A SEAL BANQUET. 457 



Then came the ribs, enclosed in tender meat ; and next, 

 the entrails, served up in pieces of two to three feet long. 

 "I saw at once," says Captain Hall, "that it was sup- 

 posed I would not like to eat this delicacy, but having 

 partaken of it before, I signified my wish to do so now ; 

 for, be it remembered, there is no part of a seal but is 

 good." 



This quotation is a digression, perhaps, but it serves to 

 explain the great value of the seal to the Greenlaiiders. 

 Their pastures are the billowy tracts of ocean ; their 

 fishery is their harvest ; their herds of seals are as 

 necessary to their maintenance as oxen and sheep to the 

 Englishman, the palm-tree to the Arab, or the cocoa-nut 

 to the islanders of the South Pacific. 



Not only, as a Dutch writer remarks, do these animals 

 supply them with food and clothing, but with roofs for 

 their huts and tarpaulins for their canoes. They burn 

 the seal-oil during the protracted darkness of the dreary 

 arctic winter ; they feed the fire with it which cooks 

 their food, and use it to preserve their stock of dried 

 fish. With the smaller fibres they manufacture sewing- 

 thread, not much inferior to the English housewife's 

 silk or cotton. The same material is woven into screens 

 or curtains for their doors, and into a kind of coarse stuff 

 for their under garments. The bladders are used as 

 vessels for holding liquids. And before the enterprise 

 of European traders brought iron within their reach, they 

 wrought their tools and implements out of the bones of 

 the indispensable and multifarious seal. 



In that yearly massacre which for four centuries has 

 been carried on so vigorously, the Eskimos, therefore, 



