Food 107 



was surprised at the quantity of water the Eskimos drank when they boarded 

 his ship. "It was often with difficulty that our coppers could answer this 

 additional demand. I am certain that Toolooak one day drank nearly a gallon 

 in less than two hours." ' Avranna drank one evening three cups of soup, two of 

 tea, and nine of ice-cold water, all within the space of three hours; the cup was 

 about the size of a large breakfast cup. The reason for this abnormal thirst 

 appears to be that meat, unhke rice and other vegetable foods, absorbs very 

 little water, so the liquid sustenance that the natives require they must take 

 into their systems as pure fluid. During the winter they obtain all their 

 water from snow, being ignorant apparently of the fact that ordinary sea ice 

 loses its salinity with age, .and that an old cake of the previous winter will yield 

 perfectly fresh water. They never use the sea ice themselves, and I never heard 

 them remark on our use of it at Bernard harbour (perhaps they thought it was 

 fresh-water ice), but the Rev. Mr. Girling tells me that they were astonished at 

 the missionaries obtaining all their drinking water from it, and refused to believe 

 at first that it would not taste saline. This ignorance is the more remarkable as 

 they are well aware of the fact that fresh water can be obtained from the spongy 

 ice found in old seal-holes during the spring. They came on such a seal-hole 

 in May, 1915, when they were migrating to the land. It was only about a foot 

 in diameter, and concealed beneath a layer of snow; beside it, but still under 

 the surface of the snow was the small cavity or chamber in which the young seal 

 had been nourished. Fragments of melting ice were floating on the surface of 

 the water; the natives merely let them drain for two or three seconds, after 

 which they tasted perfectly fresh. 



In spring, when they are camped beside a lake, the Eskimos naturally fill 

 their water-buckets from one of the fishing-holes. The hunter resorts to various 

 devices. Often there are large boulders embedded in the ice on the margins of 

 ponds, protruding a little above the surface. The stone is warmed by the rays 

 of the sun and melts some of the ice around its edges, when the hunter has merely 

 to chip away a little of the surface ice in order to reach the water. If there is 

 too little for him to suck up with his lips he dips in a piece of snow, which will 

 absorb the water like a sponge. This absorptive power of snow is utilized by 

 the natives for removing fresh blood stains from skins and furs. 



However much the Eskimo may look forward in summer and autumn to 

 the winter life on the ice, with its comfortable snow-huts where the lamps, 

 filled to the brim with seal-oil, reflect their light round the pure white walls, 

 while beneath and behind the table the floor is littered with meat and blubber 

 —winter, when the dance-house is crowded with friends and visitors who gather 

 each evening to spend the hours in singing and dancing and in the performance 

 of religious ceremonies — yet always at the back of their minds there is the 

 lurking dread of hunger and of cold in those dark sunless days, when the huts 

 perhaps are empty of food, the lamps extinguished for want of oil, and the 

 people, driven indoors by the howling blizzards, huddle together on their sleeping 

 platforms and face starvation and death. The winter of 1914-15 was a com- 

 paratively mild one; food was plentiful, and the settlements of the Eskimos 

 were filled with rejoicing. But the following winter was more severe. From 

 Christmas until the middle of March one blizzard succeeded another. Often 

 the Eskimos, unable to find the seal-holes on account of the snow that had drifted 

 over them, sat and shivered in their huts, with their lamps extinguished, or 

 burning so low that the heat they gave out hardly lessened the prevailing cold. 

 The stores of food they had collected in the summer and autumn were exhausted, 

 and the seals they caught from time to time were all too few to satisfy the needs 

 of so many hungry mouths, even though they ate the skins and blubber with 

 the meat. Many of them ate the sealskin boots that they were keeping for the 

 following spring, others the sealskin cases of their bows. Night after night 



iParry, Vol. II, p. 182, et seq. 



