104 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



Roxy now agreed that he and Sitsak would take me to 

 Tuktuyaktok, the place where Ovayuak lived, a journey 

 of about a hundred and fifty miles by the devious chan- 

 nels between the islands, although no more than half of 

 that as the crow flies. The arrangement was that when 

 we got there I should purchase from Ovayuak a chest 

 •of Hudson's Bay Company's tea and a Hudson's Bay 

 Company's four-point blanket to pay him for the trip. 

 He insisted that these things and none other should be 

 the pay for the journey and through his insistence I 

 learned one more way in which the Eskimos are similar 

 to ourselves. 



Before the whalers came to Herschel Island, the Es- 

 kimos had been in the habit of purchasing from the Hud- 

 son's Bay Company four or five main items — tobacco, 

 tea, guns and ammunition, traps and cloths of various 

 kinds — silk, velvet, canvas, blankets, etc. For all of 

 these they had to pay fabulous prices because the Com- 

 pany's difficulty in getting goods to Fort Macpherson 

 overland was great, and of course the trade of the country 

 was small. That there was in the early days no competi- 

 tion may have had something to do also with keeping up 

 the price. 



When the whalers came to Herschel Island in 1889 

 they were so eager to get fresh meat and fresh fish from 

 the Eskimos (things for which there had been no sale 

 until then) that they heaped upon the Eskimos far more 

 than they knew what to do with of all the different things 

 the Hudson's Bay Company had been in the habit of 

 selling them, and a great many other things besides. 

 Now the whaler goods differed from the Hudson's Bay 

 Company's goods. The eagerness of the whalers to ex- 

 change their wares for things which had previously had 



