340 
LAST VOYAGE Ox? CAPT 4 ROSS 
The love of the fatherland with its rude inclement skies, its 
perpetual snows, its darkness and its desolation, was paramount 
in their breasts, and although they were told that they were to 
be carried to a land, where suns perpetual shone, and all the 
luxuries of life awaited them, yet they could not be brought 
to leave the spot, where in their infancy they had first learned 
to twang the bow, and quaffed as a delicious beverage the life¬ 
blood of the seal. 
It was however on the I6th March, that the plans which had 
been for some time working in the brain of Capt. Ross, relative, 
to the adoption of an Esquimaux youth, as his future protegee' 
were likely to be carried into execution, for a youth presented 
himself before him, belonging to the tribe, who had fixed their 
station towards the north east, and who soon gave Capt. Ross 
to understand that he appeared as a candidate to be received as 
one of the inmates of the Victory, and to supply the place va¬ 
cant by the death of Sacheuse. Lord Chesterfield has said, (and 
he has said many wise and many foolish things,) that first im¬ 
pressions are lasting—Capt. Ross took an accurate survey of the 
youth, measuring him with his eyes from head to foot—now in 
the front and then in the rear, turning him round and round 
for that particular purpose, but he totally omitted one criterion, 
which were the bumps on his head, and which, if he had pro¬ 
perly examined, it is most probable that he would have arrived 
at a decision directly opposite from that which he did come to. 
In the physiognomy of the youth, there was something by no 
means disagreeable, on the contrary for an Esquimaux, it was 
rather prepossessing: the examinator could not indeed discover 
any traces of the existence of that fire of genius, which sparkles in 
the eyes of some of England’s sons, but he argued with himself 
that it might probably be there, although he could not imme¬ 
diately discover it; at all events, that it was very possible, 
that an Esquimaux had a different way of shewing his genius, 
than a native of the modern Athens or of London. Poowutyook, 
(the name of the youth,) being the only candidate to represent 
the Esquimaux nation in the parliament of the Victory, the 
ceremony of demanding a poll was dispensed with, although he 
