RAW MEAT. 
15 
our habituation to raw meats, nor does it dwell upon 
their strange adaptation to scorbutic disease. Our 
journeys have taught us the wisdom of the Esquimaux 
appetite, and there are few among us who do not relish 
a slice of raw blubber or a chunk of frozen walrus-beef. 
The liver of a walrus (awuktanuk) eaten with little 
slices of his fat,—of a verity it is a delicious morsel. 
Fire would ruin the curt, pithy expression of vitality 
which belongs to its uncooked juices. Charles Lamb’s 
roast-pig was nothing to awuktanuk. I wonder that 
raw beef is not eaten at home. Deprived of extraneous 
fibre, it is neither indigestible nor difficult to masticate. 
With acids and condiments, it makes a salad which an 
educated palate cannot help relishing; and as a power¬ 
ful and condensed heat-making and anti-scorbutic food 
it has no rival. 
“I make this last broad assertion after carefully 
testing its truth. The natives of South Greenland 
prepare themselves for a long journey in the cold by a 
course of frozen seal. At Upernavik they do the same 
with the narwhal, which is thought more heahmaking 
than the seal; while the bear, to use their own expres¬ 
sion, is ‘ stronger travel than all.’ 
“In Smith’s Sound, where the use of raw meat seems 
almost inevitable from the modes of living of the 
people, walrus holds the first rank. Certainly this 
pachyderm, whose finely-condensed tissue and deli¬ 
cately-permeating fat—oh! call it not blubber—assimi¬ 
late it to the ox, is beyond all others, and is the very 
best fuel a man can swallow. It became our constant 
