246 
LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
this kind, in which an old man and his wife were left behind, 
without any lamp or a single ounce of meat belonging to them, 
while three small skins on which they were lying, were all the 
covering which they possessed to protect them from the incle¬ 
mency of the weather. It would be difficult to conceive a more 
forcible picture of human misery and desolation, and the survivor 
appearing as he must to himself, to be the last remnant of the 
human race, must have presented a spectacle of horrid suffering 
at which humanity shudders. 
In this peculiar trait of the character of the Esquimaux, he 
certainly stands far beneath the American Indian, although on 
the other hand he rises superior to the African ; in an intellectual 
sense however, he may be said to stand on the lowest scale of 
human nature, exhibiting a strange mixture of intellect and dul- 
ness, of cunning and simplicity, of ingenuity and stupidity. 
Their mind appears in many respects to be a centre, round which 
not a single idea radiates, which can establish him as appertain¬ 
ing to the great family of mankind as a thinking being, or 
which can prove his superiority over the animals with which he 
is in daily association. Immersed in the darkest ignorance, he 
possesses not the most remote idea of a superior being: subject 
to no law divine or human, he acts from the immediate impulse 
ofhis feelings or his passions, without regarding himself as ame¬ 
nable to any one for the consequences of his actions. The law of 
property appears to be the only one which he respects, and the 
attainment of that property has only one end, which is, the gratifi¬ 
cation of his sensual appetites. Thus the chief riches of an Esqui¬ 
maux consist in the number ofhis dogs, as those of the Laplander in 
the number of his rein deer; the common affairs of an Esqui¬ 
maux family could not be carried on without their dogs, for 
which reason, when young, they are entrusted to the manage¬ 
ment of the women who bring them up with all imaginable care, 
but when trained, they are treated with great harshness and 
cruelty by the men, though they could scarcely exist at all with¬ 
out them. Six of those useful creatures will draw half a ton, at 
the rate of seven or eight miles an hour, and proceed with ease 
fifty or sixty miles a day; yet they appear to get very little food. 
