456 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



fervor. The Eskimo naturally like it ; it is a necessit}' to their 

 existence, and thus a relish for it is acquired. I can readily under- 

 stand, by personal experience, how a great many, perhaps a majority 

 of our own people, could speak well, were they north, of seal-meat, 

 of whale " rind," and of polar-bear steaks ; but I know that a mouth- 

 ful of fresh or " cured " walrus- flesh would make their " gorges rise." 

 The St. Paul natives refuse to touch it as an article of diet in any 

 shape or manner. I saw them removing the enormous testicles of 

 an old morse which was shot, for my purposes, on Walrus Island. 

 They told me they did so in obedience to the wishes of a widow 

 doctress at the village, Maria Seedova, who desired a pair for her 

 incantations. 



Curiosity, mingled with a desire to really understand, alone 

 tempted me to taste some walrus-meat which was placed before 

 me at Poonook, on St. Lawrence Island ; and candor compels me 

 to say that it was worse than the old beaver's tail which I had been 

 victimized with in British Columbia, worse than the tough brown- 

 bear steak of Bristol Bay — in fact, it is the worst of all fresh flesh 

 of which I know. It had a strong flavor of an indefinite acrid 

 nature, which turned my palate and my stomach instantaneously 

 and simultaneously, while the surprised natives stared in bewildered 

 silence at their astonished and disgusted guest. The}', however, 

 greedily put chunks, two inches square and even larger, of this 

 flesh and blubber into their mouths as rapidly as the storage room 

 there would permit ; and with what grimy gusto ! as the corners 

 of their large lips dripped with the fatness of their feeding. How 

 little they thought, then, that in a few short seasons they would die 

 of starvation, sitting in these same igloos — their caches empty and 

 nothing but endless fields of barren ice where a life-giving sea 

 should be. The winter of 1879-80 was one of exceptional rigor in 

 the Arctic, although in the United States it was unusually mild and 

 open. The ice closed in solid around St. Lawrence Island — so firm 

 and unshaken by the giant leverage of wind and tide that all walrus 

 were driven far to the southward and eastward beyond the reach 

 of those unhappy inhabitants of that island, who, thus unexpect- 

 edly deprived of their mainstay and support, seemed to have mis- 

 erably starved to death then, with an exception of one small village 

 on the north shore : thus, the residents of Poonook, Poogovellyak, 

 and Kagallegak settlements perished, to a soul, from hunger ; 

 nearly three hundred men, women, and children. I recall that visit 



