Pre-civilization races

August 21.- We now pushed for the Fiord or opening to the south, which I expected would lead us again to the coast. After pulling a distance of sixteen miles, we encamped a tour sixth station. The inlet was from a quarter of a mile to a mile and a half in breadth, but of a sufficient depth of water for a vessel drawing 14 feet; the sides were more level than the shores we had hitherto passed the mountains not rising so abruptly from the sea, and the face of the country presenting a less barren and heath-like appearance. We shot some swans, which we found excellent eating. 

August 22.- Proceeded up the inlet, the head of which we soon reached : it terminated in low marshy land, about eighteen miles from its entrarice from the bay; named it Loch Fine. Up to this period, with the exception of the gale on the night of the 17th, we had had a constant calm, accompanied with the most beautiful and serene weather, so that the whole distance we had hitherto come, we had always occasion to make use of our oars. After refreshing ourselves at our seventh station, we started on our return, with a fine breeze from the southward, and made such progress, that we were enabled to reach our Esquimaux friends the same evening, although it had again fallen calm, and we were obliged to ply our oars for the last seven miles. 

August 23. and 24. 

These two days were spent with the natives, whom we found to consist of twelve in number, including women and children. We were well received by them, but our attempts at making ourselves understood were very unsuccessful. They are evidently the same race as the Esquimaux in the other parts of Greenland and the northern parts of America. Our intercourse was of too short duration to acquire any of their language ; but the descriptions given by Captains Parry and Lyons of the natives at Igluleik, in many particulars resembled those of our friends. I observed particularly the same superstitious ceremony of sprinkling water over a seal or walrus before they commence skinning it. 

Their amazement at seeing one of the seamen shoot a seal was quite unbounded. They heard for the first time the report of a musket, and turning round in the direction in which the animal was killed, and floating on the water, one of them was desired to go in his canoe and fetch it. Before landing it he turned it round and round, till he observed where the ball had penetrated, and, putting his finger into the hole, set up a most extraordinary shout of astonishment, dancing and capering in the most absurd manner. He was afterwards desired to skin it, which he did expeditiously and well. Wishing to give them farther proofs of our skill in shooting, several muskets were fired at a mark, but without permitting them to see us load. A pistol was afterwards put into their hands,and one of them fired into the water; the recoil startled him so much, that he immediately slunk away into his tent. 

The following morning we found they had all left us, leaving their tents and every thing behind, which I have no doubt was occasioned by their alarm at the firing.

In 1967, I lived some months at Coral Harbour on Southampton Island in northern Hudson Bay and often traveled with Tommy Nakoolak, then, at sixty-two, patriarch of the island's sizable Nakoolak clan. Of Knud Rasmussen, the great Danish ethnologist, it was said that he was the only man known who collected old women. They, of course, were the repositories of the ancient tales he loved and recorded. Similarly, whenever possible, I lived and traveled with older Inuit who told and taught me many things the lore, the legends, the skills of their people. 

Tommy Nakoolak was small and wiry, kind and considerate, and he owned a Peterhead boat, the Tereglu (the word for a baby bearded seal), which he handled as if it were a racing yawl. One day along Coats Island, south of Southampton Island, he spotted a herd of walruses on a rocky promontory. "You want pictures?" he asked, and when I said yes, he swung the boat around and headed full speed for the rocks. He sheered past them so closely, I tensed instinctively for the coming crash, but Tommy only smiled. Like many old-time Inuit, he had an astounding geographical memory and knew every rock and ridge along hundreds of miles of coast. 

One day while his sons were hunting caribou on Coats Island, Tommy said: "Come, I'll show you something." He took the Tereglu to a secluded bay near Cape Pembroke. Ashore were ancient stone houses, man-high cairns, box-like graves built of large flat stones, and everywhere masses of bleached bones of caribou, walrus, bowhead whale, and seal. "This is where the Sadlermiut lived," said Tommy. A mysterious, long-isolated Stone Age people, the Sadlermiut were briefly known to the outside world and then all were killed by a whaler-brought disease in the winter of 1902. They may even have been Tunit, the powerful Dorset-culture people. Extinct everywhere else for 800 years, they had found a final refuge on these isolated islands. (The people who now live on Southampton Island are descendants of mainland Inuit brought by whalers and traders to the island to replace the extinct Sadlermiut.) 

The Sadlermiut were "discovered" in the summer of 1824 by the explorer Captain G.F. Lyon of the Royal Navy. He anchored his ship, HMS Griper, off Cape Pembroke. From the camp which Tommy Nakoolak was showing me, a man approached the Griper, riding on a most peculiar craft. It consisted of "three inflated seal- skins, connected most ingeniously by blown intestines, so that his vessel was extremely buoyant." The man's legs dangled in the water while he propelled this strange float toward the ship with a narrow- bladed paddle made of whale bone. The poor man had never seen other humans before and he was afraid: "his teeth chattered and himself and seal-skins trembled in unison. 

Lyon went ashore. The people were shy but friendly, of "mild manners, quiet speech, and as grateful for kindness, as they were anxious to return it." The men wore pants of polar-bear fur; their mittens were the skins of murres, feathers inside. The women were slightly tattooed, and "their hair was twisted into a short club, which hung over each temple." The men's topknots were even more impressive: "Each man had an immense mass of hair as large as the head of a child, rolled into the form of a ball, and projecting from the rise of the forehead." 

Once the Sadlermiut had been numerous. At Native Point on Southampton Island, the archaeologist Henry B. Collins of the Smithsonian Institution found, in 1954, "the largest aggregation of old Eskimo house ruins in the Canadian Arctic." But whalers began to stop at the islands and contact with another world was fatal to the long-isolated people. When the whaling captain George Comer visited Southampton Island in 1896, only seventy Sadlermiut were left. Comer admired the strength and courage of these "fearless people" who had only stone-tipped harpoons and spears: "For an Eskimo in his frail kayak to attempt to capture a [50-ton/ 45-tonne] whale with the primitive implements which they manufactured meant great courage. 

In the fall of 1902, the whaler Active stopped at Southampton Island. One sailor was sick; he may have had typhus or typhoid. Sadlermiut visited the ship and took the disease back to their village. That winter the last Sadlermiut died in lonely agony upon their island. Collins studied their house ruins and graves in 1954 and 1955 and "found evidence that the Sadlermiut descended from the Dorsets - that they were in fact the last survivors of the Dorset culture."

Page 24

The strangers were so well pleased in our society, that they showed no wish to leave us, and, when the market had quite ceased , they began dancing and playing with our people on the ice alongside : this exercise again set many of their noses bleeding (which at their first arrival we had observed to be the case) , and discovered to us a most nasty custom , which accounted for their gory faces ; and which was, that as fast as the blood ran down, they scraped it with the fingers into their mouths, appearing to consider it as a refreshment or dainty, if we might judge by the zest with which they smacked their lips at each supply. Some of the most quiet came on board the ship, and behaved very well ; while others walked quietly alongside, gazing occasionally at the men, but more frequently at some quarters of Old English beef, which were hanging over the stern, and had a most attractive appearance. Some slices were cut off and thrown down to them , and these they instantly devoured with great satisfaction ; but they refused to eat the biscuit which was offered at the same time. One  woman in particular attracted general notice by her unwearied application for presents, and by feigning to be hurt, and crying to excite compassion ; in which she no sooner succeeded, than a loud and triumphant laugh proclaimed the cheat. Of all horrible yells, this laugh was the most fiend - like I ever heard ; and her countenance corresponded with her voice. She had lost all her front teeth, with the exception of the eye-teeth; her mouth was plentifully ornamented by blue tattoo- lines ; and a vast profusion of black, straight, and matted hair, hung all round her head and face. At her back was an imp not more prepossessing in features than herself, and screaming itself black in the face . Although the countenances of the other young children were generally rather pretty than otherwise, yet, from their dress and man ner of walking, they might, without any great stretch of the imagination, have been taken for the cubs of wild animals ; particularly some who were laid for safety in the bottom of the women's boats, amongst blubber, the entrails of seals, &c. of which they were continually sucking whatever was nearest to them.

The mountain man was a rugged individualist of whom Washington Irving wrote, "You cannot pay a free trapper a greater compliment than to persuade him that you have mistaken him for an Indian." In fact, he virtually had to become an Indian in order to survive. "A turned leaf," wrote George Frederick Ruxton in Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, blade of grass pressed down, the uneasiness of wild animals, the flight of birds, are all paragraphs to him written in Nature's legible hand." 

In addition to his other talents, the mountain man had to be a master of buffalo hunting, for meat comprised almost one hundred per cent of his normal diet--at least when in the buffalo country. As in everything else, he had to develop new techniques for "making meat." When hunting horseback, according to the traveler Rudolph Kurz, the hunters (those operating from fixed forts, at any rate) did not use long-barreled rifles because "they think the care required in loading them takes too much time unnecessarily when shooting at close range and, furthermore, they find rifle balls too small. The hunter chases buffaloes at full gallop, discharges his gun [a short- harreled shotgunk and reloads it with out slackening speed.

Buffalo meat has been called the greatest meat man has ever fed on. The mountain man usually boiled the outs from the hump, and roasted other pieces. He cracked the marrow bones to make "trapper's butter", or he used the marrow to make a fine thick soup.

He said the Village would go to the Fort in three or four days to trade. We left them next morning loaded with as much fat dried Buffaloe meat as our horses could carry which had been given as a gratuity: we were accompanied on our return to the Fort by six of the men. On the 10th the Village arrived and pitched their Lodges within about 200 yards of the Fort. I now commenced learning the Snake Language and progressed so far in a short time that I was able to understand most of their words employed in matters of trade. Octr 20th a Village of Bonnaks consisting of 250 Lodges arrived at the Fort from these we traded a considerable quantity of furs, a large supply of dried meat, Deer, Elk and Sheep skins etc. - In the meantime we were employed building small log houses and making other nessary preparations for the approaching winter