Cancer

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.

 Page 40: Hoffman quotes from Dr. Charles Powell's The Pathology of Cancer (Manchester, 1908): “There can be little doubt that the various influences grouped under the title of civilization play a part in producing a tendency to Cancer.” 

Aboard with Amundsen I heard from all and sundry, but especially from the second-in-command, the Danish naval lieutenant Godfred Hansen, about the relatively admirable results of Danish care for Eskimos of Greenland. I also heard much of the allegedly deplorable results of our hit-and-miss system, or lack of system at that time, in the civilized parts of Alaska and Canada; and about the healthy, happy, and admirable, not yet civilized Eskimos whom the Gjoa had known for two years in and around King William Island. Better than anything I could write up, from memory and records, is to quote on this point from Amundsen's two-volume The Northwest Passage (London and New York, 1908). The following excerpt is from his two-chapter section “The Inhabitants of the Magnetic North Pole”:

“During the three year voyage of the Gjoa we came in contact with ten different Eskimo tribes in all, and we had good opportunities of observing the influence of civilization upon them, as we were able to compare those Eskimos who had come in contact with civilization with those who had not. And I must state it as my firm conviction that the latter, the Eskimos living absolutely isolated from civilization of any kind, are undoubtedly the happiest, healthiest, most honourable and most contented among them ...”

Here and there The Northwest Passage gives instances of modern physical decay, and of the tragic effect of Europeanization on health and longevity. On page 142 of Vol. II Amundsen speaks of the people of the Mackenzie delta, a region in which I was to live Eskimo style off and on during the six years following the Gjoa's voyage. Says Amundsen: “... civilization has had its corrupting influence upon them, so that instead of several hundred families their number was reduced to a handful.”

In Amundsen's book, the last sentence of the final chapter on the people of King William Island is set off by him as a paragraph:

“My sincerest wish for our friends the Nechilli Eskimos is, that civilization may never reach them.”

Among Eskimos, Europeanization has been longest delayed in the Canadian eastern Arctic, that great region which begins on the mainland about 500 miles east of the Mackenzie at Dolphin and Union Strait and extends to Hudson Bay. There, in Coronation Gulf and Victoria Island, our second expedition, the one of 1908-12, found more than 500 of what are now called Copper Eskimos, most of whom had never seen a white man. A decade later, in the 1920's, the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen found on the eastern edge of the Copper Eskimo district about twenty who had missed seeing us, and who told him he was the first white man they had ever seen.

The Copper Eskimos, so named because many of their weapons and tools were of native copper, had never dealt with any traders before 1910. They did not even know tea, used no salt, and lived exclusively on flesh foods, eating roots and such only in time of famine. In 1910, they for the first time tasted sugar, given them by the first trader to reach Coronation Gulf, Joseph Bernard. They disliked it. Ten years later they were beginning to use material amounts of European foods, including both sugar and salt. Farther east, in the same section of arctic Canada, are people who first met whites long ago; but, even including them, the Eskimos of this section still are, with respect to food, the least Europeanized of all North Americans.

First I turned to the cited Hoffman compendiums, the 1915 Mortality from Cancer Throughout the World and the 1937 Cancer and Diet. Among applicable references I found one in the 1937 book that does face squarely the issue of whether the advancing of Europeanization has been considered to have promoted cancer in Africa. The source given on Hoffman's page 41 is Cancer: The Problem of Its Genesis and Treatment, by Dr. F. W. Ross (London, 1912):

“... the savage negro in the interior of Africa is enjoying ‘His comparative immunity from cancer because his method of preparing his food and drink is different in every essential from the methods used by the more civilized negro and white man ...’”