goods, cooking utensils, tents and clothing, etc. The 

 whaling ships came laden with all sorts of civilized food 

 and all sorts of trade goods, and the one thing they lacked 

 was fresh meat. At that time the Eskimos considered 

 meat and fish about the only things fit to eat, and it 

 was at first difficult for the whalers, no matter what price 

 they offered, to secure fresh meat or fresh fish. It became 

 one of their chief purposes, therefore, to teach the Eski- 

 mos quickly to like sugar, bread, fruit, bacon, and other 

 things which could be purchased cheaply in San Francisco 

 and easily carried north. 



When I arrived at Herschel Island sixteen years later 

 this sort of thing had already passed and the Eskimos had 

 become so far acquainted with American foods that they 

 were willing to consider them approximately one-quarter 

 as good as fresh meat or fresh fish. By this I mean that 

 in 1906 they used to trade fifty pounds of fresh caribou 

 meat for about two hundred pounds of flour and other 

 groceries. Some of them still confined themselves largely 

 to a meat and fish diet but there were others who ate 

 considerable quantities of bread, sugar, dried fruit, etc., 

 and nearly all of them had become passionately fond of 

 tea and coffee. 



In ordinary years the whalers had groceries in plenty 

 to sell, whether for meat or for money. But in 1903 they 

 had come to the Arctic outfitted for two years and had 

 now been compelled to spend three because of being 

 frozen in prematurely the autumn of 1905. They had 



