All History

Among articles of diet may also be mentioned clay, which is eaten without preparation, both in times of scarcity and as dessert after an ordinary meal. Honey was not the only sweet substance known to the Australians. In various parts a sweet secretion, probably of a species of Psylla, was collected from the trees, and sometimes eaten, sometimes infused in water and fermented. It was gathered in the summer and eaten with various kinds of animal food. A fermented drink was also prepared from the fruit of the pandanus. In a dry and thirsty land like Australia the European is naturally at a loss for water ; but the native has many ingenious methods of obtaining it, and can live comfortably where a white man would perish miserably. In many places are found what are called native wells — narrow deep holes, the position of which is known to the natives, for otherwise they would hardly be able to find them. But when these holes and ordinary water-holes fail them, they are far from being at the end of their resources. In the mallee scrub they dig down and get pieces of root some eighteen inches long ; there is plenty of water in this, which, when the root is turned on its end, drains out into a vessel placed beneath. Where the pandanus- tree grows the moisture below the surface is tested by pushing a spear three or four feet into the ground ; if the point is moist, a bunch of dry grass is rammed down ; this acts as a strainer, and the water is sucked up with a reed. Sometimes the base of the Melaleuca- tree bulges out ; when this is cut open it is found to contain a pint or two of water. Where real water is not obtainable the native refreshes himself with a sweet substance from a Sterculia. They also cut holes in the trunk ; the water lodges in these holes and rots the inside of the tree. When water is wanted they cut a foot or two below the original incision and obtain an abundant supply from their reservoir.

On my first visit to Hay River, in 1906, the mission was in charge of Rev. Mr. Marsh, an excellent man in many ways, and remarkable as one of the first missionaries in the North to realize the deadliness to the Indian of the white man's house. Few things are more common in missionary conferences than to have those who have just returned from work in distant fields show with pride the photo graphs of the native communities at the time of the coming of the missionaries, and again a few years later. Typically the first picture shows a group of tents or wigwams, while twenty years later the missionary is able to point with pride to how, year by year, the number of cabins increased until now the last tipi has gone and a village of huts has replaced them. They do these things and we listen and applaud, in spite of the fact that we ourselves have come to realize that the way to deal with tuberculosis, which is deadly among us but far more deadly among the primitive peoples, is to drive the affected out of the house and into tents in the open air ; and while charitable organizations in New York are gathering money to send the invalids of the city into the open air, there are also in New York missionary organizations gathering money to be used in herding the open air people into houses. While the missionary shows on the one hand a series of pictures indicating the growth of his village of civilized looking dwellings, it would be interesting to ask him if he happens to have also a series of photographs illustrating the growth of the graveyard during the same period. No dwelling could be more sanitary and more likely to forestall tuberculosis than the tipi of the Indians of the Mackenzie Valley. It is not only always filled with fresh air, but it never becomes filthy, because it is moved from place to place before it has time to become so ; but when a house is built it cannot be moved . The housekeeping methods which are satisfactory in a lodge that is destined to stand in one place only two or three weeks at a time, are entirely unsuited for the log cabin , which soon becomes filthy and remains so. Eventually the germs of tuberculosis get into the house and obtain lodging in it. The members of the same family catch the disease, one from the other, and when the family has been nearly or quite exterminated by the scourge, another family moves in, for the building of a house is hard work and it is a convenient thing to find one ready for your occupancy ; and so it is not only the family that built the house that suffers but there is also through the house a procession of other families moving from the wigwam to the graveyard. 

Mr. Marsh saw these conditions and attempted to remedy them , but the Indians had become used to the warmth of the house and refused to go back to their old tenting habits. One family in particular had a daughter grown to womanhood who showed in the spring the symptoms of tuberculosis. In the fall when they wanted to move back from their summer camp into their filthy cabin, Mr. Marsh gave the father a lecture on the unsanitariness of the house and on the necessity of their living in a tent that winter if they wanted to save their daughter's life. But the arguments did not appeal to the Indian. He could not see the germs that the missionary talked about, and did not believe that the cabin had anything to do with it . He announced that he knew better than to freeze in a tent if he could be comfortable in a house and therefore he would stay in the house. But it happened that Mr. Marsh had been a heavyweight prize fighter before he became a missionary, and so he walked into the Indian's house one day and threw him and his family bodily outdoors and their gear after them, nailed up their doors and windows, and told them that he did not want to see them around the village until the next spring. There was some loud talk among the Indians and several threats of shooting and other vio lence, but eventually the family moved out into the woods and stayed away all winter as directed. In the spring they came back with their daughter apparently cured, and when I saw her she looked as well as any woman there. Mr. Vale and Mr. Johnson have since taken up Mr. Marsh's work along lines he had set for them and apparently with good results. In some other places, however, tuber culosis has made a nearly clean sweep of the population. This is noticeably true at Fort Wrigley, where we were told that only nineteen hunters are left in all the territory belonging to that post.

There are many people in the Mackenzie district who have given me much valuable information about their country, the greater part of which , however, has to be omitted here, but few men perhaps know the country better than Father Giroux, formerly stationed at Arctic Red River but now in charge of Providence. He says it is true in the Mackenzie district, as it is among the Arctic Eskimo, that measles is the deadliest of all diseases. There have been several epidemics, so that it might be supposed that the most susceptible had been weeded out, and yet the last epidemic (1903) killed about one fifth of the entire population of the Mackenzie Valley . He had noticed also a distinct and universal difference in health between those who wear white men's clothing and who live in white men's houses, as opposed to those who keep the ancient customs in the matter of dress and dwellings. These same elements I have since found equally harmful among the Eskimo, although among them must be added the surely no less dangerous element, the white men's diet, which is no more suited to the people than white men's clothing or houses. 

Grains and vegetables of most kinds, and even strawberries, are successfully cultivated at Providence. North of that, the possible agricultural products get fewer and fewer, until finally the northern limit of successful potato growing is reached near Fort Good Hope, on the Arctic Circle. Potatoes are grown farther north, but they do not mature and are not of good quality. 

In certain things the Mackenzie district was more advanced the better part of a century ago than it is now; the explorers of Franklin's parties, for instance, found milk cows at every Hudson's Bay post and were able to get milk and cream as far north as the Arctic Circle and even beyond. At that time, too, every post had large stores of dried meat and pemmican, so that if you had the good-will of the Company you could always stock up with provisions anywhere. Now this is all changed. Game has become so scarce that it would be difficult for the Company, even if they tried, to keep large stores of meat on hand. The importation of foodstuffs from the outside, on the other hand, has not grown easy as yet, and it is therefore much more difficult to buy provisions now than it was in Franklin's time. The trading posts are located now exactly where Franklin found them, so that taking this into consideration, and the decrease of game all over the northern country, it is clear that exploration on such a plan as ours — that of living on the country —is more difficult now than it was a hundred years ago. Another element that makes the situation more risky is that while then you could count on finding Indians anywhere who could supply you with provisions, or at least give you information as to where game might be found, now there are so few of the Indians left alive , —and all of those left are so concentrated around the trading posts , —that you may go hundreds of miles without seeing a camp or a trail, where seventy-five or a hundred years ago you would have found the trails crossing each other and might have seen the camp smokes rising here and there. 

The food supplies of the different posts vary according to location . In general the trading stations are divided into "fish posts" and “meat posts.” Fort Smith is a typical meat post, for caribou are found in the neighborhood and moose also; and the Indians not only get meat enough for themselves and for the white men, but the fur traders even find the abundance of the meat supply a handicap in their business, - for the Indian who has plenty to eat does not trap so energetically as do others who must pay in fur for some of their food. Resolution, Hay River, and Providence, on the other hand, are fish posts, while at any of the northern trading stations potatoes nowadays play a considerable part in the food supply, even as far up as Good Hope. In certain places and in certain years rabbits are an important article of diet, but even when there is an abundance of this animal, the Indians consider themselves starving if they get nothing else, and fairly enough, as my own party can testify, for any one who is compelled in winter to live for a period of several weeks on lean-meat will actually starve, in this sense: that there are lacking from his diet certain necessary elements, notably fat, and it makes no difference how much he eats, he will be hungry at the end of each meal, and eventually he will lose strength or become actually ill. The Eskimo who have provided themselves in summer with bags of seal oil can carry them into a rabbit country and can live on rabbits satisfactorily for months. The Indian, unfortunately for him, has no animal in his country so richly supplied with fat as is the seal, and nowadays he will make an effort to buy a small quantity of bacon to eat with his rabbits, unless he has a little caribou or moose fat stored up from the previous autumn.

On my first trip down the Mackenzie River all of the affairs of the Company had been under the direction of Mr. Thomas Anderson, an energetic and capable officer of the old school. He was a man generous to a fault with his own property, as I have good reason to know through being with him in Winnipeg and Edmonton, but as soon as he got into the North where everything he handled belonged to the Company rather than to himself, he became parsimonious even to niggardliness ; and much of his talk concerned the degenerate later days when people insisted on living on such imported things as beans, canned corn, and tomatoes, whereas in his day they lived entirely on fish and caribou meat. Now everything was changed. Not only had the modern Mackenzie River replaced the old - fashioned Wrigley, but Thomas Anderson had died, and the affairs of the Company were under the no less energetic but completely modern direction of Mr. Brabant. I remember how, in 1906, Mr. Anderson boiled with indignation at having to carry one of the servants of the Hislop & Nagle Trading Company as a passenger for sixty miles from Red River to Macpherson, and he spoke with suppressed fury of the degenerate officials at Winnipeg who compelled him to countenance such things; and now we had in his stead Mr. Brabant, who would have been the better pleased the more of his rivals' men he could have carried, providing, of course, they paid him fares for transportation which yielded a profit to the Company. The change had been gradually taking place, but with the coming of Mr. Brabant the transformation was complete, from the old policy of exclusion of competitors to the modern one of unrestricted competition.

In their absence, the Flaxman Island base of the Anglo-American Polar Expedition was commanded by Dr. George Plummer Howe, the expedition's surgeon. It turned out that he and I had been contemporaries at Harvard, though we had never met — not strange, for the medical school is in Boston, and I had been in the divinity school and then in the graduate school, both of which are in Cambridge. He was A.B. 1900 and M.D. 1904.

Though a medical man by training, Dr. Howe proved to be an anthropologist at heart. What he told me included his having heard in the summer of 1906, almost as soon as the Duchess reached Alaska waters, that “Eskimos never have cancer,” and that Captain Leavitt was credited with originating the local search on which this view rested. One of the first to tell Howe this had been the surgeon on the United States revenue cutter Thetis, whose name I neglected to record; but more extensive detail had been given Howe by the head of the Presbyterian medical mission at Point Barrow, Dr. Horatio Richmond Marsh, a native of Illinois.

In talking with Dr. Howe, both the surgeon of the Thetis and the medical missionary at Barrow had agreed on several points, among these that in northern Alaska Leavitt had originated the local quest; that he had been indefatigable in urging government doctors, medical missionaries, expedition surgeons, everybody, to look for malignant disease; that many of these searchers, including Howe's informants, had expected to find cancer; but that all of those who remained in the Alaskan Arctic had been convinced eventually, that cancer was not to be found among Eskimos who still lived native style.

“It has been said that cancer does not exist among the Eskimos. So far as I could find out, this is true ...”

It was probably at the Arctic Red River (where on July 20, 1906, I first saw an Eskimo) that I first heard of Captain Leavitt, who, I found later, was known on the lower Mackenzie, as well as on the shores of the western Canadian Arctic, as “the man who started the search for cancer.” Or perhaps I first heard of Leavitt the next day, July 21, at Fort McPherson, where I met John Firth, Hudson's Bay Company factor, destined to be my friend until his death two decades later. In later years we talked a great deal of Leavitt, whom Firth admired, and whose search for cancer in northeastern Siberia, the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and northwestern Canada, led a half century later to the writing of this book.

At the present moment we are in the midst of one of those periodical outbursts of discussion concerning food. Plentiful evidence is afforded by the various catering companies that ideas and theories on the subject are taking the definite and practical form of a return to dishes of greater simplicity than were fashionable before the movement began. So many dogmatic opinions are expressed and propagated, that those who, without being fanatics, desire to order their lives intelligently in regard to the food they eat, will be glad to turn to a scientific authority like M. A. Gautier, whose Diet and Dietetics (Constable) has constantly been translated into English by Dr. A. J. Rice-Oxley. The work is a very learned one, and we may as well say here that it is not our intention to attempt any criticism of the innumerable analyses contained in it. The broad result only concerns the reader who wishes to have sound guidance in regard to diet, without caring to devote a large proportion of his time to what, after all, is a mere detail of existence. There are certain main propositions to which he would like an answer. 

On one side he is admonished by certain zealous reformers to give up meat and confine himself to a vegetable diet. M. Gautier, who carries out the Apostle’s injunction to be temperate in all things, does not endorse the teaching of the vegetarian. He quite recognises that a man may be strong without eating meat. The street porters of Salonica and Constantinople live chiefly on rice and figs, and drink water or lemonade, yet it was their strength which gave rise to the saying, ‘as strong as a Turk.” Many men and women have become better in health after adopting a vegetarian diet, and it serves as a check to arthritic, gouty, or rheumatic diathesis. Morally speaking, it tends to produce softness and gentleness of manners. Need we recall the fact that “the mild Hindoo” is a vegetarian? The main disadvantage is that “in order to obtain a vegetable alimentation sufficiently nutritive and varied, the vegetarian is obliged to have recourse sooner or later to exaggerated weights of food.” This our author properly describes ‘‘as a method of alimentation all the more fatiguing for the stomach and alimentary canal because it encumbers them with a quantity of useless matters. The herbiverous animal is constructed so as to digest vegetables, but man digests them very incompletely and more laboriously.” To some extent the difficulty has been got over by using a mixed vegetarian diet, which is still further varied by milk, eggs, fatty bodies, cheese, sugar, and wine. In this shape the diet is well fitted to a passive and peace-loving race, but M. Gautier does not recommend it to those who are hard-working and energetic. 

Luckily, no band of prophets has yet risen to urge us to confine our eating exclusively to meat. And yet an exclusive meat diet has in certain circumstances been tried and not found wanting. Says our author: 

Some men obliged to live a very fatiguing life, the trappers and hunters of the pampas of America and Siberian steppes, the inhabitants of very cold climates, the fishermen living on the banks of the frozen sea, etc , can eat almost exclusively, without suffering from it, enormous quantities of meat or fish, but on two conditions—that the meat be accompanied by its fat, and that the individual subjected to this diet lead a very active life in the open air. 

Darwin relates that the Gauchos of the American pampas live for months on the fat meat of the oxen they watch over. The Esquimaux can get along very well by eating from 5lb. to 6lb. per day of reindeer or seal’s flesh, so long as it is not too lean, but contains a due proportion of fat. These facts might furnish some argument for an exclusive meat diet, but our author is antagonistic to exaggeration in this respect as in the other. He observes quite properly that ‘the well-to-do classes are only too carnivorous,” and his own recommendation is that the best food for the general is a judicious mixture of meat and vegetables. 

From a bill of fare that he draws up for the obese, wherein he closely follows Mr. A. Robin, it will be seen that he takes a fairly liberal view of a man’s requirements. He would begin in the morning by giving him who has to say, like Sir John, “Old do I wax and fat,” at eight o’clock an egg, some lean meat, and a very small quantity of bread, following this up at ten o’clock with a couple of eggs, a still smaller quantity of bread, and a glass of wine well diluted with water. At twelve o’clock he would give him some lean meat and bread and vegetables and another glass of wine diluted with water. At four o’clock he recommends tea without sugar and nothing to eat with it. At seven o'clock the patient is to dine on a fair quantity of lean meat, taken with bread and butter and vegetables. He does not seem to allow any wine with this last meal, but he remarks that such a regimen only corresponds to 1,290 calorties per day, and as the average adult loses from 2,100 to 2,200 calories per day he will have to make up about 900 calorties from the combustion of stored-up fats.

During my stay at Fort Macpherson I was the guest of Major Jarvis. The rest of the policemen occupied the barracks on top of the high bluffs that here flank the eastern side of the Peel, but the Major preferred a tent by himself down by the riverside. Soon after our arrival, the Eskimo boats began to come from the North and the Major's tent became the center of a village of their tents. Most of the Eskimo were old friends among whom I had lived on my previous expedition. There was much talking and laughter, and apparently they were very glad to see me, but no more glad, I am sure, than I was to see them, for I had reason to consider some of them among my best friends in the world. Under their communistic system of living the Eskimo have developed the social virtues to a considerably higher degree than we have; they are therefore people easy to live with, and one readily makes friends among them, but, of course, they differ individually as we do. Of all those who came here this summer the finest, in my estimation, was Ovayuak, a man who had been my host for several months during 1906–1907. The Hudson's Bay Company had recognized in him the same qualities which were apparent to me, and had accordingly made him a “Chief,” which merely means that he is the Company's accredited representa tive among his countrymen , and acts, in a sense, as the Company's agent. In talking with Ovayuak I found that many of my acquaintances of a few years before were dead, some of them of consumption, some of unknown diseases, and a group of eight had been poisoned by eating the meat of a freshly killed white whale. It happens every now and then that a whole party of natives is killed by eating white whale meat. This sort of thing is referred to by the whalers ordinarily as ptomaine poisoning; but it can scarcely be that, as I have seen tons of semi- decayed whale meat eaten and have never known a single case of sickness or death connected therewith, while the poisonings always occur at feasts which are held immediately after the killing of a whale, or else from whale meat that has been cut up promptly after the killing and stored so as to largely or entirely prevent its decay. On the lower posts of the Mackenzie River and here at Mac pherson we had gradually been picking up such dogs as were for sale, and now had eleven all together. So as to put in operation as early as possible our principle of living on the country, we began here to set our fish nets to get food for ourselves and the dogs, but there were so many other nets in the water that we got very little, and I had to buy a few hundred pounds of dried fish to eke out.

We reached the open ocean July 23d, but were delayed here somewhat by strong winds, for, like the delta flats of any other river, the Mackenzie mouth is an exceedingly dangerous place in a high wind, when mountainous breakers roll in from the open sea. On the 24th we reached the first Eskimo camp on the coast, at a place called Niakonak, just after the sudden death of a woman and young girl from white whale poisoning. This is another of the cases I have since heard referred to by mounted policemen and whalers as ptomaine poisoning. But the Eskimo explain it by saying that the women died because they made some caribou skin into garments the day after they ate white whale. In other words, they had broken a taboo. Personally, I agree neither with the policemen nor the Eskimo. It seems to me the poisoning could scarcely have been ptomaine, because the meal after which the women sickened took place within three or four hours after the animal was killed; in fact, the pieces of meat were put right into the pot the moment they were cut from the animal.

"Dr. Kellogg appointed Lenna as the Chief Dietitian of the Battle Creek Sanitarium and the Director and Dean of the Battle Creek Sanitarium School of Home Economics. The School of Home Economics began in 1906, offering a one- year course for matrons and housekeepers. In 1907, a two- year course to instruct teachers and lecturers was offered. All courses included training in the Sanitarium’s philosophy of health through “biologic living.” The growing demand for trained dietitians for hospitals led to the school’s development of a two-year comprehensive course in dietetics to be included in its curriculum. Vegetarian nutrition and cooking was the foundation of the dietetics courses taught at the school under Lenna’s supervision. More than 500 dietitians graduated from Battle Creek under her tenure. Lenna became a leading proponent for health care through diet and a pioneer in the field of vegetarian nutrition and dietetics."

During the northward journey MYLIUS-ERICHSEN had constantly been writing letters for TROLLE, containing an account of the journey and of the discoveries made. Altogether there are 6 of these letters, The last was brought home by KocH and has been written at Cape Rigsdagen on the day when the 1st party drove westward and the 2nd eastward on the return journey. As this is the last communication from MYLIUS-ERICHSEN, the portions refering to the journey may be quoted here.

North Cape of NE. Greenland. ca. 82 03 Na lat. 28th May 1907.

2 months after the departure from the ship.

Dear TROLLE.

With Koch and his comrades, whom we left on May 1st and met last night at midnight quite by chance, I send you these lines in haste in order personally to tell you the good news, of which Koch's party will be able to give a more detailed report, that everything has gone well with us all. In spite of illness, owing to an exclusive meat diet for a long time, Koch's party succeeded in reaching Cape Bridgman, and, what I consider a great triumph, in finding and bringing away Peary's record.

My party acting in the belief that we found ourselves in Peary Channel has discovered and penetrated into the head of one of East Greenland's largest fjords, which runs in south of the land where we are at present and reaches the inland ice, for which the glacier behind Academy Land forms the northern outlet. In here we shot 22 hares, 4 ptarmigan and 21 musk-oxen, found drift timber in the inner fjord (at ca. 81° N. lat. and ca. 29° W. long.) and Eskimo ruins! Shot at a wolf at too long range, saw 2 snow-owls etc and collected a considerable number or samples the sedimentary-like, imposing rocks along the coast.

Unfortunately we had to drive about 80 miles to get out of the fjord again and north round this land, on the northern point of which we drove right against our 3 returning comrades. They were suffering from constipation, Tobias also from snow-blindness, but in good spirits and full of energy: and now today they start off for the ship which they will probably reach in about 3 or 4 weeks. A week later or at the utmost a fortnight you may expect to see us. We now seek to end the journey of our party by a 40 miles tour towards Cape Glacier We will then have established a connection with Peary's point and will return with satisfactory results. When we separated from Koch's party on the Ist of May, we had only one sledge-case left and have now for about 3 weeks been living exclusively on hare and musk-ox meat, of which we boil a pot-full twice during the 24 hours, the one time mixed with a packet of knorrsk' which makes the soup saltish and a little more substantial. We have all 3 heen in good health and have not suflered from constipation, rather the reverse, though not troubled thereby in any way.

Unfortunately, your dog-team has by mishap been considerably reduced. But we shall make up for it later! HAGEN has lost 2 dogs and Jorgen and I have each shot one tor dog-food. Our travelling is still fairly good. With another fortnight at our disposal (now it is too late in the year) and 10 quarts of petroleum besides the 5 still left, we should willingly have made more journeys in these attractive regions. Hard days we have had, that cannot be denied, days full of hope and bitter with deceptions, and the month we have still left will not be the easiest - but we are all grateful for our work, the life and comradeship during the 3 months we have spent up here. We should like to travel with Koch's party towards the south, but duty calls us 2 or 3 days to the west, so we must separate again after 24 hours never to be forgotten.

Good-bye to you, dear TROLLE, and to every one onboard, with greetings and all good wishes, once more good-bye with the last sledge post we can send and then in a month we shall certainly meet,

Yours sincerely

L. MYLIUS-ERICHSEN.

On the 28th of May at 7 p. m. MYLIUs-ERICHSEN, HAGEN and BRONLUND drove west into Independence Sound with 3 sledges and 23 dogs and at the same time KocH. BERTELSEN and ToBIAS left the tent place and drove east