242 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



dress ten pounds each. This shows an average consumption of 

 nearly six hundred pounds of seal-meat by each person, large and 

 small, during the year. To this diet the natives add a great deal 

 of butter and many sweet crackers. They are passionately fond of 

 butter. No epicure at home or butter-taster in Goshen knows or 

 appreciates that article better than these people do. If they could 

 get all that they desire, they would consume one thousand pounds 

 of butter and five hundred pounds of sweet crackers every week, 

 and indefinite quantities of sugar. The sweetest of all sweet teeth 

 are found in the jaw of the ordinary Aleut. But it is of course un- 

 wise to allow them full swing in this matter, for they would turn 

 their stomachs into fermenting-tanks if they had free access to an 

 unlimited supply of saccharine food. The company issues them 

 two hundred pounds a week. If unable to get sweet crackers, 

 they will eat about three hundred pounds of hard or pilot bread 

 every week, and, in addition to this, nearly seven hundred pounds 

 of flour at the same time. Of tobacco they are allowed fifty pounds 

 per week ; candles, seventy-five pounds ; rice, fifty pounds. They 

 burn, strange as it may seem, kerosene-oil here to the exclusion of 

 that seal-fat which literally overruns the island. They ignite and 

 consume over six hundred gallons of kerosene-oil a year in the vil- 

 lage of St. Paul alone. They do not fancy vinegar very much ; per- 

 haps fifty gallons a year are used up there. Mustard and pepper are 

 sparingly used, one to one pound and a half a week for the whole 

 village. Beans they peremptorily reject; for some reason or other 

 they cannot be induced to use them. Those who go about the ves- 

 sels contract a taste for split-pea soup, and a few of them are sold 

 in the village-store. Salt meat, beef or pork, they will take reluct- 

 antly, if it is given to and pressed upon them ; but they will never 

 buy it. I remember, in this connection, seeing two barrels of prime 

 salt pork and a barrel of prime mess salt beef opened in the com- 

 pany's store shortly after my arrival in 1872, and, though the peo- 

 ple of the village were invited to help themselves, I think I am right 

 in saying these three barrels were not emptied when I left the isl- 

 and in 1873. They use a very little coffee during the year — not more 

 than one hundred pounds — but of tea a great deal. I do not know 

 exactly — I cannot find among my notes a record as to that article 

 — but I can say that they each drink not less than a gallon of tea 

 per diem. The amount of this beverage which they sip from the 

 time they rise in the morning until they go to bed late at night is 



