LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
215 
be fully satisfied, and this was on the occasion of an invitation 
given to the Esquimaux party, to favour the crew with a specimen 
of their singing and dancing, and which might be afterwards 
represented on the boards of an English theatre, as a contrast to 
the dulcet tones of a Malibran, or the sylphike aerial motions of 
a Taglioni. It was not until after the most pressing entreaties 
had been made, accompanied by the promise of a handsome 
present, that the choristers and figurantes of the Esquimaux 
nation could be induced to display their extraordinary talents, 
and the party were accordingly ushered into the cabin, to give 
a specimen of their agility, and perhaps “ to crack the ears of 
the groundlings,” with their wide-swelling notes of harmony and 
of concord. The women placed themselves in a circle, and one 
man in the midst of it, who commenced the song, that is if the 
most unearthly howl that almost ever burst from human lips, be 
worthy of being denominated as such. If however the sounds of 
the accomplished cantator struck upon the ears of the astonished 
crew, as likely to burst their tympanums, dreadful was the effect 
when the deep and sonorous voices of the women joined in the 
chorus, each striving to excel the other in the altitude of their 
tones, until it arrived at one of those horrible screams which are 
supposed to issue from the mouths of the damned, on their first 
introduction into the boiling lakes of brimstone. The entranced 
auditors had hitherto contrived to preserve that decorum, which 
was requisite before such extraordinary performers, but when the 
last great and sublime chorus burst upon them, (to which the 
Hallelujah Chorus at the festival in Westminster Abbey, was 
like the sound of a popgun to the explosion of a two and thirty 
pounder,) then all further ceremony was at an end, the hands 
w ere applied almost instinctively to the ears, and the faces of the 
auditors became distorted, as if a dozen carpenters had been 
sharpening their saws “in horrid dissonance,” 
Coming on the ear, like sounds infernal, 
Startling in their graves the dead. 
Convinced that neither Bunn nor Laporte, nor any other pur¬ 
veyor of cantators or cantat”’ ces, would visit the Esquimaux to 
