102 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



of Herschel Island during my first year. These police- 

 men had come to the country only a year or two before 

 and had found the jargon in daily use between Eskimos 

 and white men (such white men, for instance, as Cap- 

 tain Klinkenberg) who had been married to Eskimo 

 women so long that they had large families already partly 

 grown. I think Klinkenberg's oldest daughter was about 

 twelve or fourteen when I heard him talking to his wife 

 fluently in some language I did not understand. I wrote 

 in my diary at the time that he talked with her in Es- 

 kimo. The same had been the impression of the police 

 when they came to the country. Then month by month 

 they had learned this language which the whalers were 

 talking to the Eskimos until they knew nearly or quite 

 every word of it and could speak it as fluently as the 

 whalers. They then thought they could speak Eskimo, 

 and when I came they told me so. 



Constable Walker gave me a three-hundred-word vo- 

 cabulary of what he considered pure Eskimo. I found 

 out later that the stems of about ten of the words came 

 from the languages of the South Sea Islands. These were 

 apparently words used by the whalers in talking with 

 Hawaiians and later incorporated by them into the speech 

 they used with the Eskimos. There were a few words de- 

 rived from Spanish and from English, as in the case of 

 the phrase "me savvy" where the "me" comes from Eng- 

 lish and the "savvy" from Spanish by way of southern 

 California where some of the whalers had lived. Other 

 whalers had been in Greenland waters before they came to 

 Herschtl Island and had brought with them Greenland 

 jargon words which came ultimately from the Danish — 

 such as "coonie" (so written by ( onstable Walker when 

 he gave me his vocabulary). Although I can read Danish, 



